Crazy times
When, in the late 1960s, I set out to do my first fieldwork among the Javanese of Jogjakarta, I was struck by the reference to the period they were under Dutch rule as the zaman normal or the time of normality. The Japanese invasion of 1942 announces the turn of the wheel of time: the Dutch East Indies cease to exist, and country and people enter the turmoil of the zamanédanor - crazy times. During such periods the righteous will suffer while rascals will rise and rule in a world turned topsy-turvy. The Dutch are interned and forced to labour under arbitrary Japanese, and may have to fill the bathtubs of their mistresses who formerly served the white masters.
During my first time on Mid-Java many people doubted whether the coming ofIndependenceheralded normalcy. Under Sukarno’s whimsical rule, they were fed slogans rather than rice, and the massacres that marked the end of his ‘guided democracy’ were still fresh in mind; even to the point that some who had participated in them told me nervously giggling their stories. Would his successor—an eminent product of the crazy times, rising from a colonial non-com to the very apex of the nation—augur a period of order?
And the War is Over is set in the final days of World War II in a small village in Northern Sumatra where the Imperial Armed Forces have established a prisoner-of-war camp for Dutch internees and a site for a group of Javanese forced labourers, the so-called romusha. It is a time rife with rumour and short on solid information, even as internees and the Javanese are totally in the dark. Unaware of what is going on, a group of Dutchmen plans and prepares for their escape into the jungle for which they need the cooperation of some influential locals. An exceptional romusha—generally these are mistrusted and looked down upon by the local population—is about to propose the daughter of a prestigious haji. Some Japanese surmise that theUnited States has finally capitulated, as others commit suicide in the expectation that their out bombed country is about to surrender.
As much as the narrative has an exceptional romusha, it also presents us with various leading and a crowd of ordinary villagers, willing-to-flee and staying-on Dutchmen, successful mistresses and whores, a humane Japanese officer and hard-line non-coms and soldiers, and the reasoning of wandering Minangkabau (West-Sumatran) merchants. All of these play their part in ephemeral settings that change by the day—and that, as such, evoke flashbacks of life in Japan, in the Minang heartland, and in the normal Indies—while giving the author ample scope to narrate a complex story in relatively few pages. In order to add particular flavour to the variety of nations and customs, a modicum of Javanese, Minang, Arabic (Muslim), Dutch and Japanese words and expressions occur in the body of the text, next to a considerable number of specific Malay-Indonesian nouns that had better be left un-translated; they are explained in a six-page ‘Glossary’ at the end of the narrative.
Ismail Marahimin’s first and only novel was an immediate success as it was nominated the best of the year by the Jakarta Arts Council in 1977; later, in 1984, it was still named recipient of the Pegasus Prize, a literary award sponsored by Mobil Oil Indonesia. Dan Perang pun Usai also drew foreign attention, as it already appeared in 1986 as And the War is Over in a translation by John H. McGlynn (Louisiana State University Press). The Lontar Foundation’s edition—here reviewed—contains McGlynn’s revised translation, and appeared in the Foundation’s ‘Modern Library of Indonesia’ series that is devoted to introducingIndonesia to the world through literary translations.
Niels Mulder recently concluded his swan song, Situating Filipino Civilisation in Southeast Asia; Reflections and observations. Saarbruecken: LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing (print-to-order ed., ISBN 9783659130830), 2012. <niels_mulder201935@yahoo.com.ph>.