Van Gemert, STW; (2014) Of Unity and Disunity in-between: The post/colonial ‘unhomely’ in the works and lives of Jean Rhys and Hella S. Haasse. Tropos , 1 (1) 52 - 58. 10.14324/111.2057-2212.013.

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Abstract

The Creole authors Jean Rhys – born on Dominica in the former British West Indies – and Hella S. Haase – from the former Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia – challenge the idea of temporally unified colonial pasts as neatly preceding the postcolonial present. They do so by blending past and present in works on decolonisation published in the UK and the Netherlands. The real-life events of the authors’ colonial repatriation further stress that colonial unity is a construction. Within the colonial system, Rhys’s and Haasse’s biographical movements from the colonies to the European metropolises London and Amsterdam are considered re-turns to familiar motherlands (re-patriation). Yet Haasse and Rhys illustrate the complexities attached to these so-called ‘returns’ by staging and creatively appropriating them in their novels, showing a temporal and spatial disunity that proves to be inherent to both colonialism and post/colonialism.

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