These quotations, two from Dutch memoirs and one from a Javanese woman
who worked as a nursemaid (Bnbu),recall colonial intimacies in distinctive
ways. Both Dutch accounts are marked by lush sentimentality, by sensuous evocations
of bodily intimacy. The nursemaid's comment also gestures to everyday
rhythms, to bodies and substances, smells and spaces. Hers too is strikingly
tactile. But it is spare. Emphasizing routines, tasks, commands, she evokes
a place of work, not the coziness of home. If for the remembered Dutch child
"home" is the body of the servant, for the nursemaid the place of belonging is
"the back.