Assimilation and Masquerade Self-Constructions of Indo-Dutch Women

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Pamela Pattynama UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM

ABSTRACT Drawing on postmodern feminist theories of culture and identity, this article explores a model of ‘masquerading’ instead of ‘assimilation’ in analysing self-constructions of migrant women of ‘mixed race’ living in the Netherlands. Rather than as assimilated objects, these migrant women, called Indo-Dutch women, are regarded as agents who effectively intervene in the construction of national identities through masquerading strategies and ways of communication. The article also shows how masquerading strategies form a part of the conﬂicted colonial history of Indo-Dutch women and as such constitute contemporary life narratives and identities. One incident in a life narrative is used as an example to illustrate different interpretations.

KEY WORDS assimilation Dutch colonialism gender masquerade migration

This article focuses on the persistent inﬂuence of the Dutch colonial past in postcolonial processes of identity formations. Drawing on postmodern feminist theories of culture and identity, it explores a model of ‘masquerading’ instead of ‘assimilation’ in analysing self-constructions of migrant women of ‘mixed race’ living in the Netherlands.1 These migrant women are known as Indo-Dutch women. In the 1950s and 1960s about 300,000 Indo-Dutch people arrived in the Netherlands. They are the progeny of social-sexual encounters between male European colonizers and colonized Asian women during the 350 years of Dutch colonialism in the former East Indies (Indonesia). In the former colony, under very rigid colonial rule, Indo-Dutch had taken up an ambiguous, in-between position, distinct from and above the ‘natives’, but also subordinated in dominant, white society. As the mixed offspring

The European Journal of Women’s Studies Copyright © SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 7, 2000: 281–299 [1350-5068(200008)7:3;281–299;013656] 03 Pattynama (to/d) 29/6/00 8:26 am Page 282

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of their white fathers, however, Indo-Dutch possessed the Dutch nationality and belonged to the white community, that is, if their fathers had acknowledged them as their own. Immediately after the Second World War, during the Indonesian War of Independence (1945–9), people of mixed blood were subjected to mistrust and physical abuse or violence by Indonesian nationalists since they were considered traitors of the national cause. Many people decided to leave for Holland. These so-called Indische Nederlanders (which can be translated as ‘the Indo-Dutch’) were the ﬁrst post-Second World War migrants to arrive in Holland. Nowadays, they and their offspring form the largest and most established ethnic minority group in Holland’s multicultural society.2

PROJECT ON LIFE NARRATIVES

The narrative of a second-generation woman with which I have chosen to illustrate my point is one in a series which forms the basis of an ongoing research project regarding intercultural encounters and female self- constructions of identity. Personal interviews, which are taped and then later transcribed and conservatively edited, form the basis of my research. The interviewees are women of ‘mixed race’ living in the Netherlands and in Indonesia. They have either lived in the colonial society of the Dutch Indies themselves (in Holland usually called first-generation women) or were born after the independent Republic of Indonesia came into being (1949), in most of the cases after their parents’ migration to Holland (second generation). Although a free associative flow usually occurs during interviews, they are framed and steered by my specific questions pertaining to the ways in which the women negotiate between ascribed and self-acclaimed representations of themselves in a (post)colonial context of ‘race’, gender, class, sexuality and ethnicity. Life narratives are self-representations in which constructions of personal memories are crucial (Ganguly, 1992). In this case, memories of the former East Indies and the circumstances of migration are pivotal. My focus on the persistent influence of the colonial past on Indo-Dutch identifications and self-constructions however, results also from the fact that current conceptualizations of Dutch multiculturalism are interwoven with the ‘cultural archives’ produced by the colonial past (Anderson, 1983; Locher-Scholten, 1995; Young, 1995). Imbued with gender-specific myths and gendered rhetoric, colonial imagery is therefore equally oper- ative in the tensions between ascribed and acclaimed identities among different generations of Indo-Dutch women (Pattynama, 1994; Gouda, 1995).3 I wish to argue that Indo-Dutch life narratives can bring more insight into processes of identity formation when they are treated in terms of ‘masquerading’ than when the more traditional terms of assimilation 03 Pattynama (to/d) 29/6/00 8:26 am Page 283

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are used. Since collective and individual identiﬁcations are formed in a sociocultural arena in which ways of being are constantly renegotiated, my project endeavours to contribute to the debate on and understanding of the formation of identities in contemporary Holland (Wekker, 1998).

