SUPERIORITY OF THE NATIVE SEEN IN THE TONE OF THE TRACK TO BRALGU BY WONGAR

SUPERIORITY OF THE NATIVE SEEN IN THE TONE OF

  THE TRACK TO BRALGU BY WONGAR 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

SUPERIORITY OF THE NATIVE SEEN IN THE TONE OF

  THE TRACK TO BRALGU BY WONGAR 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

  

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  First and foremost, I want to express my deepest gratitude to Almighty and merciful God, Father of all men, Creator and ruler of the universe, Jesus Christ. I 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.

  I want to dedicate my gratitude to my Daddy, we have gone through everything together and I’m wishing we would be still as one. Thank you for the faith you have given me when hope began to fade, for being there when I faced 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.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE ................................................................................................ i

APPROVAL PAGE ...................................................................................... ii 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

  

ABSTRACT

DEARTY CRIMA. Superiority of the Native Seen in the Tone of The Track to

Bralgu by Wongar. Yogyakarta: Department of English Letters, Faculty of

Letters, Sanata Dharma University, 2008.

  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

The Track to Bralgu is cynical and it brings the idea of superiority of the

colonized because its tone is examined from the colonized’s cynical view toward

the colonizer.

x

  ABSTRAK DEARTY CRIMA. Superiority of the Native Seen in the Tone of The Track to Bralgu by Wongar. Yogyakarta: Jurusan Sastra Inggris, Fakultas Sastra, 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. xi

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION A. Background of the Study Long before the expansion of European power into Asia, Africa, or the

  th

  America began in 16 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

  nd th

  2 Century AD, the Mongols defeated Middle East and China in the 13

  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

  th

Century Literary Criticism: 4 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

  1 binary oppositions are crucial not only for creating images of the outsider but equally essential for constructing the insider, the ‘self’ (1998: 91). During European colonialism, these constructed ideas about ‘other’ and ‘self’ were expanded and reworked. At least since Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks (1952) it has been a commonplace to use ‘Other’ and ‘Not-self’ for the white view of blacks and for the resulting black view of themselves. The implication of this assertion of a white self as subject in discourse is to leave the black Other as object (Goldie, 1997: 233). Consequently, laziness, aggression, violence, greed, sexual promiscuity, bestiality, primitivism, innocence, and irrationality are attributed by English to the ‘others’. Thus, ‘the East’ is constructed as barbaric and degenerate (Loomba, 1998: 95). This construction made by the European was also supported by colonialist literature. In her book Colonialism/Postcolonialism, Loomba stated that colonialist literature written by and for colonizing Europeans about non-European lands dominated by them. It was also theories that concerned with the superiority of European culture and the rightness of Empire (1998: 3). Thus, the colonialist literature also played its role in constructing the ‘East as ‘other’, and the ‘West as ‘self’. Obviously it made the rigid construction, and consequently, people’s mindset was already constructed, they believed that the ‘East’ was barbarous and degenerate. This constructed belief that was produced by European colonialism, made the colonized people to feel inferior. The colonized people felt inferior of themselves because of the view of the world considered the colonized people as indolent, thoughtless, sexually immoral, unreliable, and demented (Bressler, 1998: 267).

  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.

  While other postcolonial writings are still trapped in the old paradigm, “East is inferior and West is superior”, Bozic Wongar in his work The Track to

  

Bralgu has adopted another idea of postcolonialism. The Track to Bralgu is a

  novel that tells about the exploitation of the land and of the Aborigines by the West. It is the representation of the new paradigm of postcolonialism which 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

  

The Track to Bralgu does not have a causal relationship, and thus, plot in The

  

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).

  As a representation, the novel is also interesting to discuss because there are two levels of representations that the writer can examine; the representation of surface and the representation of depth. In the surface representation, the novel applies “the old paradigm”, while in its depth representation, it applies the new paradigm. From the depth representation, the writer can find that it seems the tone of the novel brings the idea of the second level of representation.

  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

  According to M. H. Abrams in A Glossary of Literary Terms, tone can be defined as the expression of a literary speaker’s “attitude to his listener” (1985: 156).

