Aya Zikken's Terug naar de atlasvlinder (Back to the Atlas Butterfly) (1981) recounts the author's nostalgic search for the arcadian setting of her childhood in contemporary Indonesia. In this chapter, I will interpret that search through a conceptualisation of the sublime, following Lyotard and Nancy, emphasising history's loss. The return journey to the lost landscape of Zikken's colonial youth is beset by endless delays and detours, while it is simultaneously indirectly invoked through intertextual, fictional, and imaginative allusions. Ignoring the contemporary life of Indonesia and Indonesians, Zikken ultimately finds again her pre-modern paradise – though not on Sumatra, where she actually lived during her childhood, but on the Mentawai Islands. Hence, the historical sublime is displaced, yet ultimately domesticated and beautified.

Preceding my analysis, I will briefly discuss the role of nostalgia in the literary-historical context of Dutch colonial literature about the Dutch East Indies within which Aya Zikken's travel narrative can be situated. Nostalgia plays a crucial role in the formation of an “Indies imagined community” as well as in the standard critical approaches to Dutch Indies literature. This excursion is relevant as my aim is to show that through the sublime and the traveller's nostalgic memory, the nostalgic desire saturating Terug naar de atlasvlinder both reconfirms and questions the nostalgia, which is dominant in an important strand of Dutch colonial literature about the Dutch East Indies.

Nostalgia for Empire: Tempo Doeloe Discourse

Colonial Repatriates’ Memory Communities

“Tempo Doeloe” is a recurrent term denoting a mode of nostalgia to the Dutch East Indies in contemporary Dutch culture and literature. The phrase ‘tempo doeloe’ literally means ‘the good old days’ in Pasar Malay, the colloquial colonial language that was used in the Dutch East Indies. In what follows I specifically focus on tempo doeloe discourses in the literary memories and experiences of immigrants and repatriates of the first generation, which have come to shape Dutch colonial memory, besides manifold other mnemonic writings.

If nostalgia, as argued in chapter 2, indeed responds to an experience of discontinuity, then there are a series of circumstances that gave former residents of the Dutch East Indies the impression that the link between their present and their past was abruptly broken.