Silenced Voices is about a Dutch woman’s ancestors in the East Indies, from their first arrival in the 1890s and stewardship of a rubber and coffee plantation in East Java in the 1920s, continuing up until the decline of the family’s fortunes in the 1930s, the invasion of the Japanese and the ensuing post-revolutionary period.
Intrigued by the shame and silence surrounding her family’s Dutch colonial past, Inez Hollander only gradually became aware of the tragedies that had occurred. Unlike the majority of tempo dulu memoirs soaked in nostalgia, Hollander’s story sets out to come to grips with her family’s history by brilliantly weaving together personal records with historical and literary accounts of the period.
The initial chapter deals with the background in which the events took place, giving an historical overview of how Netherlanders first traded in the East Indies and how they came to settle there. This immigrant class included members of the author’s family who arrived over 100 years ago.
For the most part, such personal stories as hers have been, if not entirely silenced, at least only whispered about in Holland, where the society at large has remained uncomfortable with many aspects of the country’s relationship with its colonial empire.
A teacher of Dutch Studies at University of California at Berkeley, Inez Hollander (www.inezhollander.info) is sensitive, erudite, and extremely well-informed about the subject. Yet, the most extraordinary thing about the vivid tale she tells is that she has never been to Indonesia!
Hollander has reconstructed year by year the long ago existence of her relatives out of her own fertile imagination, from recollections of aging surviving relatives, from the research of anthropologists, sociologists and especially writers who specialized in life during the Dutch colonial era.
“In the oldest part of town,” she writes about Batavia, “amidst the gloomy slums, the (Dutch) canals still exist, drained and filled with garbage, or so my Indonesian students tell me.” The book is filled with similar hypothetical assertions: “it seems about right…” and “it’s safe to assume…” and “at this time, it must have been…” and “I was told in an email that…”
Hollander has skillfully pieced the story together from what her aunts, uncles and grandparents have told her – essentially family gossip. She tracked down letters, snapshots, newspapers, old town maps, and even found a silent film made in 1928 of Kali Jompo, her family’s plantation outside of Jember. At times it’s difficult to keep track of all her informants.
Throughout the book the author poses unfounded but tantalizing – and probably true – conjectures: “Was the existence of Peddy’s mistress the reason Laurine married in Haarlem instead of the Indies?” Hollander’s incredible facility for penetrating and dogged research makes one marvel and uneasy at the same time.
She asks existential questions that can never be answered: “What was Mannes’s life at Kali Jompo like, and how was it different from when his parents were in the Indies?” These searching questions are sometimes so poignant and plaintive that they force the reader to put down the book, lost in deep thought.
The author even breathes emotions and sensations into her characters - what a father must have felt losing his four year old son, what a cultural shock it must have been for her grandfather to return to Europe from the Indies, what the family acted like while waiting for the Japanese to come and take their father away.
To give her story depth and authenticity, Hollander liberally quotes novelists who wrote books about their lives in the Indies: Hella Lulofs’s Rubber, P.A. Daum’s Ups & Downs of Life in the Indies, Rob Nieuwenhuys’s Mirror of the Indies, C. M. Vissering’s A Trip Through Eastern Java, as well as A. Alberts, Louis Couperus and Du Perrron.
Hollander seeks not merely to locate and preserve family memories, but also to test them against more disinterested historical events such as the change to the Ethical Policy, the rise of Indonesian nationalism, the Indies fascist movement, the brewing threat of Japanese competition and hegemony.
She gives facts and figures in the international commodities markets that coincide precisely with the drastic fall in the family estate’s profitability because of the Wall Street crash, going from a dollar a share for rubber in 1928 to just a few cents in 1929. The export-oriented East Indies felt the full brunt of the Depression from 1930 to 1933.
With a macabre fascination, I always dread reading in East Indies memoirs of the Japanese invasion which almost inevitably leads to the invaders uprooting, interning, terrorizing and starving the protagonists, their life of privilege upended forever. Each family’s tale of woe makes for riveting reading.
In the case of the Francken family, Surabaya fell first, then the population of Jember turned out to greet the Japanese army with “Bonzai! Bonzai!” Not long thereafter, Peddy – the last proprietor of Kali Jompu - was taken away by the Kempeitai police and never seen again.
The amazingly clever technique Hollander utilizes to recreate her family’s past lives – juxtaposing her relatives’ recollections with contemporaneous historical accounts - is one that should inspire any of us to delve deeper into our genealogies to bring our own forebears to life. This book is an extraordinary piece of research work.
Silenced Voices: Uncovering a Family’s Colonial History in Indonesia by Inez Hollander, Ohio University Press 2008, ISBN 0896802698, paperback, 312 pages, black and white photographs, notes, glossary of Dutch and Malay words, bibliography, index, dimensions 14 cm X 21.5 cm.
Available for Rp400,000 at Ganesha Bookstore in Ubud and Ganesha@Biku in Kerobokan, by emailing info@ ganeshabooksbali.com or telephoning Ganesha at (0361) 970-320.
