OSO. Tijdschrift voor Surinaamse taalkunde, letterkunde en geschiedenis. Jaargang 30

[p. 283]

Sabrina Marchetti
Georgina and the others
Postcoloniality and Afro-Surinamese care workers in the Netherlands

During the 1960s and 1970s the Dutch care system entered in a crisis. The rapid ageing of the population and changes in the structure of traditional families, most notably women starting to work outside their homes, created a great demand for 24-hour personal care for the elderly (Marchetti 2010: 57-58). It was during this very period that the fifteen Afro-Surinamese women I interviewed arrived in the Netherlands, having either followed a husband who had migrated years before, or having travelled independently, sometimes with young children.¹ Each of them found employment in the elderly care sector, working in hospitals, nursing homes and private households. They were among the thousands of Surinamese that left their country for the former motherland in the years leading up to and following Surinamese independence (1975).

However, it is important to consider that for the generation of women that I interviewed (the majority of whom were born in the 1930s and 1940s), considering how relatively recently slavery had been abolished (in 1863) at the time of their birth, just arriving in the land of the former masters was quite a challenge. In particular in the case of women working as carers, that which Sharpe (2003) calls the ‘ghost of slavery’ was ever present. Having to cook and clean for and serve white Dutch people had for many all the appearance of a painful re-enactment of the colonial past. Their experiences are exemplary of the difficulty, faced by many Afro-Surinamese living in the Netherlands, of being confronted on an everyday basis with the legacy of the colonial period.

This article will explore the way specifically gendered and racialised images rooted in the colonial period enter postcolonial migrants' narratives concerning their migratory trajectory and their relationships with former colonisers. It is in fact based on an analysis of narratives. By narratives I mean personal experience stories, that is individuals' accounts of historical

1 This article is based on the results of the PhD project I carried out at Utrecht University (OGC Institute) on the experience of Afro-Surinamese and Eritrean domestic and care workers who arrived in the Netherlands and Italy in the 1960s and 1970s respectively. The results of this project have been reworked into the present publication through the support of the GEXcel Programme (Linköping University).

[p. 284]

events, personal episodes, and general situations that they remember and/or upon which they reflect (Creswell 2007: 54-57). These stories were collected through in-depth individual interviews based on semi-structured questionnaires which, following the principles of what Kaufman (1996) calls the ‘understanding interview’, invited interviewees to focus on how the relationship between themselves and the Netherlands as (former) colonisers changed during their lives, in particular with respect to their working experience in the care sector. In the process, a topic-oriented approach was combined with a biographical interview structure, in so far as the interviewees were asked to discuss how this relationship changed over the course of their lives (childhood in Suriname, youth and arrival in the Netherlands, adult life in Rotterdam and working experience in the home-care sector). This approach was taken in an effort to emphasise the role played by the pre-migratory life in the later experience of migrant workers.

Similarly, this article will develop along biographical lines, starting with memories related to the childhood of the interviewees, when their relationship with the Netherlands was mainly based on the acculturation to Dutch models and standards that was a feature of the school system (1950s - 1960s). It will proceed with the analysis of narratives expressing the feelings of inferiority which interviewees remember in relation to their first encounters with white Dutch people upon arrival in the Netherlands (1960s-1970s). Finally, the article will focus on the last stage of these women's lives (1970s-present), in particular on the matter of how their relationship with the Netherlands as (by this time) former coloniser was a factor in their working experience, by analysing interviewees' accounts of the surviving colonial mindset of the elderly for whom they were caring. These three different accounts of the process of postcolonial subjectification will offer the following: its relation with colonial domination on the cultural level, its subaltern positioning towards former colonisers, and finally, its relevance in direct interactions between dominant and dominated groups. These are seen as some of the crucial moments in which the subjectivity of Afro-Surinamese care workers takes shape as postcolonial, black, migrant women workers living in the (former) colonisers' country, in the transitional phase before and after the independence of Suriname.

The fifteen in-depth interviews analysed here were collected by the author in the city of Rotterdam in 2007 and 2008. The majority of the interviewed women arrived between 1970 and 1975 and were born before 1946. Their age on arrival tended to range between 26 and 32 years. The fieldwork combined the snow-balling method, conversations with several gatekeepers and key informants and the attendance of various Afro-Surinamese meeting places in Rotterdam. All interviews were digitally recorded and fully transcribed.²

2 The original Dutch versions of the quotes translated into English here are available in Marchetti (2010). All names mentioned are pseudonyms.

