But the unscripted nature of people's accounts could only partially be attributed
to the lack of an appreciative audience. Their accounts also took shape in
the negative space around the one widely circulated and gendered local script
for colonial service: the tale of the sexually exploited and lnorally debased female
domestic. Through evasions and silences people worked to keep their accounts
from fitting into this ready mold, even as they alluded to it in whispers.
If in Dutch literature colonial servants are either nurturing or threatening, in Indonesian
literature they appear as figures of calculating opportunism or pathetic
victims of power. It is not the care-giving bnbu but the seductive nyni, the
housernaid/concubine, who dominates portrayals of colonial domestic roles.62
Merely to state that one had worked in a Dutch home was to invoke such plots,
to stir suspicion, to suggest a hidden story. Even to acknowledge having known
women who were "kept" and/or sexually assaulted was to risk being tainted
~nese