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.” From the inside, as the story is being told, it is 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
