Presented as Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Sarjana Sastra
in English Letters
By
DEARTY CRIMA
Student Number: 044214007
ENGLISH LETTERS STUDY PROGRAMME DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LETTERS
FACULTY OF LETTERS SANATA DHARMA UNIVERSITY
AN UNDERGRADUATE THESIS
Presented as Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Sarjana Sastra
in English Letters
By
DEARTY CRIMA
Student Number: 044214007
ENGLISH LETTERS STUDY PROGRAMME DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LETTERS
FACULTY OF LETTERS SANATA DHARMA UNIVERSITY
YOGYAKARTA 2008
He
who
rejects
change
is
the
architect
of
decay.
The
only
human
institution
which
rejects
progress
is
the
cemetery.
(Harold
Wilson)
When one door closes, another door opens; but we
so often look so long and so regretfully upon the
closed door, that we don’t see the ones which open
for us.
(Alexander Graham Bell)
The mind of a man is capable of
anything because everything is in
it, all the past as well as all the
future.
(Joseph Conrad)
This
Undergraduate
Thesis
is
Dedicated
to
My Beloved Parents:
Wong Wie Mie and Cecilia Sugiarti
My Dearest Grandma:
Tan Tjing Hway R. I. P.
My Pretty and Dazzling Sister:
Huang Shiau Phing
My Gorgeous Brother:
Reinard Rerri Reiner
And
My Big Family “Degung Raya” and “Sriwedari”
in Like Earth City, West Java
feel extremely blessed for giving me so many beautiful gifts in my life, and one of the best of all is being able to finish my thesis.
I would also like to express my gratitude to Gabriel Fajar Sasmita, S.S., M.Hum. as my advisor. I thank him for his patient guidance and the precious time that he has given to me, from the start until the finishing of my thesis. I also thank Maria Ananta Tri S., S.S, M.Ed as my co-advisor and J. Harris Hermansyah S., S.S, M.Hum for their time correcting my thesis and giving me their precious idea and advice.
The third, my special acknowledgements go to my family. I would like to start off by thanking my mom Cecilia Sugiarti and my dad Wong Wi Mie, for their constant love and guidance, and for giving me a strong upbringing and a world of opportunities. I love you both very much and never ever could repay you two for your love and support over the past twenty years, to you two I owe everything. I want to address my genuine gratitude to Popoh, my beloved grandma Tan Tjing Hway R. I. P., I know you are in up above now and are always guiding and praying for me, I love you and thank you for your overwhelming blessings. To my sister Lucia Yovita Desti, my little brother Reinard Rerri Reiner, and Father A. H. Y. Sudarto, thank you for the profound advice and the unconditional support.
the ground and keeping the ship sailing through the rough weather. To my trustworthy best friends, Shiu Lian, Corry Veronika, and Echi Pongpare, who have helped me so much with my inevitable burden. Thank you for being such good friends and not changing like the rest. I also thank my friends in Cor Jesu Dormitory Malang, and in Gatot Kaca 4 Club; Ka Anggi, Ka Nopi, Pipin, Nanako, Luce and Sisca, and not to forget, to Nana (KKN), for their encouragement, and most of all, for being understanding. It’s nice to know I have people like you I can laugh and act really crazy with. I would also love to thank Abang Teguh, for your positive encouragement, for giving me guidance and making a difference to so many, and keeping me in your thoughts and prayer. Loads of thanks abang, you have helped me so much in finishing of my thesis.
I am also particularly grateful for all my friends in class A, whose name I cannot mention here one by one, for their uncountable supports of optimism. I would also express my gratitude to all lecturers and staff in English Letters Department, for sharing their valuable knowledge and also their help from the start until I accomplish my study. To anyone I forgot, I am sorry, thanks a million, and God bless you.
ACCEPTANCE PAGE ... iii
MOTTO PAGE ... iv
DEDICATION PAGE ... v
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ... vi
LEMBAR PERNYATAAN PERSETUJUAN PUBLIKASI ……… viii
TABLE OF CONTENTS ... ix
ABSTRACT ... x
ABSTRAK ... xi
CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION ... 1
A. Background of the Study ……… 1
B. Problem Formulation ……….. 6
C. Objectives of the Study ……… 6
D. Definitions of Terms ……… 6
CHAPTER II: THEORETICAL REVIEW ... 9
A. Review of Related Studies ………. 9
B. Review of Related Theories ……… 11
1. Theory of Tone ………. 11
2. Theory of Postcolonialism ……… 15
3. Theory on Representation ……… 18
C. Theoretical framework ……… 20
CHAPTER III: METHODOLOGY ... 21
A. Object of the Study ……….. 21
B. Approach of the Study ………. 23
C. Method of the Study ……….... 23
CHAPTER IV: ANALYSIS ... 25
A. How the Tone Depicted in the story of The Track to Bralgu …... 25
B. Superiority of the Colonizer as the Surface Representation ….. 28
C. Superiority of the Natives as the Representation of Depths …... 36
CHAPTER V: CONCLUSION ... 48
BIBLIOGRAPHY ... 53
APPENDIX ... 57
x
This thesis focused on The Track to Bralgu, a twelve-chapter novel written by Bozic Wongar. The novel is concerned with the destruction and exploitation of the land and the Aborigines. The novel emphasizes on the superiority of the colonizer as the surface representation, and the superiority of the colonized as the representation of depths. The aim of this study is to obtain the understanding on how the tone of The Track to Bralgu provokes readers into the superiority of the colonized.
The objectives of the study are: first, to explain the steps of examining the tone of The Track to Bralgu and to explain on how its tone can provoke readers into the superiority of the colonized; second, to analyze the superiority of the colonizer as the surface representation of The Track to Bralgu; and third, to examine the tone of The Track to Bralgu which brings the idea of superiority of the colonized.
The method that was conducted in the study is the library research, for all the reference textbooks applied in the study were gained from the library. In conducting the analysis, postcolonialism approach was applied. By applying postcolonialism approach, the writer is able to understand the broad outline of the relation between the colonizer and the colonized presented in the novel.
The result of the study shows in The Track to Bralgu, the superiority of the colonizer is depicted through the superiority of tools and technological, while superiority of the colonized is depicted in its close relation to nature. The tone of
xi Universitas Sanata Dharma, 2008.
Skripsi ini difokuskan pada novel The Track to Bralgu, sebuah novel yang berisi dua belas bab dan ditulis oleh Bozic Wongar. Novel ini mengenai pengrusakan dan eksploitasi negeri dan kaum Aborigin. Novel ini menekankan pada keunggulan kaum penjajah sebagai representasi permukaan, dan keunggulan kaum yang dijajah sebagai representasi kedalaman. Tujuan dari penelitian ini adalah untuk mendapatkan pemahaman tentang bagaimana nada dari novel The
Track to Bralgu memancing para pembaca menuju keunggulan kaum yang
dijajah.
