Mosaic
of Cultural Confluence: Exploring the Power Dynamics in Pramodya Ananta Toer’s
Coastal Narrative
Sikha Mohan A.L.
Ph.D. Research
Scholar
PG and Research
Department of English,
All Saints’
College, University of Kerala,
Thiruvananthapuram,
India
Abstract: The paper “Mosaic of Cultural Confluence:
Exploring the Power Dynamics in Pramodya Ananta Toer’s Coastal Narrative”
examines the hegemonic and cultural elements that results from power relations,
which are always apparent yet ignored when it comes to social inequality. As
the consequence of a bridal knot, the story follows the traumatized life of a
young girl from a fishing village who is uprooted and adopted by an
aristocratic family. There, the protagonist experiences isolation and
hopelessness as a result of her separation from her culture and community. She
is torn from both her old and new culture and her hopes for a bright future
that appears to be separate from the madding crowd. The protagonist’s
experience highlights the intersectionality of issues such as gender,
alienation, displacement and hopelessness. These elements are often intertwined
and can perpetuate social hierarchies without compulsion, instead are
normalized through cultural dissemination. The paper attempts to delve deeper
into the social structure that hems the society where the marginalized and less
privileged groups are coaxed to comprehend the analogy that exists in the
society.
Keywords:
Displacement, Alienation, Hegemony, Power structure, Cultural dissemination
Culture is a shared set of values, beliefs
and practices that structure a society, the people and their ways of life. It
embraces everything from their basics like language, religion, cuisine,
tradition, ethnicity and art. Moreover, these elements form the base of an
individual’s identity and thereby interpret and comprehend the world around
them. The culture of an individual or a collective is influenced by factors
such as geographical location, economic conditions, social classes, ethnicity,
and more leading to variations. The prominence and prestige of a person in a
social hierarchy make him follow specific values and also impels others to
follow and maintain the power dynamics. It involves the ways in which
individuals or groups assert influence, control, and authority over each other.
According to Pyo Merez, “it involves understanding the relationships between
those who hold power and those who do not, and how power is used to influence
others, make decisions, and control resources.”
Ideology,
in its essence, encompasses the cultural beliefs that are specific to a
particular society or sect. It advocates existing social hierarchy and power
structure, which also influence class, beliefs, norms and even quotidian
actions. Hegemony, as a closely interconnected concept pertains to the exercise
of control over a group, encompassing not only coercive measures but also the
processes of dissemination and normalization. Such a practice benefits the
upper echelon to instill their whims and fancies over a subordinate mass. And
these underprivileged or marginalized groups must accept these norms as natural
and desirable.
The
elite groups use institutions such as media, religion, entertainment, education
to infuse the dispersal of power structure, thereby normalizing the status quo.
By framing certain ideologies as ‘normal’, the blue-bloods reinforce their
power in society.
Pramodya
Ananta Toer’s breathtaking literary skills are used in portraying the life of a
girl from the coast which sketches the real-life story of his grandmother. The
author is known for exploring the social and political themes in Indonesian
society and criticizes the inhumane practices of the upper-class noblemen. The
prevailing hegemony in the society marginalizes the coastal community who eke
out a living, as inferior. The protagonist of the novel is under double
oppression as she is a girl from a marginalized community wedded off to
‘Bendoro’, an upper-class official. She becomes the epitome of resilience and
survival as Toer says “But you are everyone, Grandma. You are all the people
who have ever had to fight to make this life their own.”
Pramodya
Ananta Toer’s The Girl from the Coast brings forth the challenges a
nameless protagonist faces in a society where a particular status quo is
maintained. The paper tries to reveal her struggle for survival in an estranged
environment and how the elite group is treating her along with her community
and culture of people. From being a pleasant girl of a coastal community, she
is uprooted to the city through the wedding knot. Though the protagonist is not given any name,
towards the end of the novel, the author acknowledges it as a biography of his
grandmother; who is wedded to a dagger, in the absence of the groom: “She was
now the wife of a ‘keris’, a dagger standing in for a man she had never seen”.
(4)
The protagonist is displaced from a
comfortable childhood where she can breathe without the tension of being
suppressed. From being a butterfly who flies in the field to a caged bird in
Bendoro’s house, she endures a lot which has transformed her inner self into an
entirely different person, whom she never dreamt of: In the village, she has
been able to say whatever she wanted to say, to cry when she wanted to cry, and
to scream with delight when she felt happy. But now, in this house, she had to
be silent; there was no one willing to hear her voice. All she could do was
whisper. And in this prayer room, even her movements had to follow a prescribed
script. (31)
Jonathan
Safran Foer, an American novelist often talks about the theme of displacement
and human experience along with the ways people tussle with the deracination,
be it physical, cultural or emotional. The protagonist in The Girl from the
Coast undergoes a plethora of emotions when she is uprooted from her
comfortable childhood environment. It is quite discernible that the girl has
not tasted her springtime enough and is completely clueless about her upcoming
life. At the same time, her parents find an alternate side to this marriage.