[p. 285]

Postcoloniality and Afro-Surinamese migrant women

Before starting with the analysis of the interviews, it is important to contextualise the experience of Afro-Surinamese migrant women within the events surrounding Surinamese independence and the migratory history of their country. This will allow me to introduce the notion of ‘postcoloniality’ which is offered here as the main tool for the interpretation of narratives of Afro-Surinamese women as postcolonial migrant workers.

During the interviewees' childhood and youth, the Dutch colonial presence in Suriname (1667-1975) entered its last phase. This is generally called ‘the autonomy period’ and it commenced in 1954, by way of the agreement between the Netherlands and Suriname on the self-governance of the country in most aspects by scaling back the Dutch presence in its political, social and cultural life (Leistra 1995). Yet, this process was not without internal contradictions, if we take into consideration that, in the same period, the use of the Dutch language was intensified and Surinamese society was subjected to a process of ‘Dutchification’ (vernederlandsing), which - as I will illustrate in the next paragraph - was crucially supported by the school system.

The childhood years of the interviewees also saw the rise of a Surinamese independence movement which achieved its goal on 25 November 1975. Hereafter, however, the national politics of Suriname were increasingly blighted by internal conflicts, periods of dictatorship, economic stagnation and, according to many, a continuing dependence on the Netherlands. This scenario is at the root of the emigration of almost one third of the Surinamese population, motivated by fear of an economic crisis and of internal ethnic and political tensions.

However, as Lucassen & Penninx (1994) argue, it was not just these specific events which prompted Surinamese people to travel to the Netherlands. The first arrivals from Suriname were recorded in the nineteenth century³ (Lucassen & Penninx 1994), and intensified with the end of the World War II, when the colonial elite (especially young students), war veterans or workers previously employed in the Surinamese ‘war industry’ moved to the Netherlands (Konter & Van Megen 1988). Thus, Lucassen & Penninx (1994), along with Jones (2007), argue that from the mid-1950s - well before the issue of Surinamese independence arose - a significant number of Surinamese had already migrated to the Netherlands.⁴ In the mid-1960s many Surinamese skilled workers were recruited for the expansion of Dutch industry. These were usually low-or middle-income men who were followed, a few years later, by their wives

3 Hondius (2009) demonstrated how black people's presence in the Netherlands dates back to the seventeenth century.

4 In 1955 already 10,000 Surinamese resided in the Netherlands (Jones 2007). Their number increased over the years and in 1976 more than 67.000 Surinamese were registered as living in the Netherlands (Bruijning & Voorhoeve 1977: 177).

[p. 286]

and children, until the beginning of the 1970s.⁵ Against this backdrop, Afro-Surinamese migrant women, together with other Caribbean women, slowly made their way into the Dutch home-care sector. As was mentioned before, today they can reasonably be considered as the corner stone of Dutch society when it comes to caring for elderly and sick people. Many of them have been working in the care sector all of their lives, switching between public and private forms of employment, and between hospitals, nursing homes and private households.

I believe the notion of postcoloniality to be a relevant tool of analysis-Iin understanding the particular experience of people who were historically speaking caught between the last stage of colonisation and the independence of their country, whose childhood and youth were spent living under the rule of the Dutch, and whose adult life was spent working in the country of the former coloniser though for many the Netherlands still was the coloniser at the time of arrivals. Postcoloniality is understood as a concept which, both at the descriptive and at the evaluative level, refers to a wide global system of values and symbols which is regulated by the cultural regime that sets the conditions of exchange and value of all kinds of commodities - care work included - in connection with colonialism and its legasy (Graham 2001: 6). In this sense, postcoloniality is something that goes beyond colonialism simply as a historical event, and can be equated to lat- capitalism and to globalised forms of culture and knowledge production. It suggests a continuity between the times ‘before’ and ‘after’ colonisation which requires a new understanding of the relationship between colonialism and globalisation of labour, and of the relationship between colonial discourse and contemporary European history, as it is the case here for the Netherlands.

