4

‘So I say my name’: Towards a decolonial ethics for reading girls’ worlds in letters

Bronwyn Anne Beech Jones¹

Introduction

I greet you with my hand my friend

So I say my name.

—Sitti Salamah²

This call for recognition and friendship was penned by Sitti Salamah from Panyabungan, a northwestern area of the island of Sumatra. Published in the women’s newspaper Soenting Melajoe (‘Malay Headdress’) in 1919, Sitti Salamah’s poem provides insight into the sentiments of an elite, educated girl in colonial Indonesian society. This chapter contributes to efforts to rethink the limits of a historical understanding of women writers by using the letters of teenagers to whom I refer as girls.³ Drawing on writings produced by girls in two West Sumatran Malay-language newspapers between 1912 and 1921, I trace an approach to understand their senses of the world, including race, modernity, locality and injustice. Girls’ perspectives elucidate how conceptions of self and solidarity and dreams of opportunities to participate in a global modernity reinscribed and refused colonial grammars of gender, class and racial differences.

Using thematic case studies, I examine writers’ senses of geography, origins, friendship, homeland and hopes. Individual perspectives on self and collective identities have been glossed over in research that has predominantly used Soenting Melajoe to probe Minangkabau women leaders and gender politics.⁴ Distinct in their public textual form, letters to newspapers and periodicals were tools girls and women used to fashion senses of self, forge friendships and form political languages. It is possible to track a small number of writers over multiple years in Soenting Melajoe and document advocacy, especially for girls’ schools.⁵ Conversely, by piecing together senses of the world, this chapter examines who is made visible and whose labour and experiences remain invisible in this archive.

The first section outlines an approach to reading girls’ self-making and world-making practices to make visible networks of knowledge. I then present a genealogy of a visualisation—word maps—to contextualise 11-year-old Retna Tenoen’s letter to Soenting Melajoe about her multiple sources of geographic knowledge.⁶ The second case examines how girls from Natal and Tapanuli crafted a cohort based on sharing their aspirations in letters in 1918–19. The final case reconstructs the agency of a female translator, who, as far as I know, did not write about herself. Using her translation of Leo Tolstoy’s short story ‘The Empty Drum’, published in the periodical Minangkabau in 1918, I argue that Fatimah Rasad scripted a global sense of inevitable justice into an anticolonial vernacular for Pariaman, a trading port north of Padang. Their writing reveals girls’ complex subjectivities—aspiring to be modern, claiming an ‘authentic’ collective identity and expressing self-determination. This chapter extends the volume’s aim to understand how coloniality interlaces local experiences with capitalist circuits of power. It reveals multiple ambiguities and subtexts within girls’ world views, whispering alternatives that belie the dominant modes of subjectification.

Letters and girls’ world-making

The girl writers examined in this chapter were overwhelmingly of the middle to upper classes and enmeshed in colonial political and economic systems through familial employment that enabled formal education. They were among the few Indonesians permitted to attend Dutch-language schools (Hollandsch-Iinlandsche Scholen, HIS)⁷ for seven years of primary education. The transformative experience of education for elite girls in colonial-era Indonesia is well documented. Cora Vreede-de Stuers and Susan Blackburn chronicled how associations and new ideas about girlhood and womanhood in the early twentieth century reflected and spurred debates about the interplay between Western-style education, religion and tradition, including in women’s newspapers.⁸ Although cohering with a colonial agenda of uplift, girls’ schooling had radical unintended consequences, as Blackburn described, ‘giving rise to uncertainties, contradictions and conflicts, as well as emancipatory implications’.⁹ Communities forged in the classroom and the pages of newspapers presented new possibilities and aspirations, thus literacy was ‘a key that opened the door to authority’.¹⁰

In the early 1910s, there was also colonial concern about a limited take-up of government girls’ schools, especially on Java.¹¹ A 1913 Bataviaasch Nieuwsblad (‘Batavia Newspaper’) article reported officials’ attempts to naturalise low female attendance in ‘native culture’ by claiming that Islam and the prevalence of early marriage discouraged parents from educating girls. Bataviaasch Nieuwsblad significantly targeted a contradiction, notwithstanding substantial and diverse gender barriers, between a lack of interest and letters in Soenting Melajoe on the imperative of education written by Muslim girls and women of the matrilineal Minangkabau ethnic group.¹² Blackburn contended that, by 1914, government reluctance to guarantee financial support and consider local models constrained girls’ schooling more than lack of community interest.¹³ Furthering this, Suwignyo has argued that restricted educational systems ensured the reproduction of social stratification based on race and class.¹⁴

The burgeoning West Sumatran press reflected comparatively high literacy rates, including among elite girls.¹⁵ Literacy nonetheless remained confined; by 1930, only 6.44 per cent of Indonesians were literate in Latin script, subsequent to the Ethical Policy’s increased investment in People’s Schools (Volksschool), some speciality girls schools and flourishing nongovernment schools.¹⁶ Across West Sumatra in 1911, there were 111 People’s Schools offering three years of primary schooling financed by local communities, expanding to 358 by 1915 and 548 by 1925, when 40 per cent of students were girls.¹⁷ The first newspaper on which I focus, Soenting Melajoe, was published in Padang between 1912 and 1921, edited by women and supported by politician Mahjoedin, known by his title Datoe’ Soetan Maharadja.¹⁸ The weekly’s editors positioned it as a forum for girls and women to learn, challenge Minangkabau male authority, centre women’s status in matrilineal customary law and suggest that God-given maternal strength was pairable with Western modes of education.¹⁹ Conversely, the monthly Minangkabau was printed in 1918 in Pariaman²⁰ and promoted self-sufficiency and published contributions from male agricultural officials. Fatimah Rasad edited Minangkabau and translated two short stories. Neither publication was overtly anticolonial but both were inherently subversive by advocating cultural sovereignty and self-help and seeking to form and strengthen communities. Their reading publics portray Stoler and Cooper’s idea of contested divisions between coloniser and colonised, with ‘ambiguous lines that divided engagement from appropriation, deflection from denial, and desire from discipline’, particularly regarding knowledge-making.²¹

Reading girls’ letters for world-making requires locating how they wrote about themselves in relation to others directly and indirectly, spatially and temporally. World-making denotes the symbolic ways in which people comprehend the world across multiple radiating scales: individual, neighbourhood, community, national, regional, global.²² I consider three modes of world-making—geographic connections, cohorts and imagined worlds—that were underwritten by notions of community service. Drawing attention to multiple levels of identity, world-making necessitates remaining attuned to shifting borders of inclusion and exclusion. Paul Bijl theorised that, through letter-writing, women’s advocate Raden Adjeng Kartini crafted ‘selves’ entitled to European rights and law.²³ The writers examined here did not pursue direct claims to European recognition but rather horizontal bonds with educated girls. While focusing on girls, I acknowledge expressions of gender-based solidarity (bangsa perempoean) encompassing students, graduates of teacher training colleges, older women and future women that were for some ethnically confined and for others more open.²⁴ While most younger writers were students or school graduates, older women like the co-editor Siti Roehana (Ruhana Kuddus) were taught to read informally in the family. To examine the writing of girls aged between 11 and their late teens, I follow Saraswati and Beta’s framework of decolonial knowledge-production that ties girlhood to youthfulness, rather than strictly defined age cohorts.²⁵ Writers coalesced around their mutual membership of a modern, progressive cohort.

