A Certain Age: Colonial Jakarta through the Memories of its Intellectuals

by Rudolf Mrázek

A Certain Age is an unconventional, evocative work of history and a moving reflection on memory, modernity, space, time, and the limitations of traditional historical narratives. Rudolf Mrázek visited Indonesia throughout the 1990s, recording lengthy interviews with elderly intellectuals in and around Jakarta. With few exceptions, they were part of an urban elite born under colonial rule and educated at Dutch schools. From the early twentieth century, through the late colonial era, the national revolution, and well into independence after 1945, these intellectuals injected their ideas of modernity, progress, and freedom into local and national discussion. When Mrázek began his interviews, he expected to discuss phenomena such as the transition from colonialism to postcolonialism. His interviewees, however, wanted to share more personal recollections. Mrázek illuminates their stories of the past with evocative depictions of their late-twentieth-century surroundings. He brings to bear insights from thinkers including Walter Benjamin, Bertold Brecht, Le Corbusier, and Marcel Proust, and from his youth in Prague, another metropolis with its own experience of passages and revolution. Architectural and spatial tropes organize the book. Thresholds, windowsills, and sidewalks come to seem more apt as descriptors of historical transitions than colonial and postcolonial, or modern and postmodern. Asphalt roads, homes, classrooms, fences, and windows organize movement, perceptions, and selves in relation to others. A Certain Age is a portal into questions about how the past informs the present and how historical accounts are inevitably partial and incomplete.

Genres: History

328 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[Jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

speed and lightness

I wrote some thoughts about this wonderful book here: http://wp.me/pJ3ez-6c Excerpt: “Speed and lightness over the mud and dust define the city and this observer of the city as well,” Mrázek writes in the book’s preface, and in the role of the observer he conjures up Walter Benjamin’s flaneur, but with a rushing twist. He is not just an idle passerby, doing a series of household interviews in Jakarta, sampling his informants like one might browse paintings in a gallery before moving on to the next. There is also an element of compulsive flight, as if Mrázek was never too comfortable getting into the lives of his informants (“keeping my distance from my subjects, my passing by, the burden of my method”); in fact one might find comfort in the moving on, and Mrázek quotes Sartre: “he knew that it was possible for him to make his escape at any moment with the flap of the wings.”

[Hunter Marston · Rating 3 out of 5]

Poetic, imaginative, and engaging, but it's not quite a history so much as an ethnography. Mrazek tends to lose the lay reader with his verbose and heady quotations of foreign philosophers and abstractions that he imposes onto mundane phenomena.

[Nanto · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mrazek adalah seorang sejarawan yang imajinatif. Pada awalnya, ia menulis tentang Sutan Sjahrir sebagai thesis doktoralnya dibawah bimbingan Goerge Kahin. Topik itu sepertinya kelanjutan ketertarikan sang supervisor akan lingkaran Sjahrir yang dituangkan dalam buku Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia. Bila saat menulis Sjahrir, Mrazek masih berkesan empirisis dalam melihat perkembangan hidup Bung Kecil, pada buku ini Mrazek jauh lebih imajinatif.

Buku ini sebuah ethnografi sejarah atas wawancara dengan tokoh-tokoh Indonesia. Mrazek mewawancarai mereka yang merupakan tokoh perjuangan namun sangat kental dan fasil berbahasa Belanda. Hasilnya sebuah imajinasi Indonesia dari sudut pandang elite pada saat itu. Saya membayangkan buku Kota-kota Imajiner namun versi sejarah Indonesia. Kita tidak melihat Indonesia secara empirik, namun berangkat dari imaji para penggagasnya. Jarak empirik dan imaji menjadi kekayaan buku ini.