What I was feeling then, such very depressed feelings, my ancestors called nelangsa--feeling completely alone, still living among one's fellows but no longer the same; the heat of the sun is borne by all, but the heat in one's heart is borne alone. The only way to obtain relief was communion with the hearts of those of a similar fate, similar values, similar ties, with the same burdens: Nyay Ontosoroh, Annelies, Jean Marais, Darsam.
Minke is the only fully Native student in his class at a prestigious school in Jakarta. The Indonesia in which Minke lives is one governed by strict racial hierarchies: at the top, the "Pure" Dutch and other Europeans, then the Indos, who are of mixed race, and Natives like Minke at the bottom. Still, being at the school is a rare honor, and Minke is an apt student. The school inculcates in him a respect for Europeans and their civilization; his first crush is on the Netherlands' Princess Wilhelmina. But Minke's life is transformed when he makes the acquaintance of Annelies Mellema, an Indo girl of otherworldly beauty, and her mother, Nyai Ontosoroh. "Nyai" is a title given to the Native concubines of European men, but Nyai is more than a kept woman: she has kept her rich master's business going while his brain turns to oatmeal, thanks to the syphilis he's contracted from a nearby brothel.
Everyone in This Earth of Mankind wants to teach Minke. There are his teachers at school, mostly racists, but also a Dutch radical named Madga Peters who recognizes the potential in Minke. There's his father, a powerful "bupati" in the service of the Dutch, and his traditionalist mother. There are a pair of Dutch girls with reformist ideas who strike up a correspondence with Minke, and many other "Pures" besides. But it is the elegant and headstrong Nyai Ontosoroh who, more than anyone else, becomes Minke's instructor. He is surprised to find that, despite any formal education, she has a worldly wisdom that can only be gained through hard experience, and it is through her care that Minke begins to understand for the first time the truth about the relationship between the "Dutch Indies" and their rapacious colonizers.
I came to understand the strange circumstances of the Mellema family as a kind of metonym for that relationship. Syphilitic Herman Mellema has never legally wed his Nyai, nor legally recognized his daughter Annelies or her brother Robert. Whereas Annelies rejects her father and embraces her mother, renouncing her European blood, Robert runs the other direction, despising his Nativeness and even plotting the death of Minke, whom he sees as a Native interloper after his inheritance. In this way the two siblings represent different approaches to the psychic problem of being mixed-race, running towards binaries because there is no legal or social model for how to remain in that middle space. When Herman's murdered body is found at the brothel, suspicion falls on Annelies, Minke, and Nyai Ontosoroh. They are innocent, of course, but the story tells itself: the abandoned colonial child who takes revenge on the absent European father. Europe keeps its reputation intact by being selective about whom and what it claims as its heirs. And it can always change its mind: the climax of the book comes when Herman Mellema's legitimate son, halfway around the world in the Netherlands, asserts a legal right over Annelies' guardianship and calls her away to a country she's never visited.
In doing so, Annelies is torn from the protection of her mother and from Minke, whom she has recently married. The case causes a nationwide scandal--for one, it angers the indigenous Javanese Muslims by declaring that the pair's marriage has no legal standing--and gives Minke an opportunity to exercise the voice he has been building as a popular journalist. This late section of the novel pushes into a realm that is perhaps too pointedly political. By contrast, the earliest parts of the novel, when Minke is still a humble student torn between devotions to his European teachers and his native country, often crackle with a low-level violence. I loved, for instance, Minke's sole conversation with Robert Mellema, in which the resentful Indo pretends to befriend Minke, inviting him to go hunting. Though they each keep a pretense of formality, both characters seem to understand that what Robert really intends is to wreak some violence upon Minke, or even kill him. This Earth of Mankind is full of such moments, where the truth of colonial violence threatens to break through the restraints of politesse that keep it bound.
Toer wrote This Earth of Mankind while in prison under the dictatorship of Suharto; this and three other novels make up the Buru Quartet, named for the prison. Though Minke is apparently based on the life of Indonesian journalist Tirto Adhi Soerjo, it's not hard to see a vision of Toer's self in the young writer becoming disillusioned with the structure of a corrupt state, who is compelled to use his voice. The most lasting image of the novel, though, might be that of tender, fragile Annelies, being whisked away to her destruction by forces that are as all-powerful as they are capricious.
With the addition of Indonesia, my "countries read" list is up to 71!
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