Reviews

Laine Berman, Speaking through the silence: Narratives, social conventions and power in Java, New York, Oxford University Press, 1998, Hbk ISBN 019-510-8884, AU$140.

Reviewed by DAMIEN KINGSBURY

There has been much acknowledgement of the 'levels' of language in Javanese society. Many observers - usually half informed - have noted the 'polite' and 'refined' aspects of the language. However, with Speaking through the silence, Laine Berman not only offers one of the most detailed accounts of Javanese culture, she identifies the quite pronounced power relations inherent in the Javanese language.

Berman's understanding of Javanese language and culture is based on her years of living and working in Yogyakarta, with ordinary families as well as within the confines of the palace. The focus of her study identifies the hierarchical power relations between different social levels in Javanese society, as well as between men and women.

Several characters in Berman's book are well brought to life, but she saves the most attention for a young woman who works in a local garment factory. Conditions are slave-like, but she has difficulty in even talking about them, or having them listened to. The 'silence' here is that which speaks most, though the gaps in communication are noticeable throughout. 'Politeness' is maintained through a use of non-language. One cannot offend or challenge if utterances are devoid of meaning.

When the protagonist does finally break loose of her restrictive 'cultural' bonds she is sacked. The lesson is that while what is defined as Javanese culture and its so-called refinement remains intact, there is little hope for the social or political emancipation of ordinary Javanese (and hence Indonesian) people.

From a scholarly perspective, Berman's work is thorough and detailed and it rewards close reading. Indonesianist academics and more general anthropologists and linguists should all find this book essential reading. It is a strong work and will undoubtedly find its well deserved place within the canon of texts on Indonesia. Only those with a vested interest in the Javanese status quo, or who have a misplaced sense of appreciation for what passes for Javanese 'politeness' and 'refinement', will come away from this book disappointed.

Dr Damien Kingsbury Damien.Kingsbury@arts.monash.edu.au is Executive Officer at the Monash Asia Institute, Melbourne, Australia.

Laine Berman, Speaking through the silence: Narratives, social conventions and power in Java, New York, Oxford University Press, 1998, Hbk ISBN 019-510-8884, AU$140.

Review: How one man's courage changed the course of history

Ron Witton

This book is a beauty. It tells how the sixteenth century Dutch East India Company, the grand old VOC, spread its tentacles across the globe in search of the inordinately valuable spices of the eastern islands of present day Indonesia.

The Dutch, like other European nations (particularly the English, their greatest competitor), initially followed Columbus westward from Europe in order to find a passage to the East Indies. This resulted in the Dutch establishing themselves on Manhattan Island, which they named New Amsterdam. They sailed up the Hudson River hoping to reach the Pacific. When that proved unsuccessful, they began to explore northwards in search of the fabled, but ultimately impassable, northwest passage. Others travelled northeast from Europe in search of an equally fabled, but also unpassable, arctic passage along Russia's northern coast. Mariners had horrifying experiences caught in winter ice floes thousands of miles from home, on routes that would prove fruitless.

Even the proven passage to the east via the Cape of Good Hope was perilous, but with luck they returned to Europe with cargoes of spices worth far more than gold. There are enough stories here of heroism, horror and adventure to keep the reader awake until late at night, exploring the roots of modern empire. Contemporaneous illustrations and maps are an added bonus.

Not till two thirds through this gripping book do we meet Nathaniel, whose 'courage changed the course of history'. He was an Englishman committed to his nation's titanic economic struggle against the Dutch. He succeeds in taking over and fortifying the now forgotten island of Run, which lies 'in the backwaters of the East Indies, a remote and fractured speck of rock that is separated from its nearest land mass, Australia, by more than six hundred miles of ocean' (p2). Forgotten today, it is not even shown on modern maps. However, Run Island figured prominently on seventeenth century maps because of the fragrant nutmeg that grew in abundance there. The island was the key to monopoly control of the world's supply of this fantastically valuable spice.

For five years, Nathaniel Courthorpe and his half-starved band of thirty men were besieged by a Dutch force one hundred times greater. Their heroism led directly to one of the most momentous geo-political rearrangements of the world. Stymied by Courthorpe's courage, the Dutch were forced to give the English the island of Manhattan in exchange for this now insignificant speck of rock. Thus New Amsterdam became New York. It is a tale so fantastic that one is left wondering why it has never been previously told.

