[In the following essay, Phaf explores the interplay between the Caribbean imagination and the literature of the countries comprising the Caribbean basin, focusing particularly on the Antilles and Surinam.]

IN SEARCH OF CARIBBEAN CHARACTERISTICS

This essay examines an important function of the Caribbean imagination in that part of the region where, in the seventeenth century, colonies were established and administered “in the name of Oranje.” Because of the lack of translations and critical studies that might draw the attention of an international audience to its literature, this imagination is hardly known beyond the Dutch-speaking corners of the world. Thus this literature resembles a blind spot in the Caribbean literary landscape, giving a totally false impression of the real situation. Authors born in the Antilles or in Surinam are being published constantly; compared to the entire preceding period, current productivity is so original and versatile that one might speak of a Golden Age in this field.

In Holland this blind spot is scarcely apparent. Every year many new books by Dutch and foreign authors are published and reviewed in dailies and magazines, and this is considered a matter of course. But in Paramaribo, Willemstad, or Oranjestad the panorama is quite different. There is no university with a special academic program in literature. Publishers make little money from literary works which are not profitable for weeklies or dailies. Therefore, there is no literary-critical tradition since there is not a penny to be made from it. Moreover, in the small local community critical articles are often taken so personally that one hardly dares to express an objective opinion. These are by no means encouraging conditions for a literary career.¹ For that reason most authors seek publication in Holland, whereas in their own countries, with few exceptions, they devote themselves to other tasks.

Because of a shared colonial past, the very different material and socio-cultural conditions in the former “West” and the former “mother country” are connected even today. As long as initiating a cultural dialogue on equal terms is out of the question, this situation is perceived as unjust, and the process of decolonization is not complete. In Holland people are working hard to bring about an exchange of ideas. Publishers, critics, and institutions such as CARAF in Leiden² and STICUSA in Amsterdam,³ promote specialist literature, collect information and put it at the disposal of a broad reading audience. Interest in Caribbean literature and art is still growing, particularly because there are so many Surinamese or families of Surinamese descent living in Holland who closely follow the developments in their region of origin.

Meanwhile, in the literary imagination, “colonial” inequality leads to fierce debates that are concerned less with the Low Countries than with Caribbean conflicts. This is an exceedingly complicated issue. After all, ever since the discovery of the New World, the Caribbean has been the epitome of a complex and chaotic history, and an area of sharp contrasts. This is because of the rivalry between the European powers and other influential countries that later entered that arena. In this complex society pirates and freebooters, maroons, Indians, and adventurers tried to win a place in the sun and keep it, but not until the end of the eighteenth century did a political alternative arise at the national level. Inspired by the French Revolution and by their own traditions of resistance that hark back to Africa, the people of Saint-Domingue fought for their freedom and having gained it, became citizens of the first black republic in the New World, Haiti (an Indian word meaning mountainous country). The second republic, though by no means “black,” is the Dominican Republic founded in 1821, a year in which many Spanish colonies in the Americas secured their independence. And after long wars of liberation and North American intervention, Cuba gained its status as a republic in 1902. Not until after the Second World War did the British and Dutch territories follow along the road to independence in accordance with detailed plans drawn up by their governments. Apparently the militant nationalism of the nineteenth century no longer had much effect, and experiments were made with other modes of transition to an autonomous form of government.

It is important to draw attention to a creative element in the nation-building process of former colonies and of former mother countries that accompanies the laborious process of decolonization and searches for a way out of the oppressive colonial reality, not with political or military, but by other means. In this context Jean Franco and Frantz Fanon point out the struggle against the “colonized imagination”⁴ as a condition for a real liberation from the past. As they have always done, artists and intellectuals view their own reality through European eyes; they reason from a European standpoint; and they speak a European tongue. Consequently those traditions that are not oriented towards this image of the world receive little consideration or, if they do, are subject to a negative interpretation, although in recent times there has been some change. Authors begin to appeal to the “hidden” African, Asian, or Indian roots in their daily reality, but at the same time they notice that these are still “repressed,” that is to say they are regarded as inferior and secondary when it comes to social mobility in a “modern” society.