To engage with girls’ agency in crafting selves and worlds requires multiple modes of slow, reflective reading. These modes respond to Saraswati and Beta’s call for a ‘knowing responsibly’ framework for Indonesian girlhood studies. They foreground how patriarchal projections of victimhood on to contemporary Indonesian girls are sustained by intersecting colonial race and gender hierarchies.²⁶ This chapter focuses on girls who partially refused such subjectification, emphasising how girls engaged in and crafted modernity. To form a feminist ethics of reading, after Saraswati and Beta, I find instructive María Puig de la Bellacasa’s conceptualisation of care as a research method acknowledging interdependency—growing analysis around meaning, rather than dissecting it.²⁷ This method of care co-locates with Mignolo and Walsh, whose decolonial approach involves grasping how Western knowledge systems have been universalised to undo hierarchical structures.²⁸ As Indonesian feminist philosopher Gadis Arivia has emphasised, a critically reflexive, decolonial approach positions a researcher/reader as a learner of knowledge, rather than a ‘discoverer’.²⁹ A decolonial ethics of care for reading early twentieth-century Indonesian print culture cultivates analysis by reconstructing textual and social worlds while acknowledging a writer’s agency and voice.

At the micro, textual level, this approach involves careful, slow reading to understand individual opinions without assuming that a writer’s position or terms remain stable. Showcasing individual concerns by selecting and translating quotes attempts to avoid what Gayatri Spivak referred to as the generic ‘international translator-ese’ through which non-Western women’s writing is presented as sources on distant cultures.³⁰ At a meso, intertextual level, this necessitates tracking relationships within and across newspapers, including, where possible, reader reception. Reading thematically can illuminate silences, indirection and world-making practices that replicated, were influenced by and resisted colonial structures of power.³¹ Third, at a more macro-level, applying a decolonial ethics to reading selves and worlds situates perspectives within wider cultural, political and economic shifts and changes across multiple geographic scales. Cutting across these scales are structures that shape perception, expression and visibility, which underscore the importance of intersectional awareness especially in elite textual spaces.

Bridging: Mapping felt connections

Retna Tenoen’s January 1921 letter to Soenting Melajoe discussed forms of connection she felt with other parts of Asia. Retna was born on 25 January 1909 and her story in Soenting Melajoe was threaded with references to Crown Princess Juliana of the Netherlands and the weaving school Retna’s parents founded in Pulau Air, Padang. Retna’s father, press entrepreneur and Padang City councillor Majoedin (referred to by his honorifics Datoe’ Soetan Maharadja), was a cultural nationalist, who carved out spaces to strengthen Minangkabau matrilineal adat (‘customary law’) as the foundation of a modern community. Minangkabau girls were frequently cast as objects of interventions in newspapers and the weaving school he founded, where Retna’s mother, Siti Amrin, taught.³² At a night market to mark the tenth birthday of the school and the princess in 1919, Retna made a speech in Dutch and presented a Malay-language poem about the weaving school, celebrating the ‘loyal and steadfastly charitable’ Netherlands.³³ This event presented a hybrid conception of modernity that emphasised culturally salient girls’ skills, such as weaving, lace-making and word craft. Retna also featured prominently in the night market craft showcase and won an award alongside five other young competitors aged between seven and 11 years, who were held up by Datoe’ Soetan Maharadja as exemplars of a generation skilled at both Palembang-style embroidery and French knots.³⁴ Before 1921, Retna’s letters reflected a common emphasis in the newspaper on being polite and virtuous.³⁵ To understand how she layered geographic knowledge in a 1921 letter in Soenting Melajoe requires first contextualising the word maps that featured in the same edition. These visualisations were developed in Soenting Melajoe’s sibling, the daily Oetoesan Melajoe (‘Malay Messenger’) (1911–26).³⁶ Word maps accompanied articles on World War I and origin stories of the Minangkabau ethnic group, bridging readers with faraway places.

These visualisations arranged words in different fonts to represent locations and distances, crafting a cosmopolitan outlook. In 1915, Oetoesan Melajoe published a visualisation of World War I battles. Paired with coverage of troop movements (telegraphed from Sumatera Bode’s Batavia office), the map encouraged readers to imagine key locations such as Gallipoli and Galata. Word maps cohere with recent studies of contemporaneous data visualisations as pedagogic tools in newspapers, albeit in more technologically crude ways, indicating vernacular publications’ limited budgets.³⁷ Initial word maps evolved to visualise Minangkabau history. For instance, a 1916 map depicted regions of India in relation to the Himalayas, China, Melaka and Siak in Riau. It accompanied Datoe’ Soetan Maharadja’s account of historical Minangkabau connections through trade, religion and matriliny. Women weavers featured prominently in his culturally nationalist vision. Explaining the superiority of Keling fabric for sarongs compared with European fabric, he mused that ‘perhaps later Minangkabau women skilled at making sarong for our own consumption will have a product to trade’.³⁸ To scale up production, he looked to the Pulau Air weaving school in Padang, its sister school in Pariaman and classes offered by Keoetamaan Isteri in Padangpanjang. Word maps thus positioned girls within global networks, bridging a Minangkabau past and future.

Word maps published in Soenting Melajoe from November 1920 to January 1921 accompanied accounts of Minangkabau origins. These maps emanated from the centre of the Minangkabau alam (‘realm’, ‘world’): Mount Marapi in the highlands. Articles recounted the well-known Minangkabau tambo (‘origin story’)³⁹ about Iskandar the Great’s youngest son, Maharadja Diradja, his wife and a philosopher settled near Mount Marapi, where his wife gave birth to a daughter.⁴⁰ New generations expanded out, forming Luhak nan Tigo. Word maps also show later settlements like Bonjol, Kumpulan, Lubuk Sikaping and Air Bangis. Merging with patterns of mobility, these visualisations depict Jambi, Aceh, Bandung, Pontianak and Makassar, where, especially from the late nineteenth century, Minangkabau families migrated, including to take up civil service positions. Word maps thus incorporated girls and women spread across the archipelago into a community, visualising what Hadler termed a ‘textual and metaphorical alam’.⁴¹ Eleven-year-old Retna Tenoen engaged with these accounts to negotiate her own place in the world.

In January 1921, Retna wrote of her sense of belonging, which was geographically broader than her father’s accounts of connections. Her January 1921 article explained that ‘Indië’ (Hindia) was derived from the River Indus, south of the Himalaya Mountains, which were visually depicted by their prominent position on the accompanying map (Figure 4.1).⁴² She continued:

The Hindu people are a very ancient people who have been civilised for thousands of years, according to a Dutch book. The Hindu people then became our ancestors, the people of the Minangkabau World, who until the present are still called Hindus, which means we are one lineage (kaoem), one large family (familie) of the same clan.⁴³

Figure 4.1 Word map in Soenting Melajoe, 1921

Source: Soenting Melajoe, 14 January 1921.

