Discord Consensus

Zelden drong in enkele zinnen soms, de atmosfeer zo ontroerend-​
onthullend tot mij door als in deze sobere verteltrant. Een
verteltrant die landschappen in de verbeelding oproept –​ ook landschappen
van de ziel –​waarvan iemand als ik, die Indië niet kent,
hoogstens in exotische dromen gedroomd kan hebben. 14
Rarely a few sentences managed to disclose an atmosphere to me
in such a touching-​revealing manner, as this sober narrative did.
A narrative that recalls landscapes in the imagination –​landscapes
of the soul too –​of which someone like me, who does not know the
Indies, can only have dreamt exotic dreams.
These reviewers seem to suffer from the same ‘static vision’ as Oeroeg’s
narrator, which Snoek described as ‘an inability [. . .] to accept, that
the Indies are fundamentally changing’. 15 Their wistful and nostalgic
responses are illustrative of what postcolonial literary theorist Homi
Bhabha described as colonial ‘double-​think’ or ‘belatedness’. Bhabha
explains what is ‘belated’ in colonial societies, highlighting colonialism’s
timeline:
As a signifier of authority, the English book acquires its meaning
after the traumatic scenario of colonial difference, cultural
or racial, returns the eye of power to some prior, archaic image
of identity. Paradoxically, however, such an image can neither be
‘original’ by virtue of the act of repetition that constructs it –​nor
‘identical’ by virtue of the difference that defines it. Consequently
the colonial presence is always ambivalent, split between its appearance
as original and authoritative and its articulation as repetition
and difference. 16
Colonial time exposes an ambivalent delay –​Bhabha calls it ‘belatedness’
–​ that turns a blind eye to political inequality and violence. Exactly
therefore –​because of its inherent ‘split’ –​colonialism draws critical
attention to its insincerity, its double-​ness. As such it enables and encourages
postcolonial criticism from within.
To Dutch reviewers, however, the Indies remain dear and close
and, at the same time, unreal and dreamlike –​exotic. These contemporary
reviewers of Oeroeg seem resistant to the critical pull of colonial
time; they are comfortably ‘split between’. This is particularly striking
because, when Oeroeg was published, the Netherlands and Indonesia/​
the Indies were at war. None of the contemporary reviewers in 1948
mention the (very real) ongoing violence in Indonesia which clearly is
‘A sort of wishful dream’ 123