Although there had been Dutch involvement with Indonesia since the seventeenth century and later on in the Netherlands a few novels with a Dutch East Indies background were published by those who had returned from serving there, almost no fiction was published in Indonesia itself until the 1930s. With the loss of this part of the Dutch empire in 1949, there was an upsurge of such writing. The authors were drawn more or less evenly from ex-colonialists of Dutch origin and from members of Indo-Dutch families who had been established in the territories for generations and usually had Indonesian blood tucked discreetly away somewhere in the line. Most of them were now in exile; very few followed the example of Beb Vuyk, who had come to the colonial Dutch East Indies in the 1920s but decided to stay on after Indonesian independence in 1949 and adopted Indonesian nationality. Educated Indonesians like Joke Muljono who chose to write in Dutch were even fewer.


This kind of Dutch East Indies literature forms a genre of its own and is strongly influenced by the Indonesian story-telling tradition. The authors are personally involved with the stories they relate and a good deal is autobiographical to a greater or lesser degree. This is particularly so in the case of character sketches. Willem Walraven’s ‘The Clan’ relates the story of his marriage to an Indonesian woman without even bothering to change the names of those involved. Jan Eijkelboom’s more sombre ‘The Journey Back’ sticks equally closely to the facts of his left-handed relationship with an Indonesian prostitute who goes mad under the pressure of conflicting loyalties during the struggle for independence. Writing under the pseudonym of E. Breton de Nijs, Rob Nieuwenhuys himself makes telling use of this interdependence of fact and fiction. His Aunt Sophie (in ‘One of the Family’) fictionalises the past and lives in a world of her own; the sketch he gives of her is a kind of mirror image in that it pretends to be an objective account of the facts but is published as fiction.


There are also two contrasting character sketches of males. Edgar du Perron’s ‘Double Portrait of Arthur Hille’ is frankly autobiographical and concerns a college friend who is bumptious and a bit of a brute. He eventually joins an army unit fighting the Aceh ‘rebels’ in northern Sumatra and acquires the reputation of a sadist. Justifiably so, it seems at first from his conversation when the two meet again during one of his leaves. His unit has taken to using the native sword rather than revolvers in defending themselves. By the end of the conversation, however, it is clear that Hille knows perfectly well that he is becoming brutalised. It is this capacity for self-knowledge, in spite of everything, that draws the author to him.


L.A.Koelwijn’s ‘Mr Tamagashi, Interpreter’ introduces another characteristic in many of these stories, sympathy for ‘the enemy’, or rather the perceived humanity of ‘the other’. His story is set in an isolated way-station in Thailand and concerns a rather kindly Japanese who is despised by his fellow soldiers because of his knowledge of the enemy’s language. There are also two stories with Indonesian backgrounds which illustrate this same sympathy. Albert van der Hoogte’s prosecuting magistrate in ‘The End of Pak Romat’ goes so far as to compare himself to Herod for his part in the trial of a bandit who has been terrorising the countryside. He protests rather too much, perhaps, and the reason for his sympathy is not too clear. It only emerges in A. Alberts’ lighter companion-piece, ‘The Hunt’, in which the protagonist shoots a similar bandit himself.


This is the area that has given English the phrase ‘to run amok’. There is always violence not far below the surface. H.J. Friedericy’s ‘Blood’ concerns internecine wrangling in a small native state during colonial times. Joke Muljono’s ‘No-man’s-land’ and Beb Vuyk’s ‘Full of Sound and Fury’ recount incidents during the struggle for independence. Vuyk underlines the primitive nature of institutionalised violence by having the incident told to her while on an expedition among the head-hunting Dayaks of Borneo. These, while she is visiting one of their longhouses, show her some relics from the Japanese occupation: ‘»There they are, in that new basket. They are precious heads, because the Japanese were brave warriors.» A moment later, when we were seated, he added: «They stood up to torture very well, too».’