Similar to scholarship on Malay-ness that has highlighted the influence of colonial hierarchical categories, Retna knitted together origin stories with sources she deemed authoritative.⁴⁴ The ‘Dutch book’ referenced was a P.G. Geysbeek Witsen encyclopedia published in 1861.⁴⁵ Six months earlier, Datoe’ Soetan Maharadja had used aspects of the encyclopedia entry on India to explain that the Minangkabau were, in his view, descended from the Kshatriya (‘warrior’) caste.⁴⁶ While echoing her father’s focus on shared lineage, Retna framed her understanding around a quote from the encyclopedia reproduced in Soenting Melajoe in Dutch in June 1920: ‘Before the Hindus were under the yoke of foreign rulers, they stood on a higher stage of civilization, and their country was the cradle of all arts and sciences.’⁴⁷ This account reflects Dutch perceptions of a revered ancient Hindu past set in contrast to a colonised present. Retna reproduced her father’s emphasis on common lineage but added the dimension of being a ‘family’, thus imbuing a sense of her herself and her Minang peers reading the paper as intimately connected across time and space.⁴⁸

Retna’s multilayered sense of the world also drew bonds of economic and racial solidarity. She explained that she knew that people from Saigon, Rangoon and Siam (Thailand) had traded with her Minangkabau ancestors ‘a very long time ago’, had recently supplied the rice she ate and ‘helped us in the East Indies when we were struck with the dangers of famine’.⁴⁹ News coverage about rice importation embedded certain places with an image of generosity. Despite the Netherlands’ wartime neutrality, the importation of rice from Burma was prohibited in 1914 and from French Indochina in 1915. Combined with successive low domestic harvests, this led to progressively higher prices, eventually causing a nearly Indies-wide rice shortage in 1918–19.⁵⁰ Retna’s focus on cooperation contrasted with discontent expressed in 1918, including in Soenting Melajoe, by women working at markets. Her privileged and still-in-formation view abstracted trade to cooperation and friendship, removed from the material realities of food price increases and crop failures. This view of the world led Retna to also suggest that, as a member of the Minangkabau ethnic group and Malay race, she shared racial similarities with people in Siam. Retna’s account contained a greater flexibility compared with her father’s explanation of a modern world divided into five racial categories.⁵¹ She wrote that ‘for people from China and Japan a desirable colour is that which is like their skin, and for people from Siam a desirable colour is that which is like their skin’.⁵² L. Ayu Saraswati argued that classification projects in Soenting Melajoe demonstrate racial awareness and hierarchies that were resisted in the formation of a non-racial Indonesian-ness.⁵³ By contrast, Retna’s letter looked out to parts of Asia beyond the colonial borders that became the nation of Indonesia to form a decentred sense of beauty and desirability.

Retna’s predominant focus on being Minangkabau and Malay generated the historical and contemporary connections she shared with others, particularly girls who similarly learned at a HIS. Towards the end of her letter, she posed a series of questions about her identity as a Dutch-educated Minang girl:

Would it not be good if girls of my people sometimes wore clothes like Siamese girls? Chinese women’s clothes are often copied and have become models, and European women’s clothes have become exemplars … What would it be like if we wore the clothes of Siamese girls, we who already understand Dutch; what would happen if we wore clothes like the Siamese?⁵⁴

Retna questioned whether clothes reconstructed a self, strongly contrasting with a 1919 writer who condemned women who wore European-style dresses without head coverings as ‘not deeply rooted in their ethnic group and … not truly of Minangkabau blood’.⁵⁵ Her points of reference are reminiscent of earlier writers who looked to Siam with admiration for modernisation and wariness that forms of female work, such as being royal guards, were narrowing due to Western influence.⁵⁶ Nonetheless, Retna’s questions specifically pertained to a subset—‘we who already understand Dutch’—underlining an assumed classist requirement to fully embody this modernity. Retna carved out space to consider her evolving sense of self through school, her father and the newspaper. This case nuances Anderson’s identification that colonial mapping introduced new, dominant ideas about space by demonstrating multilayering.⁵⁷ In Soenting Melajoe, colonial knowledge-making practices such as the categorising and universal intent of encyclopedias and spatial organising were co-located with local understandings of the past and imagined interpersonal connections.

Meeting: Serving local communities

Soenting Melajoe is an archive containing subcommunities of friendships. The newspaper has predominantly been analysed as a product of ethnically Minangkabau women, mirroring its subtitle as a women’s newspaper for ‘Women of the Minangkabau Alam’. However, attention to the locations of writers reveals how, alongside large cohorts throughout the west coast of Sumatra, contributors were spread in regional centres and towns on Sumatra and trading ports on other islands.⁵⁸ This section explores a coalition of girls who self-identified as being Mandailing, Tapanuli and Batak who have not been the subject of previous analyses.⁵⁹ It adds to a method of reading world-making attention to how homelands were imagined within Soenting Melajoe and underwritten by notions of service.

From 1917 Soenting Melajoe reported on a weaving school for girls, Panagoe Hagabean in Padangsidempuan, and how girls and women from this area attended weaving schools in Padang. Salamah attended a HIS in Padangsidempuan before her father, Maharadja Djamboer djagong Nasoetion Brotan, supported her to undertake craft schoolteacher training in Padang and then return to teach in Panyabungan, Natal.⁶⁰ Salamah and this nongovernment school were nodes in an expanding network of schools in central Sumatra, including Angkola-Batak and Malay-language primary schools and Dutch-language schools for elite girls and boys.⁶¹ Two years later, Salamah dedicated two poems in Soenting Melajoe to Siti Hafasah (known as Boeroe Enggan) that encouraged devotion to developing Panyabungan through formal education and learning weaving in Padang. She switched between Malay and Mandailing (underlined).⁶² These extracts illustrate how place, community and cause were structured as dialogue.

Oranges, limes, and pomegranates

The train from Pariaman arrives

The cries of Sitti Salamah

[I] hope she is praised by the people of Panyabungan.

Brought by train from Pariaman

To Padang

To the government I entreat

For the cries of women to be answered …

Listen to the [calls for] progress

Men and women to advance together

My cries are no different

Only that my homeland is no different

Only a matter for my homeland P. Panyabungan …

But actually nonetheless,

I do not agree with holding hands

As is the way of Europeans

I only wish to advance together …

Even though the old seem like children

That is what I really wish for

To the government of Batak lands.

I hope what I wish for comes true

The ship arrives from Hindustan

And docks at Pulau Batu

Oh, Hafasah Boeroe Enggan!

Greetings of welcome for you.

Docking briefly at P. Batoe,⁶³

The sailor sings so sweetly,

I greet you with my hand my friend

So I say my name …

Oh B. Enggan, my peer,

Batak adat

Is said to be the guide

If we are of different nations

We are family

Loving each other even though it’s hard

Oh my sister! If you like confusion in your chest

Since we met

Even though we are far my sister

Here is our meeting place

Oh! B. Enggan (my sister-in-law)

With this I say

Perhaps my sister has not met me

But with SM we meet.⁶⁴

Writing predominantly in Malay connected writers to a larger community of women and girl readers and coded for participating in modernity. As Tom Hoogervorst and Henk Schulte Nordholt have argued in the case of the contemporaneous Javanese middle class, notions of progress, innovation and agency encompassed by modernity were embodied and enacted. Reading and writing in Malay, they suggest, became ‘the source of self-identification for the upwardly mobile middle classes, setting them apart from the rural and working-class communities’.⁶⁵ In Malay, Salamah endorsed progress and education and echoed a common critique of women’s calls for personal liberty and public handholding in rival publication Soeara Perempoean (‘Women’s Voice’).⁶⁶ She also reached out to forge friendship across distance in the newspaper: ‘Perhaps my sister has not met me/But with SM we meet.’ However, the words Salamah chose to express in Mandailing—‘people’, ‘you’, ‘friend’, ‘sister’, ‘family’, ‘meeting place’—suggest attempts to emphasise thick ties of intimacy and local connection among a subcommunity of readers. This poem to a peer from Panyabungan coheres with Rodgers’ observation that the elite sons and daughters in the southern Sipirok region ‘were generally proudly multilingual’ from the 1880s.⁶⁷ Salamah also expressed criticism of her elders for being ‘like children’, presumably referring to their lack of formal education, to this more intimate Mandailing readership. At the same time, this subcommunity of writers in Soenting Melajoe commonly conveyed everyday expressions of Islamic faith—a common world-making effort in the publication, which sought commonality with Minangkabau girls in West Sumatra as well as other Muslim readers.⁶⁸ Poems presented vignettes of Ramadan and Eid al-Fitr, and many writers bookended articles with Arabic expressions.

