![]() ![]() But it is still true that someone who knows nothing about the Indies does not properly understand the Netherlands. The world may have changed radically in the meantime, the colonial era is over and since then the Netherlands has changed almost beyond recognition. That is over three quarters of a century since the end of the Dutch East Indies, an end that may seem a long time ago, but that is far from forgotten. ![]() Whoever knows nothing of the Indies, cannot understand the Netherlands properlyįollowing their example, I want to discuss here the Indies writing of the past twenty years. du Perron (1899-1940), who was concerned in texts with such questions as: how well do those authors write? what have they got to say? what is special about their point of view? what kind of style and personality emerges from their work? In taking this broad view Nieuwenhuys was following the example of the writer E. Literature is defined broadly: alongside novels and poems, it includes history writing, stories, journalism, letters, diaries and other documents, seen in their socio-cultural and colonial-historical context. In his large-scale history of Indies literature, Oost-Indische Spiegel (1972 Mirror of the Indies, 1982), the writer and literary scholar Rob Nieuwenhuys (1908, Semarang – 1999, Amsterdam) gives an overview of “what Dutch writers and poets have written about Indonesia from the first years of the Dutch East India Company down to the present”. It still plays off colonial myths and realities against each other, and finds words for painful, half-forgotten things. ![]() What role does Dutch Indies literature, in the widest sense, play here and now, a lifetime after the end of the colonial era, in a Netherlands that has changed almost beyond recognition? Since Max Havelaar, Dutch Indies writing constitutes some of the best that the Netherlands has to offer in the literary field. ![]()
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