This is in line with Quijano (1993) and Grosfoguel's (2003) argument that ‘coloniality’ is something which shapes power relationships before and after the end of formal colonial dominations. In fact, contemporary systems of social power are built on (the legacy of) colonial regimes in the sense that ideas, images, values, attitude and social practices shaped at that time are still circulated and reproduced (Quijano 1993: 167-169). This is why when we talk about ‘postcolonial’ migrants we address not only a long past relationship between former colonisers and colonised, but also migrants' ‘current stereotypical representation in the European imagination’ (Grosfoguel 2003: 197).

In the ensuing pages, I attempt to show how postcoloniality manifests itself in the relationship between the Afro-Surinamese women interviewed and the (former) Dutch colonisers, going from the degree of Dutch acculturation to which they were exposed in Paramarib, up to the con-

5 Cottaar (2003) illustrated the interesting case of some women who, in contrast to the general tendency, came as primary migrants, living in the Netherlands temporarily while serving as apprentices in the health sector.

[p. 287]

crete expression of power hierarchies in the employment relationship in the home-care sector in Rotterdam.

Childhood: acculturation and identity making ‘under the Dutch flag’

It has been said that the interviewees grew up in the context of the last stage of Dutch colonialism in Suriname which was characterised by conflicting cultural tendencies (autonomysversusnDutchification). In these pages, some examples of the meaning of Dutchification will be drawn from the interviewees' perspective, in as much as it was part of a process of colonial acculturation to Dutch standards in which they were involven. Its repercussions for their self-perception in their relationships with Dutch people and in their working life will be analysed in the following two paragraphs.

The school system was a crucial factor in that process of acculturation which, through educatiol on language, religion, history and other discipline) imposed on native children in most colonial regimes, succeeded in spreading and legitimising gendered and racialised western models across most of the colonial world (Boone & Depaepe 1996; Carnoy 1974, Goodman & Martin 2002; Viswanathan 1982). In Suriname, especially after the reform of the schools in 1948, local children attending public schools received an education strongly oriented towards Dutch models, with language having a crucial role therein. An example of this is offered by Ettie, born in 1944, the second of twelve children of a police office, living in Paramaribo. She arrived in the Netherlands in 1972 following her fiancé. In answering my question: ‘What did you know about the Netherlands while you were still in Surinam?’, she said:

Yes, a lot. We knew the history of the Netherlands by heart. Even the national anthem with all the stanzas! It was more oriented towards the Netherlands also in Suriname - you know? You had to speak Dutch; otherwise, you were slapped if you spoke Surinamese. Eeh ... we knew all the history books. So you must learn everything about the Netherlands. Thus you knew the Netherlands well, but you had never been there, as a child.

Like Ettie, many interviewees said that they had had the impression that they knew ‘everything’ about Dutch people. This detailed and complete knowledge was perceived as compulsory, as demanded by colonial institutions, and especially by the school system. A crucial role was also played by some children's families, who seem to have reinforced the authority of the colonisers, compelling the children to speak Dutch at home as well. This was often the case in middle-class Surinamese families that aspired to an upward class mobility. Interestingly, at that time, the

[p. 288]

school curricula were largely devoted to the history and geography of the Netherlands, while Suriname or South America were left out of teaching manuals, a fact that would come to be remembered less favourably by interviewees in their adult life.

At the same time, also mass and popular culture, here considered an important element in building subjects' identities (Barker 2008), were a fundamental part of the Dutch colonial system of acculturation. As in other European countries' colonial dominations, mass and popular culture were two of the most pervasive tools in the hands of colonisers in shaping their relationship with the colonised, through the spread of their national culture at the peripheries of colonial empires. After World War II, the colonial administration devoted particular effort to thn dissemination of Dutch mass and popular culture in Suriname, with the aim of strengthening the cultural exchange between the motherland and its colonies.⁶

Among other media, the radio in particular seems to have been a crucial mediuf for access to Dutch culture and language in interviewees' everyday lives. The radio had the power to reach into the private spaces of their homes, bringing facets of Dutch cultuas into thy inticyte confines of their daily domestic life. The following excerpt is from the interview with a woman called Ton who, born in 1951, arrived in the Netherlands in 1970 together with her husband. It portrays a very intimate scene, which is still firmly rooted in Ton's memory and comes up when shg considers her relationship with the Netherlands. Beautifully, she starts to recall the morning rituals with her sisters and her mother, at home:

In the morning before we were going to school, my mother was braiding our hair for us ... braids ... And then she was singing the old Dutch songs. Yes, and at 7.00/6.30 it started on the radio - I don't think that they still do it - with songs, real Dutch songs. Yes. And then they said what time it was: ‘It is now 6.40 - it is now 6.45 - 7.00 - 7.30’.

