FICTION
Sunbirds
Mirandi Riwoe
UQP, $32.99

It’s 1941: West Java faces Japanese invasion. At the van Hoorns’ cash-crop estate, a pilot, Mattijs, hopes to join the war effort in the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia). He has eyes for the family’s daughter, Anna, who is herself enamoured of Sigit, a young freedom fighter. Sigit is a product of colonisation, educated in Holland and thus, like so many schooled in the metropole, a strong critic of its imperialism.

Love and revolution have never been easy to keep apart, and many of Sunbird’s observations about colonisation play upon the kind of Freud/Lacan sexual-social dynamics that have occupied thinkers from Aimé Césaire to Frantz Fanon. When a local woman, Fientje, is allegedly murdered by a Dutchman – Riwoe drawing from the real-life case of Fientje de Feniks – Anna registers a strange affinity towards the case.

The lawyer for the defence argues against heeding the testimony of Fientje’s coworkers, these being “women of [...] promiscuity of body and mind”. Such promiscuity of body and mind is dangerous yet also key to cultural and ethnic survival. (In another scene, Diah, the van Hoorns’ housekeeper, finds – and gleefully destroys – a potboiler discovered in the family library that meditates upon “the impossibility of companionship between the Dutch and those of native blood”; its protagonist, attracted to a Javanese servant, is described as “swept from his moral moorings”.)

In colonial Java, Riwoe suggests, morality depends on hypocrisy, injustice, and Nietzschean ressentiments. Even Sigit accuses Anna of treating him as a “pelacur pria”, or male prostitute. Every document of civilisation is a document of barbarity, one that refuses to look at itself in the mirror, requiring always that someone, somewhere, be treated not in their own right but as an object or trinket.

No surprise, then, that Sunbirds is full of doubles: Sigit, whose Dutch at one point surprises Anna (“He’s spent time in Holland even when she has not”), and who almost invokes the lyrics of the Rodgers and Hart tune Glad to Be Unhappy when he tells Anna, “There wasn’t that much difference between you [and Fientje] ... Except she was from the kampung. No money, no Papa”.

Or what about Anna’s mother discouraging her from wearing kebayas and sarungs (the more fair-skinned Dutch women, she contends, are not liable to “be confused with kampung Indos”). Anna is separated by class from locals such as the household servants, even as she comprehends the Sundanese dialect they use in private.

Like Fientje, who curses her mixed blood and sees herself spurned by white and native alike, enduring a selfhood that is “irreconcilable yet still conjoined in a murky mess”, Anna is prone to see herself according to the trope of the culturally hybrid as deficient/lost/doomed. She and her brother Willem are the offspring of an Indonesian mother, yet Willem scolds her: “We are Dutch. Don’t be so embarrassed all the time.” (Fanon says much the same thing in Black Skin, White Masks – “I am French” – but draws the opposite conclusion, favouring revolution over complacency.)