To Ibu Suwarsih Djojopuspito,
First of all, I am sorry for writing this letter to you in English.
English has increased the chance of this letter being read by more people; but at the same time, I know there will always be some part of my thoughts and feelings that cannot be incorporated by this language. Although, you know what, here I am not just writing in English. I am also thinking in Indonesian while I am writing in English.
Take this for an example: I have to think for a while to decide whether I want to use aku or saya to address myself in this letter for you. You must have known that aku and saya have different sense of intimacy in our language. Aku is usually used in personal and informal settings, while saya is typically used for academic or formal purpose. Please take in mind that I am speaking to you, Ibu, with aku. Yet, the English translation for both aku or saya can only be I. Using I as the first person narrator has somehow erased the tone and position that I want to put forward to you.
I; the 9th letter of Latin alphabet, a stark vertical line, which—to be honest, stood like a lonely self-conscious ego. From now on, I will italicize the word I, so you know; that my I is not just an English I.
I am not saying that Indonesian language is more rich, complex or superior than English or any other languages. They are just different. While I am writing this letter, my mind moves in between Indonesian and English. The manifestation of my thoughts and feelings is always in the process of reciprocal translation. I am always in the process of building a common ground for these two languages, and at the same time, trying to give a space of recognition for words that cannot be translated. Indeed, now my mind is cluttered with uncanny words, and I have to think slower as I am moving in-between the linguistic and epistemic differences of Indonesian and English. However, new meanings and new senses of words are blooming in the messy garden of my mind because of this translation process. I am glad to be able to do this; and I have to acknowledge that it is a privilege, of course.
I started this letter by problematizing language and translation because it seems to me translation is a strange technology. It reproduces while also destroying, it recognizes while also disdaining. This is what I think when I started to deliberate over your life and works.
Your first novel manuscript, Marjanah, written in Sundanese, was rejected by the publishing house Balai Pustaka, the official-colonial Kantoor vor Volkslectuur. They said it was not didactic enough and your writing style was too complicated. At that time, your interest in narrating the life of a non-heroic woman subject in an undramatic structure was disdained. They said, it was not “traditional” enough. Ibu, I know how you were really disappointed with this rejection.
Some time later, you became acquainted with an Indo-Dutch descent author, Edgar du Perron who suggested you to write in Dutch. He said, Dutch is the language that gives you the meaning of literature. I am not sure how you felt about his view, but in my opinion he was overvaluing, if not imposing, the influence of European literature in the development of our literary movement.
So you followed du Perron’s suggestion. Well, after all, du Perron was quite a good ally, right? He was one of the editors of a progressive, anti-colonial magazine in Bandung where you often published your writings. So you wrote, amidst your deep disappointment with the rejection of Marjanah. You wrote Buiten Het Gareel (Out of line, or perhaps Out of harness), a semi-autobiographical novel about your life embedded in the character of Sulastri; a woman, a writer, a mother, a wife and a teacher in sekolah liar (literal English translation for this would be wild school, which is a term coined by the Dutch to identify nationalist underground school).
You depicted and analyzed Sulastri’s feelings with sentimentality and self-critical irony. You narrated how she lived in bitter poverty and emotional uncertainty—a life she chose as she preferred to teach in sekolah liar to a reasonably well-paid position in the colonial government school. But Sulastri does not figure as the main character; doesn’t she? She, too, was a really attentive observer and an honest storyteller that showed us the minute details of disappointment, doubt and hope amongst her nationalist comrades.
In the first pages of Buiten Het Gareel, you told us that Sulastri is very sad because she has to separate from Sundanese language. Splitting up with one’s own language was so painful, so you said. I think I get what you meant, Ibu. That feeling of being touched by intimate terror under your throat—oppressions from two sides of patronizing-patriarchal forces that withhold you from speaking up. One that says your character is not “traditional” enough, and the other that says you to just have to follow his path to be “modern”.
Dear Ibu,
Allow me to be a bit upset with du Perron again. Perhaps I should send a copy of this letter to that guy too.
In his introduction to your novel he wrote that Buiten Het Gareel, “is a product of Western culture, or at least the product of Western education.” Ibu, I know you went to Dutch school for girls and you were the very first Indonesian teachers who received European certificate. It was all “thanks to” the Dutch Ethical Policy that, they claimed, based on a moral duty and an ethical responsibility of the Dutch to educate and improve the social and cultural condition of the colonized subjects.
Du Perron confidently assumed that your criticality is a “gift” from the modern Western education. Oh dear Ibu, did you really believe that? Du Perron seemed to ignore the fact that you had to face the impossibility of breaking through the dividing structural lines between you and the Dutch pupils, exactly in that very Western education that taught you “moral” education. And really, if he thought that it was a gift, why did he narrate it as if we’re in debt?
If I sound angry here, it is not just because I think du Perron and the whole framework of Ethical Policy has treated you and your work with disdain. I am too, implicated; because their imagined ethics of salvation have hidden the fact that modernity cannot be understood without coloniality. Or better, modernity cannot exist without coloniality. Let’s know call it modernity/coloniality.
