From Jail to Jail. Tan Malaka

means to acquire power, and into the Minangkabau view of isolation in the rantau (outside) as a necessary course to strengthen the alam (Minangkabau world).⁴ This concept was presented in exquisite form by Ho Chi Minh in one of the poems in his Prison Diary, used as the frontispiece to the present volume.

      By stressing the harshness of his experiences, Tan Malaka sought to establish his credentials as a true leader. At the same time, by emphasizing the parallels in the behavior and attitudes of all the governments that had imprisoned him, he tarred the republican government with the brush of arbitrary and repressive policies that he so liberally applied to the imperialist powers. In so doing he sought to undermine the credentials of those then in power: by implication they had forfeited their right to govern, and might be expected one day to pay the price for their sins and surrender power to the true leader.

      Structure of the Text

      While the jail experiences themselves, and the consequent fugitive life that Tan Malaka was forced to lead, certainly form a consistent thread through the manuscript, they form the focus not for the manuscript as a whole, but rather of the most dominant of a series of interweaving themes, the autobiography itself. Violations of the rule of law by a number of different powers is a recurrent projection from these prison experiences, as are the role of imperialism and the overriding need for unity in the struggle to achieve its overthrow. A counterpoint to such a political emphasis is provided by the significant role of good fortune (or fate) in the story, and the style of romance and adventure, about which I comment further later in this introduction.

      Tan Malaka asserts that his life history does not follow “the usual chronology from childhood to adulthood.” And the autobiographical sequences are so penetrated by these above-mentioned recurring themes that the course of events frequently is hard to follow. Time and again through the text a particular incident will serve as a springboard for leaving his own story to embark upon a moral or theoretical exposition, or for telling another tale in the “that reminds me of the story about” style. Tan Malaka often becomes so engrossed in the storytelling that he finds it hard to break off and return to the account at hand. His difficulty in keeping within bounds is illustrated in the following comment: “I have deliberately selected only a few episodes. . . . Even so, what I have written for this section has exceeded what I had planned . . .” (Volume I, p. 36).

      The balance between the space given to particular incidents or periods may seem uneven in terms of their apparent significance, but it is often through the rendition of seemingly tangential issues that Tan Malaka gives the emphasis and structure he seeks to impart to his life story. The prison incidents themselves occupy but a brief period of his life—two periods of several months each in 1922 and 1932—prior to the longer detention during which he wrote the autobiography. It is clear, however, from his introduction and from his choice of title, that they provided the framework in which he wished to present his life.

      In his exposition both of the past and of his own story, Tan Malaka employs historical materialism as his paradigm. While not presented as a “history of Indonesia,” this text may be regarded as perhaps the first to bring this paradigm into play on the broad canvas of Indonesia from prehistory to the contemporary struggle for independence, as I discuss later in my assessment of the significance of this text. Tan Malaka himself had used this tool of analysis as early as the 1920s, but in a more limited and directed fashion in support of his argument for Indonesian independence and for the organizational and political means to achieve this end. In From Jail to Jail, however, for the first time we see how the historical materialist approach shapes his perception of the development of Indonesian society from Homo erectus in Trinil, East Java, to the signing of the Renville Treaty in January 1948.

      Before discussing the style and language used by Tan Malaka in this text, it is necessary to provide an overview of its structure, showing the interweaving of the various themes and their relative balance.

      Volume I

      Following the introduction, Tan Malaka precedes his own story with four short chapters in which he seeks to provide an ideological perspective through which to view his life story as “the struggle between justice and tyranny on the battleground of my own person and my own life,” and in which he moves from the general to the specific.

      In chapter 1, “The Struggle Between Two Forces,” Tan Malaka introduces his readers to the concepts of repulsion and attraction in the physical world and their reflection in philosophy as thesis and antithesis, touching briefly on the differences between Hegel’s idealism and Marx’s materialism. Chapter 2, “Human Rights,” gives a lightning sketch of the development of class struggles to advance these rights through the English, French, and Russian revolutions. Chapter 3, “The Right to Self-Preservation,” focuses on the struggle for the rights of individuals to survive economically and politically, as illustrated in the destruction of feudalism. Chapter 4, “Laws and Regulations,” deals with individual rights as guaranteed in the democratic states of France, England, and the United States, paying particular attention to rights relating to arrest and detention, trial and punishment. He concludes the chapter by asking what meaning these rights have for the proletariat, who faces structural oppression within capitalist countries, and even more so for the oppressed of the colonies. Only at this point does he feel that the ground has been laid for a discussion of his own life, and chapter 5 begins the autobiography proper, with Tan Malaka returning to Indonesia in November 1919.

      On board the ship as it pulls out of Amsterdam, he looks back at his five years’ teacher training in Holland, his political evolution in the wake of the unfolding Russian revolution and, in passing, he writes a few pages on his childhood and schooling in West Sumatra. In chapters 6 to 11 of Volume I, Tan Malaka continues his story in basically chronological order, through his employment from 1919 to 1921 in Deli, North Sumatra, as a teacher of the children of “coolies” working on the tobacco plantations; his period of political involvement in Java in the union movement, the PKI, and the radical nationalist education system, culminating in his election as PKI chairman in December 1921, his arrest in February 1922, and his deportation to Holland; his candidacy for the Dutch Communist party in the 1922 parliamentary elections and his fifteen-month stay in Moscow, including participation in the Fourth Congress of the Comintern; his dispatch to Canton, from where he was to function as Comintern representative for Southeast Asia; and his activities in this regard during 1923-1925.

      Chapter 12, “The Philippines,” is a forty-page essay on the history of the Philippines, in particular of the nationalist revolution of the 1890s. In this major departure from his own story, Tan Malaka stresses two recurring themes of his autobiography: the common identity of the Malay/Indonesian/Filipino people and cultures; and the need for unity among various political currents, classes, and ethnic groups in the fight for national liberation. The lessons he draws in this section are echoed throughout the rest of the autobiography. The final two chapters of Volume I return to his own story, relating his activities in the Philippines from 1925 to 1927, the events surrounding his arrest and deportation to China in August 1927, and his flight to the tiny village of Sionching in South China, where he lived in seclusion until late 1929. Only in passing in chapter 14 does Tan Malaka discuss his role in opposition to the 1926 PKI-led uprising in Indonesia, the subsequent smashing of the party by the colonial authorities, and the establishment by Tan Malaka of a separate political party, PARI.

      Volume II

      Although one hundred pages longer than Volume I, the second volume contains only six chapters, providing a narrative account of Tan Malaka’s experiences from 1932 to 1945. It opens with Tan Malaka caught in the thick of the Sino-Japanese conflict in Shanghai in January 1932. Chapter 2 describes his arrest and detention in