Marginal Female Characters As A Site Of Postcolonial War The Nyai, The Ibu And The Olanda

Abstract

As a Dutch colonial outpost, Indonesian writers have not been laxed in their postcolonial pursuit to overturn, invert and erase imperialism from themselves as reflected in their literature today. In fact, the site of liminal or interstitial postcolonial discourse began with the writings of the Indonesian Chinese Peranakans in the late 19th century. Written in a "low Malay", the plethora of fiction written by them for a period of two decades; inconclusively included under "early Indonesian literature", expose intertextual and intratextual delegitimizing of the colonial. Colonial power is intratexually dismantled through negative representations in these texts. No where is this more clearly expounded than in the romantic novels written by the Chinese Peranakan writers whose tools of a subaltern resurgence is found in their written works. This paper hopes to explore the depiction of the Nyai (mistress), the /bu (mother) and the O/anda (Dutch colonial) intertextually, to reveal a site of postcolonial war of subaltern literature bearing in mind that the characterization of subalternism is twice removed. As the authors are Chinese Peranakans with political and social agendas of their own in that period of time the depiction of the women and the colonial serves as an indication of the Chinese Peranakans allegiance.