A Life Beyond Boundaries

by Benedict Anderson

  I was also feeling rather suffocated by a nativist turn in Philippine nationalist historiography. Before the 1960s, it had basically been a sort of conventional historiography principally based on Spanish or American archival materials and other documents. Afterwards, it began to criticize the colonialist and imperialist biases in these documents and propose a ‘nativist’ history based on ‘our materials’, such as oral history. This inward-oriented historiography largely excluded the rest of the world, except for colonial Spain and especially imperialist America, which were to be condemned. Gradually, however, I found myself discovering all kinds of filiations between first-generation Filipino nationalists and Brazilian, French and Spanish anarchists, Cuban nationalists, Russian nihilists, Japanese novelists and liberal leftists, French and Belgian avant-garde writers and painters, and so on. Many were linked by the telegraph, the first communications technology by which messages could be sent round the world in a very short time.

  It then occurred to me that the best way to write up the research material was to employ the methods, if not the gifts, of nineteenth-century novelists: rapid shifts of scene, conspiracies, coincidences, letters, and the use of different forms of language (e.g. mixing formal and informal languages, standard speech and dialect). I had always been fond of these novelists’ habit of giving elaborate, suspense-filled or enigmatic titles to their chapters, and so decided to follow suit in an entirely unscholarly manner. Even the title, Under Three Flags, which has mystified many readers, is a sort of homage to my childhood reading. Rory and I were addicted to an endless, late-nineteenth-century series of books-for-boys written by a British super-imperialist called G. A. Henty. The usual hero of these novels is a brave, moral and sexless English boy whose adventures take him all over the world (a sort of ancestor to Tintin, without the humour). One of our favourites was titled Under Two Flags, in which the hero ends up working as a cabin-boy on both an English and a French ship.

  Nineteenth-century novels were often heavily illustrated, so for the first time in my life, I included a lot of photographs in my novelistic academic work, including a terrific one of the admirable Suehiro Tettyo with beard and bow tie in a three-piece suit. Raised on the island of Shikoku, at the age of twenty-six he joined the staff of the liberal metropolitan newspaper Tokyo Akatsuki Shimbun, and quite soon rose to become its editor-in-chief. He became famous for his newspaper’s attacks on the Meiji government’s suppression of democracy and free speech, and naturally was put in prison. There he wrote a novel that was a huge success with the young. On his release, he set off to study the political systems of Europe and the US, and on the ship taking him to San Francisco met no other than José Rizal, the leader of the Filipino nationalist movement and a great novelist. On their journey across the Pacific, the American continent and the Atlantic, they became friends.

  On his return to Japan, Tettyo wrote a big book, titled Remains of the Storm, in which the hero – of Japanese ancestry, but living for a time in the Philippines – was clearly a mirror of Rizal’s courage, intellect and suffering. He became a liberal member of the Diet and later its speaker. But while still young he died of cancer, only a few months before Rizal was executed in Manila.

  A second return to my youth was a renewed passion for film. As a full-time professor under a lot of pressure, I had little opportunity to follow contemporary films, and in any case remote Ithaca was largely under the permanent miasma of Hollywood. But around the time of my semi-retirement, there began the spectacular rise of Asian films of the highest quality from Iran to Korea, Japan to Malaysia and Siam, with the grand Taiwan trio of Edward Yang, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang at the centre. No one interested me more than the young Thai genius Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who won two top Cannes prizes in three years for his Blissfully Yours and Tropical Malady. The latter film consists of two connected halves, the first about a romance between a young soldier and a young villager and the second about a strange encounter in the forest between the soldier and the villager turned ‘tiger-shaman’.

  The irony is that Apichatpong’s films have never been allowed a normal commercial run in Siam itself, and he has been locked in a running battle with the imbecilic censors in Bangkok. So, for fun, I wrote a long article about Tropical Malady itself, but especially about the reactions of different audiences (villagers, arrogant and ignorant Bangkok know-it-alls, students, middle-class families, teenagers, etc.). It turned out that people in the countryside understood better what the film had to say than urban intellectuals. In July 2006 the article was translated by my former student Mukhom Wongthes as ‘Sat Pralaat arai wa?’ (What the heck is this beast?) in Silapa Wattanatham. Three years later the text was republished as ‘The Strange Story of a Strange Beast: Receptions in Thailand of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Sat Pralaat’, in James Quandt’s edited collection Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Later I also joined, in a quiet way, the fight against the imbeciles. It was in this way that I first met Apichatpong, with whom I soon became close. (The deliciously unacademic cover for the Thai translation of Imagined Communities was designed by my new friend.)

