4 - Diverse Voices: Indonesian Literature and Nation-Building

Summary

INTRODUCTION

In Rethinking Nation, Wong (2002) criticizes “literary workshops, conferences, seminars, [that] continue to trot out the theme ‘Literature and Nation-Building’ as if the idea of ‘Nation’ is fixed, indeed, sacrosanct and thus not open to debate.” Writing about literatures written in English in the Malay-oriented cultural/national politics, Wong is challenging “the belief that cultural identity is similarly fixed and unchanging, and that there is a pristine, pure origin to this identity.”

This paper will seriously consider the concern that Wong raises. Looking retrospectively towards the past runs the risk of committing anachronism, of imposing our contemporary, taken-for-granted notions that was then still nonexistent or in the making. Furthermore, what Wong suggests here is the need for scholars to critically position themselves vis-à-vis national myth-making, defined by Elias (1970) as follows:

[the creation of] the national past with which present generations can identify themselves, which gives them a feeling of pride in their own national identity and which can serve as a catalyst in a nation-building process that usually includes the integration of disparate regional groups and different social strata around certain dominant core groups…

This national self image usually masks not only internal power-relations but also the complicated, heterogeneous, and conflict-ridden processes that continue throughout processes of nation-building. This paper will start by looking at the formative history of Indonesian literature, precisely as the site of these myth-making processes, and by identifying the diverse voices that are being subordinated. Secondly, using a constructivist perspective, the paper will read three texts of pre-Independence literatures as illustrations of the roles these diverse voices play in nation-building. The paper will end by looking at the continuities as well as disruption of Indonesian literary history in the perspective of the contemporary scene in the continued processes of nation-building in Indonesia.

LITERARY HISTORY AND COLONIAL LEGACY

The perennial question that haunts scholars of Indonesian literary history is, “when Indonesian literature begins” (Damono 2003, p. 1). Tracing birth and origin cannot be separated from a more fundamental task of defining what Indonesian literature actually is.