Alongside common language use, Mount Sibualbuali featured as a motif of a Tapanuli homeland, including in titles and embedded in verses. H.W. Siparloengoen signed as the ‘Fairy of Sipirok’ and wrote in a combination of English (underlined) and Malay. She had moved from Sipirok in 1913 with her family and studied at the American Methodist School in Medan, dreaming of a familiar landscape:

When the nigt [sic] has come

From Sirumalun, in Deli

In my eyes I spot Si Bualbuali,

Very, very far away, like a stove pot.⁶⁹

Writing about home was a creative endeavour, a testimony and an appeal. H.W. Siparloengoen emphasised that her family was from Hasibun, 100 kilometres north of Sipirok, reflecting multilayered spatial identities and networks.⁷⁰ She wrote in a playful combination of English, Malay and Mandailing. For instance, she signed off one May 1918 letter by expressing, in English: ‘I hope my dear sisters, let me hear about Green Field of Sipirok by return of the post.’⁷¹ Other writers named friends living away from their hometown, celebrating students, teachers and assistant teachers in Sibolga, Balige and Medan to document how ‘the people of Tapanuli have a role’.⁷² Led by middle to upper-class educated Tapanuli youth and reliant on trickle-down benefits, these aspirations for modernity were premised on the universal adoption of newness as a collective aspiration.⁷³

Expressions of love for homelands were politically inflected through appeals to service. Siti Hafasah explicitly posed a mission for girls to inspire one another to strive for opportunities in Sipirok, ‘so that those in our hometowns, our brothers and sisters, can pick those delicious fruits’—presumably, the familiar ingredients of formal education, employment, consumer goods and physical and social mobility.⁷⁴ The next year, she urged compatriots to ‘wake up from your sleep’ to develop their homeland, which she believed to be ‘behind’ in consensus-making, intelligence, agriculture and patriotism.⁷⁵ Aligning a lack of adequate schooling and agricultural infrastructure with political mechanisms and sentiments shows an ascendent emphasis on organising, which nevertheless commonly appealed to Batak adat as a guide, as in Salamah’s poem. At the same time, some writers also lamented barriers to enacting this modernity. For instance, Nai Angat Soer Tapanoeli lamented the risks and precarity experienced by young people who left Tapanuli for jobs in Deli, on the east coast of Sumatra, where, according to the apparently popular refrains sung by children, ‘I thought I wanted to go to Deli but I don’t have enough money for the journey’, and where ‘the young unemployed are discarded’.⁷⁶ Nevertheless, more detailed accounts of personal experiences of disappointment and labour, especially in the plantation economy, were undiscussed in Soenting Melajoe, reinforcing its utility in narrating discourses within modernity and coloniality rather than resistance.

This cohort nuances Perret’s identification that different communities (bangsa) competed against one another to achieve ‘progress’.⁷⁷ Writers articulated the feeling of falling behind, which does invoke competition to achieve Eurocentric modernity, but this reaction also saw the cultivation of subnational political discourse. Girls adopted a primary language of service that was tied to local communities but also extended beyond ethnic difference to common gender, especially to appeal to Minangkabau peers. Appeals were advanced to established community organisations and educated girl reading publics, rather than linked to perceived differences between women in Minang matrilineal and Mandailing and Batak groups’ patrilineal adat. This analysis supports Grace T. Leksana’s (Chapter 5 in this volume) questioning of the extent to which understandings of coloniality provide space for Indonesian agency to adopt and adapt to modernity, but also underlines the predominance of discourses of service to an ethnic nation or local community, albeit outwardly linked by common gender and youth. These discourses emphasised leadership but replicated colonial trickle-down models of education and modernity, dominating but never fully consuming individual expressions of belonging and friendship.

Scripting: Tracing intertextual critique

A focus on translated fiction further illuminates intertextual discursive formation. Literary fiction was a popular genre of consumption, some written expressly for newspapers and some adapted and serialised to encourage repeat purchases.⁷⁸ Extant copies of the monthly periodical Minangkabau (1918) suggest that Fatimah Rasad translated two stories, ‘The Empty Drum’ (titled ‘Emelyan the Day Labourer’) by Leo Tolstoy and ‘The Story of Kuprin’s Mother’, attributed to a Muslim woman named Moesafir. The microfilm copies I accessed did not contain either story in full, so I have chosen to analyse the more complete, ‘The Empty Drum’.⁷⁹ This section offers a speculative reading of Fatimah’s translation of this 1891 short story based on a Volga region folktale. The story follows the poor labourer Emelyan, who meets an otherworldly, beautiful woman, who suggests that they marry despite Emelyan’s hesitation because of his limited means. The tsar, glimpsing the beauty of Emelyan’s wife, desires her as his own and seeks to work Emelyan to death, yet Emelyan survives and eventually prevails by summoning the tsar’s soldiers and destroying the drum of war. Although Fatimah did not directly write of herself or her world, an intertextual analysis of her translation reveals worlding that connected local discourses on capitalist injustice to global literary flows.

Fatimah’s translation was published in Minangkabau, a periodical that promoted self-sufficiency. Under Netherlands-educated agriculturalist Bagindo Djamaloeddin Rasjad, the monthly attracted subscribers in Pariaman, the West Sumatran highlands and Aceh.⁸⁰ While studying in Wageningen in 1910, Djamaloeddin wrote about the obligation to work with Dutch officials as equals: ‘[W]hile these matters [progress] are incredibly large, they can in fact become light if we, the children of the earth and government officials, white and black, see each other as carrying it together.’⁸¹ Correspondingly, the 1918 publication Minangkabau positioned itself as upholding justice, couched in a colonial humanist position of improving conditions to achieve welfare—somewhat symptomatic of the Ethical Policy but with an emphasis on local leadership.⁸² The August editorial stressed how agriculture underpinned the lives of all, ‘from the day labourer to the Governor General’.⁸³ Some writers, however, emphasised that to become knowledgeable and skilled, farmers needed to learn from Indonesian agriculturalists, as ‘agriculturalists in the Netherlands [provide examples] for farmers native to the Netherlands, or German agricultural officials in Germany’.⁸⁴Minangkabau’s focus on self-sufficiency also reflects wartime economic shifts.⁸⁵ Fakih suggested that the war resulted in the expansion of credit and the employment of Indonesian men in administrative positions, which exposed Indonesians to racial discrimination, while Minangkabau underlines its influence in cementing a commitment to self-help.⁸⁶ More seismic yet was the deepening of a cash economy. While in 1905 only 4.5 per cent of West Sumatra’s male agricultural population did not own their land, by 1920, 20 per cent engaged in wage labour.⁸⁷Minangkabau’s opening editorial stated that wartime disruptions had altered perspectives: ‘We understand even more because we have felt the difficulties and ill-fortune of this world war that farming is the mother of all industries on earth.’⁸⁸

Fatimah and her colleagues sought to serve farmers. She had recently graduated from the King’s School in Bukittinggi and worked at the Minangkabau Cooperative Bank run by Sarekat Minangkabau in Pariaman.⁸⁹ This bank provided loans to farmers. Sarekat Minangkabau established itself as a bridge between colonial agricultural offices and farmers, in contrast to Mohammad Hatta’s later conception of cooperatives carving out autonomous economic spaces to free Indonesian capabilities and energies from colonial structures of dependence.⁹⁰ Advertisements to join the bank and association addressed both women and men. Beyond bringing together village (nagari) heads in Pariaman to develop training in agriculture with the district government, the association advanced more forthright political agendas, including women petitioning to replace a district head⁹¹ and the association advocating for autocratic rules to be replaced with democracy in 1919.⁹² The association imagined an inherently racialised local (bumiputera, ‘son of the earth’) solidarity with lower-class farmers, positioning them as victims of capitalist exploitation and government ineptitude that inhibited higher crop grades and more advantageous supply chains. Minangkabau framed the Cooperative Bank as helping farmers navigate traders, who were their ‘whole world’ (bumi langit), yet the publication set about increasing awareness among agricultural officials rather than engaging directly with farmers.⁹³Minangkabau’s emphasis on local and global interconnectedness frames Fatimah’s translation of Tolstoy’s short story ‘The Empty Drum’, published in the August and September issues.

