Beyond Memory

Silence and the Aesthetics of Remembrance

Alexandre Dessingué, Jay Winter, Alexandre Dessingué, Jay Winter, Alexandre Dessingué, Jay M. Winter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317421337
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Beyond Memory: Silence and the Aesthetics of Remembrance analyses the intricate connections between silence, acts of remembrance and acts of forgetting, and relates the topic of silence to the international research field of Cultural Memory Studies. It engages with the most recent work in the field by viewing silence as a remedy to the traditionally binary approach to our understanding of remembering and forgetting.

The international team of contributors examine case studies from colonialism, war, politics and slavery from across the globe, as well as drawing examples from literature, philosophy and sites of memory to draw three main conclusions. Firstly, that the relationship between remembering and forgetting is relational rather than 'hermetic', and the space between the two is often occupied by silence. Secondly, silence is a force in itself, capable of stimulating more or less remembrance. Finally, that silence is a necessary and key element in the interaction between the human mind and the 'outer world', and enables people to challenge their understanding of art, music, literature, history and memory.

With an introduction by the editors discussing Memory Studies, and concluding remarks by Astrid Erll, this collection demonstrates that acceptance and consideration of silence as having both a performative and aesthetic dimension is an essential component of history and memory studies.

Part I
Silences beyond remembering and forgetting

1
Colonial and postcolonial silences

Listening to Kartini in the Netherlands

Paul Bijl

Luisa Passerini writes about the paradox of memory (and, we can add, forgetting) that we cannot look for something we lost unless we remember it at least in part (Passerini 2003: 239). When investigating cultural memory of colonialism in Europe, a first impression many people have is one of silence in the sense of oblivion (Ricoeur 1994): colonialism, in this conception, has vanished without a trace. In the Netherlands, people have claimed that Dutch colonialism in Indonesia is not taught in high schools, not talked about in the media, that photographs of colonial atrocities committed by the Dutch colonial army have been swept under the carpet and that the voices of those once colonised by the Dutch are never heard in the Netherlands. Yet if we investigate particular places and communities, a different picture emerges: histories of Dutch colonialism have been part of the school exams since the 1970s, colonial ‘scandals’ (e.g. abusive labour conditions of coolies in colonial Indonesia) have been reported upon in newspapers since the nineteenth century, photographs of colonial atrocities were widely published and distributed in the early twentieth century, and the Netherlands has a rich tradition of publishing Indonesian authors, both originally writing in Dutch and in translation (Bijl 2012; Bijl 2015). How can we account for this impression of silence and this abundance of sounds? In this essay, analysing current cultural memories of the Javanese author Kartini (1879–1904) in Dutch contexts, I will argue that in investigating silences we need to pay particular attention to location as both sounds and silences are always unevenly distributed: while in certain locations there can be almost a cacophony of sounds, in others utter silence can be encountered. Second, I want to show how silences, once they have occurred or been produced, change position and meaning over time, sometimes being perpetuated and repeated, sometimes changing character as they move across contexts. By investigating these two aspects I want to draw attention to silence’s spatial (synchronic) and temporal (diachronic) dimensions.

Currently, I am developing a new research project in which I investigate the transcultural appropriations of the writings of a woman named Kartini who lived in Java, the central island of the Dutch East Indies (colonial Indonesia), and who exchanged letters in Dutch with a diverse group of Europeans living in the Indies (the contemporary Republic of Indonesia) and the Netherlands. First published by the Dutch jurist J.H. Abendanon in 1911 (Kartini 1911), the letters and the figure of Kartini have been received and appropriated by Indonesian pre-independence nationalists, the Indonesian postcolonial state, UNESCO, international women’s movements and Dutch multicultural organisations, among other agents, to articulate these institutions’ visions of the role of women of colour (Javanese, ‘Native’, Indonesian, Asian, migrant) in colonial or postcolonial society. At this moment, Kartini is one of the most widely known original Dutch-language authors in the world, possibly the most famous Dutch-language writer after Anne Frank. Crucial in this respect is that Kartini is a national hero (a pahlawan nasional) in Indonesia, whose birthday is nationally celebrated on the twenty-first of April (Kartini Day or Hari Kartini), when many Indonesian girls dress up as Ibu (mother) Kartini. As Indonesia is the fourth most populous nation state in the world at the moment this means that Kartini is known by hundreds of millions of people, a figure seldom reached by Dutch-language authors.