Tujuan dari penelitian ini adalah: pertama, untuk menjelaskan langkah-langkah dalam memeriksa nada dari novel The Track to Bralgu dan untuk menjelaskan tentang bagaimana nada tersebut memancing para pembaca menuju keunggulan kaum yang dijajah; kedua, untuk menganalisa keunggulan kaum penjajah sebagai representasi permukaan dari The Track to Bralgu; dan ketiga, untuk memeriksa nada dari The Track to Bralgu yang membawa ide keunggulan kaum yang dijajah.
Metode yang dilakukan dalam penelitian ini adalah metode penelitian pustaka, karena seluruh referensi buku pelajaran yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini didapatkan dari perpustakaan. Dalam melakukan analisa, pendekatan paskakolonialisme digunakan. Dengan menggunakan pendekatan paskakolonialisme, penulis dapat mengerti garis besar tentang hubungan antara kaum penjajah dan kaum yang dijajah yang disajikan dalam novel.
Hasil dari penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa dalam novel The Track to
Bralgu, keunggulan kaum penjajah digambarkan melalui keunggulan mereka
dalam alat perkakas dan teknologi, sedangkan keunggulan kaum yang dijajah digambarkan dalam hubungannya yang sangat dekat dengan alam. Nada dari The Track to Bralgu adalah bersifat sinis dan nada ini membawa ide keunggulan kaum yang dijajah karena nada tersebut diperiksa dari pendapat sinis kaum yang dijajah kepada kaum penjajah.
Long before the expansion of European power into Asia, Africa, or the America began in 16th Century, actually colonialism had already begun and was considered as one of the widespread features of human history, as Ania Loomba put it in her book Colonialism/Postcolonialism (1998: 2). Before Western colonialism did occur, the Roman Empire spread from Armenia to Atlantic in the 2nd Century AD, the Mongols defeated Middle East and China in the 13th C. Those two examples of history are one of the reasons of the emergence of European colonialism, but it adopted a new and different kinds of colonial practices. Ania Loomba gave an opinion about this modern colonialism, that
It did more extract tribute, goods, and wealth from the countries that it conquered – it restructured the economy of the latter, drawing them into a complex relationship with their own. So colonialism can be defined as the conquest and control other people’s land and goods (1998: 2-3).
The Western colonialism as the modern colonialism gave birth to racial stereotyping and binary opposition; the ‘othering’ of vast numbers of people, and their construction as backward and inferior. The ‘other’ refers to the marginalized or the colonized (Das, 2002: 204). Bijay Kumar Das in his book Twentieth Century Literary Criticism: 4th Edition stated that the colonial power had exploited the colonized both politically and culturally and sought to establish the superiority of the West over the East, and thus the West superiority paved the way to the binary opposition that structured people’s minds into colonized’s inferiority and the colonizer’s superiority (2002: 214). According to Ania Loomba, such
The inferiority of the colonized led postcolonialists into existence. Postcolonial theory slowly emerges because it is triggered by the colonized people’s frustration, their fears and hopes about their future and their own identities, and also culture defeat with the conquering culture (Bressler, 1998: 266). Frantz Fanon is one of the examples of postcolonialists who started to write postcolonial texts. He was the first postcolonialist who sought to articulate the oppressed consciousness of the colonized subject in his notion The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and Black Skin White Masks (1952)(Edgar and Sedgwick, 2002: 291). Then it was followed by Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin. According to Elleke Boehmer, postcolonial literature or postcolonial writing is generally defined as that which critically or subversively scrutinizes the colonial relationship. It is also writing that sets out in one way or another to resist colonialist perspectives (2005: 3). Boehmer’s opinion is also justified by Bijay Kumar Das who stated that the postcolonial critics seek to overcome the stigma the marginality (2002: 206). From this perspective, it is obvious that it shows how postcolonialists were trapped in the paradigm of ‘the colonizer’s superiority and the colonized’s inferiority’. Postcolonial writings, in fact, represent inferiority of the colonized since they try to impose sympathy toward the colonized.
believes that the natives are superior. This new paradigm – that Wongar tried to tell us through his work - , obviously will make people’s mindset to alter from previously believed in the constructed text of binary opposition of postcolonialism into the new insight of the idea of postcolonialism. In order to make it more tangible, the writer will compare Wongar’s The Track to Bralgu with Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness. In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the concept of the ‘colonizer is superior’ is applied through his work; Congo is described as the dark continent inhabited by ruthless cannibal, and the native African people are described as selfish, helpless, uneducated, exotic, lower and inferior, while all of the white people think that they are better and it is the white men’s burden to civilize the black people. From the above explanation of Heart of Darkness, the writer may conclude that Heart of Darkness is seeing more to the superiority of the colonizer and still holds on to the constructed text of binary opposition of colonizer’s superiority and colonized’s inferiority. Thus, the tangible differences between The Track to Bralgu and Heart of Darkness is that Heart of Darkness use the old paradigm of postcolonialism that stressed on both the colonizer’s superiority and bad images of the colonized people, while The Track to Bralgu adopts a new insight of postcolonialism that stressed on the colonized’s superiority and it rejects the idea of binary opposition of ‘the colonizer’s superiority and the colonized’s inferiority’.
Wongar’s work is different from others in the way that he adopted a new kind of genre. The plot of a story usually is a causal relationship, but the plot in
Track to Bralgu is not a system of reading events. In Wongar’s work The Track to Bralgu, there is no relationship between each chapter, or in other words, every chapter is standing by itself. Another significant element in The Track to Bralgu
is tone. The tone in The Track to Bralgu is significant because the superiority of the native is depicted in the tone itself. It provokes readers to have the new insight of postcolonialism. Therefore the examination of the novel’s tone is needed to reveal the new insight about superiority of the native people or the colonized.
According to Stuart Hall in Representation: Cultural Representation and Signifying Practices, representation is the production of meaning through language (2003: 28). Representation can be divided into two; first, is the surface representation which is founded in the visual, includes what is apprehended by the senses, while the second is the depth representation which means penetrating the visible (Gibson, 1996: 82).
B. Problem Formulation
There are three main problems that will be analyzed in this study: 1. How is the tone depicted in the story?
2. How is the superiority of the colonizer depicted?
3. How does the tone bring the idea of the superiority of the colonized?
C. Objectives of the Study
According to the problem formulation above, there are two goals that can be gained from this study. First, this study is aimed to dig deeper on how the tone of the text can be gained and how the tone of The Track to Bralgu reveals the new insight exists in the work, and thus the understanding of the tone that will lead to the new insight is achieved. Second, this study is aimed to analyze the superiority of the colonizer in the novel. Third, this study is aimed to examine on how the tone of The Track to Bralgu brings the idea of the superiority of the colonized, and how this idea leads into the new insight of postcolonialism
D. Definition of Terms
The definition of terms is needed to avoid ambiguities of certain terms that are being used in this study. These are some terms that should be explained further more in this study:
1. Tone
2. Postcolonialism
According to Bressler in his book Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice, postcolonialism can be defined as an approach to literary analysis that concerns itself particular with literature written in English in formerly colonized countries (1998: 265).
