H. Maier Beware and reflect, remember and recollect; Tjerita Njai Soemirah and the emergence of Chinese- Malay literature in the Indies In: Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 149 (1993), no: 2, Leiden, 274-297 This PDF-file was downloaded from http://www.kitlv-journals.nl Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 10:28:37PM via free access H.MJ. MAIER BEWARE AND REFLECT, REMEMBER AND RECOLLECT: TJERITANJAIS0EM1RAH AND THE EMERGENCE OF CHINESE-MALAY LITERATURE IN THE INDIES For Claudine Salmon On the basis of linguistic considerations it may be inappropriate to suggest that the forms of Malay as found in the corpus of publications by Chinese in the Dutch East Indies catalogued in Salmon's monumental book can be summarized under the single term 'Chinese Malay' (Salmon 1981). The more we reflect upon the phenomenon of linguistic communication - 'that uninterrupted process of historical becoming so characteristic of all living language' (Bakhtin 1981:288) - the more we should beware of attempts to organize the concrete and continuous flow of utterances among individual s by means of clear-cut terms, to relate them to distinct cultural identities, and to pin them onto geographical names. No community, no group, can claim to have absolute borders, strict barriers in terms of a single language; its members will always have a variety of registers, forms of discourse, sociolects, and dialects at their disposal, of which the borders are constantly moving and the limits constantly changing due to on-going tensions and conflicts. Every attempt at ordering these tensions with the aid of statistics and maps, lines and colours suggests a disregard of the process of becoming. Concurrently, it seems equally inappropriate to intimate that the forms of Malay that are used in the said corpus are clearly distinct from those that are used in texts written by people from other groups, other communities in the Indies. Relevant research has shown that what are usually presented as variant versions of Malay were not always tied to any self-conscious ethnic identity or distinct cultural tradition. Often they served as vehicles for exchange between people who had a command of yet another 'language' and felt closer to the values and ideas that, to their mind, were sustained by that other language - such as 'Javanese', for instance, or 'Acehnese', or 'Sundanese', the inverted commas alluding to the heterogeneity which these terms seek to cover. 'Malay' was used as the main medium of com- munication in the area of what is today called the 'alam Melayu' (Malay world), and supported the central elements of a 'Malay culture' there. Other forms of what could be termed Malay were used by inhabitants of the archipelago in their contacts with people from a different background. Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 10:28:37PM via free access Tjerita Njai Soemirah and Chinese-Malay Literature 275 Sometimes they were turned into a tool for subverting the ethnic identity of the speakers and escaping from the cultural tradition which was allegedly upheld in using, say, 'Javanese', 'Acehnese', or 'Buginese'. This is what happened in Aceh, in the trading centres on the coasts of the Java Sea, and in the Eastern Indonesian seas where the use of 'Malay' was often regarded as an act of negation, of 'difference' - and eventually it was to lead to the emergence of a new, loosely knit tradition, a culture of newness that was distinct from all the other cultures in the region, even from the one which the people who claimed to form part of the Malay heartland so self- consciously maintained. Indians and Arabs, Dutch and Portuguese, traders and immigrants, priests and merchants played a role in this process of differentiation. So did members of Acehnese-, Javanese- and Sundanese- speaking communities themselves. And so did some of the people of Chinese descent who, moving southward from China since time imme- morial, settled on the shores of the southern seas. Some of them, of course, preferred to keep to themselves, keeping a certain distance from the local population, preserving the language, customs and values of their mother- land, and maintaining the religion and rituals of their ancestors. Others assimilated and integrated with the local population in terms of language as well as culture, thus losing the traces of their Chinese antecedents. And others again tried to find a way in between the extremes of isolation and assimilation. The latter often enough shared a variety of forms of Malay with the local population, thus in their own way contributing to the dis- tribution of concepts and ideas, to the creation of the 'different', the 'novel', the 'modern'. Suffice it to quote the leading authority in the field, who said 'II n'y a pas eu de sino-malais a proprement parler' (Salmon 1980:186). In terms of language it may seem like an unpromising endeavour to explicitly contrast Malay texts written by people of Chinese descent with other publications in Malay. In terms of literary life, however, it is certainly possible