Second Read: Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Co-presented with Lapham's Quarterly, BPL's Second Read examines Pramoedya Ananta Toer's The Buru Quartet and its courageous composition. With translator/author Max Lane, playwright Faiza Mardzoeki, author Siddhartha Deb & scholar Christopher GoGwilt. 

This Earth of Mankind recounts the life of Minke, a Javanese student at a prestigious Dutch school when only European colonizers can hope to pursue a degree of this kind. Minke meets Nyai Ontosoroh, the concubine of a Dutch colonizer who runs the colonizer's business. When Minke falls in love with her daughter, Annelies, and marries her, the Dutch invalidate the marriage. From here, This Earth of Mankind recounts the story of Indonesian national awakening, from its earliest seed. Brooklyn Public Library’s Second Read considers Pramoedya's Quartet, This Earth of Mankind and its three sequels, how it fits into our moment (or was denied its place in our moment after Pramoedya was sent to a labor camp where it was written). As we filter the novels through the rules of our times, what is its place in that shifting concept we call the canon? 

In his new book, Indonesia Out of Exile: How Pramoedya’s Buru Quartet Killed a Dictatorship, the Quartet's translator Max Lane tells the story of the collaboration between Pramoedya, Joeoef Isak and Hasyim Rachman, that saw the Quartet’s publication. The Suharto dictatorship banned the first novel after several months of tactical struggle by the three men. In defiance of the dictatorship, they went on to publish the three sequels, each time followed by another battle and then a ban. Indonesia Out of Exile (Penguin Australia) tells of these men’s struggle, their arrests and imprisonment. They return from exile to a different Indonesia, its radical past suppressed and its people terrorized. Pramoedya’s epic novels starting with This Earth of Mankind then explode onto the scene. Set in a time when even the idea of Indonesia had not yet formed, the book tells an inspiring creation story that even now inspires a new generation.

Co-presented with Lapham’s Quarterly, a magazine of history and ideas. Lapham’s Quarterly events are supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. For its Spring 2023 issue, the Quarterly takes up the topic Freedom. www.laphamsquarterly.org

---

Participants

Siti Faizah Hidayati (Pen-name Faiza Mardzoeki) is a writer, playwright, theatre producer and director, based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.  She is cofounder and director of Institut Ungu, former member of Jakarta Art Council – Theatre committee and founder of Wanita Baca, a feminist bookstore and reading room. Her play, Nyai Ontosoroh, was declared the iconic production of the year by the major daily newspaper, Kompas. Nyai Ontosoroh was her epic adaptation for the stage of the late Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s epic novel, This Earth of Mankind (Bumi Manusia). She took her production of They Call Me Nyai Ontosoroh, which she also wrote, to Amsterdam, The Hague, and Antwerp, commissioned by Troppen Theater, Amsterdam. She has participated and spoken at feminist and theatre related events outside Indonesia including in the United States, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Australia, Norway, Sweden, Malaysia,Thailand, the Philippines, and Singapore. Her play Silent Song of the Genjer Flowers has been selected for a dramatic reading at the Women’s International Playwrights Conference in Santiago, Chile, October, 2018.

Siddhartha Deb was born in northeastern India and lives in Harlem, New York. He is the author of the novels The Point of Return, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and An Outline of the Republic, longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. His nonfiction book, The Beautiful and the Damned, was a finalist for the Orwell Prize and received the PEN Open award. Deb’s journalism and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Republic, n+1, The Nation, and Dissent.

 

 

 

Christopher GoGwilt is the author of The Passage of Literature: Genealogies of Modernism in Conrad, Rhys, and Pramoedya (Oxford, 2011) which won the Modernist Studies Association book prize for 2012.  He is also the author of The Fiction of Geopolitics: Afterimages of Culture from Wilkie Collins to Alfred Hitchcock (Stanford, 2000) and The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the Double-Mapping of Europe and Empire (Stanford, 1995). He has published numerous essays in the areas of Victorian studies, modernism, colonialism, and post-colonialism as book-chapters and in such journals as Comparative Literature Studies, Cultural Critique, Modernism/Modernity, Mosaic, New German Critique, Victorian Studies, and The Yale Journal of Criticism. Recent publications include "The Novel and the Nation" (for A Companion to the English Novel. Wiley-Blackwell, 2015). He is the co-editor of the volume of essays Mocking Bird Technologies: The Poetics of Parroting, Mimicry, and Other Starling Tropes (Fordham University Press, 2018). His website is chris.gogwilt.com.

Dr. Max Lane ​has been engaged with Indonesia for over 50 years. In the 1970s, he translated W.S. Rendra’s play The Struggle of the Naga Tribe, which was performed in English in Australia and Malaysia. He spent time with Rendra’s group, Bengkel Teater. In the 1980s, he worked in the Australian Embassy in Jakarta when he started translating Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s This Earth of Mankind and its three sequels, together now known as the Buru Quartet. He was withdrawn from the Embassy by the Australian government for translating these banned books. He later translated Pramoedya’s novel Arok Dedes and historical work, The Chinese in Indonesia. He was almost two years as Second Secretary (Development Assistance) at the Australian Embassy in Jakarta after being on the Southeast Asia desk in Canberra. He had responsibility for Embassy liaison with a number of development projects in Indonesia. Returning to Australia, as its first editor, he helped found Inside Indonesia magazine. During the 1980s, he also spent time as the Principal Research Officer for the Senate Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade in the Australian Parliament in Canberra. He also wrote on Indonesian political affairs for the Canberra Times newspaper and other media. In the 1990s, he actively supported the democracy movements in Indonesia and East Timor and as a journalist wrote hundreds of articles about Indonesia. Since the early 2000s, he has written regularly for the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies - Yusof Ishak website as well as book chapters.