IMMIGRATION AND ASSIMILATION IN THE NETHERLANDS

The postcolonial Dutch concept of multiculturalism is often limited to social tensions and problematic differences between ‘we’ (the authentic, white Dutch) and ‘they’ (the newcomers, immigrants, non-white groups). The distinguishing element in this conceptualization is nationality. After the Second World War, the Netherlands was confronted with various groups of newcomers from further aﬁeld, mainly as a result of decolonization and labour immigration. Although Holland never wanted to perceive of itself as a destination for immigrants, it is, compared to sur- rounding countries, an immigration country par excellence. Newcomers, however, tend to be regarded as ‘temporary residents’ (tijdelijke verbli- jvers), while the term ‘immigrant’ is avoided.4 When Holland was forced to grant sovereignty to the Republic of Indo- nesia in 1949 it was considered ‘natural’ that the ‘pure’ white settlers in the previous Dutch colony, the so-called totoks, would return to Holland, but also that most people of ‘mixed race’ would give up their claim to Dutch citizenship and opt for Indonesian citizenship. The Dutch government maintained that these people belonged in Indonesia and viewed their integration in Dutch society as impossible and undesired. Conse- quently, the Indo-Dutch were initially discouraged from coming and their passage to Holland was even impeded. The emotional and historical ties to Holland of the Indo-Dutch were, however, totally underestimated. When large groups of ‘mixed-race’ people began to arrive, the Dutch government perceived them as temporary migrants and searched eagerly for an alternative, or an ultimate, destination for the Indo-Dutch. But their emotional bonds with Holland and legal position as Dutch citizens proved strong enough to give the migrants political strength. After its initial reservation, the Dutch government opted for an intensive policy campaign aimed at resocialization and assimilation of the group (Willems and Lucassen, 1994; Lucassen and Penninx, 1999: 140).

SOCIAL AND THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

Although developments in cultural studies have extensively interrogated the familiar models of assimilation and ethnic identity rooted in a male, Eurocentric tradition, the material situation in Holland differs from 03 Pattynama (to/d) 29/6/00 8:26 am Page 284

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theoretical developments elsewhere. For centuries Holland disclaimed being an immigration country. In 1970, in response to the criticism of newcomers, the Dutch government abandoned the term ‘assimilation’. Nevertheless, newcomers are still expected to adapt to Dutch ways as soon as possible. The Dutch concept of assimilation is, therefore, the process by which the ethnic-cultural and social position of Indo-Dutch would be, in due course, similar to that of the supposedly homogeneous indigenous people in the receiving society. This concept of assimilation does not imply complete ‘sameness’: second and following generations may have preserved typical characteristics of the first generation. It does, however, imply that the newcomers are seen and see themselves first and foremost as members of the indigenous society (Lucassen, 1998: 11). My research takes this background into account and starts from the theoretical assumptions of ‘transformative incorporation’, which means that I take the active participation and sociocultural contributions of migrants as guidelines in my explorations (Josipovici, 1993). This starting point opens up possibilities to go beyond the usual notions of migrants as either temporary residents or troublesome minorities. Migrants will be regarded as subjective agents who effectively intervene in the construction of national identities through their social behaviour and ways of communication. In line with this point of departure, my project adopts an interdisciplinary perspective by which cultures are defined as dynamic processes in which identities are constantly (re)produced. Accordingly, identity can be defined as the contingent outcome of struggles over externally ascribed and self-acclaimed identities (Grossberg, 1996; Hall and du Gay, 1996). The social order can thus be regarded not merely as a restric- tive force in that it defines people in gender-, ethnic- and class-specific ways, but also as providing enabling possibilities for resistance and individual agency through sociocultural practices. Working with these interactive definitions of cultures, identities and the social arena, I have turned to ‘masquerade’ as a theoretical model to explore identity formations and to understand the complexities involved in the life narratives of Indo- Dutch women.

MRS MORJAN

Before exploring the implications of using a model of masquerading, I would like to introduce Mrs Morjan.5 I have selected one incident in Mrs Morjan’s narrative because it is typical of her life story as a whole and it also refers to recurring elements in life stories that many Indo-Dutch women have told me. I use it, therefore, as casus in a more general narrative. It can show how an approach in terms of masquerading differs from an approach in terms of assimilation. 03 Pattynama (to/d) 29/6/00 8:26 am Page 285

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Mrs Morjan was born in the Netherlands as the child of immigrant Indo-Dutch parents who had arrived in the Netherlands in the early 1950s. As a second-generation woman, Mrs Morjan narrated her life story in response to my question how she ‘became’ a Dutch woman. In Mrs Morjan’s life story, her parents’ migration often emerged as a signiﬁcant factor in the development of her sense of self. She suggested that as a child of migrant parents, she began the process of becoming Dutch at a later age than her peers did. She used the images she had of ‘being Dutch’ and of ‘being a girl’ to help her adopt sociocultural practices; she observed and attempted to imitate the behaviour, values and norms of her white peers. She recalled, for example, her own reaction when she once told her classmates the true story about her mother who, during her child- hood in the prewar Dutch Indies, had been close friends with a princess, the daughter of the Sultan of Solo. Being the sultan’s daughter, this girl was restricted to staying at home after school, and Mrs Morjan’s mother often went to visit her friend at the Kraton, the Javanese Royal Court. Mrs Morjan’s Dutch peers, however, found this story utterly unbelievable and accused her of being a liar and a braggart: ‘There’s no way you brown paupers would have been allowed to enter a palace!’ ‘Shame was my response’, Mrs Morjan said.

I was ashamed, because I could easily have prevented their lack of understanding by either telling my story in another way so that they could have comprehended it or by not telling the story at all. I learnt my lesson. I never again told such a story. Since then I’ve always taken care to ensure that others couldn’t know how I really was, because how I was might not be appropriate.

