Crushed by
colonialism – or just hapless?
I once berated Australian newspaper colleagues for using the
words ‘Indo’ and ‘Indons’. They
countered that the terms were legitimate because ‘Indonesian’ was too long for
a snappy headline, and everyone understood the meaning.
Not everyone. In Indonesia it refers to mixed race people,
usually the offspring of European fathers and Indonesian mothers. These are the creamy-hued but black-haired beauties
often seen promoting skin whiteners, vitamin supplements and Jakarta condos on
television.
Do they feel insulted by the term ‘Indo’, like African - Americans
bristle and call their lawyers when referred to as ‘negroes’? Many Australian Aborigines dislike ‘blacks’,
a prejudicial word Down Under, though not in the US.
Early last century when the Dutch still ruled the
archipelago, it was certainly derogatory in the mind of a fictional unmarried mother of two ‘Indos’;
the slur was one of the many burdens born by the principal character in Jakarta
journalist and historian Hanna Rambe’s novel Mirah of Banda.
This was first published in Indonesia in 1986 during
Soeharto’s repressive Orde Baru (New
Order) government that saw books as subversive, so don’t expect an allegory.
It’s now available in English thanks to a translation by Toni Pollard, who has
been teaching Indonesian in Australia for four decades, and Jakarta publisher Lontar
as a volume in its Modern Library of Indonesia series.
This is not a literary work, which is obvious from the hackneyed
opening: ‘As soon as the taxi had screeched to a halt at Ambon’s Pattimura
Airport the driver jumped from the car to open the trunk.” Fortunately the prose improves later, enough
to justify turning the pages.
The book’s value is more as historical drama, the life story
of a much put-upon Javanese woman kidnapped as a child to work on a Dutch
nutmeg plantation in the Malukus (also known as the Moluccas), the islands
sprinkled between Sulawesi and West Papua.
When Mirah matures she becomes the plantation owner’s
concubine after his wife has an affair with a European and quits the estate.
Mirah bears her lover two children (‘Indos’) that carry his name.
He wants her to convert to Christianity and marry, but she
refuses; Mirah fears being humiliated by the Dutch wives as a nyai, a kept native woman with no
rights, but she also wants to die a Muslim.
Here was a chance to explain why holding her faith was so
important because there are no other revelations about Mirah’s beliefs. Instead we read that this was the religion of
her parents – ‘I’m afraid of the angels at the graveside. I’m afraid of God’s Judgement
Day.’
When the Japanese invade her de-facto husband is arrested
and later dies in internment. Her children are also seized and her daughter
Lili conscripted and sent to Papua as a ‘comfort woman’, the vile euphemism for
forced prostitution. Here she becomes pregnant to a caring Japanese officer.
Back in Banda, her Dutchman gone, Mirah weds a childhood
sweetheart but the marriage is barren and turns bad. The couple split.
If the reader is supposed to have sympathy for the lady’s
problems then the author fails, for Mirah is no national heroine like Kartini, challenging
the system and arguing for women’s rights.
Instead she takes the victim position, constantly telling
herself and others that she is ‘just an ignorant servant’ … ‘a contract worker’
… ‘a coolie’, even when opportunities are available to escape
her plight. In the jargon of modern psychology Mirah would be a good candidate
for a course in empowerment.
Yet earlier in the book she proves she has teeth, literally;
while still young she preserves her virginity by savagely biting the genitals
of a plantation overseer who tries to rape her.
Mistress of the plantation homestead, loved by her kind
Dutchman (she only bites his tongue), surrounded by local friends and given every
freedom except to linger with men, she instead pines for the squalor of the
plantation laborers’ barracks, where she
can be with the people she knew as a child.
Some readers may see Mirah’s meek acceptance of her fate and
reluctance to buck the ugly system she encounters as proof that generations of
colonization can numb an individual’s spirit.
Others may read this as a story of Javanese fatalism and
proof that Indonesians rank the company of their friends and relatives above
all else, including comfort and relative security.
More practically Mirah was unschooled, far from her hometown,
and ignorant of the war and the struggle for Independence. She remains a
bewildered onlooker. Yet with a little tweaking
by her creator Mirah could have been a keen observer, giving the 21st
century reader insights into those dramatic times.
Instead we get little more than brief mentions of the
momentous events that are known to every schoolchild who’s done basic history. Sadly there’s no sign of deeper research that
could have given the book more substance.
There are also errors:
The Battle of Hollandia (now Jayapura) when Allied forces routed the Japanese
occurred in March 1944. The book says that ‘lasting peace was still more than
two more (sic) years away.’ The Japanese surrendered to the Allies on 15
August, 1945.
The device of Mirah telling her story to glamorous Wendy
Morgan fails in the chapters on Lilli’s fate, when the author has to step in
with a third-person account to fill in the gaps.
Despite these issues the book is an easy read, although the
ending is unsatisfying because it stops short of revelation and reconciliation,
surely the just dues of someone whose life seems to have been little more than
a leaf in the winds of history.
Mirah of Banda by Hanna Rambe (translated by Toni Pollard) Lontar, Jakarta 2010,
(First published in The Jakarta Post 1 December 2014)
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