On one of my trips to Indonesia, I dressed up as a bride in traditional wedding clothes for fun. Had I known about colonial Indonesia’s custom of “practice wives”, it probably would have cast a cloud on my idea of fun a decade ago.
A “practice wife” is a village girl who is married to a ceremonial kris (not a proper noun but the noun) proxying for a nobleman she has yet to meet. She will bear him a child she won’t be allowed to keep, she is to be divorced when he finds another practice wife, or when the nobleman officially marries a woman of his own social status. She is kept in the dark of what will befall her, and she will only understand her role as a practice wife as her life in the domain of the nobility unfolds.
For the entirety of the novel, Toer’s eponymous character is curiously referred to as “the girl”. It was only after I read the epilogue when I learned that the story is based on Toer’s grandmother, a practice wife whose name he never knew.
This novel is a profound peek into the complex Javanese caste system made more complicated by the presence of the Dutch colonial government at the turn of the 20th century.
I observed how the same people of the girl’s social station were complicit in perpetuating their own subjugation by accepting the status quo despite the girl’s mounting questions about inequality; how the nobleman provided the girl with everything she needed; and how he did not treat her cruelly, that is until he divorced her and she insisted on her rights as a mother.
As Toer is renowned for his strong views against colonial abuse and dictatorships, I could not help but see the nobleman, known as the “Bendoro”, and the villagers as allegories for dictatorships we tolerate and are complicit in — just because we think we benefit from them, or just because we are not the ones who are directly sacrificed at its altar.
The Book-Butterfly 