The girl was ashamed of telling her story inappropriately. Her feelings of shame, as well as her cultural imitation, correspond with and support the public narrative about the social integration of Indo-Dutch people. The public narrative about Holland’s largest postwar migrant group is that of their so-called successful assimilation: they share the same language and religion, they are well educated and economically independent. Having quietly settled down without causing any trouble, they meet the nation’s expectations of gender, ‘race’, religion and class. Nowadays, they are regarded as cooperative, non-distinctive Dutch citizens. Submerged in this public story of sameness and indifference, however, lies a hidden message which discloses a prevailing attitude of the Dutch society towards differences. It reads as follows: Compared to the Surinamese, Turks, Somalians and other groups of newcomers, the Indo-Dutch are well adapted. They make no difficulties for us and are integrated into our society to such an extent that one can hardly distin- guish between ‘them’ and ‘us’. They may be coloured, but the Indo- Dutch are like us. 03 Pattynama (to/d) 29/6/00 8:26 am Page 286

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PUBLIC AND INDO-DUTCH INTERPRETATIONS

The public story about Indo-Dutch assimilation is a national narrative. It reveals Dutch self-images of ‘race’ and class, and suits the existing ideas of Dutch identity. Contrary to recent signs of xenophobia, the Dutch have always fostered the image of their own hospitality, tolerance and liberal attitude. In this context, the circulating story of the successful integration of Indo-Dutch migrants can be interpreted as a sign of national tolerance. Perhaps the achieved assimilation may even be regarded as a ﬁnal tribute to the once revered Dutch colonial enterprise. Notwithstanding their social achievements, Indo-Dutch migrants are thus considered the objects rather than the subjects of this success story. From the perspective of the public narrative about the Indo-Dutch, Mrs Morjan would emerge as ‘the other’. Ashamed of her own difference and inadequate efforts to belong, she struggles to become a ‘good’ Dutch citizen. Surprisingly, the narrative of successful assimilation not only domi- nates Dutch public opinion but is upheld in many life stories of the Indo- Dutch themselves. The collective Indo-Dutch narrative of successful assimilation reads as follows:

After an enforced migration we found ourselves in an ethnocentric society and were bound to internalize the cultural values of the Dutch community by forfeiting our own culture. We were forced to keep silent, to forget our life stories and family histories, and on top of that we were, to our dismay, outrageously disgraced as traitors and colonizers. But we managed becoming good Dutch citizens.

According to the stories a number of Indo-Dutch have told me, Mrs Morjan’s shame would represent the situation of most Indo-Dutch.6 To become a good citizen, she had to strip away her own culture and forget her family history and life story. The Indo-Dutch version speaks thus of self-estrangement and self-effacement, while the public version speaks of otherness. While the public narrative does not question the supremacy of Dutch self and Dutch culture, the Indo-Dutch interpretation emphasizes the existence of an original and authentic Indo-Dutch self and culture. Both interpretations, however, are framed in the binary assumptions of cultural assimilation in which Dutch culture reigns supreme to the detriment of an Indo-Dutch culture. As a consequence, in both interpretations, Mrs Morjan would be dismissed from the narrator’s position and, even worse, she would be the passive object of political events and social structures. My understanding of Mrs Morjan’s position deviates from the two interpretations mentioned above. In her story two narrative elements catch my attention: the feeling of ‘not being understood by the others’ and the necessity of ‘different behaviour’. These recurring references to (mis)communication and identity formation continually crop up in many 03 Pattynama (to/d) 29/6/00 8:26 am Page 287

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stories Indo-Dutch people tell about their process of migration and social integration (Pollmann and Harms, 1987; Boon and van Geleuken, 1993; Willems and Lucassen, 1994). That is why I regard these two narrative elements as key elements, which subsequently have prompted me to question the official assimilation theory. Based on quite rigid, binary notions of culture and identity, the assimilation theory allows for just two exclusive, fixed positions. In this context, white Dutch culture as the ‘absent’ centre can take its own power for granted so that any presumably non-Dutch culture is classified as ‘other’ (Ferguson, 1990). Consequently, Mrs Morjan may either occupy the position of the outsider or that of the insider. To become a ‘Dutch woman’ and be in the centre would thus imply for her to gradually but completely strip away her ‘other’ culture and become ‘white’. Apart from difficulties with the persistent colonizing moves of this model, I do not feel its reductive conceptualization of culture and identity formation is very helpful to explain the intricacies of intercultural encounters and female self-constructions. First, the interactive encounters between cultures are not taken into account and, second, Mrs Morjan is transformed into a passive object who does not enfold any activity whatsoever in the formation of her own identity. My rejection of the limited, even colonizing, notions implied in the theory of assimilation initiated a search for a cultural model that would allow for the many complexities that underlie the decisions people take and the subsequent courses of their lives.

