A Life Beyond Boundaries (16 page)

Furthermore, in most universities the everyday power of the disciplinary departments encourages members to take themselves very seriously, such that you feel that the word ‘discipline' – whose history goes back to the self-punishing rigours of medieval monks intent on subjugating the body as the enemy of the soul – should really always be spelled with a capital D. ‘Frivolity' and irrelevant digressions are therefore frowned upon. I learned this lesson quite soon after I arrived at Cornell. Still thinking like an undergraduate, in my early papers I included jokes and sarcasms in the main text and, in the footnotes, anecdotes and digressions I had enjoyed in my reading, as well as personal comments. In a friendly way, my teachers warned me to stop writing like this: ‘You are not at Cambridge now, and you are not writing a column for a student magazine. Scholarship is a serious enterprise, anecdotes and jokes rarely have scholarly value, and no one will be interested in your “personal opinions”.' It was really hard for me to accept this advice, as in previous schools I had always been told that, in writing, ‘dullness' was the thing to be avoided at all cost. Later I sometimes frivolously thought: ‘Now I understand what traditional Chinese foot-binding must have felt like.' But eventually, at least after gaining tenure, I escaped.
Java in a Time of Revolution
(respectably published by Cornell University Press) has no jokes, few digressions and not many ‘personal comments'. But
Imagined Communities
(published ‘commercially' by Verso) is full of them.

The obvious point is that breaking down unnecessarily high disciplinary walls usually improves a scholar's prose, decreases dullness, and opens the way to a much wider potential readership. This does not mean ‘dumbing down'. Books by great stylists like Joseph Schumpeter, Marc Bloch, Maruyama Masao, Eric Hobsbawm, Ruth Benedict, Theodor Adorno, Louis Hartz and many others are often difficult, but they are always a pleasure to read.

To the last page of this chapter, my friend Yoshi adds the following comment:

We think and express ourselves by language if we are novelists or scholars. Between the two, novelists, or generally speaking artists, are usually more innovative and creative than scholars because they are supposed to break out of conventional ideas and expressions. In contrast, scholars tend to become complacent in their world, surrounded and protected by their disciplinary jargons. Jargons can be a blessing and a curse at the same time. Their use facilitates communication among scholars and certifies the professional credentials of their users. But they may also become a prison which constrains the way scholars conceive and express ideas. Thus the question of audiences and prose style goes beyond the simple question of not being dull; it is closely connected with creativity and innovation. It is in this context that the significance of interdisciplinary studies must be appreciated.

In 1986 the US federal government passed a law which in principle prohibited forced retirement based on advanced age. Thereupon retirement ceased to be applied to tenured university professors. It was lucky, however, that Cornell University had instituted a ‘phased retirement' system a few years before my heart attack in 1996, at the age of sixty. I decided to take advantage of this and follow the advice of my doctors, partly to make way for younger scholars. Thus, for the next five years, before full retirement, I taught only half the academic year, stopped accepting new graduate students, and quit all administrative work. It then became possible for me to start spending about half of each year at Cornell and the other half in Southeast Asia. At that point I was still banned from Indonesia, so I decided to settle in Bangkok, in easy reach of the capitals of Southeast Asia, and not too far from Taiwan, Japan and India. In this way, I could still work hard at Cornell's magnificent library in the summer and autumn, yet escape Ithaca's long dark winters and icy springs.

Two nice events showed me that many people thought
my career was coming to an end. In 1998, the American Association of Asian Studies awarded me its annual prize for ‘distinguished lifetime achievement'. A friend suggested that in my acceptance speech I should say something about Asian studies and, more generally, area studies. I told the audience that what differentiated area studies specialists from scholars in other disciplines was the emotional attachment we feel to the places and people we study. I then gently pushed my two teenage adopted Indonesian sons, Benny and Yudi, to stand beside me on the platform to show what I meant. The assembled Asianists responded with sympathetic applause. I felt like crying with happiness.

In 2000 I was awarded the annual Fukuoka prize for academic contributions to the study of Asia, which is usually given to someone on the verge of retirement, or over it. By a piece of luck, the grand prize that year was awarded to the great Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who had been imprisoned by the Suharto dictatorship for twelve years without trial in the penal colony on the island of Buru. In fact, Pramoedya had been repeatedly nominated for this award in the last decade of the Suharto dictatorship, but Fukuoka was too afraid of the Japanese Foreign Ministry, and the Foreign Ministry too afraid of Suharto, to give the Indonesian his well-deserved due.
*
Thanks finally to the Fukuoka committee, however, we now had a chance to be together for several days, after years of semi-clandestine correspondence.