3. Representation
According to Stuart Hall, representation is the production of meaning through language (1997: 28). As Andrew Gibson stated in Towards A Postmodern Theory of Narrative, classical theory develops two accounts of narrative representation (1996: 81). The first is the Surface representation which is founded in the visual and the senses (1996: 82). The second is Depth representation which means penetrating the visible or in other words, it pierces through the veil of the visible to what the visible supposedly secretes (1996: 82).
4. Binary Opposition
CHAPTER II
THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
A. Review of Related Studies
The Track to Bralgu is a twelve- chapter story written by B. Wongar. The Track to Bralgu was not allowed to be published in Australia. Consequently, Wongar’s first book, The Track to Bralgu was translated into French (Les Temps Modernes) in 1976 and in English edition two years later in 1978 by Little Brown, Boston. However, The Track to Bralgu has adopted a new genre of creative writing since each story is standing by itself and thus the plot is not a system of reading events. The stories in The Track to Bralgu are all the figures of Aboriginal myths, for example like, Mogwoi, the Trickster and Jambawal, the Thunder Man. The Track to Bralgu contains of twelve chapters within 118 pages and it uses the native point of view. Each chapter has its own story and character to reveal the superiority of the native.
Wongar’s first work The Track to Bralgu was published in 1978 and due to his creative writing, he received his fame at the same year. However, some white people considered his work about Aborigine as a fake reflection, thus he was rejected in the Northern part of Australia and had to move to Melbourne. Wongar’s autobiography was Dingoes Den. After The Track to Bralgu, Wongar produced the nuclear trilogy novels, Walg, Karan, and Gabo Djara. The trilogy novels were Wongar’s best known work. The trilogy was first published in Germany and the first English language edition was launched at the Aboriginal
Research Centre, Monash University in 1988. Walg is the story of his tribal wife Djumala, Karan is about a story of an Aborigine man who wakes up and finds his skin strange, while Gabo Djara is about a green ant from Aborigine mythology. In the end, Wongar published Didjeridu Charmer and his last work made his nuclear trilogy novels as a quintet. Wongar won the American Library Association Award in 1982 and the Pen International Award in 1986. Due to his contribution to Australian literature, he received an award from the Literature Fund of the Australian Council in 1997. http://www.abc.net.au/arts/books/stories/s440019.htm.
There is a paper discussing postcolonialism entitled Wongar’s “The Track to Bralgu” and Maris and Borgs’ Women of the Sun” to deconstruct
postcoloniality of the Myth of the Third World written by Gabriel Fajar Sasmita Aji S. S., M. Hum. As the title suggests, it proves that The Track to Bralgu and
The most tenacious aspect of colonial control has been its capacity to bind the colonized into a binary myth-- … --of colonizer/colonized, civilized/uncivilized, white/black which works to justify the mission civilatrice-- … --The theorists who re-write the story of Europe as ‘developer’ into the story of Europe as ‘exploiter’ remain caught in the binary of Europe and its others. The subject of the new history is still Europe (2001:21).
Therefore, The Track to Bralgu by Bozic Wongar and Women of the Sun
by Hyllus Maris and Sonia Borgs are the works which employ a new insight or paradigm of postcoloniality. These works reject the binary myth of “the colonizer is superior and the colonized is inferior”, and thus, these works are the deconstructive phenomenon.
This undergraduate thesis discovers something new, since it analyzes how the tone of the text provokes the reader to have a new insight of postcolonialism that stressed on the natives’ superiority and how this superiority reflects a new paradigm of postcolonialism.
B. Review of Related Theories
1. Theory of Tone
purpose of depersonalizing the empirical author is that he wanted all literary criticism to be objective. Soon after, Roland Barthes declared an essay about The Death of the Author, same with T. S. Eliot, Barthes’ essay is about the impersonality of the author whose function is as a particular medium. Contrast with Romantic criticism, the New Critic believed that the reader should have the priority to interpret the text. According to Bijay Kumar Das in his book Twentieth Century Literary Criticism: Fourth Edition, the result of taking these inquiries to their logical extremes was the disappearance of the author himself and the exaltation of the text (2002: 160).
6th Edition, tone can be described as critical or approving, formal or intimate, outspoken or reticent, solemn or playful, arrogant or playerful, angry or loving, …, and so on through numberless possible nuances of relationship and attitude both to object and auditor (1985: 156).
Tone is delicate matter than it is with spoken language, for we do not have the speaker’s voice to guide us and it may convey not simply one attitude, but a medley (1999: 138). To interpret the message that the author conveys in his work, the writer uses the point of view of hermeneutics. Hermeneutics point of view is when a work of literature is seen from the theoretical discourses, which work as the major shift in interpretation of literature, such as postcolonial theory, deconstruction, feminism, psychoanalysis, etc, to interpret what a work of literature is all ultimately ‘about’ (Culler, 2000: 61).
There are two accounts of hermeneutics point of view, hermeneutics of recovery and hermeneutics of suspicion. According to Jonathan Culler in Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, hermeneutics of recovery seeks to reconstruct the original context of production, while hermeneutics of suspicion seeks to expose the unexamined assumptions on which a text may rely (2000: 64). Thus, the writer may say, the tone of The Track to Bralgu can be gained from the hermeneutics of recovery, since it concerns on the text and its author as it seeks to make an original message accessible to readers today (2000: 64).
Track to Bralgu. The interpretation of the message is certainly context-bound, or, context brings a message but at the same point, context is also boundless. Meaning to say, there is no determining in advance what might count as relevant, what enlarging of context might be able to shift what we regard as the meaning of a text. Meaning is context-bound, but context is boundless, always open to mutations under the pressure of theoretical discussions (2000: 63-64).
Since The Track to Bralgu is a story about the relation between the colonizer and the colonized and also a story of the destruction of one world by another, the writer may decide that the context of The Track to Bralgu is postcolonial. The context of The Track to Bralgu is postcolonial and the writer uses postcolonial theory for the theoretical discourse or the hermeneutics point of view. Thus, to reveal the tone of The Track to Bralgu is to uncover the message that the text of The Track to Bralgu wants to provoke and its message certainly have something to do with postcolonial. The message exists in The Track to Bralgu is the best way to show human beings living through a series of events that leave them different – perhaps wiser from what they were the events took place (1974: 77-78).
Bralgu. Once the writer gets the tone of The Track to Bralgu, it will lead to the message that exists inside the text.