  It so happened that when Apichatpong came to fame, just after the military coup d’état in 2006, there arose a quartet of Thai female intellectuals, artists and activists such as I had never met before. Idaroong (na Ayutthaya), a long-time activist and formidable intellectual, created and edited Aan (READ!), a journal to my mind far better than any other public intellectual journal in Southeast Asia. She was close friends with May Ingawanij, raised largely in London, now an excellent teacher at Westminster College, and far the best writer on avant-garde films from across Southeast Asia; and Mukhom Wongthes, now an outstanding and withering social critic in her country. I wanted to write for Aan’s readers, but my written Thai was miserable, so the three friends took turns in translating my English-language articles. The most difficult text was an analysis of Anocha (aka Mai) Suwichakompong’s stunning avant-garde film with the enigmatic title Mundane History.

  Meanwhile I discovered to my astonishment that there was virtually no contact, intellectual or otherwise, between Thai scholars and the world of Thai filmmakers and artists. I find this situation rather curious, but have learned several interesting things about it. Most of the leading scholars in Siam work at prestigious state universities – in other words they are at some level bureaucrats. They have titles, they are mostly Bangkokians, and they have access to the higher political circles. They regard themselves as part of the national elite. The filmmakers and artists, on the other hand, typically come from the provinces, do not have advanced academic degrees, and make a living by their wits and talents. This may explain why so few Thai academics have seen an Apichatpong film, and know his name only from the prizes he has won around the world.

  It occurred to me that the same situation probably prevailed for the same reasons in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia. (For different reasons – for example, because of increasing academic and artistic professionalization – a comparable divide seems to exist in parts of Europe and North America.) In any case, for the first time in my life, I now have good filmmaker friends – thanks to the luck of retiring at the right time and in the right place. This experience has also helped me look at the world of universities through a reversed telescope. What once almost entirely filled my vision now seems much smaller, more distant, and less important.

  ~

  The third retirement interest of mine also has its roots in my student youth. When I was in Jakarta in 1962–64, one of my favourite routines was to pay a weekly visit to a street famous for its long line of second-hand bookstalls. It was the perfect time to accumulate, quite cheaply, an interesting personal library. When the Dutch who had remained in Indonesia after independence were finally expelled at the end of 1957, many of them sold off their libraries, which were too large and heavy to take back to Holland. Most of these books, some very valuable, were in Dutch, which few Indonesians under twenty-five understood any longer. In th
e early 1960s, inflation was already very high, so that people living on fixed salaries could only survive by corruption or by selling off possessions, including old books and magazines. Commonly, when elderly book-collectors died, their children, uninterested in their parents’ hobbies, did the same thing with their inherited libraries.

  One day, I found an extraordinary book called Indonesia dalem api dan bara (Indonesia in Flames and Embers), published in 1947 in the Dutch-occupied East Java city of Malang, by a writer using the pen-name Tjamboek Berdoeri, which means ‘a whip into which thorns are imbedded’. It contained a brilliant, funny and tragic first-person account of the writer’s experiences during the last year of the old colonial regime, the three and a half years of the Japanese Occupation, and the first two years of the armed Revolution (1945–47). Even today, it is still far the best book written by an Indonesian about this period of great turmoil.

  When I asked my friends about the book, it turned out that only one of them had ever heard of it, let alone read it, and this person had no idea who ‘Tjamboek Berdoeri’ really was. I tried many times to get a second copy, but with no success. I promised myself that one day I would try to track down Tjamboek Berdoeri, but had neither the time nor the contacts to fulfil this promise before I was expelled from Indonesia in 1972. But I did not forget it. When I returned to Cornell in 1964, I donated my copy to the library’s rare books section, fearing that no other copy existed in the world. (Only forty years later did our expert librarians track down two copies in Canberra, and one in Amsterdam.) When I was finally allowed back into the country in 1999, I decided to renew my search for Tjamboek Berdoeri, and to solve the mystery of why a brilliant book written in 1947 had been completely forgotten by 1963 and was never republished.

