What diversity of perspectives on the climate crisis become available to young readers not only through literature, but through literature in translation? In the Netherlands, the Dutch literary market has long shunned thematizations of the climate crisis in home-grown literature. Only recently has posthumanist Dutch author Eva Meijer earned accolades for her novel Zee Nu (2022), set in a distant dystopian future: the sea level has risen, and the Netherlands is lost to the water. Water management defines Dutch identity: the below-sea-level nation has only been made habitable by dikes, dams, windmills, and polders. But water has also defined the nation’s darker history: it was the sea that facilitated extractivist colonial commerce, and the long Dutch slave trade.

Dutch authors, however, do not draw this link between environmental precarity and colonial history. Meanwhile, Indonesian flood narratives from the below-sea-level (and sinking) former capital of the Dutch East Indies stand in stark contrast to Dutch flood narratives. They are not speculative or futurist but respond to ongoing and existing crises. Through a close reading of Khairani Barokka’s poetry on “flood women”, I first tease out the Indonesian subjectivities of flood in contrast to Dutch subjectivities of flood as characterized in Zee Nu. I then turn to the short story “Buyan” by utiuts, in which self-driving electric cars fail to navigate a flooded Jakarta. This story moves beyond flood alone, linking major industries of the Capitalocene – the mining of nickel for batteries, the farming of rubber and palm oil, and the overdevelopment of urban areas – to Dutch colonization, ongoing green colonialism, and the epistemicide of indigenous language and knowledge. Whereas Dutch and Anglophone literary markets quickly categorize novels as “CliFi” or “Ecofiction”, Indonesian texts that deal with climate as one among many other pressing issues are now branded as such in translation, packaged and anthologized for Global North readers. How does this impact the characterization of Indonesian literature on the world stage, and the indigenous perspectives on climate precarity therewithin?

Lucelle Pardoe is a doctoral researcher at University College London, where her interdisciplinary research is supported by scholarships in Translation Studies and Education Studies. With one foot in each field, she develops pedagogical methods based on translation and translanguaging theories to support creative self-narrative in multilingual classrooms. Drawing on her linguistic repertoire of Dutch, English, and Indonesian, her doctoral thesis explores the decolonizing potential of Indonesian literature in the Dutch curriculum. Her other research interests include children’s literary culture, translation for the cultural heritage sector, sustainability in literature, gender in translation, and digital literature. She is a translator from Dutch into English of scholarly articles, children’s books, and museum catalogues.