Poets in the Spanish-speaking islands were the first to discover this problem as a national conflict, and they immediately placed it in a wider regional perspective. In their works they travelled to neighboring islands or coastal regions where they found exactly the same conflicts they had at home. That is why the oeuvre of the producers of poesía negra⁵ has a pioneering function for the emergence of a nation-building Caribbean imagination which asserts itself in contemporary literature and draws attention to limitations typical of a multi-ethnic state. V. S. Naipaul from Trinidad even depicts this as a “literary mission,” for on his 1961 visit to Surinam he notices that as an “itinerant author” he can have a liberating effect on others:

“When it came to the writing, I was uncertain about the values I should give to the traveller's. This kind of direct participation came awkwardly to me, and the literary problem was also partly a personal one. In 1960 I was still a colonial, travelling to far-off places that were still colonies, in a world still more or less ruled by colonial ideas. In Surinam in 1961, in a banana plantation (curiously quiet, the mulch of rotten banana trash thick and soft and muffling underfoot), the Indian official who—with a Dutch technical expert in attendance—was showing me around broke off to say in a semi-conspiratorial way, You are the first one of us to come out on a mission like this.”⁶

In Finding the Centre, the introduction to his autobiographical essay, he draws attention to the importance of this Caribbean centrifugal force that compels a writer to break through his colonial isolation, to bridge the communication gap and articulate vital developments in literature.

A CARIBBEAN STEREOTYPE IN SPANISH-SPEAKING AUTHORS

Apparently the scholarly world is also becoming aware of this Caribbean dynamic in literary development. In 1979 an extensive bio-bibliography of Caribbean authors published in Washington, D.C. was introduced by a quotation in Sranan from the work of the Surinamese poet Johanna Schouten-Elsenhout.⁷ The Casa de las Américas cultural center in Havana has been working for quite some time on a publication policy for Caribbean literature, and has been doing research on the subject. Nosotros, esclavos de Surinam,⁸ a 1981 translation of Anton de Kom's well-known book, received an enthusiastic welcome from Spanish-speaking readers. At the University of the West Indies and in Puerto Rico the interest in this subject matter is growing, but so far it is only a matter of taking stock. There is little comparative research in this field, certainly none regarding Surinamese or Antillean literature. For that matter, these are more often treated separately than together, so that it looks as if they have nothing in common at all. If at the basis of a Caribbean literature one considers nation-building as a dynamic regional element, then of course the question arises as to what extent this applies to the literature of the Dutch-speaking regions. After all, Surinam did not gain its independence until 1975, while the Windward and Leeward Islands have recently formed the Antillean Federation, Aruba having a status aparte.

But the question is whether these outward political appearances reveal the whole truth about the traditions of resistance against a colonial imagination in literature. We shall investigate this topic in the following analysis, comparing “national stereotypes” in the Spanish- and Dutch-speaking Caribbean areas. As has been demonstrated by a research project on the literature of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico, a regional identity crisis has been assumed to be a dilemma in the poesía negra of the twenties. This assumption was founded on the sociological thesis that the countries in the Caribbean Basin may be regarded as the paradigm of the socio-economic dependence of previously colonized countries in today's world. In their work, the authors formulate a critical response to this situation, as a paradigm of protest against this national and regional problem at the level of the imagination, a response motivated by the need for an autonomous nation-building process.⁹ From different points of departure they denounce socio-cultural polarization as a problem in daily life which still shows roughly the same patterns of behavior as those of the plantation societies with slave labor. These patterns of behavior make it difficult even today to bring about “free” human relations, and they repeat as it were the old colonial contrasts.