For many men, retirement is, initially at least, a rather painful time. The days can seem very long without a regular work schedule, frequent drinking sessions with colleagues and friends, and regular trips to the golf course. But teachers and scholars are often an exception to the rule. If they no longer teach, they can attend conferences, give speeches, contribute papers, pen reviews and even write books. Many also keep in close touch with former graduate students, since the teacher-student bond is something one can find the whole world over. In this way, academic retirees can also follow new trends, look for new research agendas, and find new problems to ponder over. In fact, they have more time to think than their younger colleagues, who are immersed in administration, committee assignments, teaching, advising, and sometimes buttering up the government officials in control of research funds. Retirees can also, if they wish, free themselves from disciplinary and institutional constraints, and return to projects left undone in the distant past.

I have pursued a number of avenues since my retirement in 2001. As a teenager, I had often dreamed of being a novelist, though I soon realized I had no talent. But when I started on the project that eventually became
Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-colonial Imagination
(2005), my childhood literary instincts were reawakened. I had always felt a strong political sympathy with anarchists, and for a time had taught Cornell undergraduates about Bakunin and Kropotkin. But it was only when I realized that the period in Philippine history that interested me
most – the last two decades of the nineteenth century – coincided almost exactly with the period between Marx's death and Lenin's rise, when international anarchism was at the height of its prestige and influence, that I began to see a way to ‘globalize' early anti-colonial nationalisms.

I was also feeling rather suffocated by a nativist turn in Philippine nationalist historiography. Before the 1960s, it had basically been a sort of conventional historiography principally based on Spanish or American archival materials and other documents. Afterwards, it began to criticize the colonialist and imperialist biases in these documents and propose a ‘nativist' history based on ‘our materials', such as oral history. This inward-oriented historiography largely excluded the rest of the world, except for colonial Spain and especially imperialist America, which were to be condemned. Gradually, however, I found myself discovering all kinds of filiations between first-generation Filipino nationalists and Brazilian, French and Spanish anarchists, Cuban nationalists, Russian nihilists, Japanese novelists and liberal leftists, French and Belgian avant-garde writers and painters, and so on. Many were linked by the telegraph, the first communications technology by which messages could be sent round the world in a very short time.

It then occurred to me that the best way to write up the research material was to employ the methods, if not the gifts, of nineteenth-century novelists: rapid shifts of scene, conspiracies, coincidences, letters, and the use of different forms of language (e.g. mixing formal and informal languages, standard speech and dialect). I had always been fond of these novelists' habit of giving elaborate, suspense-filled
or enigmatic titles to their chapters, and so decided to follow suit in an entirely unscholarly manner. Even the title,
Under Three Flags
, which has mystified many readers, is a sort of homage to my childhood reading. Rory and I were addicted to an endless, late-nineteenth-century series of books-for-boys written by a British super-imperialist called G. A. Henty. The usual hero of these novels is a brave, moral and sexless English boy whose adventures take him all over the world (a sort of ancestor to Tintin, without the humour). One of our favourites was titled
Under Two Flags
, in which the hero ends up working as a cabin-boy on both an English and a French ship.

Nineteenth-century novels were often heavily illustrated, so for the first time in my life, I included a lot of photographs in my novelistic academic work, including a terrific one of the admirable Suehiro Tettyo with beard and bow tie in a three-piece suit. Raised on the island of Shikoku, at the age of twenty-six he joined the staff of the liberal metropolitan newspaper
Tokyo Akatsuki Shimbun
, and quite soon rose to become its editor-in-chief. He became famous for his newspaper's attacks on the Meiji government's suppression of democracy and free speech, and naturally was put in prison. There he wrote a novel that was a huge success with the young. On his release, he set off to study the political systems of Europe and the US, and on the ship taking him to San Francisco met no other than José Rizal, the leader of the Filipino nationalist movement and a great novelist. On their journey across the Pacific, the American continent and the Atlantic, they became friends.

On his return to Japan, Tettyo wrote a big book, titled
Remains of the Storm
, in which the hero – of Japanese ancestry, but living for a time in the Philippines – was clearly a mirror of Rizal's courage, intellect and suffering. He became a liberal member of the Diet and later its speaker. But while still young he died of cancer, only a few months before Rizal was executed in Manila.

A second return to my youth was a renewed passion for film. As a full-time professor under a lot of pressure, I had little opportunity to follow contemporary films, and in any case remote Ithaca was largely under the permanent miasma of Hollywood. But around the time of my semi-retirement, there began the spectacular rise of Asian films of the highest quality from Iran to Korea, Japan to Malaysia and Siam, with the grand Taiwan trio of Edward Yang, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang at the centre. No one interested me more than the young Thai genius Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who won two top Cannes prizes in three years for his
Blissfully Yours
and
Tropical Malady
. The latter film consists of two connected halves, the first about a romance between a young soldier and a young villager and the second about a strange encounter in the forest between the soldier and the villager turned ‘tiger-shaman'.