FEMININE MASQUERADE

At the beginning of this century, the term ‘masquerade’ was coined by psychoanalyst Joan Riviere (1986). Referring to the ‘mask of femininity’, she argued that women employ a feminine masquerade to compensate for taking up the male position of authority. She explained, however, that in reality there is no difference between ‘real or true femininity’ and the masquerade. She concluded that, in fact, material women play the role of a woman. Riviere’s study prompted Jacques Lacan (1985) to his infamous statement ‘la femme n’existe pas’. Departing from their own experiences as female social subjects, feminist theorists have taken up Lacan’s statement as a comment on the patriarchal nature of western culture. In line with poststructuralist, semiotic theories of subjectivity, they nevertheless agree on denying the existence of an original, authentic feminine identity. Judith Butler, for instance, perceives gender identities as a type of action which is rehearsed in a variety of ways at all times. She speaks of gender as a ‘repetition of acts instituted through the stylisation of the body, and, hence must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an 03 Pattynama (to/d) 29/6/00 8:26 am Page 288

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abiding gendered self’ (Butler, 1993: 402). Femininity is thus understood as being dispersed in an endless series of enactments, roles, representations, images, imitations and appearances. However, as Tania Modleski argues, in spite of the fabricated ‘nature’ of femininity, material women cannot afford to put aside the history of representations because it is based on powerful stereotypes, habits of language and unexamined – because unconscious – psychic associations (Modleski, 1991: 24). If we assume that female identity formation is the contingent outcome of struggles not merely over self-acclaimed representations, but also over externally ascribed identities, then women should be seen as constantly renegotiating their social position and cultural identity (Donald and Rattansi, 1992; Hall and du Gay, 1996). One way of negotiating between ascribed and self-acclaimed identities/representations is to strategically and consciously play with all the different images of femininity, or, in other words, to perform, imitate, mime and masquerade (ethnic) femininity (Irigaray, 1981; Butler, 1990; Emery, 1990; Doane, 1991). Far from masking or hiding ‘authentic’, ‘true’ femininity, masquerading may be understood as a female, perhaps even feminist strategy of a series of changing identities in a context loaded with verbal and visual stereotypes. In exploring Indo-Dutch femininity in terms of masquerading, I do not intend to adopt the psychoanalytic understanding of masquerade dis- cussed by Joan Riviere, Jacques Lacan and Mary Ann Doane. I wish to counter the assumption of assimilation in Indo-Dutch life narratives that would entail a stripping of one’s ‘own’ culture or a hiding of a ‘true’ identity. In terms of a postcolonial understanding of cultural identity formation, I deﬁne masquerade as a continually changing series of identiﬁ- cations, which varies according to the context and its gendered, racial and class stereotypes. In that sense, masquerading is a self-determined, dynamic strategy, which is restricted by established power relations and (colonial) stereotyping.

COLONIAL HISTORY

‘The colonized’, argue Chandra T. Mohanty and Satya P. Mohanty, ‘are not just the object of the colonizer’s discourses, but the agents of a con- ﬂicted history, inhabiting and transforming a complex social and cultural world’ (Mohanty and Mohanty, 1990: 19). The model of masquerade also allows for the ‘conﬂicted history’ of Indo-Dutch people and the ‘complex world’ they inhabited to be interpreted as constituent for contemporary life narratives. From a perspective of masquerading, the Indo-Dutch can be seen as both objects and agents in (post)colonial history. A brief historical detour explains to what extent identifying or masquerading processes have taken place. 03 Pattynama (to/d) 29/6/00 8:26 am Page 289

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Identiﬁcations evolved in three stages, i.e. a colonial, a postwar and a postcolonial stage. In all three stages different forms of masquerading took place. In the former colony, which was under very rigid colonial rule, racially mixed people – known as ‘Indo-Europeans’ – occupied an in- between position, one distinct from and beyond that of the ‘natives’, but subordinated in a dominant society of white settlers (van Marle, 1951– 2).7 Postcolonial studies have made us aware that claims of the Enlightenment about selfhood and individuality were underwritten by the simultaneous ‘othering’ of colonized people. As Edward Said (1978) explains, ‘orientalism’ was an indispensable instrument in the invention and maintenance of French and British colonialism. But colonial mastery often encom- passed much more than a homogeneous ideology invented merely to disguise or legitimate western domination: ‘European colonialism tended to be partially shaped by indigenous traditions, while conversely attempt- ing to recast native customs and practices in its own image’ (Clancy-Smith and Gouda, 1998: 4–5). For the Dutch, as well as for the French and British, ‘orientalism’ was instrumental in keeping their communities in the East white. The recasting of local customs and practices in Dutch orientalism can clearly be traced in the negotiations over the ethnic, social and national positions people of ‘mixed race’ were to hold in the East Indies. Mainly for economic reasons, and unlike British or French colonialism, the establishment of Dutch colonial control was grounded in the encouragement of interracial sexuality and concubinage.8 Hence, in the colonial ‘contact zone’ of the Indies, the dominant domestic arrange- ment was one of a white European man living with an Asian woman.9 If the white father acknowledged the mixed offspring as his own, they legally belonged to the white community. Consequently, Indo-European family ties cut right across indigenous, mixed and Dutch cultures. Nevertheless, it was the indigenous women who paid the price for the seemingly harmonious blending of cultures and ‘races’ in the colony. In the widespread and customary practice of concubinage, the native woman had no rights whatsoever. A European man was free either to acknowledge his offspring and even take them away from their mother, or to dismiss his concubine and send her back to her ancestral village together with their ‘mixed-race’ children without assuming any ﬁnancial responsibility for any of them. In the last decades of the 19th century, however, the dominance of a ‘mixed-race’ society was put to an end. In the context of an expanding white European colonial power, growing fears of ethnic and racial contamination emerged. Invented as a term in the late 19th-century vocabulary of sexuality, ‘miscegenation’ became associated with a set of discourses on degeneracy and eugenics. As Ann Stoler argues, the object of this fear was less interracial sexuality than the decline of the white population, which, it was presumed, would be the inevitable result (Stoler, 1991). Interracial sexuality and concubinage – 03 Pattynama (to/d) 29/6/00 8:26 am Page 290

