LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

I love storytelling. It’s why I joined the Tufts Observer and why I have loved writing, reading, and editing every semester since. However, I have always stayed away from my own stories. So, for my last letter from the editor, I decided to look into my personal archive, made up of stories of my own making and those passed down by my ancestors.

My mother’s side, the Kambel family, has rows of file cabinets filled with our complicated history preserved by several generations.

My grandfather was one of three “legitimate” children of a Surinamese man who built himself up from a rural rubber tapper to a wealthy land, property, and business owner in Paramaribo. Quite a feat for the son of an enslaved woman in a Dutch colony. My grandfather, Emro Kambel, was never allowed to walk barefoot lest he offend our enslaved ancestors who were denied their shoes along with their freedom.

My grandmother is the daughter of an Indonesian woman who left Sulawesi at 16 with my great grandfather, a Dutchman twice her age. They met when he was a soldier in the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army, an army that committed numerous war crimes in Indonesia. They last saw each other when he was arrested in the Netherlands for resisting the Nazi occupation, leaving my great-grandmother with seven children when he died in the Dachau concentration camp. My grandmother, Tineke Hout, spent her fifth birthday in a Dutch orphanage after her mother fled back to Indonesia.

I hold archives of colonizer and colonized, enslaver and enslaved. I am still figuring out how to hold those legacies within myself without feeling the perversity of stitching together harm and harmed. That being said, along with the painful stories, my grandparents also passed on a love of music, letters, and learning to my mother and to me.

My father’s side, the Mackay family, remains an ambiguous, thin manilla folder filled with more questions than answers. While I don’t know many of our stories, my dad has given me his passion for doing what is right, an insatiable curiosity, my two dear siblings, and all his love.

I carry their stories with me, even the ones I haven’t heard, as I create my own. I don’t think any of my ancestors imagined that their descendant, who grew up in Amsterdam, would end up in charge of a college magazine in the United States.

In my 21 years, the Observer has become a large part of my archive: two semesters as a staff writer, two as a section editor, and the last one as editor-in-chief. I get to file away all the sunrises, back-and-forths over titles, and thousands of Slack messages into my own archive. In return, I also get to be part of the Observer’s archive. A small part of 127 years of history. A set of five little magazines on the top of a towering stack reaching back into the 19th century.

Before this issue becomes part of the archive, I would like to say thank you. Thank you to Sabah, Julia, and Bao for learning how to do this job with me; I am forever grateful that you took the leap. Thank you to my wonderful staff; I wouldn’t want to stay up with anyone else. And thank you to everyone who has worked on this magazine, past and present, for all you have given to the Observer and all you have given to me.

With love and in power,

Aroha MacKay.