  With the help of my Javanese labour activist friend Arief Djati, and after many false starts, I eventually discovered that Tjamboek Berdoeri was Kwee Thiam Tjing, a well-known Sino-Indonesian journalist and columnist during the final twenty years of the Dutch colonial regime. With the additional help of some Sino-Indonesian friends, the two of us managed to get the book republished in 2004, with a huge number of footnotes to help modern readers with no experience of the colonial era.

  Kwee – we got used to calling him Opa (Grandpa) among ourselves – came from an old East Java Chinese family stretching back many generations. Born in 1900, he was among the very few Chinese youngsters of his time to be educated wholly in Dutch-language schools, but he never went beyond high school because there was no university in the vast colony. (At the end of his life he laughingly recalled how he often got into fights with his Dutch and Eurasian classmates, and thus was one of the very few ‘natives’ who had the luck to beat up a white boy now and then without being punished.) After a brief and unhappy experience working in an import-export firm, he turned to journalism, where he enjoyed immediate success. He worked for various newspapers till the arrival of the Japanese, who suppressed the entire press except for a very few newspapers sponsored by the military authorities themselves.

  During the Occupation and after, he worked as the head of a local branch of the Japanese-installed Tonarigumi neighbourhood association, officially created in 1940 for mutual help and national mobilizations, but originally born out of the Gonin Gumi of the Edo period, also set up for mutual help but mainly for spying on behalf of the authorities. (This set of associations still survives today in the Indonesian term Rukun Tetangga [Neighbourly Local Group].) He did his best to protect Dutch women and children in his neighbourhood when their men were imprisoned and often killed.

  After 1947, we largely lost sight of him until 1960, when he went abroad for the first time in his life, following his daughter, her husband and children to Kuala Lumpur. In 1971, he returned to Indonesia, and began to write a serialized autobiography for the Indonesian newspaper Indonesia Raya, which was banned by Suharto in January 1974. He died a few months later. Arief and I edited the serialized stories into a successful book, published in 2010 with the title Mendjadi Tjamboek Berdoeri (Becoming a whip with thorns). The more research we did, the more the mystery of the disappearance of Kwee’s 1947 masterpiece became understandable. We concluded that there were two primary factors, which are so interesting that they are worth detailing here.

  The first was that Indonesia dalem api dan bara is written in an extraordinary combination of languages. While the basic language is Indonesian, parts are written in the Chinese dialect of Javanese used in East Java, and the text includes many phrases in a cunning parody of colonial Dutch and Hokkien Chinese, as well as a sprinkling of words in English and even Japanese. The one language Kwee never used was Mandarin. He was proud of the fact that he could not read Chinese characters, and felt himself to be an Indonesian patriot. He was sent to jail in early 1926 for defending an unsuccessful rebellion by the Atjehnese of north Sumatra the previous year. In late 1926, the young Indonesian Communist Party started a hopeless rebellion, and Kwee watched the cadres enter Jakarta’s Tjipinang prison just as he was being released. He had been imprisoned for political reasons by the colonial authority a few years earlier than Soekarno, who in 1945 would become the first president of Indonesia.

  The use of all these languages (which makes the book almost impossible to translate) was not casual or random. Kwee typically switched languages for satirical purposes, or to give a flavour of the conversation of the people he observed during those years. Sometimes he would also use the technique for poetic or tragically ironical purposes. For example, in one place he uses the complex expression ‘Of Romusha, of Tjaptun’. It is a mixture of the doubled Dutch word ‘of’ (meaning ‘either/or’), the Japanese ‘Romusha’ (forced labourers recruited during the Japanese Occupation) and the Hokkien ‘Tjaptun’ (ten guilders). It was a bitter remark, saying that ‘money is the best lawyer in hell’. Elsewhere, he describes a grim scene in which revolutionaries are torturing or killing fellow Indonesians suspected of spying for the Dutch. He writes gruesomely that the sound of the battering of the victims’ heads was like that of the metallic kenong and kempul (key instruments in the Javanese gamelan orchestra).

