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“Recovering black women's history”
WomenS SMdies ht. Printed in tile USA.
Forum, Vol. 16, No. 4, pp. 415-417,
1993
0277~53%/93 $6.00 + .oo copyTi@01993F+ergamotlPraaud.
“Recovering black women’s history” AMALIA DEEKMAN Former Student of Economic and Social History, With Special Attention to Women’s History
What follows is a description of my life, emphasizing three main shifts. This is a way of constructing a history of Amalia Deekman, but certainly not the history. I was born in 1966 in Paramaribo, the capital of Surinam. My story begins, however, when I am already a high school graduate with dreams and expectations, starting my new life as a university student. With a slight change of perspective, I then show the making of a university student, slowly growing conscious of the implications that academic and the related scientific business is likely to have for women. And at the end, an older and wiser Amalia takes over, armed with her university degree, more pragmatic but also more politically motivated. ACT ONE. AFTER HIGH SCHOOL: DREAMS AND EXPECTATIONS In 1985 I became a student at the University of Utrecht, in the faculty of Arts. I chose the history department, though it was only my second choice: I had dreamt of becoming a journalist, like so many others at the time, but I did not make it into the quota reserved for the media degree course. Thus, in spite of a marginal interest in the topic, I decided to plunge into the respectable-if by now not unpredictable- field of writing ancient history. The central issue being, of course, the problem of how to find reliable sources. Next thing you know I was involved in passionate discussions about the nature of historical writing and the problem of objectivity (already!). After that, history sort of won the day. This was my first acquaintance with history as a dynamic, narrative process, instead of being a static account of past ways of being. And yet, I kept at it precisely because I was caught in the magic spell of the past, that other, strange world. This romantic idea, however, was not all that made me go on with my history degree. I reckoned I still could be-
come a journalist, later on. After all, there I was, sweet 18, in the big city of Utrecht with all its challenges, dangers, and seductions. ACT TWO. WOMEN’S HISTORY: AN ACCIDENT It was not until my second year of the history degree that I actually got involved in women’s history. Before that I had heard about it, of course, but I couldn’t quite fathom what it was all about and more importantly-I was working hard to make my first academic year into a small personal triumph, so there wasn’t any time to spare for exciting new findings. Looking back I cannot actually recall why I didn’t get interested in women’s history before. I certainly can’t tell a comforting story of consciousness growing fast in a white male dominated scientific environment, although all that was to come later on. At the time women’s history wasn’t what my supervisors would call a ‘strategic’ choice, because to take up a feminist course would condemn you to marginality. You could certainly get your credits if you passed an exam in women’s history, but it wasn’t exactly a ‘career path’. What happened to me was that I took a women’s history course as just another degree course, which simply happened to focus on women. I guess you could say that it just popped up in my field of interest. To say I was unprepared is saying nothing: I had no sense of feminism, of women’s topics, women’s oppression or the battle against sexism. Before discovering women’s history, for me men and women were equal. Women’s history was the catalyst for my consciousness-raising: Afterwards I became aware of the inequalities in various fields of science, society, and everyday life. That awareness has not disappeared since. I was able to make the connection between my own life-experience as a woman and the intellectual and political framework which had produced wom415
416
AMALIADEEKMAN
en’s history. It must have been there and then that I sowed for the second time the seed of a sense of history as a living and structuring process and not as an objective, factual thing that only requires to be transcribed for posterity. So my studies went on with this knowledge simmering at the back of my mind. I did all the very nice things an academic-minded girl is expected to do: I became an editor of Dina-
Miek. Tijrischrift voor vrouwengeschiedenis. This is a women’s history academic journal produced by the women’s history students of Utrecht, which celebrates its tenth anniversary in 1993. Meanwhile, women’s history or the history of women had become an integral part of my study in social/economical history. At about this time I went to the university of Bielefeld (Germany) as a Women’s Studies Erasmus exchange student. I met very interesting people there from other European countries and I consider this period as an unforgettable experience. But just then things started to become serious. The government deadline that limits the period of undergraduate study to a maximum of 6 years was approaching fast and I had to set an end to it all. To think that the lucky generations before the latest university reform had an unlimited period for their undergraduate study! Graduating is a moment of re-assessment of everything: what had I learnt, all these years? And more importantly, what was to be the worthy topic of my final thesis, that ‘prestige product’ that all the students dream about, and compete with each other over, so as to see who gets to write ‘the ultimate story’ on a certain topic, in a certain era? ACT THREE. THE TURNING POINT: MY FINAL THESIS In 1991 I graduated with a final thesis on Surinam student migrants in the period 19201940; the title was: “Children in Holland.” It is not only the fruit of research and hard work, but also the result of doubt and certainty; it is a mixed bag of ideas about what history should mean and of straight applications of the skills in historical research which I had learnt at university. I began to realize that writing history always means writing from a political standpoint, no matter what