2. Theory of Postcolonialism
As stated by Ania Loomba in her book entitled
Colonialism/Postcolonialism, colonialism was not an identical process in different parts of the world but everywhere it locked the original inhabitants and the newcomers into the most complex and traumatic relationships in human history. Colonialism, according to Ania Loomba, not only includes the process of un-forming or re-un-forming the communities that existed there already, but it also reshaped all existing structures of human knowledge (1998: 2, 53). In its interaction between the colonizer and the colonized with the conquering culture, the colonized or indigenous culture is forced to go underground or to be obliterated, and this makes the colonized people to think and then to write about their oppression and the loss of cultural identity (Bressler, 1998: 266).
term Orientalism, the East will not be constructed as barbaric or degenerate anymore (Bijay Kumar Das, 2002: 218). According to Rajnath, Orientalism is addressed to the West and the East as well. Said wanted the West not to repeat its past error and he wanted to show that the West was wrong to treat the East as inferior both culturally and intellectually, while for the East, Said wanted the East to take its imperialist phase as a historical experience rather than a permanent divide between it and its other (Rajnath, 2002: 219 & Bijay Kumar Das, 2002: 215). In conclusion, Orientalism by Edward Said is aimed to reconstruct the structure that having the bad connotation over the East, to demonstrate the values of Oriental Culture and brought the marginalized ‘Other’ to the centre stage (Said, 1979: 84). This makes the Orientalism by Edward Said as the starting point of awareness of being colonized.
The colonizer-colonized relationship is based on Abdul R. JanMohamed’s
The Economy of Manichaean Allegory:
The dominant model of power – and interest – relations in all colonial societies is the Manichaean opposition between the putative superiority of the European and the supposed inferiority of the native (1985: 63).
This Manichaean division of the world stresses out that the colonizer is good, has power, and controls the colony’s resources, while the colonized is bad, must be dominated, and must forfeit control over both land and labor (Rajan and Mohanram, 1995: 20). This Manichaean division of the colonizer-colonized also led into resistance of the colonized.
personal cultural clashes with the conquering culture, and their fears, hopes, and dreams about the future and their own identities (1998: 266). Resistance is a very broad arenas within which much of the drama of colonialist relations and postcolonial examination and subversion of those relations has taken place (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, 1997: 85). Ania Loomba has the same opinion with Ashcroft’s above statement, she stated that anti-colonial resistances have taken many forms, and they have drawn upon a wide variety of resources (2005: 155).
In both conquest and colonization, text and textuality played a major part (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, 1997: 85). There are many colonized people who struggle to regain their identity by writing back to the centre, telling the colonizer that what they did wrong and how their Western hegemony damaged and suppressed the ideologies those who were conquered (Bressler, 1998: 267-268). Bressler’s previous statement corroborates Bijay Kumar Das’ opinion about the purpose of the textual resistance done by the colonized people. Das stated that the colonized people write to establish their individual identity independent of their colonizer and try to show that not only they have gained independence from the latter, but successfully made the colonizer’s language (i.e., English) a vehicle for creative expression (2002: 231-232). Thus, resistance literature can be seen as that category of literary writing which emerges as an integral part of an organized struggle of resistance for national liberation (Slemon, 1997:107).
stated that resistance is an act, or a set of acts, that is designed to rid a people of its oppressors, and it so thoroughly infuses the experience of living under oppression that it becomes an almost autonomous aesthetic principle. Anti-colonial struggles therefore had to create new and powerful identities for colonized peoples and to challenge colonialism not only at a political or intellectual level, but also on an emotional plane (Loomba, 2005: 155). Elleke Boehmer in her book Colonial and Postcolonial Literature gives several examples of the early acts of resistance towards the colonizer that obviously have inspired one another. In 1905-1908, the native Indian pioneered by Mahatma Gandhi, refused to depend on the colonizer’s invention by implanting ‘Swadeshi’ movement. Resistance that was done by Mahatma Gandhi was called passive resistance. Gandhi’s refusal to compromise in Gandhi’s swadeshi, ahimsa, satyagraha, and hartal were proved to be successful, and followed by the emergence of the first Civil Disobedience movement in India in 1921-1922. In the 1920s the rise of an African mass movement under the auspices of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, with the Jamaican emigrant Marcus Garvey at its head, gave inspirational guidance to emergent black nationalisms in other lands (2005: 95-96).
3. Theory of Representation
(1996: 69 & 74). According to Gibson, the Classical theory develops two accounts of narrative representation, which are the representation of surface and the representation of depths (1996: 81).
Representation of surface views on language as innocent, or in other words, it conceives of language as adequate to what it represents (1996: 81). Nonetheless, surface representation is not confined to the visible, but also other senses that are apprehended by the world (1996: 82). Meanwhile, the representation of depths means penetrating the visible. In other words, representation of depths pierces through the veil of the visible and then captures the unseen or captures beyond the visible (1996: 82).
communicate concepts that we have in our mind without a second system of representation; a language (1997: 17 & 28).
In Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, Stuart Hall gave us three approaches to explain how representation of meaning through language works, and those are the reflective approach, the intentional approach, and the constructionist approach. The first, reflective approach argues that meaning is thought to lie in the object, person, idea, or event in the real world. The intentional approach stands as the opposite of the reflective approach, in the way that it argues the author’s use of language intends the meaning on the world. The last, constructionist approach argues that representation can be related with objects, people, and events in the real world, and it can also be related in imaginary things and fantasy worlds or abstracts ideas which are not in any obvious sense part of the material world (1997: 24 - 28). Obviously, this approach wants to emphasize that it is the language system which conveys meanings and not the material world (1997: 25).
C. Theoretical Framework
In order to answer the first problem formulation, the theories of tone are applied. The theories provide any understanding about how to discuss tone and how to reveal the tone presented in the novel.
CHAPTER III
METHODOLOGY
A. Object of the Study
Bozic Wongar is the author of The Track to Bralgu. Bozic Wongar was born as Sreten Bozic in Tresnevica, Serbia in 1932. Wongar is actually an Aboriginal word which means “the messenger”. Wongar as his Aboriginal name was given by the natives he known and it was adopted in the early 1970s. He arrived in Australia in 1960, he was 28 at that time, and he lived with tribal Aborigines in Northern Territory of Australia for some years. He learned a lot about Aboriginal poetry and their traditional way of life in the bush from his tribal wife, Djumala. Wongar often spent his time in Melbourne since he had an acquaintance called Alan Marshal as an Australian writer. Djumala and their children were dead when Wongar wanted them to live in Melbourne. Some said that their death (his wife and children) because of the cyclone and some said it because they drank contaminated water.
The Track to Bralgu had achieved several awards. In 1982 Wongar won the American Library Association Award. He also won The P. E. N. International Award (USA) for his Nuclear trilogy novels in 1986. Wongar won Senior Writer’s Fellowship, Australian Literature Board in 1985, 1986, and 1989. Due to his great contribution to Australian literature, he received an emeritus award from the Literature Fund of the Australian Council. In 1999, he won My Brother Jack
Short Fiction Award, City in Glen Iris.
http://www.abc.net.au/arts/books/stories/s440019.htm. There is a compliment from Alan Paton directed to The Track to Bralgu, stated that all the stories in the
Track to Bralgu are beautiful and the author who does it is the master of the ancient craft (1992: 1).