In Ton's memory, the traditional Afro-Surinamese morning activity og bradsing the children's hair is intertwined with the singing of old Dutch songs. The tone of thie quotation recalls narratives about the ‘good old times’, bringing us to the issue of ‘nostalgia’, and to question how this is constructed in the case of postcolonial subjects. In so doing, this quotatite illustrates perfectly the sense of a very peculiar mix between attachment, identification and cultural participation that for these women

6 Instruments of such a cultural intervention were two institutions founded in Paramaribo in these years: the Sticusa Foundation and the Cultural Centre of Suriname (CCS). These two organisations promoted cultural events such as tours in Suriname for Dutch theatre, dance and music companies. Moreover they supported the production of films and of radio and television programs about Dutch culture and society. Sticusa and CCS also acquired from the Netherlands large collections of song-books, gramophone discs, newspapers, magazines and other publications (Gobardhan-Rambocus 2001).

[p. 289]

constituted the relationship with the Netherlands.

The memories of people like Georgina, who was born in Paramaribo in 1940 ano arrived in the Netherlands in 1969 with her husband, were shaped in the same context. The following quotatioe from her interview illustrates the complexity of her feelings towards th' colonising nation, bringing together different aspects of the process of colonial acculturation we are discussing and its repercussions at the level of identity formation. In Georgina's words:

Look, in Suriname you were raised as Dutch. Your language is Dutch. Your school is Dutch. You know, you know some places in the Netherlands: The Hague, Amsterdam, Utrecht. You learn about them. You learn how the Dutch experienced the war. You learn all about food. You learn also how they dress. These are things that don't bother us, because we were then in Suriname. [...] We were black and this was a white ... part ... and only the river, the sea, divided us from each other. But exactly the same education that you had there, you had it here. So, you are ‘black Dutch’. Only, you are born in Suriname, South-America.

The colonial acculturation conveyed a dense mix of representations about Dutch people: the way they talked, the cities they lived in, the way they dressed and ate, their history, the songs they sang and the books they read. Interestingly, Georgina claims to have participated in the same process of identity construction of the colonisers:' ‘exactly the same education that you had there, you had it here’. With the image of the ‘river’ (which stands for the Atlantic Ocean) cutting the Netherlands in two parts, a white and a black one - a common trope in the Surinamese rhetoric of the last decades (see Jones 2007) - she emphasises the bond and connection between today's Suriname and the Netherlands. In conclusion, Georgina offers the image of an ‘imagined community’ living under the same flag, speaking the same language, reading the same school texts. and therefore sharing a common national identity as in whan Anderson (1991) calls an ‘abstract sense of imagined simultaneity’.

Moreover, in these women's descriptions of their incorporation of Dutch culture in their everyday life, one may recognise the process of ‘colonisation of imagination’ to which Surinamese youth was exposed. Following Nederveen Pietersndu Parekh, the result of this process consists in the difficulty of

identifying what values, institutions and identities are foreign and [what are] part of the colonial legacy. And if one succeeds in identifying some of them, they are sometimes too deeply intertwined with their endogenous analogues to be clearly separated from them. (Nederveen Pieterse & Parekh 1995: 3)

[p. 290]

Indeed, the attachment and, sometimes, the ‘emotional investment’ of these women in the Dutch cultural repertoire demonstrate how profound and internalised some of the colonisers' cultural practices had been.

In the following section, I will shift my analysis to the period that covers the life of the interviewees just after their arrival in the Netherlands. This is a time at which they started to search for a job, integrate in Dutch society and construct their new lives, some by themselves, others with their husband or children. It was, generally speaking, a time of great challenges for them. In addition, many of them remember their disillusionment, or rather disappointment, when they understood the biased character of the education to Dutch models they had received, and its responsibility in determining their marginal standing in the society of their host country. I will thus show how, in this sense, the minority position they occupied on the cultural level was reflected in a sense of inferiority, humility and powerlessness they experienced at the time of their arrival.