They believe their daughter will be saved from the toils of being in a
fisherman community sweating or running about collecting the sun racks of
drying fish when it rains. The author portrays two sides of the same coin which
ultimately ends in ennui. To substantiate the darker side of displacement, it
is worthwhile to observe Jonath Safran Foer’s words in Everything is
Illuminated:
What? She said once to herself, and then once
aloud, what? She felt a total displacement, like a spinning globe brought to a
sudden halt by the light touch of a finger. How did she end up here, like this?
How could there have been so much- so many moments, so many people and things,
so many razors and pillows, time pieces and subtle coffins- without her being
aware? How did her life live itself without her? (n.p)
Displacement
often leads to estrangement when a person is disconnected or alienated from
anything on an emotional or relational level. In this novel, the protagonist is
isolated from everything that she can claim as hers to an entirely new scenario
that is novice to her. This disparity in the environment where she belonged and
now belongs makes her estranged from her true self. She finds it difficult to
fit into the new space where she is pushed into. Viewing from an outer circle,
her status must be elated but as a person, however, she feels like being
ensnared in a golden cage. As she is displaced from her home and planted in an
entirely different place, her struggle to fit in makes her question her
identity as a person. “She felt like a chick that had been removed from its
flock, having to live alone, with no friends, among a group of strangers she
would never get to know. She wasn’t allowed to have friends. All she could do
was give orders or wait for them to be given to her.” (41). Since time
immemorial, marginalized cultures have had to undergo suppression by the elite
class. As a result, women in the lower strata of hierarchy endure double
oppression owing to their gender. The protagonist is taught to obey her husband
like a slave obeys her master: "A woman must be with her husband. That’s
the way it’s been for me," the mother consoled. It doesn’t matter if you
live in a rundown shack or whether or not you’re happy; you have to learn to
please your man.” (61). This advice the girl receives from her mother makes her
confused and blank for a while. Her gender is yet another cause for this
wreckage. She has no power over herself as she is asked to serve her husband
without any objection: “The girl turned quickly and dropped to the floor, first
kissing his feet and then throwing her arms around his legs. When he lowered
his body to sit on the edge of the bed, she raised his legs and pressed her
face against the soles of his feet”. (97). Such gestures and thoughts are
ideologically instilled into her mind as normal. Knowingly or unknowingly, she
is willing to appease her master, who happens to be her husband, at any cost.
This agonized girl is trained from the very beginning that she has to become something
other than her true self and deny her exact feelings in order to appease
others. A girl should be selfless to be tagged as the ‘epitome of womanhood’.
To authenticate this, one can observe what Glennon Doyle, an American author
and queer activist, contemplates:
We weren’t born distrusting and fearing
ourselves. That was part of our taming. We were taught to believe that who we
are in our natural state is bad and dangerous. They convinced us to be afraid
of ourselves. So we do not honor our own bodies, curiosity, hunger, judgment,
experience, or ambition. Instead, we lock away our true selves. Women who are
best at this disappearing act earn the highest praise. She is so selfless. Can
you imagine? The epitome of womanhood is to lose oneself completely. That is
the end goal of every patriarchal culture. Because a very effective way to
control women is to convince them to control themselves. (n.p)
The protagonist’s desire to be accepted
always slips through the cracks. Though the girl tries to convince herself that
she is accepted by Bendoro, the reality lies antipodal:
She didn’t know what an ass was, but her
servant told her it was one of those runt horses you could see daily in the
city, transporting people and limestone cargo. Was she an ass? No. Bendoro
would never have an ass for a wife. That wouldn’t seem strange at all. Over and
over again she tried to convince herself that she was not a beast of burden,
but her heart would not be lifted. (73)
Social disparity is visible throughout the
novel, where Pramodya Ananta Toer tries to bring out the economic, class, and
cultural differences. The girl, along with her entire community, is treated as
inferior even by Mardinah, the servant girl at Bendoro’s house. The privilege
of being Bendoro’s relative and coming from the town gives her the audacity to
remind the protagonist of her inferior birth. The village is divided into poor
peasants and affluent elites. The ones in higher strata often cooperate with
the Dutch authorities so that they can reap the benefits, while the peasants
always suffer under their oppression. The girl, along with other female
characters, is subjected to the whims and fancies of the patriarchal power
structure. Throughout the novel, the author tries to elucidate the social,
cultural, and economic injustices that were prevalent during the Dutch colonial
period in Indonesia. When Toer talks about the incident where the girl's
relatives are shushed as they do not belong to the upper class, he sheds light
on the denial of basic rights of common people: "The girl’s mother took a
deep breath, then exhaled loudly. "Please, not so loud," the servant
said again. "The only people whose voices are supposed to be heard in this
house are those of important visitors who have come to see the Master, and the
Bendoro himself, to be sure." (12). The noble class always needs to be
respected. It is said that the deepest fear the elites hold is being
disrespected by the commoners. However, the girl, being Bendoro’s consort, is
scared of the respect she will receive from her villagers when she goes back.
That acknowledgement shakes her identity and self, which makes her take an
alternative path when she is pushed out of Bendoro’s house.
