In a Dark Wood Wandering by Hella S. Haasse

There he meets Oeroeg again, an armed guerrilla fighter who regards him as the enemy. He leaves for Europe, qualifies as an engineer and returns to the East Indies during the nationalists’ struggle for independence.

‘I don’t need any help from you,’ Oeroeg snaps at the narrator, who is shocked to find himself suddenly ranked alongside the rest, as ‘you’. The native boy develops into a young nationalist.

The narrator’s bewilderment is set against the damage inflicted on Oeroeg by the hierarchy within which they both live. Oeroeg’s father, a servant, becomes a victim of the negligent attitude of his master, the narrator’s father.

Many whites treat the natives in a careless, even reckless manner. Both gradually discover the nature of their positions in the colonial world. In the brief scope of a novella, Haasse illuminates the funda-mental problems of the colonial system.įrom early childhood, the white narrator of the story has been inseparable from his friend, a native boy called Oeroeg.

For many Dutch people, this short novel was an eye-opening introduction to race relations in the colonial Dutch East Indies.