Rejection: A Sumatran Odyssey (translated by Jennifer Lindsay)
Ashadi Siregar
Penguin Books: 2022
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A wise Batak elder, Ompu Silangit—cultural lodestone of Ashadi Siregar’s historical novel—asks his teenage grandson who is about to join the Sumatran rebel army, ‘And now you are going to fight. So what are you defending?’ Tondinahuta, known as Tondi, scion of Batak warriors, has no answers. Unlike the older rebels, Tondi is not fighting for any cause but his own, seeking a way out of crushing poverty.
Siregar’s novel plunges us into the heaving world of 1950s and early 1960s Indonesia, via these personal and political struggles. In Jakarta, Sukarno is stoking populist fires and brandishing the army against rebel groups in various parts of the archipelagic nation. But we begin in the winding mountain roads around the Batak heartland of Lake Toba. The Bataks are an ancient people with a strong warrior code and kinship ties through marga, lineage, and their culture is interwoven throughout Tondi’s coming of age.
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