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Tracking a femme fatale in the Dutch East Indies
Courtesy of Gerard TermorshuizenBlackmailer, con artist, femme fatale
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Courtesy of Gerard Termorshuizen
Blackmailer, con artist, femme fatale. Marietje van Oordt lived a life less ordinary during the Dutch colonial period in Indonesia.
Born in 1897 in to a well-to-do family, van Oordt was an Indo ' half-Indonesian and half-European ' and was abandoned as an infant.
As she grew older, however, she became a blackmailer, con artist, courtesan and prostitute ' bamboozling men and sleeping only in first-class hotels and purchasing only expensive clothes.
'If I had been living in her time, I would have fallen for her, surely,' Gerard Termorshuizen says. The Dutch historian, who previously penned a history of the Indonesian press, published a book about van Oordt in 2013 titled Niemand zorgde voor mijn ziel, or Nobody Took Care of My Soul.
In the book, Termorshuizen collected newspaper articles and family letters to give us a glimpse of an extraodinary woman.
Van Oordt lived in a rented a house on the outskirts of Jakarta, convincing the absentee owners she had a very wealthy husband.
When the owners returned after eight months, they found the rent unpaid, the house a shambles and Van Oordt nowhere to be found. She used the house to party at length with 'high-class' gentlemen before making her escape.
'She was travelling all over Java, and Sumatra as well, all the time with a different name,' Termorshuizen said. 'She had a big personality and charisma and succeeded all the time in cheating shopkeepers [.] She was intelligent and very social, she was able to find a new man anywhere.'
Termorshuizen's own story is less dramatic.
He moved to Indonesia in the 1970s to jumpstart Dutch language instruction, after Indonesia and the Netherlands signed a cultural agreement. Instruction in Dutch dropped off to nothing after the Japanese occupation and a subsequent ban on the colonial language by Sukarno.
'The first time I arrived in Jakarta, it was a chaos. A complete mess. There were only two stoplights,' Termorshuizen said. 'There were so many holes in the road and the city was completely dark. There were just thousands of flickering oil and gas lamps and big crowds of people.'
He continued: 'I also have an old picture of some students with my car, and the girls were wearing short skirts ' that is unthinkable now in Indonesia.'
When Termorshuizen returned to the Netherlands, he wrote a dissertation about PA Daum, who published several newspapers and wrote several books in the late ninteenth century in the Dutch East Indies.
Termorshuizen said he became fascinated with the Indonesian press.
'While I wasn't finished yet, I already imagined how amazing it would be to write an history of the Indonesian press. The intriguing thing about newspapers is that they are a direct reflection of what happens in society.'
Newspapers, widely read by Dutch colonists and Dutch-schooled Indonesians, were an important source of entertainment in the Dutch East Indies, he says. 'The newspapers had a small audience and a close connection to their subscribers, so there was a lot of small news ' which is great for historians.'
Newspapers were also the reason Van Oordt became famous ' or infamous, he says. 'She was widely known across the country. She was in jail several times and had many trials. All the women would come to see her in court.'
Termorshuizen worked on his research on Indonesia's press for over 20 years, eventually publishing two books of about 2,000 pages on the topic.
This research led Termorshuizen to study Van Oordt in detail. 'I read tens of thousands of newspapers. When I presented my last press book in 2011, the grandson of Marietje approached me. I met them and they gave me access to their family archive.'
Termorshuizen embarked on more extensive research on Van Oordt, who died alone and separated from her child, who was living in the Netherlands.
'There were tens of thousands Indo-European prostitutes but we know nothing of those women,' Termorshuizen says. Van Oordt, he adds, 'is one of rare cases that we do know about and we can trace her life. We don't know much about prostitutes in general, that's the most important thing about the book.'
Termorshuizen also discusses sex between Indonesians and the Dutch in the colonial period.
'The sexual mores in Indonesia were way more loose than in the Netherlands. Many married men had relationships with Indonesian women at that time,' he says. 'Because the sexual mores were was not so strict, [Van Oordt] got more sympathy than aversion, people saw how easily it was to seduce married men, which was like a mirror for them.'
Termorshuizen, who recently returned to Indonesia to give a speech at the Univeristy of Indonesia to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the reopening of its Dutch faculty, is phelegmatic when asked for his appraisal of Van Oordt's life.
'Tragic, of course, but I also have admiration for a very strong character.'
