Two in one
In nearly all her books Janus, the god with the two faces, arrives sooner or later. Sometimes in twin brothers or twin sisters, sometimes hidden in dilemmas, reflections, contradictions, duplications or distortions in time and space. Aunt Willemijn, a leading character in The Folk Dance, said it: in each human being there lives more than one person. For that reason many characters in Tonke Dragt's books have an alter ego or doppelgänger. This obsession with hidden meanings, complex personalities or the other side of the coin is part of her life. It was in the books she read as a child, in the circumstances of her adolescence, in the various cultural contradictions she experienced. The down-to-earth Dutch mentality versus the silent powers of Indonesia; the atheism of her father against the piety of her free-thinking Remonstrant mother; the exotic rituals of the Islamic servants as distinct from the stiff upper lip of the British rulers.
Letter for the King. Cover.
To this day such doubling and redoubling remains an essential part of her life. The all-embracing motif of the doppelgänger provides excellent opportunities to investigate universal themes like good and bad, life and death, war and peace. In doing so she can avoid the issues of the day and still reflect the spirit of the time.
This two-in-one approach also dominates her daily life. Apart from the gigantic doll's house through which she devises her stories, Tonke Dragt needs two apartments. One for storing everything that has to be saved because of her work, and one for sleeping and eating.
The Twin Brothers' Stories demonstrates how even her plots reflect the topics she investigates. As the two brothers become older and wiser and go through many more adventures the narrative follows the same pattern. Every new scene offers new views on our complex world, while perfect look-alikes are a natural opportunity for the game of double-cross that people have been playing since the beginning of time.
As an artist Tonke Dragt is a kind of Janus as well. She expresses herself just as easily in language as in images. From her childhood on she was always busy drawing, painting, making pictures and collages. Long before ‘double talents’ were seen as something very special, she used to illustrate her own stories. A rather natural thing, she has said more than once, as writing and drawing spring from the same source. For practical reasons she chose to train as a teacher of fine arts and worked as such tilt 1980. From then on she concentrated more on her writing skills, but continued to embellish her stories with her own visual images.
Like her talent and her mind, Tonke Dragt's oeuvre consists of two different parts. The novels that refer to a vague past date mainly from the early years of her writing career (1956-1969). In combining action with fairy tale, narrative art with conflict, adventure with moral lessons, they fall into the same range as many stories by colleagues like Paul Biegel, Jean Dulieu, Harriet Laurey, Leonie Kooiker or Daan Zonderland. The only exception is that Dragt's ‘other worlds’ are never populated by dwarfs, trolls or fairies. She prefers protagonists who are at the same time childish and mature, while her children despite their age find themselves confronted with adult dilemmas and tasks.
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