to construct a strong argument in favour of the existence of a distinct corpus of what could be called 'Chinese-Malay literature'. Like every other group of texts, printed texts can be categorized in terms of the group of readers that is more or less explicitly addressed. Sometimes it is appropriate to define such groups in societal terms, such as 'bour- geoisie', 'aristocracy', 'urban workers', 'soldiers', 'farmers', sometimes in terms of a more or less distinctly self-conscious cultural identity, such as 'Javanese', 'Sundanese', 'Minangkabaus', 'Chinese', 'Eurasians', 'natives', 'immigrants', 'Protestants', 'Muslims'. If we want to make sense of the printed materials that appeared in the Dutch Indies once printing had become a common phenomenon there - i.e., the period between 1900 and 1942 - the second approach seems more rewarding. There is a group of texts in Malay, to formulate it succinctly, which were composed by authors who did not hide their Chinese origin and who showed themselves to have clear ideas about their intended readership: their fellow-Chinese in the Indies, with Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 10:28:37PM via free access 276 H.MJ. Maier whom they wished to share a certain knowledge of the colonial world, a certain familiarity with particular themes and forms of discourse in Malay, a certain ideology, an attitude, memories, and recollections. A bewildering variety of genres can be distinguished in these Chinese- Malay materials. On the point of mere quantity, but also on that of linguistic authority, a key role in these materials should be assigned to literary texts, that is to say, texts of an intentionally fictional character that offer a story in a coherent narrative. Within this Chinese-Malay literature romantic tales, of the boy-meets-girl-and-eventually-they-get-one-another (or don't) type, were to become increasingly important. The main protagonists in these romances are Chinese heroes and heroines who experience adventures that take place in predominantly Chinese circles - be it fully Chinese, Chinese-native, or peranakan circles. Moreover, they are impelled by problems the presentation of which suggests some familiarity with the questions of existence confronting the Chinese population in day-to-day life in late colonial society. 'Chinese-Malay literature' should not be seen as a corpus of texts with clear-cut borders. Concurrent with the forms of language in which they were written, these texts operated in a situation of historical becoming, floating readerships, changing styles, and variations in themes and subjects. The imposition of order is only useful insofar as it creates relevant signification, no matter how floating in itself. In the following passages it will be shown that this applies to Chinese-Malay literature, as a corpus which is distinct from texts in one form of Malay or another which were not written by Chinese authors and were not intended for Chinese readers. Until the end of the nineteenth century, social life in the Archipelago had been sustained in relative differentiation and heterogeneity. Boundaries between groups and communities and their respective cultural traditions had remained rather vague and flexible. Then the so-called imperialist and colonial powers started to make their presence more directly felt in South- east Asia, and European interference in local affairs became increasingly pervasive. Subsequently, groups and communities were forced to reflect upon their position, their identity, their tradition more carefully than they ever had before. In the process, barriers and segregation were substituted for the heterogeneity that had been preserved for so long. Around 1900, Indies society rapidly assumed the form of a hierarchical construction on the basis of race rather than caste (cf. Van Doom 1983). The so-called Ethical Policy that was introduced after the turn of the century may have been well-intended in some quarters, but in practice it merely accelerated the development towards a society in which fluidity, flexibility, and heterogeneity broke down. Europeans increasingly kept to themselves. Natives tended to cling to their own traditions, or rather, were forced to grope for what was presented to them as their own traditions. The observation of barriers became more relevant than the indifference to and Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 10:28:37PM via free access Tjerita Njai Soemirah and Chinese-Malay Literature 277 ignorance of borders. Hence it is not surprising that self-awareness among the main group of 'vreemde oosterlingen' (= alien Orientals), those of Chinese descent, was also considerably strengthened. As was already indicated above, these 'vreemde oosterlingen' had not always strongly felt like outsiders, as differences in mentality, morality and religion had not always hampered the interaction between Chinese and natives. They had often engaged in active dialogues with the native population, assimilating versions of the local language and mixing their ancestors' customs with local customs.