Pramoedya Ananta Toer - Footsteps

Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Translated and with an
Introduction by Max Lane

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First published in Australia by Penguin Books Australia Ltd 1990

First published in the United States of America

by William Morrow and Company, Inc. 1995

Reprinted by arrangement with William Morrow and Company, Inc.

Published in Penguin Books (U.S.A.) 1996

17 19 20 18 16

Copyright Pramoedya Ananta Toer, 1985

English translation copyright Max Lane, 1990

All rights reserved

Originally published in Indonesian by Hasta Mitra, Jakarta, 1985.

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGUED THE HARDCOVER AS FOLLOWS:

Toer, Pramoedya Ananta, 1925

[Jejak langkah. English]

Footsteps/by Pramoedya Ananta Toer; translated from the Indonesian by Max Lane.

p. cm.

ISBN: 978-1-101-61534-8

1. IndonesiaHistory17981942Fiction. I. Title.

PL5089.T8J4513 1994

899.22132dc20 94-5130

Printed in the United States of America

Set in Bembo

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For those who have been forgotten, deliberately or otherwise

T his novel is set in a time prior to the establishment of an official national language, when the choice of language was intimately tied up with social status and power. I have thus tried to preserve as much as possible of the different usages, including honorifics, of the original. These are usually Malay, Javanese, and Dutch terms. These honorifics and other words and names listed in the Glossary in the back of this book are italicized only the first time they appear.

There are a number of people I should thank for help in completing this book. As with the first two volumes of this tetralogy, I must thank all my many Indonesian friends for continuing to encourage me with this project. Of course, there is no need to thank them for setting such an inspiring example of commitment to the advance of Indonesian culture and society. Among these many people, it is natural that I should mention in particular the three men who set up the publishing company Hasta Mitra (Hands of Friendship) and started publishing Pramoedyas books. These three are: Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Yusuf Isak, and Hasyim Rahman.

I should also thank Elizabeth Flann for the editorial work she did on the manuscript. And finally, I would like to thank Anna Nurfia and Melanie Purwitasari for their tolerance of my times away from home that were needed to finish this work.

Footsteps is the third volume of a quartet of novels inspired by the life of one of the pioneers of the Indonesian national awakening and of Indonesian journalism, Tirto Adi Suryo. These novels, along with other manuscripts, were written in the last period of fourteen years of imprisonment under barbaric conditions on the prison island of Buru in Eastern Indonesia. Pramoedya, along with thousands of others, was imprisoned in Jakarta jails and the Buru Island concentration camps without ever being tried and sentenced. Many, including Pramoedya, were beaten or suffered torture. Many died during their imprisonment.

Pramoedya obtained writing materials and the opportunity to write only in the last few years of his time at Buru. Prior to this he had narrated to his fellow prisoners the story of Minke, Annelies, Nyai Ontosoroh, Robert Suurhof, and the characters of Footsteps and The Glass House. He had to rely on his memory of the historical research he had undertaken in the early 1960s to be able to capture the detail and color of the Netherlands Indies of the early twentieth century.

Footsteps is essentially an adventure story, and a story of discovery. It is the story of a pioneer who discovered a new country. But for Minke, the narrator and protagonist of the story, his discovery was not of an unknown land across the seas, but of the very land in which he livedthen called the Netherlands Indies. In the process of discovering this country he sees for the first time the plight of its people and culture, the oppression by white colonial power and brown collaborators. In the process of the arduous struggle to understand what to do about it all, he, and others after him, eventually created the vision of a new country: Indonesia. Pramoedya Ananta Toer, through his wonderfully vivid storytelling, brings us back to the very beginning, to before the birth of the nation of Indonesia, or even the idea of Indonesiato its conception.

Preceding the release of Footsteps, Pramoedya also published a nonfiction account of the life of Tirto Adi Suryo and an anthology of Tirtos journalism and fiction. Tirto Adi Suryo was publisher and editor of the first Native-owned daily paper, instigator of the first legal aid service, co-founder of the first modern political organization, co-publisher of the first magazine for women, and a pioneer of indigenous literature in the language of the nation yet to be born. All this and more is brought to life for the reader in an amazing adventure of intellectual discovery and emotion.