Curaçao and the Folding Diaspora: Contesting the Party Tambú in the Netherlands

Abstract

General diasporic discourse informs the definition of immigrant minority groups as "residing and acting in host countries but maintaining strong sentimental and material links with their countries of origin--their homelands" (Sheffer 2986, 3). Yet for Curacaoans living in the Netherlands, the distinction between the ideas of "host country" and "homeland" becomes hazy at best. Curacao, the largest of the Dutch-speaking Caribbean islands, boasts strong social and political ties with the Netherlands. The Dutch language, for example, is the official language of Curacao, and on the island, the Dutch educational system reigns supreme. Curacaoans hold Dutch passports and are legally Dutch citizens; therefore, there is a tendency to gravitate to the Netherlands, and Curacaoans who do emigrate typically expect their integration into Dutch society to be problem free. The reality, however, is decidedly different. Curacaoans who make the move are likely to find themselves treated as "ethnic migrants" in the Netherlands and considered "foreigners with a Dutch passport" by the general Dutch public (Sharpe 2005, 292). "I always thought of myself as Dutch," said one Curacaoan gentleman in 2009, a man who migrated to Amsterdam nearly twelve years ago. "That is until I came to Holland." His Curacaoan friend, living in the Netherlands for over seven years, said the same year that "growing up on Curacao, you are told you have two homes: here and there. And you believe your destiny is to move to Holland.... It was very traumatic for me when I got here and I discovered [that] none of this was true." (1) For Curacaoans living in the Netherlands, the notions of "home" and "homeland" quickly lose their former meaning. Concepts of "self" dissolve into experiences of "otherness" as feelings of belonging are replaced with uneasiness. A simultaneous feeling of disconnect to Curacao inevitably accompanies the Curacaoans trying to make their way in the Netherlands, and they become folded into and hidden within the larger, culturally diverse immigrant society surrounding them, composed of Moroccans, Congolese and Turks, to name a few. As their histories and experiences connect, a "folded diaspora" emerges. Born of disjunction and struggle, the folded diaspora represents a venue for global and local coexistence: a place where a multitudinous terrain of belonging and unbelonging, sameness and difference, converge. For displaced Curacaoans specifically, entrance into the folded diaspora is less the result of their leaving home than it is the result of being cast as a stranger within what had heretofore been considered home territory. And yet the folded diaspora affords Curacaoans a place of perceived safety and strength--an arena in which (borrowing from James Clifford) to construct "alternative public spheres, forms of community consciousness and solidarity that maintain identifications outside the national time/space [of the Netherlands] in order to live inside, with a difference" (Clifford 1994, 308). At the center of the folded diaspora, a new, alternative consciousness begins to emerge. Tambu parties--the commercialized ritual music popular on Curaqao's mainland--helps many Curacaoans living in the Netherlands resolve feelings of contradiction and conflict and creates within the folded diaspora a creative means of control. Tambu parties transcend ambiguity and ambivalence and offer meaningfulness in their place; and as the "self" becomes reestablished, new identities emerge. Tambu parties in the Netherlands have widened in scope in recent years, with the result that numerous other displaced genealogies have joined Curacaoans in enjoying a renewed sense of belonging. Put another way, Tambu parties provide the folded diaspora a means of "living inside, with a difference." At Dutch Tambu parties, youths join with elders, and Afro-Curacaoans dance alongside African and other Afro-Caribbean migrants. In this way, strong transgenerational and transcultural bonds are forged as solidarity emerges out of difference, and a new sense of belonging is born. …