B. Approach of the Study
The approach that the writer used in analyzing the work is postcolonialism. Postcolonialism concerns with diverse and numerous issues and all of them draw attention to one of postcolonialism’s major concerns; highlighting the struggle that occurs when one culture is dominated by another (Bressler, 1998: 166). Therefore, postcolonialism also refers to a term indicating a national writing on the effects of the period of European imperial domination (Ashcroft, Griffiths, Tiffin, 1991: 2).
Postcolonialism approach is used in order to find out how postcolonial constructed the view of the world: the East is inferior while the West is superior. From postcolonialism approach, readers will get the understanding easier on the story and also the understanding of the new paradigm that the text of The Track to Bralgu wants to reveal. This approach is the most appropriate one due to its central stresses on the struggle of colonized people against the colonizer. In analyzing this novel, the writer believes that it is appropriate to choose postcolonialism approach so that readers can have the wholly understanding of the superiority of the native as a new structure of postcolonialism.
C. Method of the Study
Litarary Terms; and C. Hugh Holman and William Harmon’s A Handbook to Literature: 5th edition. In order to gain the understanding of postcolonialism, the information was taken from Bijay Kumar Das’ Twentieth Century Literary Criticism: 4th Edition, Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin’s Key Concepts in Post- colonial Studies.
CHAPTER IV
ANALYSIS
A. How the Tone Depicted in the Story of The Track to Bralgu
In M. H. Abrams A Glossary of Literary Terms, I. A. Richard defined tone as the expression of a literary speaker’s “attitude to his listener” (1985: 156). Meaning to say, inside a work, there is a speaker who has determinate personal qualities, and who expresses attitudes both toward the characters and materials within the work and toward the audience to whom the work is addressed. Tone exists in a work of literature when an author has seriously attempted to record life accurately or to reveal some truth about it and when he has mechanically introduced some concept on theory of life into it that he uses a unifying element and that his story is meant to illustrate (Perrine, 1974: 104).
As the writer has explained in chapter two “Theory of Tone”, how the tone depicted can be examined from the text of The Track to Bralgu as its first step. The text of The Track to Bralgu is a story about the relation between the white or the colonizer and the Aborigines or the colonized. After reaching an understanding with the text of The Track to Bralgu, the writer can simply move on to the second step. The second step is to decide the context of The Track to Bralgu. Since The Track to Bralgu is a story about the relation between the colonizer and the colonized, and also a story about the destruction of one world by another, the writer can simply decide that the context of The Track to Bralgu is postcolonial. The purpose of pointing out the text and the context of The Track to
Bralgu is to gain a narrower field in examining its tone. In conclusion, since the context of The Track to Bralgu is postcolonialism, the message that is attached to its tone certainly has something to do with postcolonial. The third step is to examine deeper the text of The Track to Bralgu in order to find the object that is being emphasized. The objects being emphasized in The Track to Bralgu are the colonizer and the colonized, but what is being emphasized in colonizer is different with the colonized. Within the text of The Track to Bralgu, the colonizer is emphasized on its superiority of tools and technology, so that the whites can support the transportation faster, the development of their mining operation and build their town. While the colonized is emphasized on its closeness to nature, and consequently, the natives can survive in the terrible long drought, since they can perform the rainmaking ceremony. The colonized is also emphasized on its view towards the colonizer, meaning to say, it can be shown from the text of The Track to Bralgu that the colonized people tend to state their thought or view towards the colonizer. Tone is the expression of a literary speaker’s attitude to his listener (Abrams, 1985: 156). From this, it is obvious that the view of the natives that is addressed to the colonizer brings the tone into the surface. The forth step is to examine the view of the natives towards the colonizer in order to get the idea of the tone in The Track to Bralgu. Itcan be drawn from what the native has in mind about the colonizer that is stated in the text.
The cynicism above is stated by the native for the colonizer. It shows how cynical the native is, because the white men only concern about their own self-interest rather than to the native who has served them as a reverend for all of his life.
The white man is so rock-hungry he will soon have moved the whole island away – and such a lot of the work has been done by me, swinging a hammer. (19-20)
The above is about a cynicism that is addressed to the white men, since they are so mad about rocks and they seem want to have all rocks in his land, but surprisingly, this kind of job, swinging a hammer to reduce the sizes of the rocks, is done by the natives.
We all go the same way, but the white man would never understand that. It is so strange, and I wonder often, why the hell they bother to ask – sometimes even force words from you when they do not believe anything of what you say or do. (31)
From the view of the native that is explained above, it is obvious that this native is cynical towards the white men. The native shows his cynicism in the way that he will never understand the reasons why the white men force him to speak or to answer if they never believe anything of his words.
I shouldn’t be in this at all; you track an animal or a snake but not a man. White fella will never understand that – he’s keen to hunt down even his own kind. (47)
The above native’s view shows that he is cynical towards the white men. The native believes that the white men will never understand that it is not wise to hunt down a man.
his name, yet during lifetime, many of them have destroyed whole mountains. (64)
The above cynicism is about the native’s thought on the white men who are so rock-hungry that they have destroyed the whole mountains to gain more rocks.
What a bastard, this white man, who likes neither my voice nor my color, yet wants me to come up with a miracle that will make him a god. (66) It shows another cynicism of the native being aware that even though the white men do not like him because of his voice and his color, but they still need the native to help them as a slave.
Those explanations of the expression of the natives show cynicism and those are addressed to the colonizer, and thus the tone of The Track to Bralgu is cynical.
The fifth and the final step is that the tone of The Track to Bralgu
obviously provokes readers into the message that exists within the text. From this cynical tone, the native’s view shows what insight exists within the work. The new insight exists within the text of The Track to Bralgu that will be penetrated in the third analysis using the representation of depths, is for readers not to be trapped anymore within the constructed discourse of postcolonialism that stresses in the superiority of the colonizer over the colonized.
B. Superiority of the Colonizer as the Surface Representation
representation and depth representation (1996: 81). Surface representation views language as innocent and conceives it as unproblematically adequate to what it represents. It does give primacy to the visible that advantages us with clarity and distinctness, on the other hand, the surface representation tells us about things only within certain norms of justification that determine what things are from the outset (1996: 81-83).
The first story of The Track to Bralgu is about the black Christian priest named George of Riratjingu who wants a piece of land to bury his body, so that he can be buried in Christian way. He asks for the land to three important white people, but unfortunately he is not given a piece of land for his grave.
“Whatever happened to me will have no bearing on your mining operation. I only need three feet by six feet – it’ll do for the hole.”
“I am afraid … we could not allow burial on the leased land.” (7)
I whispered: “what about the church, there is plenty of room in the courtyard.”
“One has to be a saint to be buried there. Sorry, we could not bend the rules.” (9)
“No, just three feet by six feet.”
“Do not challenge the property law: make no obstruction to progress.” (11) From this story, it is obvious that the colonizer is superior since the native that is Reverend George has to beg and plead to the colonizer for three times for his grave. In this story, Reverend George understands that even though he has served the white as a reverend to preach and help them, but the white will not take into account about this.