Fatimah’s translation scripted local grievances with economic modernity into global circuits of moral literature. Analysing contemporaneous Korean translators of Tolstoy, Heekyoung Cho argued that translators idealised Tolstoy and minimised the citation of influential Japanese texts to craft an image of a nationalist-resisting intellectual.⁹⁴ Why this story was selected for Minangkabau and by whom cannot be definitively stated. Equally, it can only be presumed that Fatimah translated from Dutch. Significantly, Fatimah did not vernacularise ‘The Empty Drum’ by adapting it to her local context. Apart from one addition of ‘Bismillah’ (Basmala) and an emphasis on divine fate, her translation resembles widely accessible English-language translations of Tolstoy’s work.⁹⁵ This contrasts with Hoogervorst’s work on Chinese Indonesian translators who, he argued, attempted to ‘de-Europeanise’ short stories by staging narratives for ‘a more forward-looking, ethnically heterogeneous readership’.⁹⁶ Instead, Fatimah’s translation extended the geography of Minangkabau, appealing to a belief that the ingenuity of the oppressed would overcome unjust labour relations. The dually fatalistic and agentive world view of ‘The Empty Drum’ is captured by Emelyan’s wife, who, having presented an evening meal, reassures her husband, ‘Don’t look before or behind to see how much you have done or how much there is left to do; only keep on working and all will be alright.’⁹⁷ The story emphasises women’s strength through the characters of Emelyan’s wife and a grandmother, who enables Emelyan’s survival by completing seemingly impossible tasks, but it also reinscribes gendered scripts of conjugal service, domesticity and objectifying patriarchal competition.

The positioning of Fatimah’s translation underneath essays in Minangkabau perhaps invited parallels to be drawn between Emelyan and the tsar, who attempts to work the man to death to marry his wife, and farmers perceived to be exploited by a cash economy. Titling the story ‘The Day Labouring Farmer’ (sipeladang koeli hari), Fatimah scripted it into Minangkabau’s emerging anti-capitalist, anticolonial vernacular about the exploitation of farmers (peladang) and day labourers (koeli beroesaha tanah). The publication repeatedly critiqued Dutch and Chinese Indonesian agents who bought crops in advance at reduced prices, which supported the consumption aspirations of farmers and entered them into inescapable cycles of financial uncertainty, calling them those ‘who are unashamed of enriching themselves with the sweat of the farmer’.⁹⁸ This critique was positioned above a passage of ‘The Empty Drum’ describing the tsar’s obsession with exploiting Emelyan. Similarly, the tsar’s cunning plan to make Emelyan guess the one object he desires was positioned below a letter decrying how practices of advance payment to purchase lifestyle products marketed as necessary to be modern conveyed a cycle of suffering with a smile. The page included the caustic critique of traders and lenders who ‘will help until’ the farmer ‘is diminished and broken’—a helplessness compounded by Fatimah’s translation of the impossibility of Emelyan guessing correctly.⁹⁹ Although the deliberate or accidental nature of layout decisions remains unclear, read intertextually, the translation appealed to a global sense of the inevitable overthrow of exploitative relations, with Emelyan’s destruction of the symbol of the tsar’s legitimacy, the empty drum of war.

The reaction of three girl readers to Fatimah’s translation underlines how her work conveyed female utility. Tjajadani Saleh, Alidjah Rasjid and Noermali Latif were students at a HIS in Pariaman and wrote to Soenting Melajoe to celebrate Fatimah Rasad as shaping a new progressivism and enlarged world. They stated that Fatimah ‘found examples [of] how progress is in other lands, to provide lessons to us women in Sumatra’.¹⁰⁰ These girls interpreted Fatimah’s employment as wanting not to serve the Netherlands East Indies Government but to serve the girls of Pariaman. ‘Because she loves us women she does not want to be employed by the government, Uni Fatimah Rasad intends to advance girls of Pariaman to the field of progress.’¹⁰¹ They located Fatimah at the centre of a map linking their local context to global circuits of knowledge. Building off Jedamski’s claim that ‘pribumi [native Indonesian] writers did not recognise the political potential of translated or adapted fiction’ in her account of colonial-era Chinese-Malay and Eurasian translators, for these girl readers, the political potential was a female translator rather than her translation.¹⁰² Their praise reinscribed the purpose of education as ‘sharpening minds in the way of the Dutch’.¹⁰³ Yet, at the same time, they emphasised how Fatimah, a King’s School graduate, chose to work outside the state education system.¹⁰⁴ Notwithstanding an inability to precisely identify Fatimah’s intentions, Tjajadani, Alidjah and Noermali’s interpretation of her community service demonstrates the significance of her labour in creating a desirable imagined world.

Conclusion: Reading selves and worlds in letters

For the elite girl writers in this chapter, modernity promised opportunities to be educated, work and serve their community, ethnic nation and gender. Their diverse self-making and world-making efforts—bridging forms of knowledge, meeting common goals and scripting local critiques into global circuits—coalesce in discourses of service that positioned the education of privileged girls as a societal good. These discourses conformed to the coloniality of power by presenting Western education and wage employment as the means to achieve modernity. The hierarchy and singularity inherent within coloniality are echoed in Siti Hafasah’s identification of her Tapanuli community as being ‘behind’ in multiple political and economic ways. This chapter extends an understanding of print culture’s role in demarcating collective identities (see Ricci’s Chapter 3 in this volume), revealing ambiguous visions about who could embody modernity. Retna imagined herself and other elite girls across borders, while Fatimah Rasad worked for agendas of Pariaman bumiputera self-help that defined them against what they perceived as economic exploitation through moneylending and brokerage. These self-making and world-making efforts are more complex than appropriation, erasure and replication.¹⁰⁵ Tjajadani, Alidjah and Noermali’s interpretation of Fatimah’s translation and employment as community rather than government service opens the possibility of desires and engagement that both cohered with forms of colonial knowledge production and critiqued the colonial state.

Visibility was a cornerstone of elite-dominated textual communities. De-colonially reading girls’ writing recognises them as products of privileged subjectivities reliant on rendering invisible lower-class girls, who were not seen to embody a Dutch-speaking modernity sketched by Retna and were not necessarily materially served by elite girls’ educational advancement through exclusive systems. These case studies underline the contingency of engaging responsibly with girls in print culture.¹⁰⁶ Claiming historical subjectivity for elite girl writers by reading their words, seeking to understand their perspectives and influences and growing an analysis with them must be advanced with attention to limitations and silences as symptoms of the structures in which their agency operated. Such ambivalences were shaped by their privileged life worlds but are also characteristic of their youthful always-in-formation selves. Making visible multiple processes of self-making and world-making lays claim to girls’ production, adaptation and consumption within local and global circuits of ideas that shaped the worlds of far more girls than those who signed their names into these print culture archives.

