This Earth of Mankind Reader's Guide
READERS GUIDE
Questions and Topics for Discussion
INTRODUCTION
Set at the turn of the century in the waning days of Dutch colonial rule, This Earth of Mankind is the first of the four books that comprise Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Buru Quartet. A powerful story of oppression, injustice, and one young man’s political, emotional, and intellectual awakening. Pramoedya Ananta Toer wrote This Earth of Mankind while confined on the prison island of Buru, where prisoners did hard labor, clearing jungle with the crudest tools, and suffered starvation diets, beatings, and torture. Much of Pramoedya’s work has in fact been written under such circumstances. “I happen to be pretty productive when I am in jail,” he has said. “When you are in jail, you have to spend more time with yourself.”
The narrator of This Earth of Mankind is Minke, the first native Javanese boy to attend an elite Dutch colonial high school. A brilliant student, descendant of Javanese royalty, and an acutely sensitive observer of the complex and dangerous world around him, Minke’s life is disrupted when he is invited to live with a highly unconventional family. Here Minke meets an extraordinary cast of characters who will force him to confront the entrenched antagonisms of a society built upon racial and gender oppression. The household is headed by Nyai Ontosoroh, a native concubine who runs the family’s dairy business, and her half-European children, the beautiful Annalies and the treacherous Robert. Minke falls in love with Annalies, arouses the murderous hatred of Robert, and through his relationship with Nyai takes his first steps on the path that will lead him to become an outspoken opponent of Dutch colonial rule.
Minke and Nyai are both proud, highly educated, strong-willed individuals, who refuse to accept the hierarchy that parcels out freedom and power according to the amount of European blood running through one’s veins. In developing the novel primarily through the consciousness of these two characters and their confrontations with injustice, Pramoedya casts a stark light on the hypocrisy of European civilization. Nyai, though a concubine with no legal rights over her children or the business she has made successful, emanates a moral authority unmatched in the novel. And Minke, though his native limitations are regarded as self-evident to many Europeans, proves through his writings and his behavior that he is the equal of anyone. Read More...
