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10.3. D’Alpuget’s Bestiary
Blanche d’Alpuget has established the least common denominator of borrowings from
classical Asian archetypes with the animalistic portrayals of her characters. Koller describes
the Indian concept of the levels of reality as
ranging from non-existence to empirical existence limited by space and time,
to consciousness that is limited only by the conditions of awareness, to an
indescribable level that is beyond all conditions and limits whatever. The
deeper the level of reality, the more fully it participates in the truth of being
and the greater its value (Koller, 6).
Koh Tai Ann notes how d’Alpuget subtly applies this concept—and reinforces
Orientalist stereotypes—by describing the speech of her Asians as the incomprehensible,
queer noises of animals. Human voices described as the threatening calls of hostile beasts.
The Chinese salesgirl who ‘shrills’ at her customers (TB, 53); the aggressive, ‘monosyllabic
jabbering’ of other shopgirls; the ‘tiger noise’ of the angry Malay man (TB, 96); the nurses,
waiters, and Minou Hobday who ‘quack’ and ‘yelp’; the ‘barnyard racket’ of the poor Chinese;
and the ‘vivid and shrill as birds’ Hindu women (TB, 204) are a few examples of d’Alpuget’s
Asian barnyard (Koh Tai Ann, 30).
D’Alpuget’s beast characterisations do not stop at the level of language, and it is in
Monkeys in the Dark where she fully deploys her technique. The title comes from the
Independence Day speech of President Sukarno, who has already been crippled by the military
seizure of power in the wake of the failed Communist putsch. Sukarno warns against his
inevitable overthrow, saying,
Oh, my people, if you abandon our history you will face a vacuum. You will
become meaningless and undirected. Life for you will be no more than
running amok. Running amok—like monkeys trapped in the dark! (MD, 122)
10.3.1. The Three Gunas
Sukarno is warning the people that the reversal of the revolution he has brought to
Indonesia will lead to a situation in which they will live both figuratively and, in the next life
perhaps literally, like animals, dominated by the forces of evil and basic survival. The
significance of the concept for d’Alpuget comes from her sense that ‘suffering drives some of
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