F. Springer also looks at the primitive nature of violence in ‘Spirits Around Parula’, the story of a missionary crucified by his would-be converts in a remote Papuan valley. At the same time, it has a similarly sceptical, light-hearted touch to that found in Somerset Maugham’s ‘The Vessel of Wrath’ and reminds us that many of Maugham’s most telling stories are set in this same general area.


Primitivism has its mysterious side too and it is this that characterises the writing of Maria Dermoût, the only author here to have two stories included, and deservedly so. In ‘The Cannon’ a retired colonial officer is convinced he has met his native guide on a remote island in some former life; ‘The Sirens’ is pure fantasy and the closest allied to the Indonesian story-telling tradition of all the stories in the anthology. Dating from 1960, it may also be read as a parable of women’s liberation.

I’ve often tried out my klxxxxxwang on the skulls of those fellows and when you think of those medieval knights who sliced each other in half you know, on either side of the horse there’s half a knight toppling down you laugh till you ache. A slash would no longer need to pay taxes. They gathered a group of disciples around them, they usually dressed in white and ended up fighting to their death. They always fought to their death. There was never a successful outcome to their revolts. (p. 123; Alberts, ‘The Hunt’)

The cat was growling all the time now, jumping up at the trapdoor; it was as if the prau were creaking in all its joints.

‘Yes, yes, all right,’ said the woman, ‘I’m coming,’ and she opened the trapdoor; the cat came out of the hold, up on the deck, swishing his tail.

He looked everywhere at once with his hot, yellow eyes; at the woman, at the prau, at the submerged land on one side and the Mainland to the other side, at the trees, the hills, the mountains, forest everywhere; again he looked at the woman, he growled and in one leap was gone from the prau and was standing on the high, rocky shore: he was a fully grown, royal tiger, golden yellow with black stripes, terrible to behold!

The woman clambered awkwardly over the side of the prau, hampered by her golden sarong, and then across the rocks to the waiting beast. Then they walked on together, first the tiger, the tiger walked in front, and then the woman, to the forest on the hills, to the mountains of the great Mainland, where they must go. (p 27-8; Willem Walraven, ‘The Clan’, tr. Adrienne Dixon)

‘Where are the scoundrels?’ asked Brandsen. In silence the policemen pointed toward the plumes in the scrub near the post; difficult to discern, but suddenly Brandsen could see them, too, swarming everywhere, in the trees, among the reeds by the river, in the grass on the hillside. Columns of smoke marked the places where the chiefs were gathered around fires. Pigs were screeching in a neighbouring village: was the feast of victory being prepared? Then there came sounds of singing, further away, from villages made invisible by mist and low-hanging clouds.

Around Gerard and Tessie there reigned utter silence. ‘They want to drive Mr and Mrs Dubba crazy with fear,’ said the chief policeman. ‘They attack at intervals, you see, with spears and bows and arrows, and they don’t show themselves if they can help it. When it gets dark they will probably set fire to the post. But first they will kill Mr and Mrs Dubba.’ He was talking cheerfully, like a tourist guide.

‘Kill them? Why?’ asked Brandsen.

‘To prove to the other Zakari tribes that we, strangers, are not immortal.’

‘OK, OK.’ said Brandsen, ‘It hasn’t come to that yet.’

Howls in the mist. Brandsen and his five men hurried down the hillside, through another ten, twenty muckpools, and reached the edge of Dubba’s airstrip just at the moment when a group of warriors, with fixed spears, came storming toward the kneeling couple. Brandsen fired his rifle into the air. The Zakaris did not let themselves be distracted by it. Then Brandsen and his men took aim and fired. Two warriors toppled. The others got the message. Screaming, they took to their heels, a perfect motion picture. A moment later, silence had returned to the mission post. Tessie knelt by the bodies of the slain Zakaris. One of them was dead, the other was still moving in the mud. (p. 245, F. Springer, ‘Spirits around Parula’, tr. Adrienne Dixon)