The irony is that Apichatpong's films have never been allowed a normal commercial run in Siam itself, and he has been locked in a running battle with the imbecilic censors in Bangkok. So, for fun, I wrote a long article about
Tropical Malady
itself, but especially about the reactions of different audiences (villagers, arrogant and ignorant
Bangkok know-it-alls, students, middle-class families, teenagers, etc.). It turned out that people in the countryside understood better what the film had to say than urban intellectuals. In July 2006 the article was translated by my former student Mukhom Wongthes as ‘
Sat Pralaat arai wa
?' (What the heck is this beast?) in
Silapa Wattanatham
. Three years later the text was republished as ‘The Strange Story of a Strange Beast: Receptions in Thailand of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Sat Pralaat', in James Quandt's edited collection
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
. Later I also joined, in a quiet way, the fight against the imbeciles. It was in this way that I first met Apichatpong, with whom I soon became close. (The deliciously unacademic cover for the Thai translation of
Imagined Communities
was designed by my new friend.)

It so happened that when Apichatpong came to fame, just after the military coup d'état in 2006, there arose a quartet of Thai female intellectuals, artists and activists such as I had never met before. Idaroong (na Ayutthaya), a long-time activist and formidable intellectual, created and edited
Aan
(READ!), a journal to my mind far better than any other public intellectual journal in Southeast Asia. She was close friends with May Ingawanij, raised largely in London, now an excellent teacher at Westminster College, and far the best writer on avant-garde films from across Southeast Asia; and Mukhom Wongthes, now an outstanding and withering social critic in her country. I wanted to write for
Aan
's readers, but my written Thai was miserable, so the three friends took turns in translating my English-language articles. The most difficult text was an
analysis of Anocha (aka Mai) Suwichakompong's stunning avant-garde film with the enigmatic title
Mundane History
.

Meanwhile I discovered to my astonishment that there was virtually no contact, intellectual or otherwise, between Thai scholars and the world of Thai filmmakers and artists. I find this situation rather curious, but have learned several interesting things about it. Most of the leading scholars in Siam work at prestigious state universities – in other words they are at some level bureaucrats. They have titles, they are mostly Bangkokians, and they have access to the higher political circles. They regard themselves as part of the national elite. The filmmakers and artists, on the other hand, typically come from the provinces, do not have advanced academic degrees, and make a living by their wits and talents. This may explain why so few Thai academics have seen an Apichatpong film, and know his name only from the prizes he has won around the world.

It occurred to me that the same situation probably prevailed for the same reasons in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia. (For different reasons – for example, because of increasing academic and artistic professionalization – a comparable divide seems to exist in parts of Europe and North America.) In any case, for the first time in my life, I now have good filmmaker friends – thanks to the luck of retiring at the right time and in the right place. This experience has also helped me look at the world of universities through a reversed telescope. What once almost entirely filled my vision now seems much smaller, more distant, and less important.

~

The third retirement interest of mine also has its roots in my student youth. When I was in Jakarta in 1962–64, one of my favourite routines was to pay a weekly visit to a street famous for its long line of second-hand bookstalls. It was the perfect time to accumulate, quite cheaply, an interesting personal library. When the Dutch who had remained in Indonesia after independence were finally expelled at the end of 1957, many of them sold off their libraries, which were too large and heavy to take back to Holland. Most of these books, some very valuable, were in Dutch, which few Indonesians under twenty-five understood any longer. In the early 1960s, inflation was already very high, so that people living on fixed salaries could only survive by corruption or by selling off possessions, including old books and magazines. Commonly, when elderly book-collectors died, their children, uninterested in their parents' hobbies, did the same thing with their inherited libraries.

One day, I found an extraordinary book called
Indonesia dalem api dan bara
(Indonesia in Flames and Embers), published in 1947 in the Dutch-occupied East Java city of Malang, by a writer using the pen-name Tjamboek Berdoeri, which means ‘a whip into which thorns are imbedded'. It contained a brilliant, funny and tragic first-person account of the writer's experiences during the last year of the old colonial regime, the three and a half years of the Japanese Occupation, and the first two years of the armed Revolution (1945–47). Even today, it is still far the best book written by an Indonesian about this period of great turmoil.

When I asked my friends about the book, it turned out that only one of them had ever heard of it, let alone read
it, and this person had no idea who ‘Tjamboek Berdoeri' really was. I tried many times to get a second copy, but with no success. I promised myself that one day I would try to track down Tjamboek Berdoeri, but had neither the time nor the contacts to fulfil this promise before I was expelled from Indonesia in 1972. But I did not forget it. When I returned to Cornell in 1964, I donated my copy to the library's rare books section, fearing that no other copy existed in the world. (Only forty years later did our expert librarians track down two copies in Canberra, and one in Amsterdam.) When I was finally allowed back into the country in 1999, I decided to renew my search for Tjamboek Berdoeri, and to solve the mystery of why a brilliant book written in 1947 had been completely forgotten by 1963 and was never republished.