  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

  The binary opposition is the structuralist idea that acknowledges the human tendency to think in terms of opposition. For Saussure, the binary opposition was the “means by which the units of language have value or meaning; each unit is defined against what it is not” (Burgass, 3). This can be seen in English with white and black, where black is used as a sign of darkness, danger, evil, etc., and white as purity, goodness, and so on. One side of the binary opposition can be meaningful only in relation to the other side. Each side has the meaning of not being its opposite (Edgar and Sedgwick, 2002: 42). With this categorization, terms and concepts tend to be associated with a positive or negative. http://artsweb.uwaterloo.ca/~seainswo/binary.htm. Deconstruction sometimes involves identifying the oppositions working in a text and then demonstrating how the text itself undermines the hierarchy implied or asserted by the opposition. http://jupiter.phy.ohiou.edu/~rouzie/307j/binary.html.

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

  9 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

  Women of the Sun are the two works which exposes the different angle of viewing

  the reality of the relations between the colonizer and the colonized (Riyandari, 2008: 155). For the first approach, this paper employs a brief history of postcoloniality of the third world which already constructed into the colonizer’s superiority and the colonized’s inferiority. There were indeed the attempts of reclaiming and regaining voice of identity for the colonized country, but many postcolonialists were also emphasized by the constructed text of the third world, and consequently their attempts seemed useless. This condition is also justified by Bill Ashcroft in his Post-Colonial Transformation. He stated that:

  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

  It was the Romantic criticism which gave birth to the concept of ‘Author

  th

  as God’, but not until the end of the 19 Century, the ‘Author as God’ concept is denied. T. S. Eliot together with The New Critics, made the importance of the author fell down and the importance itself was shifted from the author to the text (Das, 2002: 159). T. S. Eliot’s essay pleaded for the extinction of the empirical author – the author in the biographical sense, the author as a real or historical person (Das, 2002: 159). Therefore, the writer may conclude that T. S. Eliot’s 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).

  According to I. A. Richards in C. Hugh Holman and William Harmon‘s A

  th

Handbook to Literature: 5 Edition , tone is a term designating the attitudes

toward the subject and toward the audience implied in a literary work (1986: 503).

  This definition really supports Barthes’ essay which stresses that the author is only a particular medium. Based on the definition above, in order to reveal the tone of The Track to Bralgu, the writer depends fully on how the text itself provokes the reader into something. To conceive a work as an utterance suggests that there is a speaker… who expresses attitudes both toward the characters and materials within the work and toward the audience to whom the work is addressed (M. H. Abrams, 1985: 155). In other words, the writer may conclude that the attitudes of the text lead the reader to have interpretation of what the text is going to provoke. Moreover, I. A. Richards in M. H. Abrams’ A Glossary of Literary

  

Terms , stated that tone is the expression of a literary speaker’s attitude to his

  listener (1985: 156). According to M.H. Abrams in A Glossary of Literary Terms:

  th

6 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).

  From Culler’s definition on hermeneutics of recovery, the writer should first decide the text of The Track to Bralgu, and the second is to decide the context that The Track to Bralgu brings before comes up with the message exists in The

  

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).

  The tone in The Track to Bralgu can be shown from the view of the colonized people to the colonizer, since it emphasizes the colonizer as the object.

  From the intensive reading, the writer may conclude that the tone of The Track to

  

Bralgu can be seen obviously in the colonized or the Aborigines’ view towards

  the colonizer. From the natives’ view towards the colonizer, it becomes obvious that in the role of the colonizer or the white men is as the object of The Track to

  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-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).

  In the late of eighteenth Century, Edward Said contributed Orientalism into postcolonial theory. The Europeans tried to justify their territorial conquests by producing the images of non-European as indolent, thoughtless, sexually immoral, unreliable, and demented. For a long time, they believed that they had accurately created the images of their conquered land (Bressler, 1998: 267). In Orientalism, Said tried to bring out the binary opposition between East and West, in the way that he changed the term East as the ‘Orient’ and West as the ‘Occident’, so that one cannot claim superiority over the other, and by using the 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.

  The awareness of being colonized led into resistance, as Bressler put it, resistance is born out of the colonized people’s frustrations, their direct and 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).

  Selwyn Cudjoe in his Resistance and Caribbean Literature and Barbara Harlow in her book Resistance Literature have another idea of resistance. They 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

  In Towards A Postmodern Theory of Narrative, Andrew Gibson stated that the single most important achievement of narratology over the past two decades has been the change wrought in our views of narration as representation even though there is no absolute reality of which there can be accurate representations