merely what happens. . . . there is no perspective from which to abbreviate the narrative. Without a privileged end point, there is no criterion for abbreviating, for stripping away the irrelevant.5
As well as in repetition, the text of From Jail to Jail echoes that of the hikayat in other ways, in particular its lack of a distinct chronology and its frequent change of vantage point. As shown above, Tan Malaka begins his life story only after an introduction and four chapters set the stage, and then he starts in November 1919, looking backwards at his life. At frequent times in the text he makes a leap from the story line. Sometimes it is a theoretical digression, at other times a temporal one. More often than not, the story is not picked up again at the point which was left behind. This structure echoes Errington’s description of the hikayat as “consisting not, in a sense, of narrative but of a succession of images,” where both “distant and contemporary events are of equal stature, as material, and their arrangement ‘in time’ may be a matter of indifference.”6
One must be careful not to exaggerate parallels with the traditional hikayat, for Tan Malaka at times was a very modern writer in his use of dialogue and informal prose, as well as his Marxist terminology and rhetoric. The text has many facets. A closer analogy might be drawn to the first Malay autobiography, which, although it bore the name hikayat, was very much the harbinger of a new genre. A. H. Hill, translator of Abdullah Abdul Kadir Munshi’s Hikayat Abdullah, remarks as follows:
Although Abdullah describes the events of his life in roughly chronological sequence his narrative lacks formal development. He discusses unconnected topics in no logical order, returning again and again to his favourite themes like the evil of debt-slavery and the difficulty of the Malay language. Much cross-referencing has been necessary to keep track of the many threads in the pattern of his life story as it unfolds. . . .7
Style and Language
The style of From Jail to Jail echoes the distinction between didactic sections of the text and those concentrating on Tan Malaka’s own life story. Within the latter sections there is a further variation between a personal narrative and an exaggerated adventure-oriented style.
Tan Malaka’s use of language, particularly in the theoretical sections of the text, indicates a certain biculturalism. The patois of terminology and images that emerges to elaborate Marxist ideas reveals the straddling of European and Malay/Indonesian cultures by the author, while the inconsistent application of one language or another and uneven levels of explanation reveal the lack of resolution of this bicultural tension. This leads to some awkward and at times amusing juxtapositions, illustrated in an extreme form in the following discussion of the role of Moses:
This superior leadership by one single-minded and determined person, who according to Jewish lore conferred alone with his one god in difficulty and danger and brought the Jewish people to glory, strengthened the belief in a single and all-powerful god. For the Jewish people at that time it was a case of the proof of the pudding is in the eating! (Volume III, p. 20)
The essential problem revolves around the fact that it was through immersion in the colonizers’ culture that most colonized nationalists developed their understanding of the nature of the social and class relations that bound their people, and developed their appreciation of the ways to fight against the colonizers. Tan Malaka was no exception to this pattern. On the contrary, he was among the earliest generation of Indonesians to go to Holland for an education. He spent a great part of his formative years in a Dutch environment, initially in the Dutch-run Sekolah Raja in West Sumatra, and then for six years in Holland itself, living for the most part with Dutch people and attending a Dutch teachers college.
It was during his years in Holland that Tan Malaka developed his political ideas, as depicted in chapter 5 of Volume I. Tan Malaka saw these changes as being progressive and occurring in stages: Nietzsche as thesis, Rousseau as antithesis, Marx and Engels as synthesis.
Step by step, pushed by circumstances within and around me—influenced and illuminated by the books I was reading, in accordance with the laws of quantity being transformed into quality—suddenly in spirit and in understanding I was in a state normally termed revolutionary. (Volume I, p. 26)8
It [The Bolshevik revolution] gave certainty to my spirit, which was still caught up in the struggle between thesis and antithesis. (Volume I, p. 25)
Tan Malaka was well aware of the tensions developing within him as a result of gaining knowledge and skills in an alien culture and society. He wrote as follows:
But I no longer had the will to continue my studies to become a head teacher in the Netherlands. If in Dutch eyes I had Europeanized myself enough, I could have attained the same level as Dutch head teachers. (Although I would naturally remain a European inlander.) Then I would have had the right to teach Dutch children. Further, as a European inlander, I could have Europeanized all the inlanders’ children. But I was not prepared to do this. (Volume I, p. 26)
Indeed, as Tan Malaka became more politically conscious, and aware of the damage done to Indonesian society through colonialism, his resolve was strengthened to use his teaching skills to bring new pride and self-confidence to his people and to have them look into their own past for inspiration and models. At the same time, he was fiercely determined to be treated as an equal by those Europeans with whom he worked. The anger he felt at expressions of white superiority was a dominant feature of his recollection of life in Deli plantation society. He wrote as follows:
Skin color! This feeling of being “different from the inlanders,” as reflected in the difference in skin color, would not vanish as long as the white Dutch people monopolized the position of capitalist colonizers over the brown colonized inlanders. The arrogance was coated with “politeness,” but if it had been left entirely to Dutch “politeness” we would still feel humiliated. We always had to be ready to bare our teeth and, if necessary, to attack. (Volume I, p. 51)
As to the effect this tension had on him, Tan Malaka gives a vivid description of the problems he faced in 1921, when he left the society of the colonizers:
It often happens that when we are spurred on by strong desires we forget that our physical beings are subject to the laws of nature. When my body was adjusting to the European environment, its climate, and my shortage of necessities, my health was severely threatened. It was restored only when I adjusted myself to the lifestyle there, one which I continued in Deli, in fact to an even greater degree.
At first I was not aware that I was now in Java, in a physical situation as different from Deli as the earth from the sky. I did not notice that houses in Java were not like those in Deli or Bussum, and neither was the food. Nor was I aware that the climate in Semarang was different from that of the other places. I forgot all this because I was in a new context, one in which I could speak freely to my comrades in the struggle.
Our bodily organs are not able to endure sudden major changes. Just as glass plunged into boiling water will certainly break, so even a strong body will fall ill if suddenly put into a different situation. But as glass will not break if it is slowly lowered into the boiling water, so this mortal human body must be gradually acclimatized to new and different surroundings. (Volume I, p. 64)
The autobiography is uneven throughout—in language and terminology, in writing style, and in content. At times it is a textbook, at times stirring propaganda, at times a wistful reverie or bittersweet reminiscence.
Didacticism in From Jail to Jail
The didactic sections are composed in a textbook style, tending towards simplistic explanations or renditions of Marxist analysis. It is clear that Tan Malaka had in mind an audience relatively unfamiliar with Marxism, or with non-Marxist Western “scientific” interpretations of history and human development. With frequent resort to analogy, Tan Malaka addresses considerable effort to relating Marxist concepts to a perceived “tradition,” making them both less inscrutable and less alien, for instance in the following:
When reading Engels’ book, I have been struck frequently by the number of similarities between (Indian) the original American society and that in several regions of Indonesia. As one example, let me mention