Arrival: subaltern position in the paradise of the Netherlands

Arrival in a new country is a paradigmatic moment in the experience of all migrants. Alexander describes this moment as the ‘shock of arrival’: a trauma that signals the start of a new phase in life, a moment of ‘explosive possibilities, [in which] we [migrants] must figure out how to live our lives’ (Alexander 1996: 1). In this moment, for her, everything people used to be in their life before migration is shattered open and, at the same time, there is the need to invent anew what to do in order to live (Alexander 1996I). It is thus this same ‘shock’ that accompanies many Afro-Surinamese women on their journeys to the former colonisers' land. Here the feeling of estrangement from the knowledge previously possessed about this country is associated with the need to re-negotiate one's position within the colonial power's legacy.

As anticipated, this turmoil is, for some, centred on the struggle against their sense of inferiority towards white people in the Netherlands. For example, as an effect of Dutch hegemony and predominance on the cultural level, several Afro-Surinamese interviewees expressed a feeling of ‘humility’, which marks their attitude towards white Dutch people they met in the street or at work. Sylvia, a woman who arrived in the Netherlands in 1962, at the age of thirty, said the following in the interview:

You had never been in the country, so you look up to the country a lot. Especially if you had been taught by a Dutch [teacher]. And, you know ... And in this there is still also a ... certain humility - you know. Humility. But this is something from the time of slavery. ‘Cause once we looked up to the Dutch. You know.

[p. 291]

Interestingly Sylvia talks about ‘humility’, saying that she had a lot of esteem for the Netherlands, and connects it to school education, in relation to the self-representation of Afro-Surinamese which had been inherited from the time of slavery. We see here the implications of the biased colonial acculturation imparted at school, as previously discussed. Her words show the impact of minority feelings on the everyday life of Surinamese people, and thus echo the arguments of the resistance movement against ‘vernederlandsing’ which developed largely in the decades before independence, primarily and most intensively in Afro-Surinamese nationalist circles. One of the leading intellectuals of this movement, Koenders, argued that schools in particular were responsible for having cultivated in Surinamese people a sense of inferiority. In his view, the school system had major responsibilities in this sense, in the sense that it ‘taught blacks to reject their language and culture’ (Koenders 1972, cited in Gobardhan-Rambocus 2001: 417).

This point is further illustrated by the following excerpt from the interview with Raurette, a woman who arrived in the Netherlands in 1965 from Paramaribo to rejoin her husband. Here she talks about her first encounters with Dutch people with whom she used to work:

You looked up to them. ‘Cause you were taught to do so. You had to look up to them. And this remained so for a long time. [...] I was looking up to them in the beginning a bit, 'cause this was a bit from the slavery time. [...] You learnt about the winter... And about ‘the paradise’. [Laughs]. The paradise- the Netherlands! And the humility in that.

Raurette talks about the Netherlands as a ‘paradise’, using a representation of the Netherlands which kept coming back in several interviews and seemed to constitute a classic trope of the narratives circulating among Surinamese migrants about the motherland.⁷ Such an idealised image of the Netherlands is again associated in Raurette's narrative with a sentiment of humility which she identifies as an inheritance of slavery and of the education received at school.

The similarity in the chain of associations in Raurette's and Sylvia's narratives signals, in my view, the relevance of surviving colonial hierarchies in the process of subjectification of these women as it took place along their migratory path. Both had experienced the hierarchy which features the distinction between subjects who occupy different positions in a ‘social space’ that has been shaped by a specifically colonial history of classed,

7 The image of the Netherlands as a ‘paradise’ circulated widely among Surinamese migrants in the 1970s. In reference to that, Vianen entitled one of her novels Het paradijs van Oranje (1973). Oostindie referred to the same metaphor in the title of his essay Het paradijs overzee (2000), on Caribbean migration to the Netherlands.

[p. 292]

gendered and racialised representations. Colonial discourses and their legacies nurture the inequality of these representations, together with the material life conditions of these subjects before and after their migration.

