The tremors of genre in G.J. Resink’s poetry

Born in Java, the Dutch Indonesian writer Gertrudes Johannes (Han) Resink published his first volume of poetry Op de breuklijn (On the Fault Line) in 1952. In this collection, which consists mainly of sonnets and Persian quatrains, Resink presents himself as an interstitial writer, occupying a precarious position between the Indonesian culture of his native country on the one hand, and the Dutch literary tradition he chose to embrace on the other. His subsequent volumes display a similar in-betweenness, simultaneously looking east and west. Whereas contemporary critics, in deference to the prescriptive rules of the western canon, took issue with his seemingly cavalier attitude towards generic conventions, the article demonstrates how Resink’s experiments are intimately linked to his anxieties as a postcolonial writer. The journey from sonnet, to eastern quatrain, to the so-called quintain of his final years, is interpreted as part of his lifelong search to define and articulate his own place in the periphery, from both a Dutch and an Indonesian point of view.