Indonesian stories at The Hague

Indonesian stories at The Hague

Linawati Sidarto, Contributor, The Hague | Fri, 06/14/2013 11:18 AM | Culture
Strike a pose: Dancers strike dramatic poses during a performance at the Tong Tong Festival.
The Tong Tong Festival’s Bibit Theater was packed with hundreds of graying heads, some of whom had waited in line for half an hour with their canes to secure a seat.

On stage was Yvonne Keuls, who read passages from books about her mother. The author, 80-years-old and still vivacious, is a prominent writer whose books are mandatory reading at Dutch secondary schools.

For an hour, Keuls delighted her audience with stories about her mother and aunts, who were Indo’s (of mixed Indonesian and Dutch heritage) and were forced to leave their native land after the colony earned its independence. They never felt quite at home in the Netherlands.

“In Holland I was all alone, without my sisters and cousins. I just don’t want that. I have always lived with a large family. I’d go crazy if I were removed from all that,” her mother lamented.

Revealed: Ahmad Tohari at a discussion on his seminal novel of the Communist purge, Ronggeng Dukuh Paruk, previously published in English as The Dancer. The author discussed evading censorship when writing the novel.Keuls’ reading was speckled with the heavy Indonesian accent typical of her mother’s generation, full of exclamations such as “aduuuh”. Melancholic passages are interspersed with hilarious episodes of an aunt trying to reach out to her dead husband through a medium, something not uncommon in Indonesia but unknown in Dutch society.

“Literature has been a part of Tong Tong since the very beginning,” says Leslie Boon, responsible for the fair’s art and literary program. She is also the granddaughter of Tong Tong founder Jan Boon, a writer under the pseudonym, Tjalie Robinson.

During Dutch rule, many civil servants and merchants went to live in Indonesia and raised mixed families. Following the end of World War II and independence, hundreds of thousands of Indos, those of mixed Indonesian and Dutch heritage, migrated back to the Netherlands.

In 1959, a group of Indo’s started the pasar malam (night market), in The Hague. Its aim was to preserve and stimulate Indo heritage. “Indos are the result of colonialism, which gave birth to a new, mixed culture that blended the East and West,” Leslie Boon says.

In half a century, the annual fair grew from a three-day event with 3,000 visitors to a two-week spectacle attracting over 100,000 people. It is now held in Malie Square in The Hague’s city center each May, housing some 20,000 square meters of giant tents. Aside from being famous for its copious amounts of Indonesian food, the fair has over 200 cultural performances spread throughout its four theaters.
Avid fan: Author Paula Gomes (left) speaks with a fan after an author’s talk. Gomes left Indonesia for the Netherlands in the 1970s and published Sudah, Laat Maar (It’s Done, Let It Be) about the inevitable divide that would grow between Indonesian and its erstwhile colonizer.
“Indo writers have always enjoyed wide popularity,” says Leslie. Indonesian artists and writers started getting invited to the fair in the 1970s, including such luminaries as Sitor Situmorang and Ayu Utami. In recent years, Tong Tong has expanded its horizon to also include writers and performers from countries such as India, Malaysia and South Africa.

“What remains important is that the authors deal with European and Asian history or culture,” Leslie
explains.

When deciding on themes, Tong Tong organizers try to select topics that fit the overall spectrum of the fair. This year, book discussions focused on the social impact of political and war violence. Present was Indonesia’s Ahmad Tohari, whose seminal book Ronggeng Dukuh Paruk unveiled sufferings during
the country’s political turmoil in the 1960s.

Correspondingly, Sang Penari (The Dancer), the movie based on Tohari’s book, was screened. Meanwhile, the Sang Penari dance troupe, with dancers and choreographers from Java and Bali, performed gave workshops on the fair’s dance podium.

Tohari’s talk was preceded by a reading of passages from Ronggeng that were left out when the book was first published in the 1980s during Soeharto’s reign. Soeharto, backed by the army, came to power following a failed coup in 1965, blamed on the Indonesian Communist Party. The killings and arbitrary arrests of over a million people by some accounts following the coup was a taboo subject during his 32-year rule.
Scandalous: Gerard Termorshuizen tells the tale of Marietje van Oordt, the woman who led a series of questionable adventures in Java in the early 20th century. Temorshuizen expects to publish a book based on his research later this year.
The passages, read aloud in Dutch, described the grim atmosphere in a jail packed with those arrested after the coup. At times people are summoned out of cells, followed by the sound of gunshots.

Asked why he made the main male character in the book, Rasus, a soldier, Tohari answered: “This was my ploy to slip through censorship.”

Off stage, Tohari expressed hope that these talks would make the general public more aware of this dark side of Indonesian history. “Most people outside Indonesia, even in a country with close historical ties to us like the Netherlands, have no idea what happened then.”

Meanwhile, Dutch writer Pauline Slot unveiled her book entitled Soerabaja, about the East Java city today known as Surabaya.

Surabaya was torn by heavy fighting shortly after the end of World War II between pro-independence Indonesian soldiers and the Allied Forces, which consisted of British and Dutch troops. November 10, the day the fighting commenced, has since been annually commemorated as Indonesia’s National Hero’s Day.
Authors’ talk: Indo writers Jill Stolk (left) and Marian Bloem shared the stage for a discussion.
Few Indonesians, however, realize that in that period, thousands of Dutch civilians still living in the region were caught in the crossfire. The Japanese seized power over the Indonesian archipelago from the Dutch in 1942, and in the following three years, over 100,000 Dutch civilians and soldiers were kept in internment camps throughout the country.

When the Japanese and their German ally lost the war, the interned Dutch were “freed” into a country that was no longer theirs. Slot described the horror of that time through the story of her Aunt Bep, fresh out of a camp near Surabaya with her three young children.

“The British soldiers were not prepared to cope with the attacks on Dutch women and children,” Slot says. Bep and her children, together with other civilians, were on a truck on the way to Malang when the vehicle came under attack by Indonesian soldiers. Bep did not survive.

Slot wrote the book based on voluminous correspondence letters and diaries left by Bep and her husband, who was interned Thailand. “I wanted to give my aunt a voice,” Slot says. “Typical of many people traumatized after the war, the family neither spoke about her nor what they had gone through during the war.”

Winifred Kingma-Intveld, who raptly listened to Slot’s talk, agreed with the author. “When we arrived in the Netherlands after the war, nobody wanted to listen to our stories. The people here were too wrapped up in their own war ordeal,” says Winifred, 82, who was born in Malang to Indo-Europeans parents.
Review: Journalist and cultural observer Joss Wibisono holds a copy of Gitanyali’s Blues Merabu while leading a discussion.
Will there still be sufficient interest in Indo culture when, in a few years, the graying audience listening to Keuls, Slot and Tohari are no longer present?

Melodie van Berkel, 29, thinks people’s interest in that period may wane in a few years. Van Berkel says she enjoyed Keuls’ talk, “as it reminds me of my grandparents”. However, she does not feel like she has special ties with Indonesia. “I visited Indonesia for the first time last year, and it just felt like any other country to me.”

Keuls, however, points out that there is much more interest now in her books compared to a few decades ago. “When I first started publishing books about my colonial past in the 1980s, hardly anyone paid any attention. That has really changed. Why? I don’t really know, and only time will tell how that will develop in the future.”
Dance fever: The Tong Tong festival was punctuated by a host of performers presenting a wealth of dance.

— Photos by Hans Kleij
The Jakarta Post