"Squeezed between Rice and Potato: Personal Reflections on a Dutch (Post-)Colonial Youth."

Keynote lecture by Dutch author Adriaan van Dis at the Dutch Studies Conference on Colonial and Postcolonial Connections in Dutch Literature. University of California Berkeley, Sept. 16, 2011. Introduction by Jeroen Dewulf, Queen Beatrix Professor in Dutch Studies. http://dutch.berkeley.edu

Adriaan van Dis was born in 1946 into a family of repatriates from the Dutch East Indies, today's Indonesia. His childhood was marked by the repatriate milieu. Van Dis presents in this lecture a series of personal experiences that connect the mythological Dutch Indies with the color-sensitive South Africa, another former Dutch colony. Being himself a child of two cultures, the topic of cultural mixture is his main focus. For him, as a writer, it naturally implies a strong interest in Creole languages, or in the question of how race and racial discrimination can also influence linguistics. Van Dis concludes his lecture by highlighting similarities between his own post-colonial youth and that of the contemporary immigrant cultures in Europe. Clean your ears: the author will sing!