Dutch colonial families erased the Indies from their descendants’ family memory

Evidence

Why have the Lucassen women become so hostile to her? Are they as disdainful of her clinging to European pretensions as she is of their Indische ways? When she returns to The Hague upon her husband’s sudden death at Kemanglen (the day before she turns thirty years old) and upon her father’s death the preceding year, her letters end. Her oldest son becomes the genealogist who deposits hers and her father’s letters in the genealogical bureau in The Hague. Her second son becomes an entomologist. Her only daughter marries the French Marquis de Seilhac. No further generations are born in Java. No one returns to the Indies. Investments are transferred to African plantations. Before Indonesia’s independence, the Kemanglen estates are already sold. The watermark of empire is scratched over and etched out of their lives. Descendants live in small apartments in the suburbs of The Hague with portraits of wealthier earlier generations on their walls. In 2002 the name of “Susanna Lucassen” appears on the program for an outdoor summer performance in the French Luberon for promising young ballet stars. I ask if her family ever lived in Java. “Oui,” she smiles, “someone was in the Indies once,” and she glides away. There is not an imperial trace. Or is there? — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1522

Categorization

• FICTION: The granddaughter who says ‘someone was in the Indies once’ is a perfect narrative close — generational amnesia as a story device.
• SEED: Angle: how wealth extracted in colonies silently becomes generational privilege whose origins are scrubbed from family lore.