From Reverend George’s perspective about white, it shows the difference between the colonizer and the colonized that the colonizer intentionally constructed. In this case, the natives should not be buried in Christian way and of course they also will not get any parts of the land. This certainly shows the superiority of the colonizer.
In chapter two “Jambawal, the Thunder Man” starts with how the white destroys the native’s land with superiority of their tools. The cherished customs, the tribal meanings, the sacred places, all were broken to pieces by the guns and the laws and the bulldozers of the new gods (The Track to Bralgu, 1992: 1).
They have already cleaned the bush and bulldozed the black man’s land. They have built their houses and made their graveyard – the country I knew so well is ugly and strange. No black man now can point to a place and say: “Here, at the bottom of this water hole (…), lies the spirit of our ancestors… Even the trampled space where we dance to call for rain when drought was long – that has been taken by the white man. (14)
The superiority of the colonizer in chapter two of The Track to Bralgu is even clearer from the description that the whites have successfully built their town in the native’s land. The whites are also superior in the way that they own sophisticated equipments to make the development of the land faster and easier. The second superiority of the colonizer that exists in chapter two is that the natives have to respect and obey the whites. In this chapter, the natives are forced to be slaves.
The whites exploit the natives to be slaves for the interests of the whites. The whites also exploit the natives’ freedom and their strength. Moreover, the superiority of the colonizer leads them to exploit the native’s land unfairly and only considers about their own interests on how they will get more land for profitable mining. Because of their superiority, the natives force themselves to obey what the whites force them to do. The natives know very well that they have no other choice.
“Willy-Willy Man” is a story about the white man whose life was saved by the natives when he is a boy, dying because of the drought. The natives grow him up and call him Nulumb, which means “One who springs to life again”.
He was such a little boy when we found him, lying on the sand in the dry creek bed… We found them dead from thirst, and the boy looked about the same until we gave him water. We called him Nulumb – “One who springs to life again.” (28)
When Nulumb has grown up, he does not take into account the natives who have saved his life from thirsty, meaning to say that Nulumb still considers the natives as people who have lower status than him. This is showed in the story, Nulumb is considered as the boss of the natives and they worked for him.
I should call Nulumb, the boss, and tell him; . . . There’re enough young fellas around to do my job, and do it faster than an old Abo. (23)
“Poor Fellow Dingo” is about a native who dies and can transform himself into a dingo.
… that one might be changed into a tree or animal; … that whatever shape your people are forced to take, you must still stick by them. (30)
In native’s world, it is understandable when one transforms himself into an animal or a tree when one dies. But the white will not understand about the transformation that the native believes.
Even if I tried to explain what happened to my husband the whites would not believe a word of it. No; that mob knows only its own god and holds nothing else on this whole earth could be so right. Tribal people, the elders, they could have understand it, … (29)
This story also tells us about the dingo hunt that is done often by the whites. This transformed dingo was once being hunt by several whites, but his children disguised him inside the shallow hole.
The whites have an eye for everything, so the stockmen were already tossing away their beer cans and readying themselves for the dingo hunt. (30)
Here they are! The hunt, . . . The children scooped out the sandy soil with their hands, laid the dingo in the shallow hole, and buried him, tossing a dry clump of burrs on top to disguise the spot. (31)
As the story goes, the dingo, his wife, and his children move to the town because of their fear that the whites will be after Kua, the dingo. Surprisingly, Kua has a talent to make a rainmaking ceremony and thus, he dances in town where the white men gather together. The whites are fond of watching Kua danced, but he himself is worried that there will be floods.
day, that when Pingal answered and splashed down the water there would surely be such a flood as had never been seen before. (35-36)
The flood comes and the whites realize that they can use Kua for their own purpose to get more benefits. Against Kua and his family’s will, Kua is taken by the whites.
The whites were busy fighting to save their own kind and none came looking for us till a day later, when the water had begun to go down.
“Hey! You! Lower that dog down here,” ordered one of the policemen while the other tried to tie the boat to the tree trunk.
“It’s good that you come, we would have starved,”
“We’re only concerned about that dog,” yelled his mate. “It’s a case of emergency. Most of the country is still under terrible drought. Stock are dying, men are starving!”
“Let him go, he is ours,” the children cried.
“It won’t be for long,” said the bearded man. “We only need to record his magic rainmaking code and program it on the computer. No harm will be done. All mankind will be grateful.” (36-37)
Chapter five “The Miringu” focuses its story on how the superiority of the colonizer’s tools exploits the native’s land and leads into a terrible destruction. The native’s land is destroyed because the colonizer regards it as an alien world, primitive, savage, barbarous, lacking all the genius of the West. So it was pitilessly destroyed (The Track to Bralgu, 1992: 1).
A few skeletons of dead trees, that’s all that can be seen from here to the horizon. (39)
The whole country is naked; look, as far as the eyes take you the earth is nothing but monsoon – washed sand. Here not even the dead trees are left. (40)
There was plenty of other bush tucker to be found – just off the track stretched a great billabong almost hidden under a green cover of floating lily leaves. We never passed without splashing in to swim and gather the sweet flowers for a meal. The billabong . . . It was just over there, but only dry sand remains of it now and partly buried in that sand are the huge tires and rusting metal blocks of a giant scraper. (41-42)
“The Tracker” in chapter six of The Track to Bralgu is a story about a native who is forced to track his own friend by three white men. This poor native does not have another choice because the three white men are following behind his back in order him to do their order. If the native does not obey their order, he will be shot by one of them who is carrying a gun.
They don’t talk about why they’re hunting the poor bloke; don’t even say his name. (48)
I wonder why they’re hunting him – what harm could he’ve done? None of them talk about that so maybe there’s nothing much to say. (49)
“How soon before we get that bloody bastard? . . . Hey you, Abo,” shouts the man in the dark glasses.
“What a queer bugger he is. How do you communicate with him?” “Abos know what’s expected from them.”
“It’s like a hound,” says the stockman. “You point to the track, and away he goes.” (48)
From the above conversation, it shows the unfair treatment to the native. The whites intentionally use the rude term for the native, which is Abo. Abo is the abbreviation from Aborigine and it does have a rude and bad meaning, or in other words, the word “Abo” is really degenerate. The whites are fond of humiliating the natives because of their mindset. They believe that they are superior to the natives and that the natives are nothing compared to them. The mindset that believes about the ‘colonizer’s superiority and the colonized’s inferiority’ is expanded by the colonizer to justify their conquest, but in fact it became the constructed binary opposition that differentiates between the colonizer and the colonized since it already sticks to the people’s minds.
“Buwad, the Fly” is a story about a native and his cousin who are imprisoned in a jail without any specific reasons.
