Discord Consensus

eality of colonial politics that made their shared ‘magical kingdom’
insincere and unreal. ‘Gone was the magical kingdom in which we were
heroes and explorers’ may well refer to a universal loss of childhood
imagination, but –​more specifically –​the narrator appears to address
the colonial project as a straightforwardly progressive story of make-​
believe, of ‘heroes and explorers’. The narrator’s disturbed nostalgia
points readers towards a colonialist fiction that supports a (supposedly)
nurturing colonial regime –​what Dutch politicians regarded as
their developmental duty, calling it their ‘Ethical Movement’. 18 Haasse
suggests that the adolescent Oeroeg and ‘I’ are at the point of looking
beyond colonial ‘heroes and explorers’ and will soon recognise colonialism
for what it is: a political construction of hierarchical make-​believe. 19
Esther ten Dolle 20 noted that from Oeroeg’s 1953 reprints onwards
two new lines appear in the novel, after the two young men have coincidentally
run into each other during the ongoing independence wars.
I see the insertion of these sentences as another form of Haasse interrupting
Oeroeg’s seemingly straightforward colonial timeline, only a
few years after its first publication. Haasse stresses the ‘wishful’ perspective
of the narrator’s one-​sided colonial perspective, by adding the
following question:
‘Was het werkelijk Oeroeg? Ik weet het niet en zal het ook nooit
weten. Ik heb zelfs het vermogen verloren hem te herkennen.’
(Oeroeg, 2009, p. 75) 21
‘Had it really been Oeroeg? I do not know, and never will. I have
even lost the ability to recognise him.’ (TBL, p. 113)
This explicit doubt expressed in later printings of Oeroeg allows for more
doubt among readers: it encourages a more critical standpoint towards
the narrator and his colonialist blindness. I agree with Ten Dolle that
these sentences stress the I-​figure’s inability to recognise and empathise
with Oeroeg. They highlight a more general, political blindness in the
Netherlands: a Dutch inability to recognise colonial violence when discussing
the Indies.
With her debut novel Oeroeg, Haasse thus shows an understanding
of the ambivalence of colonialism (what Bhabha described as ‘belatedness’).
She highlights the narrator’s naïve and sentimental standpoints
by turning ‘wishful​ness’ into a theme of the novel, set in a recent and
violent colonial past. She shows that her Dutch narrator is starting to
question the colonial Indies as a reliably progressive ‘magical kingdom
of heroes and explorers’. She further stresses his doubt by, later, adding
‘A sort of wishful dream’ 125