Ode to Maria Magdalena | My Indonesian great-grandmother

‘Why am I not blonde?’

You ask this question to your stepmother in my play ‘Eyes of Surabaya’ about our roots, about you. Maria Magdalena. My Indian great-grandmother from Surabaya. Surabaya. The city in the Far East that I only knew by name through that song ‘Surabaya Johnny’ by Kurt Weill. 'Surabaya Johnny. Warum bist du so roh. Surabaya Johnny. Mein Gott, und ich liebe dich so.' 

Surabaya. Your hometown. Your father, my great-great-grandfather, a colonial from Amsterdam who was successful as a merchant in Surabaya. Surabaya. A young boy still started as a shoemaker and rose to become the director of Hotel des Indes. In Surabaya.

And your mother? Who was she then? Surely an exotic beauty. His lover? His housekeeper, with whom he shared the bed. That's how they did it in those days. A Njai. Verschwunden ins blaue hinein. Your mother, my great-great-grandmother from Surabaya. Sent away? Mucked away? Died in childbirth? No one knows...

Quickly take a Dutch woman. Get married. With the glove. So at a distance of a few thousand kilometres. Six weeks later, this lady arrived by ship in the Emerald Belt.

'This is your mama. Just say mama.'

Stepmama you will mean. But you had no idea. This madam came only to collect the little girl for a European education in a nunnery in the Low Countries. You were only six. And stayed there until you were eighteen. Without a father. Without a mother. Not even your stepmother.

‘Mum, why am I not blonde?’

'No you're not blonde. Don't talk about it. Then you'll automatically become one of us. Just as blonde.'

So don't talk about it.

At 18, you returned to your father in Indonesia. There you married a Zeeuw and converted to oyster.

And you remained silent. 

Like an oyster.

But blonde you didn't get.

Grey, though. That's what my father, your only grandson, remembers about you. His grandmother. The thick grey hair in a bun. Never knew you had had that shiny black hair, let alone such exotic roots. His own grandmother. Or that his father (my grandfather) and therefore himself would have Indonesian blood. And so would his sisters and nieces. And all their children, your 12 great-grandchildren, including myself. Nobody knew, because it wasn't talked about. Why not! Does this also fall under what they call ‘Indian silence’? And if so, what else? The fact that your Indonesian identity was suppressed throughout your life cannot be justified.

Would they really have eaten those? Back then? Those oysters. Over a century ago...

(pause)

I don't know you. Until recently, I didn't know you. I didn't know anything about you. Nobody knew anything about you. Well, for my father, you were his grandmother. And to me: my great-grandmother. Not from Surabaya at all. Just from Oegstgeest. With a father from Mokum. Then again, we knew that. But that was all. Until a cousin of my father's did a DNA test. She had read about you in a book by her father, ‘The Slaves of Roku Ban’. Your alleged lineage. Or well at least the lineage of his wife, your daughter. It said something along the lines of, ‘My wife and therefore my children are Indian. So why should I consider you inferior?' And that woman he was talking about was Miesje, one of your three children. Our Auntie Mies, Uncle Jan's sister and my grandfather. My grandfather, who had climbed into an electricity pole in Bandung as a ten-year-old boy to take out his kite and was half electrocuted in the process. This accident brought you and your family back to Europe, where my grandfather was able to be treated by the best doctors. A miracle that he survived. And lucky for that! Otherwise, I would not be sitting here writing this ode to you. Anyway, you would never return to your native Surabaya. 

So years later - in 2005 - almost thirty-five years after your death, one of your grandchildren, Aunt Mies's daughter and the author of that book, then did that DNA test. Only then - reluctantly - was it allowed to be talked about. Your lineage, your Indonesian blood. Our Indonesian blood.

My son, or your great-grandchild, was almost two at the time. And he was, like me, born with that dark spiky hair. So he got that from me, we just thought at the time. Or from my Frisian great-grandfather. He also had that black hair and was always called the Spanjool. So. That's why everyone always thinks I'm from Spain. Even though my mother is from Sweden. But now son dearest also had light-coloured skin. And he didn't get that from me! Definitely from his father somehow, who else? Although his father is just an Amsterdammer.

One day I was walking along the dyke on Terschelling with the pram. I passed an elderly couple. They peered curiously into the Bugaboo. They didn't ask for the child's name, no no. They saw that little child with the dark spiky hair and said, ‘Is his father an immigrant?’

‘No, I am,’ I replied somewhat bewildered. ‘Or at least my Swedish mother.’ Haha, that confusion in their eyes! ‘Swedes aren't dark at all, are they?’ I saw them thinking. Anyway, now I know better.

(pause)

Peanuts are dark. 

(pause)

Exactly a month before I, your seventh great-grandchild, was hurled into the world, you breathed your last. Were you reincarnated in me then? At least your dark hair. Because while my brothers and sister came into the world as blonde angels, I was the rascal with those dark sprites and brown fun eyes. But where my dark colours came from was a mystery at the time. There was considerable speculation: maybe from the neighbour? Or the milkman? Or that travelling fair?

(pause)

Do you know what my favourite jam was as a child? You'll never guess! So that was ginger jam. An eight-year-old kid who loves ginger jam? Can also sit with heels on the floor. Look here, the little finger. Always looks a bit like this when drinking tea. And this jawline. That angularity. Dutch women don't have that. And eyes from Surabaya. That man saw that! I wasn't even in Surabaya! No, I was in Yogyakarta, hundreds of kilometres from there. But he looked at me like that, like, ‘There's something about you...’ And promptly he asked, ‘How much Indonesian are you?’ And I thought, ‘How can this stranger tell from me? I never got that question otherwise.' I kept my mouth shut and just looked at him, well curious where that question came from. And then he started talking about my eyes. ‘You've eyes from Surabaya,’ utterly convinced. And I believed him. I mean, I wanted nothing more than to have the same eyes of my great-grandmother from Surabaya. Your eyes, then, dear Maria Magdalena. And my son too, for that matter. He also has those eyes. Eyes from Surabaya.