‘The past should not affect the children’: intergenerational hauntings in the homes of Indo-European families

Abstract

This article examines how the traumatic experiences of previous Indo-European or Indische generations shape future generations' intergenerational family dynamics and practices within home environments. By analysing life story interviews with Indo-Europeans from the first, second and third generation within twenty-one families, we illustrate how intergenerational hauntings are embodied, expressed and negotiated among various generations within home environments. The Indo-European diaspora has multi-generational 'mixed' Dutch-Indonesian ancestry and collective memories of the colonial Dutch East Indies, the Japanese occupation of Indonesia during the Second World War, the Indonesian National Revolution, and families' subsequent repatriation to the Netherlands. Shaped by their alleged success in having silently assimilated in the Netherlands, public narratives often neglect Indo-Europeans' daily realities and histories. We argue that personal and collective histories of war violence, racialized violence and displacement are deeply ingrained in Indo-European intergenerational and gendered family dynamics and practices in home environments. These intergenerational hauntings are imbued in both presence and absence in the various atmospheres and social and physical spaces of home.

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“…Ana Dragojlovic (2015) writes about the ways in which Indonesia-Dutch diasporas grapple with memories of war, imprisonment and torture, and how Indish travellers who do not purposely invest themselves in memory and genealogy work become overwhelmed by the atmosphere of certain foreign places' feeling connected to a sense of loss that is very much part of their familial history (Dragojlovic, 2015, p. 315). Personal and collective histories of war violence, racialized violence, and displacement, are ingrained in Indo-European intergenerational and gendered family dynamics, where the home becomes a part of a geography of trauma, as home is surrounded by memory of past violence (Doornbos & Dragojlovic, 2022).…”