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fundamental elements of the existing mestizo culture – were taken to be the source of the psychological breakdown and ill health of European men. Racial degeneracy was thus linked to the sexual transmission of cultural contagions and to the political instability of imperial rule (Stoler, 1991: 72). By then, the existing blurring of the boundaries between the ‘races’ was banned in favour of a process of racial ‘unmixing’ (van Doorn, 1994). In particular, the control of the bodies and the sexual behaviour of mixed, indigenous as well as white women, was essential in maintaining the boundaries of the white group (Gouda, 1995; see also Zarkov, 1995). In the construction of a natural pure ethnicity, racial mixing became a colonial threat and a taboo. Ironically, however, most of the people who belonged to the so-called white European community were themselves of ‘mixed race’, as were their ‘half-breed’ children. Often visible, racial difference was located in oneself or one’s mixed children, instead of being located in the ‘other’. It was this otherness within the white colonial boundaries that blurred the colonial divide and threatened the colonial white community from the inside. Gradually, such ambivalent white fears were translated into inten- siﬁed strategies of divide and rule. As a consequence, many of the ‘almost white’, ‘mixed-race’ people passed themselves off as white, by hiding their non-white, non-European roots. Many women of ‘mixed race’ were among them as a result of the hybrid cross-cutting factors such as gender, ‘race’, sexuality and class that constituted the colonial enterprise. Colonial novels dealing with social taboos and secrets often show that one of the implications of passing oneself off as white could be the repudiation of the non-white mother:

Having a native woman as a mother, you didn’t own up to that. You threw up a smokescreen around your ancestry, whereby your mother or perhaps your grandmother was transformed into a Spaniard or an Italian or at the very least a princess of royal Javanese blood. Native mothers did exist, for her [Indo] children existed, children who made her into something else and obscured her, who remained silent and repudiated her, in accordance with the unwritten but relentless code of this society. (Vuyk, 1972: 509)

If repudiation of the mother and denial of one’s ethnicity seem bad, one should not forget that ‘passing as white’ should be placed in a complex racial and gendered situation in which women were constituted as marking the boundaries of the ‘race’.10 Encompassing much more than an individual ‘choice’, passing for white (or masquerading) very clearly demonstrates how strongly political motives determine the borderlines of individual and collective identities.11 It also demonstrates that this form of colonial masquerade can be a strategy which breaks down the strongly guarded dividing lines between ‘races’, classes and the sexes. In line with my deﬁnitions of masquerading, I do perceive Indo-European passing for 03 Pattynama (to/d) 29/6/00 8:26 am Page 291

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white as a form of female masquerading that emerged in a changing racial and gendered society in which women of ‘mixed race’ renegotiated their identities.

CONTEMPORARY MASQUERADING

The colonial forms can be connected to Indo-Dutch postwar and postcolonial forms of masquerading. Postwar forms were implied in the strategies for entry and survival that the first generation of Indo-Dutch newcomers had to develop. Following their war experiences and as a result of the decolonization of the Dutch East Indies many Indo-European people left behind their native country in order to embark on a permanent exodus to Holland, a so-called ‘homeland’ that was unknown to many of them (Boon and Geleuken, 1993; Willems and Lucassen, 1994). After their departure, they discovered that they were no longer ‘almost white’ but a problem for a nation recovering from a war, and an unwelcome reminder of a colonial past the Dutch were eager to forget. The loss in 1949 of its most treasured colony has become one of the most traumatic events in Holland’s collective memory. Feelings of shame about either the Nether- lands’ imperial past or, conversely, the collapse of its great empire have manifested themselves in repression and guilt. For years, the Dutch presence in the East has been relegated to a dark corner of official history to emerge every now and then to haunt the Dutch. It is only recently that the long forgotten episode has become the subject of movies, studies and media programmes.12 Sadly enough, most of Holland’s retrospection centres on loss and shame, thus keeping Dutch self-reflections within the terms of a narcissistic, white European discourse. This self-centred discourse gave way to an Indo-Dutch strategy of postwar masquerading. Subjected to a process of rapid integration Indo-Dutch migrants were assigned a new identity and name (Ellemers and Vaillant, 1985). While they kept silent about their overseas experiences, Indo migrants found themselves to be the first, official so-called hyphenated people in Holland. Ever since, they have figured as the most integrated minority group in Holland’s postwar cultural landscape. Nowadays, at the turn of the century, the established position of the Indo-Dutch is being transformed once again. Holland’s current search for a European identity corresponds with ‘fortress Europe’. In order to protect Europe from the rest of the world, fortress Europe has created legal and political boundaries to separate ‘insiders’ from ‘outsiders’ on grounds of gender, ‘race’, ethnicity and nationality (Essed, 1995; Einhorn and Gregory, 1998). Western Europe has always built its identity on the contrast with its ‘other’. In the imperial era, African and Asian colonies functioned as the ‘other’ in opposition to the European self. Since then, 03 Pattynama (to/d) 29/6/00 8:26 am Page 292

