'For Indonesian Dutch, 15 August is definitely not liberation day,' explains playwright Bo Tarenskeen. The last day of the alternative Festival Boulevard in Den Bosch, Sender Boulevard, coincides with the commemoration of Japan's surrender on 15 May 1945. The Dutch East Indies, the colony that had been exploited by our country for centuries, had also been liberated from the Japanese, but the end of the war also marked the beginning of the end of 'our' colonial rule of present-day Indonesia.
Listen to the conversation here:
'There are almost one and a half to two million people in the Netherlands with roots in Indonesia or the Moluccas, so it's kind of strange that this commemoration is so much less in the spotlight than May four and five.' Speaking is Vincent Wijlhuizen, who coordinates the programme around the 75th Indies Commemoration on behalf of Boulevard. Besides Bo Tarenskeen, whose play about processing the East Indies past should have actually premiered this year, Romy Roelofsen is also working on a production about our East Indies past. She is editing about six podcasts with Indian stories, which will be released during 'Afzender Boulevard'.
'These are excerpts read by the writers themselves. It's about the colonial era, but also about how it has had and continues to have an impact on today, and their personal lives.'
Lost paradise
We talk about that Indian background, which Bo, Vincent and Romy share, and how the sizeable group of Dutch people with an Indian background has been invisible for so long, or at least hardly seems to play a role in the racism debate. 'For a very long time, the Dutch East Indies has been talked about as a lost paradise. We always see pictures of long wide galleries, men in immaculate white suits and tropic helmets checking nutmeg cultivation, but forget under what conditions that nutmeg was extracted. I myself happened to cover the colonial era in my final history exams, but I was a minority in that. I don't know anyone else who was taught about the colonies in high school.'
'There is now, parallel to the Black Lives Matter movement, a redefinition of history going on. We tend to talk only about the Japanese era and beyond, but how intense the oppression was in the colonial era is never really told. Equally, it has not yet sunk in with the Dutch public how connected the Netherlands is and remains to the world's largest Muslim democracy.'
Internalised racism
Tarenskeen notes that there has long been a tendency among Dutch Indonesians to prefer to belong to the Dutch rather than identify with Indonesian ancestors. 'The racism of the coloniser has been internalised by a whole generation of mixed-bloods, to which we belong. The desire to belong to superior white Europeans is internalised. This is the result of centuries of violence. For a very long time, the Indian Dutchman has denied how connected he is to the Indonesian. I myself only became aware of that quite late.'
The play Tarenskeen is working on is about four generations of Dutch East Indies people, and how their past carries over into the present. It was due to premiere at this year's Theatre Festival Boulevard, but has been postponed due to the pandemic. 'It's about a family in which an Indian heritage has to be divided, which nobody wants.'
Instead of the postponed premiere of that play, a revival of The Indies Monologues is now scheduled. These are monologues, which he composed and directed.
Silence
Vincent Wijlhuizen: 'Since I started working on the subject at Boulevard, I hear things about my own family's history that I knew nothing about. There has been silence about that for 75 years. We are now working on a television broadcast on the subject. For this, we interviewed a father and a son. First we interviewed the father in front of the son. When we were about to interview the son, he said: what my father just told me, I have never heard that before. That's a very special part of this history.'
Romy Roelofsen also noticed this: 'Lara Nuberg writes in her book that only in 2003 was the last reparation payment from Indonesia to the Netherlands. So they had to pay for their independence. I didn't know that, and I think a lot of people don't know that. To this day, the fact that no apology has been made stands between much of the Moluccan community and parts of other Indian communities and the Dutch government.'
With so much unexplored territory, the question is whether Boulevard should not henceforth, because of the time in the year that the festival takes place, start making a regular spot for our colonial past. Vincent Wijlhuizen: 'It won't immediately become a regular feature because Boulevard always reflects very much on what is going on in the world at that time, but it is not out of the question that we will pay attention to it more often.'
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