On the basis of these data from the sociology of literature, the stereotype of the ambivalent and erotically attractive mulatto woman was discovered in the work of Spanish-speaking authors. This stereotype occurs in the nineteenth century, but it is in the twentieth century especially that the mulatto woman accentuates typical Caribbean contrasts, first as a symbol of “pleasant” tropical country life, and then increasingly in a metropolitan environment.¹⁰ In the literary imagination it transpires that in societies with a modern structure these contrasts don't simply vanish but do become recognizable as the obstacle to social mobility in a Caribbean country. From that point of view this stereotype represents a direct protest against racist, sexist, and social discrimination that simultaneously emerges as a consequence of the colonial era.

Now when we consider the image of Surinam and the Antilles as it is found in the work of eminent Spanish-speaking authors in the Caribbean, what strikes us is the extent to which they stick to clichés that play an important part in their own literary traditions. For instance, the Cuban Alejo Carpentier lets the young globe-trotter and translator Esteban from Havana recall, during his stay in Surinam, the well-known passage from the Old Testament:

Negra sum, sed formosa, filliae Ierusalem. Nolite me considerare quod fusca sum quia decoloravit me sol.(11)
                                                                                I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem. … Look not upon me, because I am black, because the sun has looked upon me …

(Song of Solomon, I, 5, 6. King James Version (Ed.))

In El siglo de las luces (Explosion in a Cathedral), after having visited a sad and depressing Cayenne—the cemetery of the French Revolution—Esteban in 1799 lands in a merry Paramaribo, a town resembling an exuberant Flemish fair straight out of a painting by Breughel, brimming with tropical abundance. At first sight it is a good place to stay. But appearances are deceptive. Everywhere Esteban finds the traces of conflict “under the skin,” of unwritten laws that assign to blacks and whites their “Caribbean” places. The black sweethearts and their children form a constant threat to the white woman's connubial “bliss,” and because of this an invisible war is ceaselessly waged. Moreover, Esteban discovers the “civilized” treatment of officially punished slaves. In Paramaribo's local hospital a surgeon skillfully amputates their arms or legs, an operation for which the smoking of tobacco is the only soothing drug. Disgusted by these social relations, the Cuban remembers an almost forgotten piece of paper in his luggage, the Dutch translation of a decree issued in the second year of the French Revolution, proclaiming the abolition of slavery.

In novels set in the current century, the theme of the black sweetheart, now from the Antilles, keeps recurring, as the work of the Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez testifies. He himself grew up on the coast of the Caribbean. In his well-known novel Cien años de soledad (A Hundred Years of Solitude)¹² he relates the history of a small village, Macondo, not far from Cartagena and the Caribbean. Like a Colombian Brecht, Márquez describes the “rise and fall” of this Caribbean society from colonial times until the 1950s. Near the end, the “virgin” Aureliano Buendía enters the story. This partly autobiographical personality is the last male descendant of the Buendía family whose history and Macondo's are interwoven. Nigromanta, the daughter of an old white-haired Antillean black who speaks Papiamento, initiates Aureliano into the erotic secrets of life. This is a great help to him in overcoming his timidity. Aureliano turns into a real macho, the ringleader in the village brothel, who in the end even wins his one true love, his cousin Amaranta Ursula, with whom he finds true happiness.

