Luc Marraffa

LISTENING TO LIENEKE’S ‘AETHER LETTERS’: DOMESTICITY AND COLONIAL SILENCES

Of the aethereal conversation between Jan Soldaat (John Soldier) and Lieneke van Schaardenburg (1949), only five recordings remain. Lieneke’s letters were broadcast via shortwave radio for the Dutch Armed Forces, Jan being soldier fighting in the Indonesian War for Independence. She opens her weekly radio message like a letter – ‘Amsterdam, Wednesday 29 June’ – and signs off accordingly: ‘Warm greetings to you all from us here in the Netherlands, especially from your Lieneke.’

As my contribution to Fleeting Voices, I propose a listening session featuring segments of this radio conversation – of which only Lieneke’s voice remains, archived at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. Notably absent from their conversation is any mention of the enemy or the war’s colonial context. This omission is political, and it reverberates in the one-sided narratives found in the colonial radio archive. I ask how the sonic qualities of these ‘aether letters’ further this erasure.

Echoing epistolary conversations between soldiers and their fiancées or wives, this recorded dialogue invites listeners into an intimacy typically reserved for private correspondence. By sonifying this conversation and airing it publicly, these broadcasts cultivated a supposedly relatable domesticity. Though Lieneke presents herself an emancipated woman with an office job,
her letters focus on mundane, domestic affairs – dinner plans, conversations with friends, holiday plans… She is portrayed as bound to the house, to domestic matters. Her femininity is instrumentalised to conjure a sense of home for soldiers on the field. I argue that she becomes the voice of a collective imagination, which pictures the Netherlands as peaceful and awaiting the return of its soldiers. Jan, her silent interlocutor, stands in for all soldiers. This mode of address delineates a restricted public: it excludes non-Dutch listeners, for whom a return to the Netherlands is not a shared or desired political horizon.

Luc Marraffa is a PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (University of Amsterdam). They research French and Dutch colonial radio archives and develop transcription methods that challenge colonial narratives. These methods are laid-out in an experimental article (InwardOutward Symposium Publication, 2024) and further detailed in a research paper Transcription as Curation (upcoming, Amodern). Their current work interrogates the queerness of glitches and sound parasites. Previously they taught philosophy at CUNY and attended NYU as Fulbright bursar, after a philosophy MA at Paris VIII Vincennes/Saint-Denis. At the University of Amsterdam, they teach classes in sound studies and decolonial approaches to archiving.