When I think of postcolonial literature (admittedly not often) I assume that this means writing by people who were formerly colonized. But it stands to reason that the same term applied to the literature of the former colonizers. One example is The Ten Thousand Things. Its author, Maria Dermoût, came from a family of sugar planters in Java; she was educated in Holland and wrote in Dutch. The Ten Thousand Things was published in 1956—less than a decade after Indonesia gained its independence following a years-long war with the Dutch, who had attempted to reestablish their dominion after the end of World War II and the defeat of Japan, which had occupied the country in 1942. (It was first published in English just two years later.) But none of that is part of Dermoût’s story, which takes place at an indeterminate time before those events—and yet that unspoken history is perhaps what gives the book its dense atmosphere of wistfulness, of a past sealed off in the amber of memory yet full of images terribly poignant in their sensuous precision. In fact, the main impression left by the book is of a lost and evanescent temporality, a strange mixture of stasis and quicksilver elusiveness. And by the way, despite the publisher’s back copy—this could nonetheless be a good moment to sing the praises of that most resourceful of publishers, New York Review Books—and even the translator’s Introduction to this edition, both of which refer to the book as a novel, The Ten Thousand Things is nothing of the sort. One of the most interesting things about it, actually, is its evasion of the form of the novel. It is a sequence of intersecting parts that don't quite add up and might be best described as a cycle of stories linked mainly by place—a backwater former spice plantation on an unnamed island in the Moluccas—and theme: violence, murder. “Not every year was there a murder, luckily not! Years could pass without one. It was a peaceful island, and yet, it could happen…” The book’s most deeply plumbed character, clearly a stand-in for the author, dedicates a night each year to remembrance of the island’s murdered, victims of greed or passion or ethnic conflict, along them her only son. Here’s how the moment of knowing is conveyed—I wish I know how closely Hans Koning’s volatile, casually free-associative English corresponds to the rhythm of the Dutch original:
Late in the afternoon a proa arrived, visitors? She did not expect anyone. An officer, a high one, the major himself, the—very nice—major himself. He greeted her, sat down as if he had come for tea, did not say much, cleared his throat—he had come to say, to his great regret, a message had been received, her son had been shot from an ambush by a Mountain Alfura, with an arrow—he was wounded, badly wounded—
“You can tell me.”
“Yes,” he said then.
“When?” she asked, as if that made any difference.
It’s a short book that feels like a long one—not in a bad way, but the mercurial nature of the prose, which leaves far more unsaid than said, gives the sense of a tacit repleteness, as if one of those endless family sagas had been collapsed into a sequence of fragmentary sketches. The narratives, such as they are, proceed at a dawdling pace, then suddenly there is an inexplicable cut, you are somewhere else, a bit disoriented. That disorientation is part of the pleasure of this text, something to be savored and also pondered, evidence of the strangeness of places in which cultures, stories, presuppositions rub up against one another without quite communicating—as if they’d met by accident, which is to say by fate: “the life we shouldn’t try to examine too carefully.” Evasiveness as a positive value: Some dangerous point is avoided yet remains indicated by its conspicuous absence.
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Maria Dermoût, The Ten Thousand Things, translated by Hans Koning is published by New York Review Books, New York, 2002.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.