Brian Roberts

Silkworm Books, 2019

Born into a high-status family of the Batak ethnic group indigenous to North Sumatra, Sitor Situmorang (1924–2014) was a Dutch-educated Indonesian nationalist who experienced firsthand the transition from the Dutch East Indies of his youth to the modern Indonesia of his adulthood. The stories in this collection are a window into the world of a writer dedicated to exploration and change but resolutely attached to the land, people, and stories of his homeland. Set variously in western Europe, post-independence Jakarta, and modernizing communities in his native North Sumatra, the stories live in―as the translators put it―the “perpetual tension between the urge to wander and a longing for origins.”

Review by John Bennion presented at Faculty Book Lunch:

For this collection of nine stories by Sitor Situmorang, Dr. Roberts collaborated with Harry Aveling, Monash University, Melbourne, and Keith Foulcher, University of Sidney. Each was the primary translator for three stories but edited each other’s work for stylistic unity. This project fits well with Dr. Roberts’s work on Richard Wright’s Indonesian travels and with his general work on archipelagic studies. Because islands of the sea have been colonized by Europeans, they have complex linguistic, cultural, and political identities, and translation creates relationships across boundaries inside and outside the islands. In the introduction, the translators describe Sitor’s experience in many cultures: childhood in a village in North Sumatra, Dutch education, and work in government and journalism in the Netherlands and France. Sitor experienced the Japanese invasion during WWII and the Indonesian revolution against the Dutch, who imprisoned him. Living sometimes in Europe and sometimes in Indonesia, he wrote stories that explore “perpetual tension between the urge to wander and the longing for origins.” As Sitor’s protagonist wanders, he carries Indonesia with him, and returning to the islands, he carries European culture back—a stranger in both places. This gives the stories an unsettling and ambiguous perspective, as the protagonist struggles to make sense of life. Often the task of making sense is impossible, such as when old man apparently kills the tiger that ate his foot when he was younger, when a son welcomes guests to a Christmas party in honor of his mother who became a corpse just before the party started, when a junior diplomat takes an anti-prostitution activist to all the places he knows in the red-light districts in Paris, and when revolutionary militias fight each other for control of villages instead of fighting the Dutch enemy. The stories are disorienting and Sitar eschews epiphanies as endings, possibly because there is nothing to trust about sudden insight. Like the author and the translators, these stories are complex, difficult to categorize—making for a stimulating read.