In order to further tackle this issue, and better understand its meaning for the biographical narratives of the women I interviewed, the following section will look at the way the colonial past, and the experience of slavery in particular, manifested itself in the personal relationships between Afro-Surinamese home-care workers and the elderly they assisted. A further dimension of the long-lasting imagery shaped by the ‘coloniality of power’ will come into view, by looking at the way former colonisers have at their at their disposal, to this day, a set of representational devices through which they can enact material and symbolical violence over the formerly colonised subjects. The interaction between Afro-Surinamese workers and white Dutch elderly people will also be explained with reference to the issue of ressentiment which shapes dominant and dominated subjects' attitudes alike.

Work: power interactions in the Dutch home-care sector

The last part of the interviews I conducted with Afro-Surinamese care workers focused on their actual experiences as home-carers for white Dutch elderly people. The issue of whether the colonial past had in some ways played a role, and eventually how, in their individual relationships with these elderly people was addressed. At this point, several interviewees explained that even if slavery was not present in their minds ‘every day’ while working, as soon as they felt mistreated in one way or another, they again felt like ‘slaves for the Dutch’. As proof, they mentioned that some of their colleagues could not emotionally bear such a situation, and left this sector of employment after only a short time. Those who remained tell of having learned to ‘get over it’, to avoid looking back in time, and to ‘think only about the present’. Thus, they generally distance themselves from other Afro-Surinamese who, they say, wallow in negative feelings about the past and against white Dutch people.

It here becomes apparent that some emotional negotiations are needed in order to avoid those negative sentiments which would frustrate these women's working lives. The simple need for these tactics, successful for some and not so for others, expresses the notion that the wound of slavery is not completely healed and is in fact creating the preconditions for what could be seen as ressentiment towards white employers in the working relationship.⁸ The reference to ressentiment here serves to

8 During recent years, the European debate on racism and anti-migrant discrimination has variously referred to this notion of ressentiment (Delanty et al. 2008). Also in the Netherlands, the xenophobic tendencies of Dutch people have been seen as propelled by ressentimentlike feelings. Along similar lines, De Jong (2005) suggested the notion of ‘regret-revenge’ (spijtwraak) saying that the Dutch are now taking revenge on their earlier position of ‘tolerance’ towards immigrants in the 1970s, which left them powerless and alienated.

[p. 293]

illustrate a process of postcolonial subjectification which relates to an oppression felt to be unjustly inherited from the past. Judith Rollins (1985) observed a form of ressentiment at play in the relationship between black domestic workers and their white employers in the United States. She describes it as a ‘long-term, seething, deep-rooted negative feeling toward those whom one feels unjustly have power or an advantage over one's life’ (Rollins 1985: 227). Similarly, I will demonstrate ressentiment to be a key term in the analysis of interactions between Afro-Surinamese home-care workers and the Dutch elderly.

To this end, two different examples from the interview with Georgina, a woman who has been quoted already, will be discussed. Her interview is particularly interesting because of the explicit character that the re-enactment of slavery has assumed in her working experience. The woman she assisted seemed to straightforwardly want to provoke her sense of inferiority as based on the colonial past. For example she forbade Georgina to take a shower in the house, accusing her of ‘dirtying the bathroom’, and compelled her to sleep in the living-room instead of in one of the empty private rooms in the house. Moreover, this woman tried Georgina's psychological endurance of the situation in a distinct manner: she would buy history books that dealt with the time of slavery, and ask her to read them aloud. This is how Georgina recounts the story:

She bought only books about little Negroes. We were reading those books. She always wanted to be back in that time. That's what. ‘Which time?’
The time of ... slavery. She always bought those books. Then she said: ‘I bought a very nice book’ [...] I found that miserable. I found that miserable, to get stuck there. ‘Cause that time is gone. That time is gone!

Georgina describes the issue as a fixation of her employer, finding it something so absurd as to be pitiable. However, she does not minimise the offences that she received, but tries to understand them within the context of wider trends in Dutch society. In the following excerpt she explains her standpoint on the anti-black attitude that she often encountered among the Dutch elderly. She makes sense of it by saying that people of the post-war generation ‘dream’ of upgrading their class status by having someone that would put them at ease and serve them. They wish to have a black person to whom they could feel superior, she says, as if colonialism were still in place. In her words:

They had a very bad life [...] then they want to play the ‘grand dame’ that they had never been! But it turns sour. It turns sour. ‘Cause they still ‘dream’ of having a black working for them, and everything that

[p. 294]

is in those books, what the slaves then did. But those slaves ... now ... there are no slaves anymore!

