Two places that are close to my heart
Reading time 5 min
This time I would like to take you to two places that are very close to my heart. The first one is my bookcase and the second one is a terrace above the sea on the island of Seram in the Moluccas. As for my bookcase: I have started counting again and the counter is at 439 books. Back to back that makes about fourteen meters of books. All about the Indies/Indonesia. Bought, found, received, picked up in the most diverse places, since the first copy that I bought as a teenager in 1972.
Each and every one of them is a gem. I would now like to talk about two of those gems.
The oldest of these once ended up in my bookcase, where I suddenly saw it again just before my trip to the Moluccas. At first glance the book looks quite decent, but on the inside the pages are horribly yellowed, they are speckled with brown weathered spots and the book even stinks a bit. That's probably why it ended up in the back regions of my sanctuary. But it's still perfectly readable.
"Setoewo De Tijger" (Setoewo the Tiger) is a book by Johan Fabricius. If there's one author who's written a lot about the old Indies, it's him. The good man lived from 1899 to 1981. I got that from the internet. I don't know anything about that writer. Where did he stand politically? How 'is' he in the current opinion? I don't know and all the better for it. That way I can read with an open mind and form my own opinion. Because how does that work with opinions? Today someone is on a pedestal and tomorrow he is vilified because of 'progressing insight'.
Nothing wrong with that progressing insight, by the way. That means that we are working on something, that we are not stuck in old convictions, but are open to (self-) research. Especially where our colonial past is concerned, that is to be applauded. Okay, Johan Fabricius then. In a short sentence Wikipedia states that he wrote 106 books. One hundred and six! He would fill a quarter of my Indonesian bookcase on his own if I owned them all. I will never be able to read them all during my holiday in the Moluccas. I have to limit myself to "Setoewo de Tijger". But what a delight, reading that book on a wooden terrace with the water splashing underneath and where only the fish that I see swimming between the cracks are able to distract me.
But… If we are talking about a Dutch author who writes about the old Indies, it is nice to also mention the book of an Indonesian author, Mochtar Lubis (1922-2004), who also writes about the old Indies. I found the book with the title “Een Tijger valt aan" (A Tiger Attacks) in a thrift store.
Mochtar Lubis, as an Indonesian author, quickly touches upon an indispensable element of Indonesian culture in his novel: magic. He writes about his main characters: 'All four of them were apprenticed to Wak Katok. He taught them martial arts, magic and sorcery.'
Lubis describes the supernatural as an authentic phenomenon, part of the daily life of the Indonesian, a matter of course that no one is surprised by. A little further on he writes about the dukun, the village medicine man: 'He could cure ordinary sick people, but also victims of the black magic; he had the power to give someone fatal stomach cramps; he made powerful amulets that offered protection against snakes or other wild animals; he could make people fall in love or be afraid […] and he had the power to make himself invisible.'
Lubis mentions the phenomenon of the 'spirit tiger' when he tells about Wak Hitam who '...kept a tiger that was actually a spirit tiger. He rode everywhere on the back of that tiger. It was said that he had flown on his ghost tiger on pilgrimages to Mecca several times.'
However, Fabricius certainly does not leave his work untouched when it comes to magic. In “Setoewo de Tijger” he writes: 'The village head carefully avoided the word “tiger” itself, instead he spoke of “Setoewo, the Old”. For it is not advisable to call the striped Lord of the Jungle by his true name at a time when he might hear it.'
Both authors tell the story of a tiger that cannot be caught, or only after prolonged and excessive effort. Both books are masterpieces! Extremely suitable for reading on my terrace above the sea in the Moluccas. And although I might feel a little uneasy about the magic that is present everywhere in Indonesia, I certainly do not have to worry about tigers, because there have never been any in the Moluccas.
© marian puijk