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Eastern Europe has become the mirror in which Western Europe contem- plates its reflection, thus nurturing its narcissism.13 Europe’s recent defensive shifts have resulted in the fabrication of enemies, not only outside the borders but also within them (Lutz et al., 1995). The construction of enemies within the borders brings back memories of the ambivalent position of Indo-Europeans in the colony. The first interethnic minority group within Dutch borders has now become a model minority, held up as an example to other unruly or more recent newcomers (Wekker, 1995). They have come to serve as examples of successful newcomers who know how to behave and be responsible citizens. Since the Indo-Dutch (or at least some of us) have gained access to higher education and better-paid jobs, we can serve as representatives of the perfect, because hardly distinguishable, ethnicity. In multicultural Holland, ‘assimilated’ Indo-Dutch people function in a similar way as they did in the East Indies, namely as a ‘hidden force’.14 While their colonial function was a threat and a taboo, their function in the postcolonial era is that of a model minority. Compared to the grim situation in which recent refugees and asylum- seekers find themselves in the Netherlands, a position of model minority is a convenient one. Yet, the underlying fiction of assimilation is mainly convenient for the ‘real’ white Dutch as a means of incorporating and ‘civilizing’ old and recent newcomers. In the contemporary multicultural context, the so-called model minority is being used to invent and natural- ize a narrow, white, national self-concept. As a result, Indo-Dutch ethnicity turns out to be a washed-out ethnicity, a non-ethnicity. Even in this postcolonial era, immigration is more often than not seen as a process of acculturation or cultural stripping away. In this view, newcomers – or at any rate, their children and grandchildren – are to be absorbed into the national culture. The theory of assimilation appears to have the inevitabil- ity of a law of nature: if it does not catch up with you this generation, it will in the next. Hence, via a process of thorough whitewashing the assimilated Indo-Dutch have been promoted from colonial ‘almost whites’ to silenced ‘just like whites’, to end up as ‘white look-a-likeys’. The whitewashing takes place within a situation that is still dominated by binary ideas. For instance, if we look at images of Indo-Dutch people in the popular media – a reliable mediator of ideological values – we see ourselves depicted as Indonesians, dressed, not even in modern but in folkloristic Indonesian garments, wrapped in melancholic nostalgia. Indo-Dutch people are still portrayed as relics of a glorious Dutch past, a vanished Dutch empire. Whereas ‘mixed-race’ identity in the East Indies cut through all existing boundaries of ‘race’ and gender and had a presence larger than life, in postcolonial, Europeanized Holland, Indo- Dutch intermingling that is neither white nor Indonesian seems to be unthinkable and is therefore relegated to an empty space – invisible. The 03 Pattynama (to/d) 29/6/00 8:26 am Page 293

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emptiness of these popular images signals that the second and even the third or fourth generation of Indo-Dutch citizens do not ‘belong’ here but will forever remain outsiders. However paradoxical these discourses may seem, both assimilation theories and popular representations of Indo- Dutch people reflect not so much Indo-Dutch identity as such but the binary terms in which Dutch national identity itself is eclipsed. In spite of the fact that postmodern Holland claims to be a multicultural society, in spite of her cultural theorists celebrating ‘hybridity’, ‘nomadity’ and ‘unfixed subjectivities’, and even though her whizz kids surf through cyberspace with its fast global connections, the exclusionary dichotomies of Enlightenment notions still reign over Dutch identity formations. In a society that does not question whiteness as a powerful ethnicity in itself, any non-white citizen is bound to be perceived as either a look-a-like or an outsider.15 The narrow focus of Holland’s national self-concept pre- cludes a global perspective of its colonial, interracial past in connection to its dynamic present. This makes Indo-Dutch identities seem assimilated, which means either fixed or in the process of dissolution.