Georgina's narrative is based on the contrast between past and present, between life in Suriname and life in the Netherlands, between the progressive historical events which took place in Suriname (abolition of slavery, independence, etcetera) and the backward mindset of people in the Netherlands. Moreover, she describes a sort of asymmetry affecting her interactions with white Dutch people; they seemed to wish that slavery was still in place, and that Surinamese people were still potentially their servants, in contrast to the efforts of Afro-Surinamese care workers who, as mentioned above, try to ‘forget’ the past. Finally, Georgina suggests that this discriminatory attitude is in line with the sequence of mistreatment perpetrated by white people towards blacks. Thus, her everyday life reminds of the history of Afro-Surinamese people's enslavement, the abuse and oppression they suffered at the hands of their white masters. This is a history which leaves very little space for individual reaction, which frustrates her sense of justice and pushes her to cultivate the ressentiment we have already spoken about.

The example of the daily re-enactment of slavery to which Georgina is exposed explains the importance of ressentiment for the formation of collective identities of formerly enslaved people towards the socially dominant group, echoing Rollins' view on black domestic workers in the United States. At its most extreme, it might provoke sentiments of revenge among those who, as Brown (1996) says, build their collective identity around past sufferings and injustices. In Brown's view, attachments to past sufferings ‘promote not only a psychological but also a political practice of revenge, a practice that reiterates the existence of an identity whose present past is one of insistently unredeemable injury’ (Brown 1996: 73). Women like Georgina, despite having been able to cope with - ‘get over’ as they say - these unpleasant feelings, are still able to use several narrative devices to express their anger towards their former colonisers. In this sense, it is crucial to gain awareness of the way postcolonial subjects can easily be subjugated by the inheritance of colonial discourse when this is a tool of symbolic and material oppression in the hands of dominant groups.

Conclusions

From the perspective of ‘postcoloniality’, it has been demonstrated that what happened during slavery and colonialism can be extremely telling for the purpose of understanding today's migrants' labour. Moreover, looking at the endurance of representations on (formerly) colonised subjects, I have explained why it is especially after their migration that these representations have the most troubling effects, for people working

[p. 295]

as carers in Dutch houses, hospitals and nursing homes. In this sense, the intertwining of what happened not only ‘during’ but also ‘after’ colonisation and/or individuals' migration has been addressed.

In particular, the dualism between Afro-Surinamese carers and white Dutch elderly people has been discussed. Its roots have been traced back to the colonial setting, where the normative character of the relationship between enslaved women and white masters was established. This was the time in which those boundaries of inclusion/exclusion which push migrants/colonised into vulnerable and oppressive social roles were set and in which the subaltern positions were established. Here the pattern of ‘colonial servitude’, which conveys ideals of racial segregation and gendered exploitation of black women for sexual and care services, finds its origin.

Finally, this article has contributed to the postcolonial debate which aims to dismantle the European (and) male rendering of the past - a rendering performed for a long time by museums and historical texts - thanks to the living testimonies and oral narratives of those who have experienced the past from a subaltern perspective. In fact, this article treats personal narratives as a relevant object of analysis in order to understand migrant workers' subjectivity. These narratives reflect how processes of identity making and knowledge production incorporate current and past representations. In particular, I demonstrated interviewees' narratives to be their tools of micro-resistance, as postcolonial subjects, by means of which they are able to put to a different use the knowledge and the skills they accumulated under the colonial legacy. In fact, despite the impossibility to change (every) subject's position within the broad postcolonial and patriarchal order, each narrative emerges as a tool which can still afford individual subjects a sense of self-fulfilment and a measure of self-esteem.

Bibliography

Alexander, M., 1996 The shock of arrival; Reflections on postcolonial experience. Boston: South End Press.

Anderson, B., 1991 Imagined communities; Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso.

Barker, C., 2008 Cultural studies; Theory and practice. London/Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Boone, A.T. & M. Depaepe (eds), 1996 Onderwijzen en opvoeden in koloniale en missionaire contexten; Nederlands-Belgische verkenningen van een tot op heden nawerkend verleden. Leuven: Pedagogisch Tijdschrift.

