Voices Carried: The Incorporation of Indonesia's Feminist Literary Tradition in the Works of Pramoedya

The female characters appearing in Pramoedya Ananta Toer's 1980s novels project a depth and individuality that is rare in the context of what Sylvia Tiwon has termed Indonesia's "print patriarchy." Critics have yet to consider the sources of his unique perspective and its historical and theoretical implications. It is my contention that, beyond his realistic portrayals of women and their intellectual role in the development of the Indonesian nation, Pramoedya pays tribute to an underestimated body of women's writing from the first half of this century.

In my paper I focus upon Pramoedya's 1950s association with the writer and revolutionary, S. Rukiah. Rukiah, like other women writers including Hamidah and Suwarsih Djojopuspito, realized that her stories could not be told through such "modern" literary strategies as authoritative narration and linear story lines. Instead, these writers experimented with fragmented and polyphonic narratives while exhibiting a radical awareness of the "prison house of (patriarchal literary) language" and its role in Indonesian culture. I believe there is a direct connection to be made between their literary approach to women's struggle for self-definition and Pramoedya's use of unreliable narrators and Jakarta slang in his depiction of dislocated and disenfranchised individuals in such works as Tjerita dari Djakarta.

The events of 1965-66 had a devastating effect on what I call Indonesia's early feminist literary tradition and its writers. To read Pramoedya's 1980s novels is to rediscover the urgency and experimentation of these women.

Julie Shackford-Bradley, University of California, Berkeley