Kartini wrote her letters between 1899 and 1904, when she was mostly living in her father’s house, together with her sisters, her mother and the other wives of her father. In her last year, she lived in the house of her husband. Her father Sosroningrat was a regent, an indigenous leader who functioned next to the colonial government as a metaphorical ‘younger brother’ of the Dutch local assistant-resident and resident. One of the central themes of Kartini’s letters was her wish to receive a Western education, preferably in Europe. Although she succeeded in attaining a scholarship for study in the Netherlands, forces from both the Dutch and Javanese side in the end prohibited her further education. She died a few days after giving birth to her first child (Kartini 2005).

In this essay I will mainly focus on a prize named after Kartini which has been awarded in the city of The Hague since 2001 to stimulate emancipation of, at first, Dutch women of colour but eventually, at least in theory, everybody contributing to the emancipation of anybody. Silence as a phenomenon can be connected in two ways to this prize, one spatial, the other temporal. If we look at this prize synchronically in the Netherlands today we discover it is floating in a sea of silence with respect to Kartini, whose name and work are currently almost completely forgotten in Dutch contexts. Second, there are silences within the makeup of the prize – particularly with respect to racism in the Netherlands, the problems of which remain almost wholly undiscussed – that merit a temporal analysis of silence in, respectively, Kartini’s work itself, its reception in the Netherlands during colonialism and the archives of the Kartini prize, and to ask where these silences come from and how they developed over time.

The location of silence

What struck me in the responses to my project in Dutch contexts were essentially two types of reactions, namely by those who were completely unfamiliar with Kartini and by those who seemed to know her inside out. Most Dutch people I talked to, including several professors of modern Dutch literature, had never heard of Kartini and were sometimes slightly embarrassed about this. How could they never have heard about one of the most widely read Dutch authors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? Was it really the case that parts of her letters were last published in Dutch in 1987 in an edited volume now out of stock while they could easily be ordered in Indonesian, English and French? Was there really such a thing as a Dutch-language authors who figured on Indonesian banknotes for many decades, who is part of the Indonesian high school curriculum, translated into eight languages and published by the United Nations, yet hardly ever heard of in the Netherlands any more?

On the other side there were those who wondered if it was really necessary to embark on yet another project on Kartini. Not that we knew everything about her, but what about the rest of the Indonesian colonial past? The other Indonesian women writing at the time, for instance? What distinguished people in this second category from the others was that they were all working on Dutch and Indonesian colonial history, most of them professionally. Indeed, if we look at institutes that concentrate on the colonial past, Kartini is a household name. The Museum of the Tropics in Amsterdam, formerly the Colonial Museum, has a glass case largely devoted to her in its section on Dutch colonialism in Indonesia. In 2004, the museum opened a separate ‘Kartini wing’ which connects the children’s museum to the central hall. At the moment of writing (summer 2014) a huge portrait of Kartini has been put up in one of the central squares of the city of Amsterdam (the Mr. Visserplein) as part of a project in which all cultural institutes in the neighbourhood were invited to advertise their icons (Kartini functions as an icon of the Museum of the Tropics).

A second postcolonial context where Kartini can be found in the Netherlands is within the ageing circles of what is called ‘Indian letters’ (Indische letteren). Focusing on Dutch-language literature from colonial Indonesia and the postcolonial Netherlands from the travel logs of the earliest days of the Dutch East India Company in the seventeenth century to the novels of the third generation of immigrants from the Dutch East Indies in the twenty-first century, this group of literary scholars and amateurs has regularly included Kartini in the literary histories it has produced (e.g. Nieuwenhuys 1982) and in several articles specifically about her in their own journal Indische letteren. In mainstream (European, white) Dutch literary history, however, she is nowhere to be found (e.g. Anbeek 1990; Vaessens 2013).

Kartini is not only a familiar name in postcolonial circles, but also in some ‘multicultural’ ones. There are two multicultural prizes named after Kartini. One is awarded by the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities (KHMW) for the best female first-year migrant student in a scientific or technical discipline in a Dutch university. Second, there is a Kartini prize awarded by an organisation named PEP (Participation Emancipation Professionals) and yearly given to an individual or organisation which in the eyes of the jury should be prized for its emancipatory work in the city of The Hague. This Kartini prize (formerly the Raden Aju Kartini prize for foreign women) has been awarded since 2001 and in those fourteen years has seen many both subtle and fundamental shifts in terms of its target groups, its criteria and the many considerations behind its choices.

