absent
He would have never told her about Indonesia,
the years of Dutch colonialism,
his orphan childhood, an unknown blond father,
a mother in the shack of a kampong, the ghetto near the Tjiliwoeng river
that rinsed dishes and teeth and bodies,
washed away shit and dead chickens;
about a war fought by hybrids for a queen
whose picture they had not even seen on the centerpages of papers
that were burnt to light monsoon-drenched wood
beneath half-filled pots of sandy rice.
But like her grandmother, her mother,
her Indo family,
he would have talked about William of Orange, red white and blue,
Erasmus and van Gogh,
and gladly forgotten Japanese camps, and trying not to stay behind in one place,
hoping the bamboostick would come out of his asshole unbloody,
to pass for workcamps, and get some food,
not dehydrate in mudded corners of prisoncells
and be disposed in the kali, where other dead ones floated
into yawning cavities of crocodiles.
He would not have repeated the words of Sukarno–
death to the Indos; they are worse than the Dutch, they are Holland’s dogs–
the voice of a new airtight nation that sent him seasick to a fatherland
whose only reality was his utterance of its name.
But thirty years after his suicide
and away from her family, whose words smudged
the penciled history of the Dutch-Indonesian,
grandfather speaks.
