This Earth of Mankind (1980) by Pramoedya Ananta Toer

This Earth of Mankind is the first book in Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s The Buru Quartet, supposedly composed initially as a spoken narrative–and was written only two years later in 1975– while Toer was imprisoned in the Buru Island Prison Camp. As far as memory serves, this was the first novel by a Southeast Asian, other than a Filipino, I read.

Even if it was mostly a chronological narration of events that happened in the lives of some natives and Indos toward the end of the nineteenth century in the Dutch East Indies, there was an attempt to complicate its internal narrativity and textuality. The novel, as revealed by the narrator early on, supposedly began as short notes that were thirteen years later read and studied over again, merged “together with dreams, imagining. Naturally they became different from the original.” It was also recognized, nonetheless, that this fetish to make notes was probably caused by the narrator’s “European training.” In the latter part of the novel, Europe’s dependence on paper, on what’s been documented and set on record, was argued to be almost proportional to its disregard to the human person, to relationships built on emotion and faith.

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The novel is a story of Minke—not his “real name,” but the name he’s been called by other people. Later we would realize that the moniker could have come from “monkey”—a recurring image to which the natives were compared, something not unlike the allusion that the Spaniards made to the natives in the Philippines during their colonization, as revealed in Fray Miguel Lucio y Bustamante’s Si Tandang Basio Macunat. In This Earth, name is a central issue. The natives, like Minke was, did not have surnames, and in the then modernized and educated milieu in which he was a part of, the fact could cause one’s shame—or pride, depending on one’s attitude toward the Dutch colonial policies. Born on the same day (August 31, 1880) as Netherland’s Queen Wilhelmina, Minke was situated in a conflicted position: he was the only pure native studying in the most prestigious Dutch High School (H.B.S.) in Surabaya. Would he be the perfect colonial subject—or rebel?

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Minke turned out to be a good writer (writing stories and essays as Max Tollenaar for Surabaya Daily News) and the perfect lover to Annelies, daughter of a nyai or a Dutch’s concubine, and, true to the tradition of the beloved in most classics, simply the most beautiful woman that this earth of mankind could possibly conceive.

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Chapter 10 is a fascinating brief account of being an Asian prostitute in the late nineteenth century, as recounted by Maiko, a Japanese working in the brothel owned by Babah Ah Tjong. Except for Annelies who was always lovesick with Minke until she found a strong resolve in an almost melodramatic ending, Toer presented a cast of strong women: Nyai Ontosoroh, Minke’s Mother, and Miss Magda Peters—all in their respective ways had guided Minke to the ways of tradition and civilization.

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Miss Magda Peters was fascinated with the amount of reading that a nyai like Ontosoroh’s had. Faithful to the thrust of the written word, this is another novel that encourages reading. There was even a period when Minke would make a reading list for Annelies that she had to consume for a certain amount of time. Aside from the Western canon (like Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Kidnapped, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend), it also mentioned several Malayan titles like G. Francis’ Nyai Dasima and the legends of Babad Tanah Jawi.

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When Minke told his father that he did not want to be a bupati like the latter was, and said that, “My world was not rank and position, wages and embezzlement. My world was this earth of mankind and its problems,” I felt that it was a little naïve for him to not recognize that politics played a major role in the problems of this world. Of course he would acknowledge it a little too late in the end when even his wife Annelies would be taken away from him by the European law that clearly contradicted their Islamic tradition. But it was a rite-of-passage novel, and no such story would prove successful unless the main character proved to have some shortcomings, a little shortsightedness, for where would his potential toward growth be if not for these lack and failures of vision?