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1. 1 Thank you to Wayne Modest, the editors and the contributors for their valuable feedback on earlier versions of this chapter, which I dedicate to Fathul Fatimah, who started to learn to read while this chapter was being written.

2. 2 Sitti Salamah B. Dolok, ‘Ratap Tangis ni Sitti Salamah Boroe Dolok [The Cry of Sitti Salamah Boroe Dolok]’, Soenting Melajoe [Malay Headdress], 30 May 1919: 2, in Soenting Melajoe, 6, no. 1 (1917) – 10, no. 4 (1921), Microfilm, 33168008944734 (Melbourne: Monash University, 1917–21).

3. 3 See, for example, Eunike G. Setiadarma, ‘Hoedjin: Eksplorasi Metode Penulisan Sejarah Perempuan [Hoedjin: A Methodological Exploration for Writing Women’s History]’, Jurnal Sejarah [History Journal] 4, no. 1 (2021): 1–13, msi.or.id/journal/index.php/js/article/download/49/47/112; Anna Mariana, ‘Memikirkan Ulang Historiografi Sejarah Perempuan [Rethinking the Historiography of Women’s History]’, Jurnal Sejarah [History Journal] 4 (2021): i–iv; Ruang Perempuan dan Tulisan, ed., Yang Terlupakan dan Dilupakan: Membaca Kembali Sepuluh Penulis Perempuan Indonesia [Those Accidentally Forgotten and Those Forgotten: Rereading Ten Indonesian Women Writers] (Jakarta: Marjin Kiri, 2021); and the group Ruang Perempuan dan Tulisan.

4. 4 Notably, Jeffrey Hadler, Muslims and Matriarchs: Cultural Resilience in Indonesia through Jihad and Colonialism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008); Wannofri Samry and Rahilah Omar, ‘Gagasan dan Aktiviti Wartawan Wanita Minangkabau pada Masa Kolonial Belanda [Concepts and Activities of Minangkabau Women Journalists in the Dutch Colonial Period]’, Jebat: Malaysian Journal of History, Politics & Strategy 39, no. 2 (2012): 24–47; Silfia Hanani, ‘Women’s Newspapers as Minangkabau Feminist Movement Against Marginalization in Indonesia’, Global Journal Al-Thaqafah 8, no. 2 (2018): 75–83, at 77; Saskia Wieringa, ‘Matrilineality and Women’s Interests: The Minangkabau of Western Sumatra’, in Subversive Women: Women’s Movements in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, ed. Saskia Wieringa (London: Zed Books, 1995), 241–68, at 249–50.

5. 5 Bronwyn Anne Beech Jones, ‘Textual Worlds: Rethinking Self, Community and Activism in Colonial-Era Sumatran Women’s Newspapers’ (PhD diss., University of Melbourne, 2023).

6. 6 Names in this chapter have been reproduced in accordance with how writers referred to themselves in these publications.

7. 7 Dutch-language schools for natives.

8. 8 Cora Vreede-de Stuers, The Indonesian Woman: Struggles and Achievements (The Hague: Mouton, 1960), 64; Susan Blackburn, Women and the State in Modern Indonesia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511492198, 56.

9. 9 Blackburn, Women and the State in Modern Indonesia, 38.

10. 10 H.M.J. Maier, We Are Playing Relatives: A Survey of Malay Writing (Singapore: ISEAS, 2004), doi.org/10.1163/9789004454606, 152.

11. 11 C. Lekkerkerker, Meisjesonderwijs, Coeducatie en Meisjesscholen voor de Inlandsche Bevolking in Nederlandsch-Indië, 1914 [Girls’ Education, Co-Education and Girls’ Schools for the Native Population of the Netherlands Indies, 1914] (Padangpanjang, Sumatra: Pusat Dokumentasi dan Informasi Minangkabau [Minangkabau Documentation and Information Centre], 1914), 637, 884.

12. 12 ‘Gouvernements Onderwijs voor Inlandsche Meisjes [Government Education for Native Girls]’, Bataviaasch Nieuwsblad [Batavia Newspaper], 16 June 1913: 5, resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=ddd:011036306:mpeg21:p005.

13. 13 Blackburn, Women and the State in Modern Indonesia, 39.

14. 14 Agus Suwignyo, ‘The Making of Politically Conscious Indonesian Teachers in Public Schools, 1930–42’, Southeast Asian Studies 3 (2014): 119–49, at 122.

15. 15 Hadler, Muslims and Matriarchs, 144; Ahmat Adam, Sejarah Awal Pers dan Kebangkitan Kesadaran Keindonesiaan [The Vernacular Press and the Emergence of Modern Indonesian Consciousness] (Jakarta: Hasta Mitra, 1995), 317–18; Ahmat Adam, Suara Minangkabau, Sejarah dan Bibliografi Akhbar dan Majalah di Sumatera Barat [Minangkabau Voices: A History and Bibliography of Newspapers and Magazines in West Sumatra] (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaysia Press, 2012).

16. 16 Maier, We Are Playing Relatives, 145.

17. 17 Taufik Abdullah, Schools and Politics: The Kaum Muda Movement in West Sumatra (1927–1933) (Jakarta: Equinox Publishing, 2009 [1971]), 19, 70.

18. 18 Initially Zoebediah Ratna Djoewita and Siti Roehana (Ruhana Kuddus), until 1918, when Ratna Djoewita stepped down. Amna Karim (from Bengkulu) became a co-editor in 1917, joined by Sitti Djatiah and Sitti Noermah.

19. 19 Hadler, Muslims and Matriarchs, 145; Beech Jones, ‘Textual Worlds’.

20. 20 See Mestika Zed, Saudagar Pariaman: Menerjang Ombak Membangun Maskapai [Pariaman Trader: Riding the Waves, Building a Fleet] (Depok: LP3ES, 2017).

21. 21 Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, ‘Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda’, in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, eds Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 1–56, doi.org/10.1525/9780520918085-003, at 6.

22. 22 Nathalie Karagiannis, ‘Multiple Solidarities: Autonomy and Resistance’, in Varieties of World-Making: Beyond Globalization, eds Nathalie Karagiannis and Peter Wagner (Liverpool: Liverpool Scholarship Online, 2007), 154–72, doi.org/10.5949/UPO9781846314346.009.

23. 23 Paul Bijl, ‘Legal Self-Fashioning in Colonial Indonesia: Human Rights in the Letters of Kartini’, Indonesia 103 (2017): 51–71, doi.org/10.1353/ind.2017.0002, at 51–54.

24. 24 Bronwyn Anne Beech Jones, ‘Narrating Intimate Violence in Public Texts: Women’s Writings in the Sumatran Newspaper Soenting Melajoe’, in Gender, Violence and Power in Indonesia: Across Time and Space, eds Katharine McGregor, Ana Dragojlovic, and Hannah Loney (London: Routledge, 2020), 1–38, doi.org/10.4324/9781003022992, at 21.

25. 25 Marissa Saraswati and Annisa R. Beta, ‘Knowing Responsibly: Decolonizing Knowledge Production of Indonesian Girlhood’, Feminist Media Studies 21, no. 5 (2021): 758–74, doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2020.1763418, at 761.

26. 26 ibid., 769.

27. 27 María Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt1mmfspt, 70–75.

