Discord Consensus

two insecure lines about the narrator’s inability to recognise Oeroeg’s
complexity.
Haasse complicates and challenges a limited Dutch viewpoint,
by making her nameless Dutch narrator slowly acknowledge his own
blindness. And she makes the setting of Oeroeg a clearly contemporary
and political one: it takes place during the Indonesian independence
wars.
Sleuteloog: what does it mean to be ‘Indisch’?
Whereas Oeroeg can still be described as a Dutch-​versus-​Indonesian narrative
–​revisiting a colonial binary opposition –​Haasse is more critical of
reconstructing colonial categories in Sleuteloog (2002). In Sleuteloog the
author highlights the political complexity attached to the Dutch adjective
‘Indisch’: a word still used today in the post-​colonial Netherlands to
describe colonial links with Indonesia –​both racial and historical links.
It is, confusingly, used to describe both mixed-​race people (with Dutch
and Indonesian heritage) and Dutch colonisers’ families who lived in the
colonial Indies.
Haasse questions the consensus in the Netherlands about
‘Indische’ history and ‘Indische’ literary history; she assesses what it
means to be ‘Indisch’ in the post-​colonial Netherlands. Contemporary
reviewers of the novel, on the other hand, are less critical of ambivalent
categories such as ‘Indisch’ and ‘mixed-​race’ and their complex
connotations.
I regard Sleuteloog as a Braidottian ‘block of becoming’ 22 in which
Haasse playfully uses ‘blocks’ from her individual past and from previous
literary work –​both Oeroeg and its reception history. Sleuteloog suggests
creative growth, critical development and a process of nomadic becoming
as described by Braidotti: ‘Remembering nomadically amounts to
reinventing a self as other [. . .] differing as much as possible from all you
had been before.’ 23
This ‘differing as much as possible from all you had been’ can
be related to the interview from 2009 in which Haasse said Oeroeg
‘was written straight out of my self. But [. . .] Over the years I have
[. . .] grown’. In Sleuteloog I recognise Haasse’s growth in terms of her
critical awareness of colonial politics, violence and guilt, and her literary
development as reflected in the novel’s more complex structure.
Haasse’s postcolonial awareness becomes most obvious in her imaginings
of alternative memories: in particular, the experiences Haasse
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DISCORD AND CONSENSUS IN THE LOW COUNTRIES, 1700–​2000