Something big came from writer Ellen Ombre. During conversations about topics such as the Dutch colonial past in Suriname, migration, identity and especially uprooting, she always remained particularly interested in the other voices. She asked questions, thought along, tried to empathize with the point of view of the person she was exchanging ideas with. Nevertheless, she remained very true to her own life experiences as a woman born in Paramaribo on December 8, 1948.
Last week on the night of June 13 to 14, Ellen Louise Ombre died at the age of 77. Between 1973 and 2002 she was married to sociologist and professor Abram de Swaan, with whom she had a son.
In recent years, Ombre led a secluded life, but everyone she interacted with was impressed by her independent way of thinking. Nuanced, that’s what you could call her work as a writer, from her debut, the short story collection Maelstrom (1992).
Two worlds
Ombre moved to the Netherlands with her parents when she was twelve. She worked as a medical social worker at an Amsterdam general practice until she switched to literature in the 1990s. Her major themes in an interesting oeuvre were migration and identity. More precisely: how can you maintain, find or regain your own identity if you come from a different culture?
Before it became fashionable to write about the colonial past, she devoted herself to this subject
Ombre herself grew up in two worlds, the Dutch and the Surinamese. She described how complex identity is in her impressive debut novel Negro Jew in Motherland (2004) about the struggle of the young woman Hannah Dankerlui who grows up on the border of different cultures: she is the daughter of a black Surinamese father and a Jewish mother.
On her website, Ombre writes about her groundbreaking first novel: “The complicated history of the complex Surinamese society, marked by three hundred years of colonialism, plays an important role here.”
Before it became fashionable to write about the colonial past, she devoted herself to this subject. For example, she was one of the first to write sharply and in depth about the controversial Colonial World Exhibition that was held in 1883 on Amsterdam’s Museumplein. Here, Surinamese and other people from the colonized areas were ‘shown’ to the crowd that had gathered en masse.
‘Small colonialism’
What is striking about her work is that she does not necessarily view colonialism as an immensely large and complicated socio-political situation, but that she looks for what she calls ‘small colonialism’. She watches, analyzes and describes how colonialism affects everyone’s personal fate. In that sense, her oeuvre resembles that of the Surinamese writer and judge Hugo Pos (1913-2000).
How consistently Ombre maintains her theme of personal and individual sovereignty is evident from her latest book, Last (2024). Here she returns to the subjects that she so sovereignly made her own, such as migration and living in two or more cultures. “Can you know yourself if you don’t know your own origins?” is one of the questions that the main character Lot asks her mother. “But who are our kind of people?” the character then asks.
The book is about Lot’s family that comes to the Netherlands from Suriname. And the writer eventually allows her main character to return to Suriname. Making those last pages Last into a moving book in which return to the Caribbean is considered a liberation for Lot.
What is most striking about Ombre’s oeuvre is its versatility. She wrote novels, journalistic travel stories, essays and reports, such as Who means well (1996) on the problems of development aid. An independent thinker speaks in everything she published.