INDO-DUTCHNESS AS MASQUERADING SELF- CONSTRUCTION

I seek to render Indo-Dutchness both visible and invisible, in that I wish to simultaneously reject the existence of an authentic Indo-Dutch culture and situate existent Indo-Dutch identities within multicultural Holland. I ﬁnd the concept of masquerade inspiring because it reveals the strategies that Indo-Dutch women themselves have developed in order to renegoti- ate past and present. A model of masquerade insists not only on the rela- tional nature of identity and difference, but also on the productive tensions between the two. Even more important is that masquerade underlies the intricate and interdependent ways in which ethnic agents function. If we, for example, return to Mrs Morjan, and approach her story in terms of masquerading we may become aware of her female, ethnic agency:

Shame was my response. I was ashamed, because I could easily have prevented their lack of understanding by either telling my story in another way so that they could have comprehended it or by not telling the story at all. I learnt my lesson. I never again told such a story. Since then I’ve always taken care to ensure that others wouldn’t know how I am, because how I am might not be appropriate.

Notice that Mrs Morjan said ‘how I am’ rather than ‘who I am’ or ‘who I really am’. She indicates behaviour, enactments and roles. Based on postmodern theories of subjectivity and ethnicity, the model 03 Pattynama (to/d) 29/6/00 8:26 am Page 294

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of masquerading makes it possible for us to interpret her shame differ- ently. Rather than framing her shame in terms of Eurocentric assimilation, we can now see it as an enabling force that, perhaps unconsciously, provided a fluid way of identification and communication. Such an interpretation leaves, first, room to consider shame in a cultural context in which shame has a primary function in the regulation of behaviour, as opposed to a European context in which guilt is the basic regulating force (Buruma, 1994). Second, Mrs Morjan’s self-presentation emerges as an illustration of the point made in postmodern feminist studies, that ethnic femininity has no content of its own but is a modern invention. Rather than referring to a ‘true’ self or an authentic culture, Mrs Morjan con- structs her former (and contemporary) self as a creative and flexible girl who successfully negotiates with intermingled identifications such as colonial stereotypes, the ‘white gaze’, her family history, her Dutch class- conscious peers. When Mrs Morjan’s invented girl felt that she was ‘not being understood by the others’ and found her storytelling inappropriate, she did not allow the others to whitewash her, but chose to look for more appropriate ways of telling her stories. In doing so, Mrs Morjan allows her girl not only to master the performative power of a narrative, that is the power of a narrative to make something happen, but also to master masquerading strategies in order to shift the meaning of herself. 16 By thus articulating problems of identity and identification, we can see Mrs Morjan press back against the disarticulation of that spectral other that Rey Chow calls ‘the dominated object’ (Smith and Watson, 1992: xviii). In choosing when to be silent, or how to retell a story, the girl Mrs Morjan has invented provides the possibility for her to constitute herself as a subject. This masquerading strategy illustrates that ethnic femininity is an imaginary identification that can be adopted, appropriated or discarded. As Emile Benveniste (1971: 225) argues, it is language which enables the speaker to posit herself as ‘I’, as the subject of her own story.

CONCLUSION

Through the model of masquerading, Indo-Dutchness can be conceptual- ized as a mode of cultural negotiation and intervention. Such an approach leads us from private memories into public domains and provides insights into the implicit notions of gender, ‘race’ and class that underlie deﬁnitions of the Dutch national self-concept. The global migration of the 1990s has motivated new academic and social debates in the Netherlands. Questions of ethnicity, cultural identities, citizenship and policies regarding asylum-seekers feature in an anxious public discussion about the contemporary Dutch national identity. Even though recent newcomers tend to be regarded as threatening and 03 Pattynama (to/d) 29/6/00 8:26 am Page 295

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problematic groups, the renewed interest in identity formation and cultural backgrounds opens up alternative possibilities of masquerading, or, in other words, of being. There are, in fact, signs of second- and third- generation Indo-Dutch people who see themselves as ethnic agents rather than as victims of history (Seriese, 1995; Captain, 1996). Due to these developments they might step beyond a traumatic past and look at past and present experiences as ‘situated knowledge’, to use Donna Haraway’s well-known term (Haraway, 1988). The Indo-Dutch ‘mixed’ existence in Holland undermines the established divisions of ‘we’ and ‘they’ and, more importantly, has shifted the meaning of being Dutch. Through masquerading strategies, Indo-Dutch migrants can act as a contemporary, interruptive force in Holland’s ‘Heart of Darkness’.