position you are actually defending. In my case, writing this thesis involved also the complex desire to make a difference within a professional historical context. It was the first sign of a deep-seated and growing unrest, of the need for a critique of the study I was just about to finish. I already knew that history was a process, not the account of static truths. I also knew that women’s history was a huge critique of so-called objective history, which is centered on the great men. I was also aware of the fact that many other critiques of women’s history were being formulated from feminist and lesbian studies, for example. But the perspective I was searching for: a critical standpoint on the writing of history from a black feminist perspective, was still lacking. At the end of my study I found that few white feminist historians had been interested in such a perspective, and I also found out that there weren’t any black feminist historians in the academic or scientific body, in any decision-making positions, capable of stimulating such an analysis. I realised that there was a huge field of unknown history out there, just waiting to be ploughed, if only there were enough ploughers willing to do the job. What I am talking about is the history of black women, analyzed within a black feminist perspective; colonial and post-colonial history, made up of voices which will become softer and softer, if nobody takes up the challenge to try to listen to them. The latest suggestion I had heard then was that it is up to black women to write their own history. This lack of interest almost made me fall off my chair. How could black women ever do it, considering they haven’t got access to even the most primary means of producing meaningful accounts of black women’s history? As long as black women are not fully represented in decision making positions, as long as we have no access to the policy-making about research projects, this suggestion sounds as a weak excuse indeed. How fast people forget that until recently, black women were looked upon as being incapable of any intellectual achievement at all, and certainly not of writing their own history! In conclusion, I would like to propose a strategy for recovering black history. Ladies of the Women’s Studies establishment: Take
Recovering Black Women’s History
up the challenge of real sisterhood, you who do have a voice in the making of Women’s Studies research projects, use it and make these projects into working examples of multicultural perspectives. And you, ladies on the margin-as black women’s feminist historians mostly are-you must not wait passively for that to happen. Indeed we blacks shall write as much as we can, no mat-
417
ter how difficult that may be. Doesn’t history tell us that it is in situations of difficulty that much creativity emerges? Women’s history started up thanks to a few critical students; some of them now are doctors with positions in the historical scientific establishment. Why shouldn’t black women’s history become - in a matter of speaking - a sort of establishment too?
Forum, Vol. 16, No. 4, pp. 415-417,
1993
0277~53%/93 $6.00 + .oo copyTi@01993F+ergamotlPraaud.
“Recovering black women’s history” AMALIA DEEKMAN Former Student of Economic and Social History, With Special Attention to Women’s History
What follows is a description of my life, emphasizing three main shifts. This is a way of constructing a history of Amalia Deekman, but certainly not the history. I was born in 1966 in Paramaribo, the capital of Surinam. My story begins, however, when I am already a high school graduate with dreams and expectations, starting my new life as a university student. With a slight change of perspective, I then show the making of a university student, slowly growing conscious of the implications that academic and the related scientific business is likely to have for women. And at the end, an older and wiser Amalia takes over, armed with her university degree, more pragmatic but also more politically motivated. ACT ONE. AFTER HIGH SCHOOL: DREAMS AND EXPECTATIONS In 1985 I became a student at the University of Utrecht, in the faculty of Arts. I chose the history department, though it was only my second choice: I had dreamt of becoming a journalist, like so many others at the time, but I did not make it into the quota reserved for the media degree course. Thus, in spite of a marginal interest in the topic, I decided to plunge into the respectable-if by now not unpredictable- field of writing ancient history. The central issue being, of course, the problem of how to find reliable sources. Next thing you know I was involved in passionate discussions about the nature of historical writing and the problem of objectivity (already!). After that, history sort of won the day. This was my first acquaintance with history as a dynamic, narrative process, instead of being a static account of past ways of being. And yet, I kept at it precisely because I was caught in the magic spell of the past, that other, strange world. This romantic idea, however, was not all that made me go on with my history degree. I reckoned I still could be-
come a journalist, later on. After all, there I was, sweet 18, in the big city of Utrecht with all its challenges, dangers, and seductions. ACT TWO. WOMEN’S HISTORY: AN ACCIDENT It was not until my second year of the history degree that I actually got involved in women’s history. Before that I had heard about it, of course, but I couldn’t quite fathom what it was all about and more importantly-I was working hard to make my first academic year into a small personal triumph, so there wasn’t any time to spare for exciting new findings. Looking back I cannot actually recall why I didn’t get interested in women’s history before. I certainly can’t tell a comforting story of consciousness growing fast in a white male dominated scientific environment, although all that was to come later on. At the time women’s history wasn’t what my supervisors would call a ‘strategic’ choice, because to take up a feminist course would condemn you to marginality. You could certainly get your credits if you passed an exam in women’s history, but it wasn’t exactly a ‘career path’. What happened to me was that I took a women’s history course as just another degree course, which simply happened to focus on women. I guess you could say that it just popped up in my field of interest. To say I was unprepared is saying nothing: I had no sense of feminism, of women’s topics, women’s oppression or the battle against sexism. Before discovering women’s history, for me men and women were equal. Women’s history was the catalyst for my consciousness-raising: Afterwards I became aware of the inequalities in various fields of science, society, and everyday life. That awareness has not disappeared since. I was able to make the connection between my own life-experience as a woman and the intellectual and political framework which had produced wom415
