This Earth of Mankind by Pramoedya Ananta Toer

That is a Minke now different from all his friends, different from everybody else--his situation was exposed in court, wasn't it? While the others weren't? And the judge and prosecutor didn't expose themselves either?

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!

The Ten Thousand Things by Maria Dermout

A lullaby for the child, or a story sung to it, battle songs of the wild Alfuras, head-hunters of Ceram.  And sometimes, very rarely, the old heathen lament (careful, don't let the schoolteacher hear it) for one who has just died.  "The hundred things" was the name of the lament--the hundred things of which the dead is reminded, which are asked him, told him.

Maria Dermout's The Ten Thousand Things is--digressively, elliptically--the story of Felicia, a Dutch woman who returns to the deteriorating spice plantation owned by her family in Indonesia, where her grandmother still lives.  For Felicia, like all people I suppose, returning to the place of her childhood brings a rush of recognitions that are like shocks: her grandmother's collection of shells and curiosities, guarded by crawly mollusks she keeps in the cabinets as "sentinels," the winged boats called proas moving on the water, the ruin of the original house, the three little graves of the little girls supposedly murdered.  It's so affecting that she begins to lose a sense of herself, having to remind herself that she is Felicia, and not her grandmother, who once returned this way.  In turn, she imagines her son Himpies (lol) returning to the plantation one day and having the same experience:

She thought, she had never before thought that--in the light and the rustle and the small movement of the proa--repetition, repetition, nothing but repetitions linked to one another.  Again and again the same, and again and once more.

Himpies does have that experience, returning to the "Small Garden" after years away in the Dutch military, but the expected repetitions are cut short by his murder, on a nearby island, at the hands of a native tribe.  Death stalls the sense of repetition and return, which was never anything but a myth, and Felicia grows into something of a lonely eminence on the island, respected for presiding over a little plot full of ghosts.

From there the book gets weird, at least structurally speaking.  It abandons Felicia to tell four stories that are seemingly unrelated, though they take place on the same island: the story of a professor of botany who enlists the services of a young Javanese man and is later murdered by local islanders, of Constance, a beautiful woman murdered under mysterious circumstances, of a military commissioner murdered under mysterious circumstances--okay, maybe they're not that unrelated.

The title of the book comes from a traditional song called the "hundred things," in which the dying recites--or has recited to them?--a list of things they remember from life.  These objects, like the curiosities in Felicia's grandmother's cabinet, anchor them to life and give substance to what passes away.  Dermout's amendment of the phrase is meant to suggest the futility of expressing a life in a mere hundred, that if we were really to give the dead a proper lament the list would be hyperbolically large, perhaps endless.  The book brings its various threads together at the end when Felicia is visited by the various murdered: the professor, the commissioner, Constance, her son, the three little girls.  She realizes that the murderers must join the murdered also, and her vision enacts a kind of detente between the two that the regular course of life made impossible.

Where is colonialism in this story?  Felicia, while down on her luck, comes from an old spice merchant family that colonized Indonesia.  (It's this fact that makes her imagining a permanent cycle of abandon and return spurious to begin with.)  I liked the ripe character tension between the ruffled, affable professor and the wary Javanese especially.  The professor means no harm and treats his assistant well, but it's hard to blame the assistant for his wariness.  He resists and resists the professor's friendly claim on him--"He did not want a bond between them, not of one kind nor of the other"--but is unable to escape, and that seems as good a metaphor for the relationship between European and Indonesian as any.  The professor, working from a Javanese story, crafts a version of the colonial enterprise as a kind of fruitless searching:

"All of us, always, when we're young, have to hold something for those who are old, and we drop it and want to get away, and draw a ship in the sand to reach a new country, and we always forget the ballast--there is no ballast but the earth of the old country--and the new country's earth is always just as heavy as the old country's--and for that, then, we have left and crossed the seas and might even have drowned on the way, in deep water, or grown old and in our turn let someone hold a basin up for us..."

And yet the claim to universalism here--we all feel this way--seems as false to me as it does to the Javanese assistant.  Many of the dead were murdered by locals: the mountain tribesman who killed Himpies, the seafaring tribe that killed the professor, the slave that killed the three little Dutch girls.  Felicia's vision of the murderers and murdered brought together at last might serve also as a vision of a kind of global healing, but how would we read this scene if the slave girl were reunited not with the girls she murdered but the man who enslaved her?

The Ten Thousand Things is lyrical and sensuous, often bewildering, frequently clever, and often very touching.  As Brent notes in his review, the novel ends with Felicia having to get up from her communion from the dead and go on living.  Here Dermout suggests that it's life, not death, that's really tragic, but also that perhaps it doesn't have to be.