NOTES

I wish to warmly thank Ena Jansen and my dear friends Edy Seriese and Liane van der Linden for all the help and support given to me while I was preparing this article. I am also indebted to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticism. 1. I would like to begin with an explanation of my use of terms in this article. Constructed within a discourse that represents arguments for the biological inferiority of people of colour, race is an invention used to assert white biological superiority and to justify economical and political inequities, both in the homelands and in the colonies. I maintain the terms ‘race’ and ‘mixed race’, be it with quotation marks, to point out that ‘race’ and racism were and still are a fact in many people’s lives. Equally, although the terms ‘non- white’ and ‘non-European’ set up a racialized hierarchy in which white is the standard, I sometimes use the terms to indicate the dominance of whiteness or Europeanness both in the western and the colonial world. The term ‘ethnic minority’ is associated with the modern (re)organization of national states along ethnic or ‘racial’ lines which highlights the intercon- nections between nationalism and racism (Anderson, 1983). The term is associated with the discussion about what has been identified as ‘new nationalism’ and ‘new racism’ in Europe, and Europe’s recent concern with ‘legitimising measures designed to keep out the “alien flood”‘. It indicates that the excluding of ‘others’ implies the construction of cultural, religious or ‘racial’ otherness, racialized minorities within the European Union (Lutz et al., 1995: 4–5). 2. I should mention here, that I refer to myself as an Indo-Dutch woman of the second generation. My position in this project, therefore, is one of personal interest and involvement. Far from claiming a neutral or objective position, if such a position exists at all, I am theorizing ‘from experience’, which means that there is no firm separation between my theoretical stance and my experiences as an Indo-Dutch woman. The following exploration and analysis thus mix self-reflection, memories of my family history and feminist insights. 3. On colonial imagery in literature, see Pattynama (1994); on gendered rhetoric, see Gouda (1995). 03 Pattynama (to/d) 29/6/00 8:26 am Page 296

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4. In the Netherlands an ongoing confusion exists about the use of terms referring to newcomers due to the fact that most terms are unspecific. There are also differences between the various groups of immigrants. Furthermore, a number of terms are derogatory. By using the term ‘newcomers’, I follow Lucassen and Penninx (1999) in order to refer to migrant people who had not been in Holland before. 5. Mrs Morjan is a pseudonym. 6. See also many accounts in the Indo-Dutch magazines Tong Tong and Moesson voicing disappointment, anger and incomprehension. 7. In the colony, people of ‘mixed race’ were called ‘Indo-Europeans’ (Indo- Europeanen). Contrary to a number of historians, I insist, therefore, on using the actual colonial name ‘Indo-Europeans’ instead of ‘Eurasians’. The nominator ‘Eurasian’ is useful in the situation of the British Empire, where people of ‘mixed race’ were considered to be ‘native’ people. In contrast, colonial rule in the East Indies encouraged interracial sexuality, which resulted in the inclusion of mixed (Indo-European) children in the white, European community. 8. ‘Concubinage’ was a contemporary term, used to refer to the cohabitation outside marriage between European men and Asian women. Apart from sexual access to a non-European woman, concubinage involved a variety of arrangements, such as demands on her labour and legal rights to the children she bore (Stoler, 1991: 59). Jean Gelman Taylor (1983) describes how during the 17th and 18th centuries concubinages and, in higher classes, marriages between European men and Asian women had produced a mestizo society in which Asian-born women had a relative amount of power. 9. Mary Louise Pratt coined the phrase ‘contact zones’, meaning: ‘the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and histori- cally separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, racial inequality, and intractable conflict’. This interpretation can appropriately be used for the Indo-Dutch situation because Pratt foregrounds the interactive, improvisa- tional dimensions of colonial encounters that are so easily ignored or suppressed by diffusionist accounts of conquest and domination (Pratt, 1992: 6). 10. Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis (1989) argue that since men are constituted as the mouthpiece of an ethnic and racial collectivity, and thus constructed as ethnic agents, women are constructed as ‘guardians of the race’. 11. Marjorie Garber perceives passing as ‘a category crisis: a failure of defini- tional distinction, a borderline that becomes permeable, that permits of border crossings from one (apparently distinct) category to another’ (Garber, 1992: 19). Elaine Ginsberg (1996: 4) adds that the possibility of passing chal- lenges a number of problematic and even antithetical assumptions about identities, the first of which is that some identity categories are inherent and unalterable essences. 12. The celebration of the 50th anniversary of the end of the war in the Pacific in 1995 gave a new input to this heightened interest (see also Locher- Scholten, 1995). 13. In ‘Nice People Don’t Mention Such Things’, Dubravka Ugrešić perceives the relationship between Eastern and Western Europe as an unequal love, with the European Union as ‘a dark object of desire’ for hungry excluded people (Ugrešić, 1998: 304). 14. As a number of colonial novels illustrate, in late colonial Indonesia, 03 Pattynama (to/d) 29/6/00 8:26 am Page 297

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interracial sexuality and the often visible existence of ‘mixed-race’ people became associated with danger, secrets and ‘hidden forces’. In fact, within these associations protection of white masculinity, national identity and racial superiority was at stake (Pattynama, 1997). 15. For an excellent example of white self-reﬂection see Frankenberg (1993). 16. I refer here to what has come to be called ‘the cultural turn’ in the social and human sciences that emphasizes narrative as a cultural practice producing meaning. Stuart Hall, for example, states: ‘Meaning is what gives us a sense of our own identity, of who we are and with whom we “belong”. It is tied up with questions of how culture is used to mark out and maintain identity within and difference between groups’ (Hall, 1997: 3).

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Pamela Pattynama is Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies in the Department of General Literature at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She has published on cultural analysis, colonial literature and intercultural education. Her current research is concerned with Dutch colonial literature and with life stories of Indo- Dutch women, both in Indonesia and in the Netherlands. Address: Weteringschans 61, 1017 RW Amsterdam, The Netherlands. [email: [email protected]]