I don’t know why they box me in; the whites never tell you that. Even if I know, it’d be no use to me. (57)
During in jail, the native’s cousin; Katungal is sick, and his sickness seems to be an advantage for the whites. The whites know that Katungal’s sickness can give a significant benefit for them. The whites believe they will reach the benefit from Katungal’s sickness that they exchange one bottle of medicine for a piece of paper that worth more than the native’s tribal land.
like an old man; some evil must have caught him and he sounds as if he can’t fight it for long. (58)
A white man with a briefcase comes smiling to Katungal, puts the case on the ground, and pulls out a great bottle of methylated spirits. My cousin reaches for the grog with two hands, but that whitey is quick to snatch the bottle back and holds out a piece of paper instead. “Don’t sign it’” I yell. “The whitey’s tricking you.” I wish he could hear me. That paper’s about our tribal land – you sign and the land is gone. The white man will clear the bush, and mine the rock. (58)
The superiority of the colonizer is really tangible within the text. Since the whites have reached the development in the field of health, they exchanged a bottle of medicine for the sick with a piece of paper to be signed, and at the end, the whites got the native’s tribal land in order to expand the mining operation. The whites understood that Katungal needed a medicine badly, and at the same time, the whites also wanted to own the native’s tribal land for their development and benefit. The development in medicine is one of the superiority of the colonizer, and thus they exchanged a bottle of medicine with a paper that worth of the native’s land, even though the whites slyly use this condition as an advantage to own the land.
C. Superiority of the Natives as the Representation of Depths
Bralgu. In this analysis, the writer tries to go deeper into the text of The Track to Bralgu in order to find what exactly the unseen that remains buried within the text.
In The Track to Bralgu, the most tangible thing that can be apprehended by our senses is that the Aborigines are being colonized and that the colonizer is superior. It is described very clearly that the superiority of the colonizer can be proved, first, from the sophisticated equipments that they owned for the mining operation, and the equipments to destroy the natural native’s land and changed it into their town. Second, it can also be proved from their powerful and unfair ways to exploit both the land and the Aborigines. The whites exploit the Aborigines in the way that they are forced to be slaves and they should live in the jail and work all day long for the development of their mining operation, without considering their health condition.
In the representation of depths, the view of the world that stresses on the colonizer’s superiority is rejected. Moreover, The Track to Bralgu tries to provoke the reader into a new paradigm that is kept within the text, so that the view of the world on “colonizer’s superiority and colonized’s inferiority’ can be reconstructed. And consequently, the justifications of the conquest that the West had attributed to the East as lacking all the genius of the West will no longer degenerate the East. The new paradigm that exists within the text of The Track to Bralgu can be brought into the surface by the representation of depths.
provoke becomes tangible. In the first analysis the writer had already explained that the tone of The Track to Bralgu is cynical, and it is viewed from what the colonized had in mind. The cynical view of the colonized toward the colonizer had brought the writer to the superiority of the colonized, because when the writer analyzed deeper to the colonized’s view, it shows how the colonized are proud of themselves, and of course this leads to the representation of depths that shows the superiority of the colonized.
In the first story of The Track to Bralgu, the rejections of the whites of not giving Reverend George a piece of land for his grave leads to George’s deep disappointment and finally he changes his mind to be buried in Christian way in the way that he chooses to be a Mogwoi, a trickster spirit, so that he can take revenge to the people who have harmed him.
Even if you beg and plead all your life, you are born a black, have to die as one, and worst of all you are buried differently from the way you wanted. (4)
Perhaps I should not be bothered any of them; the whites have their own problems to care about. After all what is the use of trying to nag, you played your part while you lived and when you have gone, the best you can hope for from those left behind is to forget that you ever knew them. (11)
The Riratjingu elders say often when a man dies, his spirits splits in three parts: one goes to Bralgu to join the ancestors; another sits on the bottom of the totemic water hole and waits to be reborn; while the third, the Mogwoi, they call it, wanders around tribal country. (12)
I am going to be a Mogwoi, the trickster spirit, moving around this world, and from time to time I will call on those I met in life to make their life uncomfortable too. (12)
have one place to go and that will be heaven. But, in black man’s world, the black people have three options for their death. The first is Bralgu or a place for the ancestors, the second is the bottom of the totemic water hole to be reborn, and the last is Mogwoi, a place to take revenge.
As a matter of fact, when George comes to his realization that being a black is better than being a white, it shows his awareness of being superior over the colonizer. He is aware that whatever unjust treatments that you get from the colonizer, it does not mean that the colonizer is superior, because in the end, he can take revenge to the colonizer who makes his life uncomfortable with more cruel way. George finally decides to be a Mogwoi or the trickster spirit, moving around the world and take revenge.
“Jambawal, the Thunder Man” starts with the superiority of the colonizer who succeeds destroying the native’s land. But at last, the superiority of their tools is defeated by the native’s superiority in his close relation with nature. In the story, it is told that the native can call Jambawal, or cyclone, to come and destroy the white man’s land.
I’m glad he made it at last. Since they brought me here to the island I’ve watched the sky and called to him… I knew if I called, and waited long enough, Jambawal would rise from Bralgu to sweep across the sea in such a rage that when he hit the town the white man and his houses would flutter like leaves in the air. Sometimes I climbed to the island peak, high, like an anthill there, and looking toward Bralgu I danced and sang to Jambawal – not so loud as to annoy him, but gently; just enough to remind him that he must come. (13-14)
unexpectedly, this chapter in fact represents the superiority of the colonized because of the native’s close relation with nature. In the story, one of the natives who is forced to be a slave, called Jambawal or cyclone to come, and as a result, the town that has successfully been built by the white was smashed down. The second superiority of the colonized that exists in this chapter is that the natives can stay for weeks with no food and water because of their relation with the ancestors.
In the old days the whites would chain you to a tree and leave you alone – you could stay there for days, for weeks maybe, with no food and still be happy. The ancestors from the Dreaming will care for you if you’re alone long enough to call on them – and when the ancestors hear, and come to you, you’re never alone again. (14-15)
The above description is clear to readers as the superiority of the colonizer because the colonizer used to punish the natives in a cruel way without any specific reasons, in this case, the natives are used to be left alone without barely any food. But, as a matter of fact, this story also represents the superiority of the colonized, since they have a relation with their previous ancestors that will take care of them and make them stronger during the punishment.
The third chapter “Willy-Willy Man” is a story about Willy-Willy Man who can take the souls of black people to the Dreamtime, a place where the ancestors are waiting.
… and the willy-willy will sneak in and snatch my soul back to the Dreamtime. (24)
world, it is not known where to go when one dies. In other words, for the native, the world is not the limitation.
As the writer has explained before, the West justified their conquest for trading practices, religious missions and military activities (Loomba, 2005: 54). But, what happens in this story is astonishing in the way that it is the white who does not believe there exists heaven when one dies.
