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Session 5: Lost in Translation? Teaching about Indonesia through Fiction
Organizer and Chair: Elizabeth Coville, Hamline University
Discussant: G. G. Weix, University of Montana
Keywords: Indonesia, pedagogy, fiction, history, Pramoedya.
In this panel, we explore new ways of using Indonesian fiction in translation to extend the conversation about Indonesia and Southeast Asia to general readers and introductory students. Panelists draw on experiences teaching undergraduates, presenting seminar-workshops aimed at educators in other fields, and participating in various discussions occurring at the interface between specialist and non-specialist readerships and audiences. Among other topics, we address: (1) how texts can be supplemented and (re)contextualized for readers new to this subject; (2) innovative perspectives on questions of translation and reading (in translation) across languages and cultures; and (3) the interdisciplinary nature of such encounters with works of literature.
Specifically, presenters discuss a range of media (from print to performance to documentary film) and genres (e.g., novel, essay, memoir, biography, history) by a variety of authors. Williamson starts us off reflecting on his use of historical novels by Pramoedya Ananta Toer and Couperus to convey an understanding of colonialism, the rise of nationalist consciousness, and modernity. Coville explores Pramoedya’s use (in The Girl from the Coast and This Earth of Mankind) of an emerging ethnographic sensibility. Taking wayang shadow theatre as a point of entry into modern Indonesian literature and political thought, Henry analyzes Pramoedya’s essay "The Last Time I Watched Wayang." Finally, Yampolsky discusses her documentary film on the life of Achdiat Karta Mihardja, author of the controversial 1949 novel Atheis. We also hope to engage the audience in discussion of other innovative approaches to using literature in translation to introduce Indonesia to new audiences.
Narratives of Colonial Java
Thomas A. Williamson, St. Olaf College
Teaching about Southeast Asia in a liberal arts college is a challenging task. Students tend to have little familiarity with the region, and have few courses available to learn more. Furthermore, the diversity of Southeast Asia makes most textbooks unwieldy for an introductory course. How best, then, to move between general concepts and more narrowly focused academic research?
Fiction offers a compelling window into Southeast Asia, especially for liberal arts students. In my teaching, I use fiction to introduce the complexities of modern Southeast Asia, along with the dynamics of modernity itself. In my presentation, I reflect on the pedagogical possibilities available in two novels, Couperus’ The Hidden Force, along with Pramoedya’s This Earth of Mankind. The Hidden Force is a late-nineteenth century chronicle of life in the Dutch East Indies, when colonial power was at its apex. This Earth of Mankind, composed in the 1970s, tells the story of how nationalist consciousness emerged in early twentieth-century Java.
Together the two books complement and complicate each other, showing both the consolidation of differences between colonizers and the colonized in Java, and the ways that such categories overlap and sometimes even dissolve. As teaching tools, they bring alive academic analysis on colonialism, sexuality, the concept of culture, and the origins of nationalism. Using fiction to teach about Southeast Asia helps students learn about cultural differences and also question their fixity, think about the expanse and limits of modern experience, and place Southeast Asia into a larger analytic frame.
An Ethnographic Ear: Negotiating Modernity in Two Pramoedya Novels
Elizabeth Coville, Hamline University
Providing ethnographic material that does not exoticize the Other is a challenge for faculty who teach students with little exposure to international or cross-cultural matters. What do such students take from their reading in translation of, for instance, Pramoedya’s This Earth of Mankind or The Girl from the Coast? What kinds of questions are these general readers prompted to ask about contemporary Indonesia?
In the character of Minke, Pramoedya self-consciously foregrounds writing (e.g. taking notes, the use of pseudonyms, the issue of the medium of publication, the question of readerships, etc.) as one dimension of modernity. The girl in The Girl from the Coast is similarly displaced, and her combined curiosity and empathy lead her to observe her surroundings in an ethnographic manner. In a series of dialogues with informal mentors—her female servant, the driver of a horse cart, and her father—and with herself, she questions and describes the worlds of both nobility and commoners. Of particular relevance is the poignant perspective she comes to assume with regard to her own village, where her keen ear allows us to hear the sounds of village life (e.g. language usage, social interaction, ritual performance, adat, etc.) and grasp its significance.
In describing these social contexts from an outsider’s perspective, Pramoedya’s characters negotiate the displacements of modernity, just as many Indonesians today and as first-generation and immigrant American college students do. Pedagogically, these works of fiction thus provide not just sociocultural information but, more importantly, a sense of people engaged in (re)interpreting their own experience.
"Only Carved Leather": Teaching Southeast Asian Literature with Wayang and Pramoedya
Patricia B. Henry, Northern Illinois University
For years I have been using wayang shadow theatre to teach about Indonesian literature in introductory classes and workshops aimed at non-specialists. The puppets themselves are always a crowd-pleaser, and numerous appealing multi-media resources are available. Bridging past and present, seen and unseen, gods and humans, clowns and kings, providing a place where worlds intersect, wayang itself performs a kind of translation, and is thus an excellent subject for discussion of literature in translation.
It is also an intriguing point of entry to modern Indonesian literature and political thought. Numerous modern Indonesian writers have used wayang-related themes and techniques to address the intersection of modern and traditional worldviews, and, during the Suharto era especially, to get social and political criticism past the censors.
One of Indonesia’s most censored writers, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, brings another perspective on a Javanese culture which he sees as having been rendered a tool of exploitation by the colonial experience. In "The Last Time I Watched Wayang," Pramoedya ferociously debunks wayang as a tool of the elite which deadens the masses. Still, he sees its power to redefine the identity of political prisoners on the island of Buru by contextualizing them in the wayang about the exiled Pandawa princes of the Mahabharata. Pram’s view of this "delusion" gives yet another way to see how literature relates to the social and political world around it.
Achdiat Karta Mihardja and Atheis: Islam, Communism, and Nationalism before the Revolution
Tinuk Yampolsky, Lontar Foundation
The novelist Achdiat Karta Mihardja was born in 1911 into an aristocratic.(albeit low-ranking) Sundanese family in Garut, West Java. His family’s position made him eligible for Dutch schooling, but as he grew up he found his social status contradictory and confusing: in Sundanese eyes he belonged to the elite, but to the Dutch he was only a "native." Like other young people in the educated native elite who sought to imagine an Indonesian nation, Achdiat began to question his privileged position and his loyalty to his home region. Eventually he chose to renounce "provincialism" and commit himself to nationalism.
Achdiat’s first novel, Atheis (1949), depicts the ideological ferment among young nationalists during the Japanese wartime occupation. The story concerns the spiritual conflict of Hasan, the main character, who questions the existence of God as a result of his friendship with three figures: Rusli, a Marxist; Anwar, an individualist; and Kartini, a modern woman with whom Hasan falls in love. Hasan struggles to reconcile his Muslim faith, his interest in Marxism and atheism (secularism), and his love for Kartini, whose modern beliefs make her unacceptable to Hasan’s Muslim family.
The novel became immediately controversial. Muslims called it atheistic propaganda, while Communists attacked it as insufficiently secular. The novel and the furor surrounding it reveal the tensions within the nationalist movement on the verge of independence. This paper draws on recent interviews with Achdiat, now in his 90s, in which he discussed his own identification with Hasan and his personal experience of the conflicts depicted in the novel.