From Jail to Jail. Tan Malaka
he discusses in considerable detail his experiences in, and the social structure of, Iwe, another small village in South China, and his move to Amoy, where he established the Foreign Languages School in 1935. Again the Japanese army’s southern advance caught up with him, and Tan Malaka fled to Rangoon. Chapter 4 describes his subsequent journey through the Malay Peninsula, involving a substantial, somewhat romanticised, account of Malay history, again stressing the theme of unity raised in the Philippines chapter. It continues with his five-year period disguised as a Chinese schoolteacher in Singapore. When the Japanese occupied Singapore, once again Tan Malaka moved on, seizing the opportunity the war presented to go “Toward the Republic of Indonesia,” the title of the concluding chapter of Volume II. This chapter discusses his experiences throughout the Japanese occupation, living incognito on the outskirts of Jakarta for one year and then for two years as a clerk in a coal mine in a remote area on the southern coast of West Java.
Volume III
Volume III represents a radical departure from the narrative approach dominant in Volumes I and II. The introduction is actually a postscript covering the period March-October 1948 (including the Madiun Affair) and it completely wrenches the reader from the situation of August 1945 and the Proclamation of Independence, with which Volume II closes. Following the Introduction, Tan Malaka launches into a forty-five-page chapter entitled “Weltanschauung,” in which he gives a historical materialist account of the development of human society through primitive communism, slavery, and feudalism, paying particular attention to religious beliefs. He then moves on to discuss the emergence of capitalism and the associated development of philosophy, the ascendancy of science and dialectical materialism, and concludes with a few points of “dialectical materialism as applied to modern Indonesian history.” Chapter 2, “The State,” concentrates on the evolution of state forms and on differing ways in which the state is defined in order to serve different political interests. Chapter 3, “The Rise and Fall of States,” discusses changes in modes of production as the motive force for changes in state forms. Chapter 4, “Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis,” recapitulates much of the preceding three chapters, with an emphasis on the final stage of evolution from class society to communism via the dictatorship of the proletariat.
With chapter 5 the reader is brought back from abstraction to the historical reality of the proclamation of Indonesian independence in August 1945, the legitimacy of which is defended in terms of the right of self-determination. Chapter 6 elaborates on this right, examining the class forces in Indonesian society both before and after the Dutch occupation, and the effect of the Japanese occupation in accelerating the Indonesian revolution. Chapter 7, “From Engineer Sukarno to President Sukarno,” shifts from discussion of broad social forces to examination of a pivotal individual in historical context. It contains trenchant criticism of the political direction taken by Sukarno and also leaps ahead to a discussion of the surat warisan (testament) in which Tan Malaka was nominated as president should Sukarno and Vice President Hatta be killed or captured.
In chapter 8 Tan Malaka shifts back to narrative style, picking up the story where he left off at the end of Volume II. A detailed account of the events surrounding the proclamation leads in the ensuing chapters to a discussion of Tan Malaka’s opposition to the policies pursued by the government of the republic and to his establishment of a united front known as Persatuan Perjuangan (Struggle Front) in January 1946. Considerable detail of the Persatuan Perjuangan and its differences from the government is given in chapters 11 to 14. Chapter 15 is a thorough analysis of the two agreements signed with the Dutch (Linggajati and Renville) and why Tan Malaka regarded them as setbacks to the revolution. Chapter 16 recounts the arrest of Tan Malaka and a number of his followers in March 1946 (as the Persatuan Perjuangan challenged the authority of the government) and their experiences in detention. It includes the events surrounding the 3 July Affair (1946), presented by the government as the “coup d’etat of Tan Malaka,” and the subsequent trials in March 1948. From Jail to Jail concludes with the “Official Statement of the Government of the Republic of Indonesia” on the 3 July Affair, which is followed by Tan Malaka’s point-by-point refutation.
Volume III is distinguished from the earlier volumes by its relative lack of a personal narrative to balance the internal discordances and shifts of perspective. A number of its chapters actually are previously published articles by Tan Malaka, and the volume itself has more of the feel of a manuscript in preparation. The possibility that Volume III was compiled by someone else is countered by the introduction, which is certainly in Tan Malaka’s style, with puns, Minang proverbs, foreign expressions, and rhetorical flourish, and which gives an explanation of the different approach: “This volume differs from the previous two, both in origin and purpose. It has its beginnings in my detention in a prison in the republic and concerns the resulting judicial process. Therefore it is rather abstract and theoretical, tending towards the polemical” (Volume III, p. 3).
Concerned at the attention given to the individual’s role by bourgeois historians (Volume I, p. 39), Tan Malaka continually relates his own story to broader forces in operation: colonialism, imperialism, and national liberation struggles form the backdrop to his own saga. At times this relationship emerges naturally from the story as told; at other times it is served up somewhat artificially as a distinct didactic section, such as the introductions to Volumes I and III. These sections occupy some fifteen and fifty pages respectively at the beginning of the two volumes, and a further forty-five pages constituting the chapter of the history of the Philippines. As well as these one-hundred-odd pages, many other segments within chapters on his life story cover similar historical or theoretical topics.
These sections illustrate an essential feature of the autobiography: Tan Malaka’s concern that his own story be presented and interpreted as “instructive for the present and future heroes of our struggle for independence” (Volume I, p. 3). This concern permeates both the presentation of his own experiences and the didactic sections that precede Volumes I and III, as well as the detailed historical sections such as that on the development of the Philippine revolution in Volume II.
The modern reader may find these didactic sections trite and may resent the fact that they obstruct the development of Tan Malaka’s own story. From Tan Malaka’s perspective, however, they are essential. Without an understanding of the basics of dialectical materialism and the development of class society, the whole purpose of Tan Malaka’s life and the reason for his frequent detention would elude the reader, reducing his story to the level of the adventure thrillers written about him. Tan Malaka’s principal objective was to illuminate these questions to the Indonesian reader of the late 1940s. Neither the stifling Dutch colonial education system nor the mass literacy drives of the Japanese had provided any foundation in this regard, and Tan Malaka felt constrained to rectify this at every turn. Whether he succeeded in this aim is another question. In From Jail to Jail the didactic questions sit so oddly ill at ease with the narrative sections of the work, with their fluid style, that many readers may well skip over them. The lessons that emerge in the course of the story, even if sometimes expressed in exaggerated moralizing, have much greater effect.
The structure of the text, with its interweaving themes and episodes, is reminiscent of the traditional Malay hikayat, as described by Shelly Errington:
The episodes float next to one another, strung together rather than growing out of one another. There is a sense in which the hikayat hardly have boundaries: they consist of stories or episodes which floated around the Malay world and were on occasion caught, as it were, by a scribe and given a name. . . . Thus as we peruse hikayat, we are struck by the amount of repetition and therefore detachability at every level. . . . Within hikayat, incidents are often repeated in their entirety, as though nothing had gone before. . . . Thus the reader who expects a linear narrative of a storyline finds these repetitions tiresome, as though they were an interference to the story rather than what they are in fact: the story.
As the listener is carried into each image in the narrative, what happens and what is said in each frame is repeated in its entirety. This is one reason that hikayat, like wayang, are non-compulsive: each event is retold in its entirety, hence is separable from what went before. As in life, today’s events are not abbreviated merely because they occurred before. If we stand back from the text to view it as a whole, this style is “repetitious.”