I wonder where the white men go when they get old. I’ve had heard them say they’ll travel to Heaven, and rest there. That’s their Dreaming, but Nulumb doesn’t believe in it. “Don’t let them sell you that one,” he told me. “Paradise should be down here, not in the sky.” (25)
From what Nulumb said, it can be concluded that even though one justification for mission civilatrice is to bring Christianity, it appears that the white himself does not believe about the existence of heaven. It is contradicting with their justification of bringing Christianity to the colonized. It also represents that in fact the view that the West had attributed to the East as laziness, aggression, violence, greed, social promiscuity, bestiality, primitivism, innocence and irrationality should be put into question (Loomba, 1998: 95).
There was not much change in Kua after all for although his body had shrunk from man’s to dingo’s his mind was on the family just the same. (30)
He was very good at gungi, the rainmaking ceremony. . . In the whole country there was no man, mortal or spirit, who could have danced the
gungi better; and when a blackfellow dances just right then his voice and the sounds of the dance float up to the sky and wake Pingal. The Moon answers with splashing water – the louder you sing and dance the more rain will fall, and if you are very good, the whole country could be flooded. (35-36)
At the end of the story, because Kua makes the rainmaking ceremony too often as to please the whites, flood comes and the whites fight so hard to save themselves. This story represents that the colonizer is defeated by a dingo which is an expert at rainmaking ceremony, and it also represents about the colonizer’s dependence on the colonized in order to survive for their lives, especially in the long drought. This means the superiority of the colonized, for they can survive in a terrible long drought while the colonizer cannot.
In chapter six “The Tracker”, the image of the native as uncivilized is reversed. It is a story about the native who is forced to track his own friend. But, as a matter of fact, he does not show the right way to find his friend. The whites force the native to track in order to find the native’s friend so that they will have the reward.
“I just want to get him, and collect that bloody reward,” says Glasses. (51) “I’ll blow all my cut on beer,” dreams the stockman.
“It’d make a whole pool of booze you could swim in.”(52)
The whites are bullied by the native, but they do not realize that the native that they forced is leading them to another way, it is simply because the native has his own reason that it is not wise if a man tracks his own kind.
I shouldn’t be in this at all; you track an animal or a snake but not a man. White fella will never understand that – he’s keen to hunt down even his own kind. (47)
We’re not following the tracks any longer, but the boss men haven’t noticed – they’re so sure I won’t go wrong. (53)
From this story, it is tangible that the native is superior to the white. The whites feel superior in the way that they force the native and he obeys what they want so that they think they win. But, in fact, it is the native who wins since he is showing the wrong way to them, in other words, they are bullied by the native.
Katungal looks blank; he can’t sign -- he doesn’t know a single letter. The white visitor pats him on the shoulder. “Wait a minute, my friend,” he says and hurries away… (58)
That white man’s back, smiling slyly, and he’s brought a lawyer, a policeman and a man with camera -- all bright-faced fellas. Still Katungal can’t sign; but that doesn’t matter now the mob of whites are there as witnesses. They show the blackfella how to make a cross and that’s enough. The camera clicks and the whole world will be able to see my cousin Katungal with the pencil in his hand. (59)
From this story, the whites overcame the illiterate native with brought witnesses that consist of a policeman, a lawyer and a cameraman. It is also visible that the West did this successfully, but it was against the law, since the native was illiterate, did not sign, and did not know exactly what was going on. The sick native only wanted a bottle of medicine that could make him better, without knowing the whites’ cunning purpose behind the gift of the medicine. From the above description of the story, the writer can conclude that the whites are greedy. The whites’ greediness is depicted so clearly, and this is the value of the West that makes them use the cunning way to own the native’s land. The photograph was the evidence that showed the delegation of authority for the native’s land was done under the legal condition. But in fact, the illiterate native did not sign the paper, he instead just made a cross that was taught at the moment, and thus a cameraman could take a picture of it as the evidence that the delegation of authority for the native’s land was done legally.
owned the native’s land in a fair way or in a legal way, since there existed also a lawyer and a policeman as witnesses in purpose to strengthen the evidence. Meaning to say, the whole world was deceived by the West in order to get a confession from the whole world as superior.
In “Buwad, the Fly”, instead of the East is depicted as inhumane, like the view of the world, it is the West which is depicted as inhumane.
This room is like a box. It has no door or window and the area within the concrete walls is. . . It’s hard to breathe this air. . . It’s more like the pressing of the earth. . . – the whites never told me jail would be like this. . . (56)
No windows either. High up, close to the ceiling, is a small hole – a pigeon would hardly squeeze through it. . . (56)
These walls are solid and firm – you could kill yourself calling for help, but no one would hear. (59)
The darkness is thick here, and wherever I turn I’m face to face with a concrete wall. It was very bad in the beginning, when I screamed, and cursed the whites for building a box not big enough for an animal. (61) The above description of the jail tells us straightly that the West has no pity, since they imprisoned the native in such a tiny room. The value of the West had given to the East as savage and inhumane is again being questioned. From this experience of the imprisoned native, the writer can conclude that the values of the East as lacking all genius of the West are only the justification of the West for mission civilatrice.
The second evidence that proves the whites are pitiless and inhumane is when the native talks about his wife who has half-caste children.
clearly. Two other children, naked half-castes, sit in front of the shelter grubbing through a heap of rubbish. The place must stink, but I expect the brats are used to that – they don’t seem to notice. Their faces are clotted with swarms of flies, but they hardly bother to brush them away.
One child runs to the mother with bread he’s found on the filthy heap and Wudlaru crumbles it for the baby -- but the crying doesn’t stop. (60-61) Wudlaru is the native’s wife who has half-caste children, but from the description above, it can be understood that the white men who had sexual intercourse with her, has left her with her children without any responsibilities, guilt and pity. It means this story is one example about the white men who consider the native women as sexual object and Wudlaru has become the victim of sexual object. From this story, the writer may say that bestiality as one of the values of the East is rejected.
It is not expected, bestiality that the West had created to the East turned out to be the value of the West. Even, the native wanted to accept his wife’s half-caste children with generosity, and this means that the moral of the native is better than the whites.
We were married years ago, then lost each other – some power was forcing us apart all the time. We both tried hard, but we couldn’t live together. I wish I could say something to her now, or even just a smile. It’d be good to sit down together and talk; I might cheer her up a bit. I’m not angry that the children are half-caste; I’d even look after them – have them live with us, maybe. (61)
In “Buwad, the Fly”, the imprisoned native, because of the colonized’s superiority, at the end of the story, he changed himself into a fly and freed himself through a tiny hole.
What will I become I wonder; a bird would be good, but it’s not for me to decide. . . He will make me into a fly, maybe, but I won’t mind. . . (62) In a few hours – before the dawn – I will be a fly. I’ll dart out through that pigeonhole, rise high up in the air, and head straight to my people. (63) Once again, it is another story that represents about the superiority of the colonized. Even though the native is imprisoned, but since the natives have a good relation with the ancestors, they will help him to change himself into a fly to free himself from the jail.
CHAPTER V
CONCLUSION
Based on the analysis of the previous chapter, the three problem formulations have been answered. The first problem formulation is about how the tone of The Track to Bralgu is depicted. There are five steps to examine the tone of The Track to Bralgu