Before turning to this latter prize, I want to briefly give an explanation for Kartini’s simultaneous remembrance and forgetting in Dutch contexts. Crucial here is, as Ann Laura Stoler has pointed out for French colonial memory, a compartmentalisation of both history and literary history, within as well as outside the academy (Stoler 2011; Goss 2000). The study of Dutch literature, for instance, is importantly rooted in nineteenth-century nationalism when the Netherlands was imagined as a community of white people speaking Dutch and essentially living in a particular area of Europe. As was mentioned above, Kartini (a Javanese woman) was never part of any ‘Dutch’ literary history, but also institutionally Dutch ‘colonial’ and Dutch ‘metropolitan’ literary history have been kept apart. The University of Amsterdam, for instance, has for years had three separate professorships in the Dutch department for the literatures of, respectively, colonial Indonesia, Suriname and the Dutch Antilles and South Africa. This shows that this literature was not disregarded, just treated in different compartments and forgotten in the privileged compartment of white, Dutch literature from Europe.

The times of silence

My starting point with respect to the Kartini prize is its silence on the society into which ‘foreign’ women are supposed to emancipate, or, as it is often said in the Netherlands, ‘integrate’ themselves. This silence will be connected to the silences in Kartini’s own work and in the way she has been remembered in the Netherlands since it was first published in 1911. As will be made clear below, problems in the broader Dutch society, particularly concerning racism, are discussed in other initiatives taken by the city council of The Hague, for instance by the Bureau of Discriminatory Affairs (Bureau Discriminatiezaken), but the lines of communication that reach us when we engage with the Kartini prize’s website make clear that the problems faced by the women who form the prize’s main target group are first and foremost their own, personal deficits and those of the communities they are supposed to belong to. In 2014, the website of the prize states that ‘Everything [sic] that contributes to an equal position and participation of men and women in The Hague can win the prize’ (Kartiniprijs 2014). Examples given are: a company which consciously aims for more women at the top of its organisation, a woman starting a garage, a neighbourhood signing an agreement against domestic violence, a group of foreign fathers entering the fray against honour killings, and girls who break down role patterns.

Essentially two phenomena are pointed out through these examples: on the one hand successful citizenship, apparent from economic initiatives, and, on the other hand, challenges that are supposed to thwart these initiatives. Crucial is that in Dutch contexts in 2014, these obstacles are strongly gendered and ethnicised: ‘domestic violence’ is mostly connected to immigrant families (Ghorashi 2010; when white Dutch fathers kill their family, for instance, the press usually talks of a ‘tragedy’) and the concept of ‘honour killings’ has been seen as solely applicable to immigrant communities, particularly from Muslim countries, since the 1970s (Schrover 2011). The website also offers background information about the name of the prize, and states that the prize is named after Kartini, who

from a young age onwards resisted the traditional norms and values vis-à-vis girls which she experienced as repressive. Kartini became famous far across the borders of her own country. These days she is still seen as an important source of inspiration. (Kartiniprijs [2014])

Two things are striking in this description. First of all, there is no mention of Dutch colonialism, on the contrary, the text talks about Kartini’s ‘own country’. Although this is, in a literal sense, in line with Kartini’s writing (in which Java is often referred to as ‘our land’ and ‘my land’), this can be a misleading statement in a Dutch postcolonial context, suggesting that Kartini could enjoy some form of citizenship while in fact those deemed legally ‘Native’ in the Dutch East Indies were living in what historian Cees Fasseur has called a ‘state without citizens’ (Fasseur 1994: 54). Second, Kartini’s uphill battle is described here solely in terms of a fight against tradition, harking back to a classical colonial opposition between modernity and tradition in which Europe, imagined as further on on a developmental timeline, had a historical task to bring its colonies from, for instance, the Middle Ages...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Introduction: remembering, forgetting and silence
• PART I Silences beyond remembering and forgetting
• PART II The performativity of silence
• PART III Silence as an aesthetic phenomenon
• Concluding remarks: silence and social life
• Index