Pramoedya lays bare the cruelty of the city

Tales from Djakarta -- caricatures of circumstances and their human beings; By Pramoedya Ananta Toer (translated by The Nusantara Translation Group); Equinox Publishing, Jakarta- Singapore 2000; xviii + 266 pp; Rp 99,000

JAKARTA (JP): After his release from prison on Buru island, Pramoedya has captivated readers at home and abroad with his profound analysis of the social fabric leading to the birth of the nationalist movement in Indonesia, as his Buru novels, for example, attest.

As a writer, Pramoedya is committed to exposing the inner working of a human being in his social interaction.

Long before, however, Pramoedya showed his sympathy with the oppressed, those who are called human beings but have a worse lot than animals. In Tales of Djakarta, which is the English translation of his Tjerita dari Djakarta from 1963, Pramoedya has done just that. He poignantly writes about a variety of characters, nearly all of whom cannot proudly declare that they are human beings.

This collection begins aptly with "Houseboy + Maid", a story of generations of servants attempting to improve their lot but who have instead succumbed to the powerful grip of bad luck. Pramoedya lashes out at servility and explores the basic facts of human existence: "How simple life is. It's as simple as this: you're hungry and you eat, you're full and you shit. Between eating and shitting, that's where human life is found ... "

This seems to be his conviction; human life exists between hunger and defecation. Driven by hunger, a person can do anything, such as selling one's body ("News from Kebayoran" and "No Resolution), be resigned to fate ("My Kampung") or resort to crime ("Gambir"). He seems to imply that hunger and defecation are simply the call of nature, and that a person only concerned with those two things does not deserve to be called a human being. To Pramoedya, there is more to a human being than just gratifying hunger and emptying the bowels. It is how people move between those two poles that determines their dignity as human beings.

"My Kampung" should also be read as Pramoedya's example of how the poor view life in the capital. Driven by sheer poverty, death means nothing but a relief to them. In this story, Pramoedya has as one of his characters the messenger of death, Djibril, the archangel Gabriel. He comes regularly to the kampong to take one resident after another. To some, if not them all, death is something they are waiting for.

The story closes with biting sarcasm: "... my kampung stands in all its glory, defying the doctors and the technical professionals. But none of this surprises the residents of my kampung itself. If it's surprising at all, ... the kampung's located near to the palace where everyone's health and every little detail is guaranteed. ... When yet another person is picked up by hardworking Sang Djibril, and the big drum sounds, people will just say casually "Who died?" Someone else will answer: "Old So-and-So." And then the conversation will close in mutual understanding."

Even the residents of the kampong itself, poor as they are, face death as something of a routine occurrence. Little emotion is involved, and all this happens in a capital city. If you are forced to be concerned only with gratifying your hunger and then with emptying your bowels, what human feeling will you be left with? In his "My Kampung" Pramoedya lashes out, by implication, at the authorities which have caused all this to happen.

All the stories in this collection paint a gloomy picture of lives in Jakarta in the first half of 1950s. All stories, except one, were written between 1950 and 1956, a period marked by political instability for the young Republic of Indonesia. With the observant eyes of a writer, Pramoedya captures different types of people in different situations but all of them share something in common: losing their "milk of human kindness", to borrow from Shakespeare's Macbeth, in the face of a tough life in the capital city. Demoralized by their bad lot, they turn into inhuman beings. They no longer have any sympathy nor empathy. What counts is how to survive.

It is interesting to compare the events in these stories with what we can see in the Jakarta of today. It is not far wrong to say that events today are of a bigger and more horrendous magnitude than those Pramoedya writes about in this collection. A time difference of over four decades has made things much worse in this capital which has become a giant magnet for rural people. The book serves as a yardstick of sorts for the development of Jakarta. While there has been a big leap in its physical development, as seen in the springing up of skyscrapers and the convoy of speeding automobiles along the main streets, in terms of mental development, Jakarta has undergone a terrible degeneration, something that, were he still young, Pramoedya would find a pleasure to write about as a sequel to this collection.

The translation is excellent because, as much as possible, it is faithful to Pramoedya's original sentences. His "choppy and staccato" style is preserved, enabling the reader to feel the writer's emotion that the original Indonesian edition is imbued with.

-- Lie Hua