416
AMALIADEEKMAN
en’s history. It must have been there and then that I sowed for the second time the seed of a sense of history as a living and structuring process and not as an objective, factual thing that only requires to be transcribed for posterity. So my studies went on with this knowledge simmering at the back of my mind. I did all the very nice things an academic-minded girl is expected to do: I became an editor of Dina-
Miek. Tijrischrift voor vrouwengeschiedenis. This is a women’s history academic journal produced by the women’s history students of Utrecht, which celebrates its tenth anniversary in 1993. Meanwhile, women’s history or the history of women had become an integral part of my study in social/economical history. At about this time I went to the university of Bielefeld (Germany) as a Women’s Studies Erasmus exchange student. I met very interesting people there from other European countries and I consider this period as an unforgettable experience. But just then things started to become serious. The government deadline that limits the period of undergraduate study to a maximum of 6 years was approaching fast and I had to set an end to it all. To think that the lucky generations before the latest university reform had an unlimited period for their undergraduate study! Graduating is a moment of re-assessment of everything: what had I learnt, all these years? And more importantly, what was to be the worthy topic of my final thesis, that ‘prestige product’ that all the students dream about, and compete with each other over, so as to see who gets to write ‘the ultimate story’ on a certain topic, in a certain era? ACT THREE. THE TURNING POINT: MY FINAL THESIS In 1991 I graduated with a final thesis on Surinam student migrants in the period 19201940; the title was: “Children in Holland.” It is not only the fruit of research and hard work, but also the result of doubt and certainty; it is a mixed bag of ideas about what history should mean and of straight applications of the skills in historical research which I had learnt at university. I began to realize that writing history always means writing from a political standpoint, no matter what
position you are actually defending. In my case, writing this thesis involved also the complex desire to make a difference within a professional historical context. It was the first sign of a deep-seated and growing unrest, of the need for a critique of the study I was just about to finish. I already knew that history was a process, not the account of static truths. I also knew that women’s history was a huge critique of so-called objective history, which is centered on the great men. I was also aware of the fact that many other critiques of women’s history were being formulated from feminist and lesbian studies, for example. But the perspective I was searching for: a critical standpoint on the writing of history from a black feminist perspective, was still lacking. At the end of my study I found that few white feminist historians had been interested in such a perspective, and I also found out that there weren’t any black feminist historians in the academic or scientific body, in any decision-making positions, capable of stimulating such an analysis. I realised that there was a huge field of unknown history out there, just waiting to be ploughed, if only there were enough ploughers willing to do the job. What I am talking about is the history of black women, analyzed within a black feminist perspective; colonial and post-colonial history, made up of voices which will become softer and softer, if nobody takes up the challenge to try to listen to them. The latest suggestion I had heard then was that it is up to black women to write their own history. This lack of interest almost made me fall off my chair. How could black women ever do it, considering they haven’t got access to even the most primary means of producing meaningful accounts of black women’s history? As long as black women are not fully represented in decision making positions, as long as we have no access to the policy-making about research projects, this suggestion sounds as a weak excuse indeed. How fast people forget that until recently, black women were looked upon as being incapable of any intellectual achievement at all, and certainly not of writing their own history! In conclusion, I would like to propose a strategy for recovering black history. Ladies of the Women’s Studies establishment: Take
Recovering Black Women’s History
up the challenge of real sisterhood, you who do have a voice in the making of Women’s Studies research projects, use it and make these projects into working examples of multicultural perspectives. And you, ladies on the margin-as black women’s feminist historians mostly are-you must not wait passively for that to happen. Indeed we blacks shall write as much as we can, no mat-
417
ter how difficult that may be. Doesn’t history tell us that it is in situations of difficulty that much creativity emerges? Women’s history started up thanks to a few critical students; some of them now are doctors with positions in the historical scientific establishment. Why shouldn’t black women’s history become - in a matter of speaking - a sort of establishment too?