You are Bendoro’s consort. Your position and
power rest in his authority. As you yourself must know, Young Mistress, the
path to honor and nobility is not open to everyone. What the girl had once
known in the village was that only the strong and powerful sailors were thought
to be worthy of honor and respect. They sailed the seas and caught hundreds,
perhaps thousands, of fish in their nets. And the fisherman who was shown the
most respect was the one who brought the biggest fish home. He was the hero,
but he would not sell his prize catch. He would divide the meat among the neighbors,
leaving the backbone for himself, which he would place above the doorway of his
home. (79)
The
girl who is acquainted with such unity and sharing stands aghast in the
environment where she feels left alone. Later, she finds it difficult to
identify herself with her villagers, as they respect her calling herself
Bendoro Putri, as well as the elite class, which often reminds her of her
origin. This paves the way for her to stick to her true self, causing an
identity crisis.
Identity
crises are often marked by feelings of confusion, uncertainty, and anxiety. The
protagonist wrestles with questions about her identity and freedom. When she is
forced into a married life with a man she hardly knows, she has to go through
unexpected paths and ways. This dilemma leads her to a crisis of existence, in
which she toils and moils herself. Though she tries to make amends with her
solitude, her disconnection from her own culture and community leads her to
undergo an existential crisis. Losing her cultural identity makes her question
‘why’ this life. After marriage, she neither belongs to her village nor does
she belong to the upper class. She has to navigate through a world where she
barely possesses any aids to support her. "She kept hearing the words
"Bendoro Putri—Mrs. Bendoro," the Bendoro’s wife. The words stung
her. Here, in her own village, she was now someone else. All the eyes, fixed
upon her but respectfully lowered whenever she looked their way, seemed to be
mocking her. (166)
All the
experiences she had in her village during her visit made her deviate from her
path of destiny. Once, it was a place where she could breathe and live
peacefully. Later, her comfortable shelter has turned to something bitter that
she is afraid to taste. She finds herself detached, even from her parents, when
they treat her with the utmost respect. The author says:
To her dismay, her fellow villagers continued
to ogle and stare at her and to act toward her in a feigned and, for her, most
annoying and disconnecting manner. It was her parents, however, that caused her
the most distress, acting so distant, making her feel like a coral atoll,
separated from the motherland, with only the lonely sea around her. (175)
Similarly,
when she is brought to a different cultural environment from her childhood
village, she experiences a notable cultural clash where she is torn between her
indigenous Javanese culture and the imposed Dutch culture. Her identity becomes
tied to her husband’s household, erasing her individuality. The change in roles
and expectations vested in her challenges her sense of self and identity:
"This was her life: no relaxed conversations, no trading of gossip, no
smiles of friendship. She had a closer relationship with the furniture in the
house than with the other people who lived there. (240). In the novel "The
Reluctant Fundamentalist", Mohsin Hamid substantiates his view on the
identity crisis as follows:
It is not always possible to restore one’s
boundaries after they have been blurred and made permeable by a relationship;
try as we might, we cannot reconstitute ourselves as the autonomous beings we
previously imagined ourselves to be. Something of us is new outside, and
something of the outside is now with us.(n.p)
According
to what Peter Handke focuses on in his novel Repetition, there is a
comparison of the traumatic mind to the skin of a snake. "It symbolizes
looking at the past and the lost parts of oneself in order to understand former
selves by describing the discarded skins left on the path. (90).The elements of
estrangement, displacement, disparity, and crises lead to anxiety and trauma in
the protagonist. The distressing effects of trauma can be traced through
cultural marginality. It deals with the experiences of individuals living
within different cultures but integrated into neither of them. All these
awkward situations that the girl and her community has to undergo happen as a
result of the power structure that exists in society. Through assimilating
power, the upper class gets hold of control and exerts power over the lower
strata of society. The normalized rules and principles instilled on the
commoners by the elites make them suffer in silence as their voices go unheard.
Though they accept their destiny, their struggle for existence and questioning
about the meaninglessness of life occur throughout. The remarkable resilience
of the underprivileged goes unnoticed owing to the societal structure as they
assimilate the rules and ways thrust upon them. To shed more light on this, one
can observe what Joe Ambercrombie says in The Last Argument of Kings: "The
lowly have small ambitions and are satisfied with small indulgences. They do
not deserve fair treatment. They need only think that they do."
Works
Cited
Abercrombie, Joe. Last
Argument of Kings. Orbit, 2015.
Doyle, Glennon. Untamed.
The Dial Press, 2020.
Foer, Jonathan
Safran. Everything Is Illuminated. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013,
p.132. Accessed 27 Aug. 2023.
Hamid, Mohsin. The
Reluctant Fundamentalist. Houghton Mifflin, 2007.
Merez, Pyo. “Power
Dynamics: Understanding the Complexities of Interpersonal Relationships.” The
Conducts of Life, 15 Apr. 2023, theconductsoflife.com/power-dynamics/.
Accessed 27 Aug. 2023.
Nair, Neethu A.
“Encapsulation of Traumatic Experiences: A Reading of Peter Handke’s
‘Repetition’.” Trauma Literature: Reflections and Ruminations,
Authorspress, 2022, pp. 87-91.
Toer, Pramoedya
Ananta. The Girl from the Coast. Translated by William Samuels,
Hyperion, 2003.