In that ethics of salvation, the epistemic violence of modernity/coloniality is tacitly exercising a double erasure to our agency as the colonized subject (Yes, Ibu, “our”, because coloniality is not over—at your time it was called Ethical Policy, in my time now it is called developmentalism). The first erasure of modernity/coloniality creates us as “the other”, the traditional, the exotic, the savage, and the backward thinkers, the underdeveloped countries. Then, when we are able to free ourselves from their trammeling colonial gaze because we know it is unjust; they erased our agency by saying it could only be enabled through their gift—that dangerous fiction they called modernity.
Ibu Suwarsih,
Despite your deep disappointment, your anxiety towards the use of language was never too long. It seems that you didn’t let yourself drowned in the ontological anxiety of being a traditional/modern, West/East, Dutch/Indonesian woman. Those categories are just made up by modernity/coloniality and in your writing, I think you have choose to delink from that categories.
Through Marjanah and Buiten Het Gareel, you reminded us that identity is just the surface of the problem. It is indeed really matters, but it becomes significant when you also put the question of positionality. In my present day, we would call what you’re doing now as part of decolonial movement.
You didn’t avoid Dutch language, but when you used it, you didn’t submit to its way of thinking. You used Dutch to expose your struggle against Dutch colonialism. More than that, you wrote against the border of epistemic territory that was imposed by modernity/coloniality. From which position am I writing and for whom am I addressing it? They are exactly the decolonial questions that I found in your work.
In my case, the regime of academic writing has instructed me to use passive voice, to focus on the result of action than the person doing the action. This regime has assumed that the knowing subject is self-contained and untouched by the geo-political configuration that has ranked us with racial categories, and to add that, now with economic measure as people from the Third World countries. I learned it from you, to emphasize where I come from, or perhaps where we come from (because decoloniality should be taken as a collective project), despite I and we cannot escape writing in this bloody English language.
Ibu, you never directly affirmed to or condemned du Perron’s view about your work. But somehow I can see how you operate through decoloniality when you translated Buiten Het Gareel to Indonesian. You gave the novel a new title, Manusia Bebas (A free human). It was in 1975 and you received funding from the Kingdom of Netherland to translate it (I think they still wanted to insist that your critical consciousness is a gift from their modern culture). The new title emphasized on freedom and being a free human. You had cautiously reminded us though, that this freedom is not something given. Freedom is always something that we must struggle for; you implied it when you wrote how you taught students in your school to think about freedom not à la Rousseau. I hope the Kingdom of Netherland would someday get this point.
Ibu, was it hard to translate something that had been erased? First you wrote Marjanah in Sundanese, then you have to modify it to Dutch as Buiten Het Gareel, and now you had to translate it to Indonesian. I admire how you gave recognition to untranslatability. Even when you translated Buiten Het Gareel from Dutch to your mother tongue, you said there were Dutch words that cannot be translated to Indonesian. You also did not avoid the fact that our national language is never enough. You gave space for Sundanese and Javanese terms, which were not considered “good and appropriate” in the new version of New Order’s language style. You reminded us what Suharto’s New Order regime has done to our language. In 1972 the New Order “perfected” our national language; making it homogenous, erasing local dialects and the diverse feelings and memory of our languages. By doing so they also separated the new generation from our long history because the new spelling discipline has made us difficult to read texts from the past generation. From the way I understand it, translating Buiten Het Gareel from Dutch to Indonesian was never been a gesture of returning for you. It was a way for the novel to re-exist in a borderland of languages, to undo the double erasure of modernity/coloniality.
Dear Ibu Suwarsih,
Thank you for writing Marjanah in Sundanese, publishing it as a new work called Buiten Het Gareel, and translating it into Indonesian as Manusia Bebas. Through these processes of translation, I learn to practices the politic of languages with different consciousness. I can only hope, that through my awkward italicized I, my broken English grammar, and my modest decolonial reading of your work, this letter may make both of us re-exist.
Middelburg, 2/7/2018
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I wrote this letter for a writing assignment/exercise at Decolonial Summer School in Middleburg that I joined in June 2018. The task was to engage personally with decoloniality in a form of letter to whomever the student wish. The lecturer’s invitation is to explain “in your own words” (and not to hide behind textual commentaries or statistics), our understanding of the concepts and issues discussed during the Summer School. I choose to write to Ibu Suwarsih Djojopuspito, an Indonesian writer who writes in Sundanese, Dutch and Indonesian. She is known to be the first Indonesian woman who published her novel in Dutch.
Because it took the form of a letter, I did not put the bibliographic resources inside the text, but here I have to acknowledge that when I wrote this letter, I am inspired by these references below :
Chatterjee, Partha, ‘Talking About Our Modernity in Two Languages’. Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, [S.l.], v. 2, n. 2, p. 153-169.
Vasquez, Rolando, ‘Translation as Erasure: Thoughts on Modernity’s Epistemic Violence’, Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 24 No. 1 March 2011, 27-44.
Quijano, Aníbal , ‘Coloniality And Modernity/Rationality ‘, Cultural Studies, 21:2, 168 – 178.
(though this shortlist does not include other key materials in decoloniality studies that also contribute to my thoughts)
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A collection of chance and necessity. 