Pramoedya lays bare the cruelty of the city

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