Giles Milton, Nathaniel's nutmeg. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1999, 388pp, ISBN 0340696761 (pbk)

Ron Witton (rwitton@uow.edu.au) teaches at the University of Wollongong, Australia.

Review: Tarian bumi is the story of four generations of Balinese women

Pamela Allen

With this novel (originally serialised in Republika in 1997) Oka Rusmini joins two minority groups in contemporary Indonesian literature - Balinese novelists, and female novelists. Born in Jakarta of Balinese parents in 1967, Oka is a journalist for the Bali Post. She has had poetry published in several anthologies, and short stories in a range of journals and magazines. She is married to the East Javanese poet Arif B Prasetyo, a union which so upset her family on account of his ethnicity and religion that they disowned her.

Tarian bumi is the story of four generations of Balinese women. It is told in the third person, but from the narratorial point of view of Ida Ayu Telaga, a woman in her thirties whose aspirations for herself and her daughter Sari differ somewhat from those of her mother, her grandmother, and her female peers. These women are motivated primarily by two factors: a longing to be beautiful, and desire for a high-castebrahmana husband.

Telaga's mother Luh Sekar, born into a commoner sudra family, declares when she is just a girl that the only thing she cares about is becoming the wife of a brahmana man, thus elevating herself from her lowly status. When she finally meets and marries her brahmanaman, her world changes irrevocably. She can no longer use the name Ni Luh Sekar. She can no longer pray in her family temple. When she gives birth to Telaga, her mother-in-law forbids her from taking the child to see its maternal grandmother. Yet, as a woman who has become a brahmanaby marriage rather than by birth, she is treated differently within the circle of her husband's family compound. She can never truly be a part of her new brahmanafamily, but at the same time she is expected to sever her ties with her sudrapast.

Despite the displacement and distress her new status causes her, she continues to perpetuate the importance of high-caste standing by projecting her aspirations onto Telaga who, however, scandalises her family by marrying the sudraWayan Sasmitha, in defiance of the importance in the Balinese hierarchy of a woman not lowering the status of the whole family by marrying beneath her.

Telaga's difficulty in adjusting to the lifestyle of a sudra family is proof to her mother-in-law that the marriage should never have taken place. Finally, because her presence in the household is regarded as unlucky, her mother-in-law asks her to go back to her family compound to perform the upacara Patiwangi, the ceremony which officially sets a person free from the brahmana caste. In the end, Telaga is transformed into a sudrawoman. It is a liberation for her.

Beauty

The women are also driven by the longing to be beautiful, which goes hand-in-hand with the desire to be a fine dancer. However, like the brahmana status, beauty has its price. In the novel, beauty is infused with the same sort of quality traditionally associated with power in Java: it seems to be finite, and the competition to acquire it is fierce. The envy surrounding beauty is compounded by pique that brahmanawomen are perceived as having more than their fair share of it.

Closely linked with the quest for beauty are questions about what it means to be a woman in Bali. The female protagonists of Tarian Bumi are somewhat ambivalent about their womanhood and how it intersects with their quest for a brahmana husband and unrivalled beauty. Telaga, whose life is controlled by her mother's avarice, her mother-in-law's bitterness, and her sister-in-law's greed, has frequent cause to question what it means to be a woman.

Tarian bumi is in part a novel about caste, beauty, and Balinese women. The caste system has to the outside world generally seemed to sit lightly on Balinese social structure. It is here depicted as in fact an insidious one that perpetuates a hierarchical way of understanding the world and creates jealousy and avarice in the women who are forced to compete with each other for brahmanahusbands and for beauty. Tarian bumi is also, however, a novel about the ways in which caste binds and divides per se. The male characters in the novel, too, are subjected to the inequities of this hierarchical system.

Like much other contemporary writing about Bali, the novel is an antidote to the exoticism depicted by early anthropologists and travel writers and in mainstream contemporary tourist ventures. Much of its appeal lies in the fact that it is an attempt by a Balinese, rather than an outsider, to deconstruct some of the myths that lie at the heart of the Orientalist fantasy.

Oka Rusmini, Tarian bumi, Magelang: IndonesiaTera, 2000, 141 pp, ISBN 979-95428-8-X

Pamela Allen (Pam.Allen@utas.edu.au)teaches Asian studes at the University of Tasmania, Hobart.