  The second factor was a consequence of the Republic of Indonesia’s entry into the United Nations, accompanied by the Republic’s efforts to create a modern state worthy of international recognition. On the one hand, the new state, proud of its national identity and ‘world status’, successfully imposed a monopolistic version of Indonesian, which even during the National Revolution had been variable, depending on the social or regional backgrounds of its speakers. The state now frowned upon any contamination by other languages, including even Javanese. The spelling-system was also standardized – something the colonial regime had tried to impose without much success. Hence Kwee’s spectacular cosmopolitan polyglot prose was no longer acceptable. On the other hand, the state’s education apparatus peddled a version of pre-1950 history which almost completely ignored the role of the Chinese minority, and insisted on a heroic past for the Indonesians, and a diabolical one for the Dutch.

  Kwee’s book is clearly written by a patriot, but also by a clear-eyed humanist. In it we find excellent, idiotic, pitiable and repulsive Dutch, cruel and tender-hearted Japanese, corrupt and generous Chinese, selfless Indonesian patriots, and sadistic ‘revolutionaries’ who tortured and murdered some of Kwee’s own relatives on the eve of the Dutch attack on Malang in the summer of 1947. In the political atmosphere of the 1950s and ‘60s very few people from any group wanted to read an honest, disconcerting and complicated book of this kind. So, to use a modern phrase, it was ‘disappeared’. Later, the Suharto regime’s heavy repression of the Chinese community – shutting down their press, suppressing their schools, banning much of their writing and excluding them almost completely from politics – made the ‘disappearance’ still more profound. (In the thirty-two years of his dictatorship Suharto never gave a Chinese a ministerial post till just before his fall. On the other hand, he cultivated the dozen or so Chinese billionaires who had no political power
at all.) Only after the downfall of the regime was it possible to have Kwee’s masterpiece republished, and even, to some extent, appreciated.

  What I hope to do now is to write something I have never tried: a literary-political biography, largely based on Kwee’s autobiographical writings and the several hundred articles we discovered he had written between 1924 and 1940. Its main focus will not be on Kwee’s literary and political activities as such, but rather on the interlocked relationship between the two. The idea is to try to reimagine the ‘colonial cosmopolitanism’ of that era, created by a huge tide of urbanization, capitalist expansion, new means of communication and rapidly expanding education (including self-education). Kwee spent most of his time in Surabaya, the large coastal commercial centre which was full of Javanese, Madurese, Outer Islanders, Dutch, Hokkiens, Hakkas, Cantonese, Jews, Yemenis, Japanese, Germans and Indians, and included Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Taoists and Buddhists. They picked up bits of each other’s languages for use when they needed to interact, read each other’s newspapers, and had sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile relations with one another. In many ways it was a perfect environment for cross-cultural and cross-language creativity.

  In 2012 came The Fate of Rural Hell: Asceticism and Desire in Buddhist Thailand, originally a long article in Aan and later a small book published in English by Naveen Kishore’s Seagull publishing house in Calcutta. I had always wanted to do some amateurish anthropology, and now the time had come. Early in the 1970s I had gone on the first of many visits to see a large and very strange Buddhist temple, about two hours driving west of Bangkok. Inside, the abbot had built symbols of Islam (cement camels), of Taoism and Mahayana Buddhism from Japan, of Hinduism from India, and even symbols with hints of Christianity – but with Siam’s Theravada Buddhism very much on top. Stranger still, outside he had built more than a hundred cement statues of the dead being tortured in Hell for their sins, situated in a kind of garden museum, surrounded during the daytime by vendors, tourist buses and food-stalls. Almost all the statues were completely naked – a Theravada humiliation for the tormented (usually veiled in temples by tactful fiery murals). Even more strangely, in the abbot’s office there were two glass cabinets, one containing a (Thai) skeleton, the other a copy of Donatello’s spectacular David, but clad in a reddish pair of underpants exposing David’s now substantial penis. Each statue of the tormented had a label explaining the sins of the character represented. My friends May and Mukhom carefully drew up a list of them all. The weirdest find was a village woman punished for forcing her husband to cook the domestic rice. On the other hand, there were no statues of corrupt monks, venal police, lying politicians, brutal soldiers, evil capitalists, etc. Why? No doubt out of fear.