28. 28 Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), doi.org/10.1215/9780822371779, 17.

29. 29 Gadis Arivia, ‘Menumbuhkan Analisis Dekolonialisasi di Indonesia: Studi Pemikiran Toety Heraty, Kartini, dan Siti Roehana, Sebuah Refleksi Kritis Filosofis dan Feminis [A Philosophical and Feminist Analysis of Decoloniality in Indonesia: A Critical Study of Toeti Heraty, Kartini, and Siti Roehana]’, Jurnal Perempuan [Women’s Journal] 27, no. 2 (2022): 93–102, at 94.

30. 30 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘The Politics of Translation’, in Outside in the Teaching Machine, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge Classics, 2009), 200–25, at 204.

31. 31 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd edn (London: Zed Books, 2012), 45.

32. 32 Beech Jones, ‘Textual Worlds’; Abdullah, Schools and Politics, 14–15.

33. 33 ‘Merayakan Hari Lahir Prinses Juliana [Celebrating Princess Juliana’s Birthday]’, Soenting Melajoe [Malay Headdress], 2 May 1919: 2–3; Retna Tenoen, ‘Ilmoe Pengetahoean [Knowledge]’, Soenting Melajoe [Malay Headdress], 21 January 1921: 2, Microfilm, 33168008944734 (Melbourne: Monash University).

34. 34 ‘Tentoonstelling Padang 1919 [1919 Padang Exhibition]’, Soenting Melajoe [Malay Headdress], 30 May 1919: 3.

35. 35 For example, Ratna [sic] Tenoen, ‘Nasihat kepada Perempoean Gadis Gedang dan Ketjil [Advice to Girls Young and Old]’, Soenting Melajoe [Malay Headdress], 10 October 1919: 3.

36. 36 Adam, The Vernacular Press, 317.

37. 37 Murray Dick, The Infographic: A History of Data Graphics in News and Communications (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2020), doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11379.001.0001, 19.

38. 38 7 December 1916; reprinted in ‘Bombai’, Soenting Melajoe [Malay Headdress], 8 December 1916: 1, Microfilm, 33168008944775 (Melbourne: Monash University].

39. 39 See Evelyn Blackwood, ‘Representing Women: The Politics of Minangkabau Adat Writings’, The Journal of Asian Studies 60, no. 1 (2001): 125–49, doi.org/10.2307/2659507.

40. 40 Datoe’ Soetan Maharadja in July 1920 presented another common interpretation: that this movement was during Noah’s Flood. See Tsuyoshi Kato, Matriliny and Migration: Evolving Minangkabau Traditions in Indonesia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 19, 34–35.

41. 41 ibid., 30–31; Hadler, Muslims and Matriarchs, 154.

42. 42 Tenoen, ‘Knowledge’.

43. 43 ibid., 2.

44. 44 Anthony Milner, The Invention of Politics in Colonial Malaya: Contesting Nationalism and the Expansion of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 51.

45. 45 P.G. Witsen Geysbeek, Algemeen Noodwendig Woordenboek der Zamenleving [General Essential Dictionary of Society]. Volume 6 (Gouda: Witsen G.B. van Goor en D. Noothoven van Goor, n.d.).

46. 46 Datoe’ Soetan Maharadja, ‘Asal Oesel Nikik Mojang [The Origin of the Ancestors]’, Soenting Melajoe [Malay Headdress], 23 June 1920: 1. For more on economic and cultural flows, see, for example, André Wink, Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World. Volume 2 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 289.

47. 47 Witsen Geysbeek, General Essential Dictionary of Society, 290.

48. 48 For uses of famili, see Hadler, Muslims and Matriarchs, 86.

49. 49 Tenoen, ‘Knowledge’.

50. 50 Kees van Dijk, The Netherlands Indies and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2007), doi.org/10.26530/OAPEN_389234, 369.

51. 51 Bronwyn Anne Beech Jones, ‘Crafting Community’, Inside Indonesia [SI], no. 144 (April–June 2021), www.insideindonesia.org/crafting-community.

52. 52 Tenoen, ‘Knowledge’.

53. 53 L. Ayu Saraswati, Seeing Beauty, Sensing Race in Transnational Indonesia (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2013), doi.org/10.21313/hawaii/9780824836641.001.0001, 64.

54. 54 Tenoen, ‘Knowledge’.

55. 55 Sitti Noersjamsoe, ‘De Aanhouder Wint [Persevere]’, Soenting Melajoe [Malay Headdress], 21 March 1919: 2–3; Bronwyn Anne Beech Jones, ‘“The Age of Women Adept at Writing”: Female Voices from the Dutch East Indies in the Early Twentieth Century’, Agora 56, no. 1 (2021): 69–75.

56. 56 Noerela Anwar, ‘Gerakkan Perempoean Bangsa Asing [Foreign Nations’ Women’s Movements]’, Soenting Melajoe [Malay Headdress], 3 August 1912: 1.

57. 57 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edn (London: Verso, 2006), 174.

58. 58 See Beech Jones, ‘Narrating Intimate Violence in Public Texts’, 21.

59. 59 Adding to the timeline of North Sumatran women’s writing in Sartika Sari, Gagasan Kesetaraan Gender dalam Puisi yang Terbit di Surat Kabar di Sumatera Bagian Utara 1919–1941 [Ideas of Gender Equality in Poetry Published in North Sumatran Newspapers, 1919–1941] (Yogyakarta: CV Arti Bumi Intaran, 2018).

60. 60 ‘Kepandaian oentoek Perempoean [Skills for Women]’, Soenting Melajoe [Malay Headdress], 2 February 1917: 1; Hadler, Muslims and Matriarchs, 150–51.

61. 61 Susan Rodgers, ‘Sutan Pangurabaan Rewrites Sumatran Language Landscapes: The Political Possibilities of Commercial Print in the Late Colonial Indies’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde [Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia] 168, no. 1 (2012): 26–54, doi.org/10.1163/22134379-90003568, at 32–33.

62. 62 Thank you to Abuy Ravana Siregar and Arpin Siregar for assistance translating Bahasa Mandailing.

63. 63 A small group of islands near Nias.

64. 64 Salamah, ‘The Cry of Sitti Salamah Boroe Dolok’.

65. 65 See Tom Hoogervorst and Henk Schulte Nordholt, ‘Urban Middle Classes in Colonial Java (1900–1942): Images and Language’, Bijdragen Tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde [Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia] 173, no. 4 (2017): 442–74, doi.org/10.1163/22134379-17304002, at 453; see also Su Lin Lewis, Cities in Motion: Urban Life and Cosmopolitanism in Southeast Asia, 1920–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316257937.

66. 66 For more on Soeara Perempoean editor Saadah Alim, see Aura Asmaradana, ‘Di Bawah Bayang-bayang Adat: Sebuah Pembacaan atas Hidup, Pemikiran, dan Karya Saadah Alim [Under the Shadow of Adat: A Reading of the Life, Thought, and Works of Saadah Alim]’, in Yang Terlupakan dan Dilupakan: Membaca Kembali Sepuluh Penulis Perempuan Indonesia [Those Accidentally Forgotten and Those Forgotten: Rereading Ten Indonesian Women Writers], ed. Ruang Perempuan dan Tulisan (Jakarta: Marjin Kiri, 2021), 150–60.

67. 67 Rodgers, ‘Sutan Pangurabaan Rewrites Sumatran Language Landscapes’, 32.

