These recollections-from a Dutch man's memoir of his Indies boyhood
and Ibu Rubi, a former house servant-reference the banal intimacies of
everyday life, where sweat and scent could mark the lines of difference between
kinds of people and distill the dangers and pleasures of contact across
those lines. In contrast to nation-centered narratives, the domestic occupies a
space that is neither heroic, nor particularly eventful, nor marked by the brash
violences in which colonial relationships are more often thought to be located.
31 As significantly, there is no site where Dutch colonial memoirs linger
more knowingly, where more nostalgic energy has been placed.