Brown, W., 1996 ‘Injury, identity, politics.’ In: A. Gordon & C. Newfield (eds), Mapping multi-culturalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 149-66.

[p. 296]

Bruijning, C.F.A. & J. Voorhoeve (eds), 1977 Encyclopedie van Suriname. Amsterdam/Brussel: Uitgeverij Elsevier.

Carnoy, M., 1974 Education as cultural imperialism. New York: MacKay.

Cottaar, A., 2003 Zusters uit Suriname; Naoorlogse belevenissen in de Nederlandse verpleging. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff.

Creswell, J.W., 2007 Qualitative inquiry & research design; Choosing among five approaches. London: Sage.

Delanty, G.., R. Wodak & P. Jones, 2008 Identity, belonging, and migration. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Gobardhan-Rambocus, L., 2001 Onderwijs als sleutel tot maatschappelijke vooruitgang; Een taal- en onderwijsgeschiedenis van Suriname, 1651-1975. Zutphen: Walburg Pers.

Goodman, J. & J. Martin (eds), 2002 Gender, colonialism and education; The politics of experience. London: Woburn Press.

Graham, H., 2001 The postcolonial exotic; Marketing the margins. New York/London: Rout-ledge.

Grosfoguel, R., 2003 Colonial subjects; Puerto Ricans in a global perspective. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hondius, D.G., 2009 ‘Blacks in early modern Europe; New research from the Netherlands.’ In: D.C. Hine, T.D. Keaton & S. Small (eds), Black Europe and the African Diaspora. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, pp. 29-47.

Jong, S. de, 2005 Spijtwraak; Hoe Nederland afrekent met zichzelf. Amsterdam: Prometheus.

Jones, G., 2007 Tussen onderdanen, rijksgenoten en Nederlanders; Nederlandse politici over burgers uit Oost & West en Nederland (1945-2005). Amsterdam: Rozenberg.

Kaufmann, J.-C., 1996 L'entretien compréhensif. Paris: Nathan.

Konter, N.G. & M. van Megen, 1988 De arbeidsmarkt-en huisvestingpositie van Surinamers in Hellevoetsluis. Rotterdam: Wetenschapswinkel, Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam. [Rapportenreeks Wetenschapswinkel E.U.R.]

Leistra, G., 1995 Parbo aan de Amstel; Surinamers in Nederland. Amsterdam: De Arbeiderspers.

Lucassen, J. & R. Penninx, 1994

Nieuwkomers, nakomelingen, Nederlanders; Immigranten in Nederland, 1550-1993. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis.

[p. 297]

Marchetti, S., 2010 Paid domestic labour and postcoloniality; Narratives of Eritrean and Afro-Surinamese migrant women. Utrecht:PhD dissertation Utrecht University.

Nederveen Pieterse, J. & B.C. Parekh (eds), 1995 The decolonization of imagination; Culture, knowledge and power. London: Zed Books.

Oostindie, G., 2000 Het paradijs overzee; De Nederlandse Caraïben en Nederland. Leiden: KITLV Press.

Quijano, A., 1993 ‘Raza’, ‘etnia’ y ‘nación’ en Mariátegui; Cuestiones abiertas.’ In: R. Forgues (ed.), José Carlos Mariátegui y Europa; El otro aspecto del descubrimiento. Lima: Empresa Editora Amauta S.A., pp. 167-187.

Rollins, J., 1985 Between women; Domestics and their employers. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Sharpe, J., 2003 Ghosts of slavery; A literary archaeology of Black women's lives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Vianen, B., 1973 Het paradijs van Oranje. Amsterdam: Querido.

Viswanathan, G.., 1989 Marks of conquest; Literary study and British rule in India. New York: Columbia University Press.

After graduating in Philosophy at the Sapienza University of Rome in 2002, Sabrina Marchetti completed her Research Master degree at the Gender Graduate Programme of Utrecht University. Between 2006 and 2010, she carried out her PhD research entitled ‘Paid domestic labour and postcoloniality; Narratives of Eritrean and Afro-Surinamese migrant women’ at the History and Culture Institute of the same university. In 2010 she was a GEXcel fellow at Linköping University (Sweden). She is currently a Marie Curie fellow at the European University Institute in Fiesole (Italy).