When Summer Became Winter
My mother put a big box of photos in front of my nose. It was a jumble of childhood photos of me and my brother, photos of my new-born nephew, children’s parties and Queen’s Day celebrations. And in that same box was the photo archive of my grandpa and grandma. The black and white photo’s in particular caught my interest. I wanted to know where and when all these photos were taken. “Was it on Ambon? Was it in Sorong? Was this during the boat journey to the Netherlands? Who are the other people? Is this your first house in the Netherlands?”
My grandparents did something big, they travelled to the other side of the world to build a new life. What did that mean to them? What must it have been like to swop a warm tropical environment for this small cold-hearted country?
Along the way, I realised that these questions also came from my longing to understand my family history better. The few fragments and anecdotes that were handed down to me weren’t enough to put together the whole story – a story into which my own life is interwoven.
My grandpa and grandma are no longer alive so I couldn’t ask them. My mother was six years old when she left former Netherlands New Guinea so she couldn’t really answer my questions about life there either. Neither could I find a logical timeline in the random collection of photos and that bothered me.
So how could I understand my family history?
It didn’t feel right to leave such a big part of me so vague and I found it annoying that no one could answer my questions. I could think of only one person who could help me further in my search: uncle Ka. Although he’s not a blood relative, he has always felt like family. He is the only one from the generation of my grandparents – he was a good friend of theirs – still alive and was one of the first in our family circle who, with his family, left Sorong for the Netherlands. My grandpa, grandma and mother followed a year later, in 1961, and travelled by boat to Genoa and from there they took the train to their final destination: Amsterdam.
For days I hung on to uncle Ka’s every word and listened to his stories. I was able to see my history through his eyes and in this way learnt so much about myself and my family. Through him I was able to connect the past with the present, without a clear beginning or end, but a new present emerged and that was exactly what I had been searching for.
My aim is to show in a poetic way how history can be passed on so that not only I, but also the viewer, has a better understanding of how history always has a place in the present.
* Sorong is a city in the west of the Indonesian province of West Papua. Between 1949 and 1962 West Papua was part of Netherlands New Guinea. Before that it belonged to the former Dutch-Indonesian colonial government. In 1962 it was handed over temporarily to United Nations and a year later to Indonesia.
* Ambon is an island in the Moluccan archipelago, which is part of Indonesia. Its most important city is also called Ambon.
I self-published a dummy in an edition of 40, click here to see the publication.
©2020