68. 68 Daniel Perret, ‘Ethnicity and Colonization in Northeast Sumatra: Bataks and Malays’, in From Distant Tales: Archaeology and Ethnohistory in the Highlands of Sumatra, eds Dominik Bonatz, John Miksic, J. David Neidel, and Mai Lin Tjoa-Bonatz (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 143–68, at 158.

69. 69 K.M. alias Fairy Sipirok, ‘Siroemaloen From [From Siroemaloen]’, Soenting Melajoe [Malay Headdress], 18 July 1918: 3.

70. 70 H.W. Siparloengoen, ‘Eme Dibaboan From [From a Weeded Rice Field]’, Soenting Melajoe [Malay Headdress], 26 July 1918: 1.

71. 71 Fairy Sipirok, ‘From Sirumalun’.

72. 72 Limbajoeng and Noersitti, ‘Kiriman dari Sipirok: Kedatangan jang Pertama [Letter from Sipirok: The First Entry]’, Soenting Melajoe [Malay Headdress], 12 April 1918: 2.

73. 73 Jean Gelman Taylor, ‘The Sewing-Machine in Colonial-Era Photographs: A Record from Dutch Indonesia’, Modern Asian Studies 46, no. 1 (2012): 71–95, doi.org/10.1017/s0026749x11000576, at 87.

74. 74 K. Madjenoen, ‘Sipirok’, Soenting Melajoe [Malay Headdress], 11 January 1918: 2; similar sentiment also expressed in Sitti H., ‘Tanah Airkoe Sipirok [My Homeland, Sipirok]’, Soenting Melajoe [Malay Headdress], 8 February 1918: 2; Hoogervorst and Schulte Nordholt, ‘Urban Middle Classes in Colonial Java’, 469.

75. 75 Siti Hafasah Boroe Enggan, ‘Bangsakoe Tapanoeli [My Tapanuli People]’, Soenting Melajoe [Malay Headdress], 30 May 1919: 2.

76. 76 Nai Angat Soer Tapanoeli, ‘Sian Sihadaoan [From Afar]’, Soenting Melajoe [Malay Headdress], 9 May 1919: 2.

77. 77 Perret, ‘Ethnicity and Colonization in Northeast Sumatra’, 158.

78. 78 Joachim Nieβ, ‘Telling and Selling: Literary Fiction in Early Malay Language Newspapers in Colonial Indonesia’, Wacana: Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia 17, no. 3 (2017): 377–403, doi.org/10.17510/wacana.v17i3.453, at 383.

79. 79 Extracts of ‘The Story of Kuprin’s Mother’ demonstrate a similar concern for the international situation and maternal themes.

80. 80 Adam, Minangkabau Voices, 148.

81. 81 Djamaloeddin Rasad, Boeah-Pikiran [Essays] (The Hague: Luyendijk, 1910), 44.

82. 82 See also Joel S. Kahn, Constituting the Minangkabau: Peasants, Culture and Modernity in Colonial Indonesia (Providence: Berg, 1993), 122.

83. 83 ‘Pembatja-pembatja j.t. [Dear Readers]’, Minangkabau, August 1918: 3.

84. 84 ‘6. Aniaja jang Didatangkan oleh Wang Pindjaman kepada Sipeladang [6. The Suffering Brought About by Money Lent to Farmers]’, Minangkabau, October 1918: 35.

85. 85 In the case of copra, in 1915, 17,000 tonnes passed through Padang’s Telukbayur (Emmahaven) port, steeply declining to 8,000 in 1917 and 692 in 1918, before rebounding to 30,000 tonnes in 1919. John A. Fowler, ‘Copra and Coconut Oils in the Netherlands Indies and British Malaya’, Trade Information Bulletin Foodstuffs Division, no. 34 (9 June 1922), 8.

86. 86 Farabi Fakih, ‘The Bolshevik Infection: European Perspectives on Communism in the Netherlands East Indies Press’, in The Russian Revolution in Asia: From Baku to Batavia, eds Sabine Dullin, Étienne Forestier-Peyrat, Yuexin Rachel Lin, and Naoko Shimazu (London: Routledge, 2022), 91–107, doi.org/10.4324/9780429352195, at 92.

87. 87 Pim de Zwart, ‘Globalisation, Inequality and Institutions in West Sumatra and West Java, 1800–1940’, Journal of Contemporary Asia 51, no. 4 (2021): 564–90, doi.org/10.1080/00472336.2020.1765189, at 574.

88. 88 Minangkabau, August 1918: 4, Microfilm, 33168134992318 (Melbourne: Monash University).

89. 89 The first female graduate of the King’s School was Sjarifah in 1907. See Hadler, Muslims and Matriarchs, 95.

90. 90 Suzanne Moon, ‘Building from the Outside In: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Society in New Order Indonesia’, in Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power, eds Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 174–98, doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226276663.003.0008, at 78; see also John Ingleson, ‘Mutual Benefit Societies in Indonesia’, International Social Security Review 46, no. 3 (1993): 69–77, doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-246X.1993.tb00384.x, at 70.

91. 91 ‘Perskroniek Inlandsche Bladen. Sarikat Minangkabau [Press Chronicle, Native Newspapers. Minangkabau Association]’, Bataviaasch Nieuwsblad [Batavia Newspaper], 9 May 1919: 1, resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=ddd:011038568:mpeg21:p001.

92. 92 ‘Uit Ai Maleische -pers [From the Malay Press]’, Sumatra Post, 25 April 1919: 10, resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=ddd:010367809:mpeg21:p01.

93. 93 Minangkabau, October 1918: 31, August–October, Microfilm, 33168134992318 (Melbourne: Monash University).

94. 94 Heekyoung Cho, Translation’s Forgotten History: Russian Literature, Japanese Mediation, and the Formation of Modern Korean Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2016), doi.org/10.1163/9781684175697, 48.

95. 95 In contrast to Maier’s analysis of novels and serialised fiction in We Are Playing Relatives, 147.

96. 96 Tom G. Hoogervorst, ‘Gained in Translation: The Politics of Localising Western Stories in Late-Colonial Indonesia’, in Translational Politics in Southeast Asian Literatures: Contesting Race, Gender, and Sexuality, ed. Grace V.S. Chin (New York: Routledge, 2021), 100–31, doi.org/10.4324/9781003036128, at 123; Nieβ, ‘Telling and Selling Literary Fiction’, 388.

97. 97 Leo Tolstoy, ‘Tjerita Sipeladang Koeli Hari Emeljan [Story of the Day Labouring Farmer]’, trans. Fatimah Rasad, Minangkabau, August 1918, 9–10.

98. 98 ‘Tanaman Teroetama [Primary Crops]’, Minangkabau, September 1918: 26.

99. 99 Tolstoy, ‘Story of the Day Labouring Farmer’, 37.

100. 100 Tjajadani Saleh, Alidjah Rasjid, and Noermali Latif, ‘Soerat Kiriman dari Periaman [Letter from Pariaman]’, Soenting Melajoe [Malay Headdress], 11 October 1918: 1.

101. 101 ibid. Uni is a Minang term of address for a (older) sister.

102. 102 Doris Jedamski, ‘Translation in the Malay World: Different Communities, Different Agendas’, in Asian Translation Traditions, eds Eva Tsoi Hung and Judy Wakabayashi (London: Routledge, 2005), 211–45, at 223.

103. 103 Saleh et al., ‘Letter from Pariaman’.

104. 104 Many Sumatran elite nationalists later attended the King’s School. See Hadler, Muslims and Matriarchs, 97.

105. 105 Stoler and Cooper, ‘Between Metropole and Colony’, 6.

106. 106 Saraswati and Beta, ‘Knowing Responsibly’, 771.