Such a brothel, full of mulatto “women of pleasure,” also plays an important part in village life on the Caribbean coast in Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Chronicle of a Death Foretold).¹³ Here the mother of one of the principal male characters is called Alberta Simonds; she is a former Antillean beauty queen married to a high-ranking officer from Bogotá. Even after twenty years of marriage, she still repeatedly confuses Spanish and Papiamento. By now her husband is a member of parliament for the Conservative Party, and in the village that fact favors the Liberal Party since the couple does not have a good reputation. The combination of political corruption on the national level and the loose morals of an extroverted Antillean mulatto woman is not appreciated. In his most recent novel, El amor en los tiempos de cólera,¹⁴ García Márquez uses once again the stereotypes of an Antillean sweetheart, this time apparently from the French West Indies or Louisiana. In a Caribbean coastal town closely resembling Cartagena lives doctor Juvenal Urbino with his wife Fermina Daza. One day their domestic peace is cruelly disturbed because Fermina discovers a special fragrance in her husband's clothes. This turns out to be the scent of “Señorita Bárbara Lynch,” the daughter of a preacher and a divorced woman who has a doctorate in theology from the Sorbonne. In Juvenal's eyes she is a mulata, in Fermina's a negra, and she shares the same fate as Nigromanta in the earlier novel. She is most helpful and with her erotic talents she comforts the “white” man of good family in his moments of great emotional insecurity. Afterwards, she disappears forever from his life, without leaving awkward traces. In the public life of local notables in a Caribbean city or village her constant presence would be undesirable. In this novel Curaçao is merely mentioned as an island where some of the townsmen have made their fortune.

García Márquez and Carpentier link the presence of the “colonial” stereotype in their work to the past, a tendency increasingly found also among other Spanish-speaking authors in the Caribbean islands. This indicates that they are aware of the fact that even in their current societies the “colony” has by no means been conquered, and as a weapon against it they use literature both to criticize and to entertain through ironically expressed ambivalence.

TO THE CARIBBEAN WITH EUROPEAN LANGUAGES

If we consider the fact that today as in the past the Caribbean problem plays an important part in the daily life of the Antilles and Surinam, then it is quite natural for this Caribbean stereotype to be found in their literary imagination as well. If we undertake this investigation by reconstructing literary development in a “Caribbean” way, we are instantly struck by a characteristic that distinguishes the “Dutch-speaking” region from the other Caribbean countries with the single exception of Haiti. For in the “Dutch-speaking” region the former lingua franca or “slave languages,” Papiamento and Sranan Tongo, are at least as important as Dutch. In his novels García Márquez has already pointed out that Papiamento closely resembles Spanish. It is a language that is spoken mainly in Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao, that has a rich oral tradition, and that only recently has been considered a worthy vehicle for literary expression. This did not happen until the Dutch padres started to “convert” the poor population of the islands and for this purpose translated the catechism and missals into the local language. According to Father Brenneker the proclamation of the abolition of slavery in 1863 was also made known in Papiamento, but he immediately points out that probably no one was able to read it!¹⁵ In the school curriculum this language long remained taboo; although everyone spoke Papiamento at home, it was not allowed in school. The official language was Dutch. Only in the last few years has this started to change, and rapidly so. The Instituto Lingwístiko Antiano, a governmental institution, is working particularly hard on standardization research and on a publishing policy, so that Papiamento may also gain official status as a written language in the Antillean community.

Neither is Dutch the principal colloquial language spoken in the streets of Surinam. Sranan Tongo is usually spoken in the back yards of Paramaribo and the interior, whereas elsewhere and among Amerindian, Chinese, Hindustani, or Javanese groups, numerous other languages are customary.¹⁶ In the past Sranan Tongo had an even lower social status than Papiamento ever had in the Antilles, and was called Negro-English or taki-taki. In school it, too, was a forbidden contact language and even now it remains uncertain whether it will be acknowledged as a communication vehicle in independent Surinam. An advocate of official status for Sranan Tongo was the late professor Voorhoeve, the well-known specialist in the field, who in an interview during the first colloquium on Surinamese Language and Literature held in the Netherlands reflected on this issue as follows:

The first advantage is that Sranan Tongo is used by most Surinamese, followed at a considerable distance by Dutch. So if it comes to choosing a national language, Sranan Tongo certainly is a serious candidate. Moreover, it has a highly efficient structure, as it was really created to bring about, as it were, communication between people speaking different languages, and hence can be learnt very rapidly so that it will be much easier for the 10٪-15٪ of the population who do not use this language yet, to express themselves in it, than if for instance Spanish were chosen. These are the two main advantages, and in addition it is the only language that arose in Surinam, so that we could achieve a certain Surinamese identity with it.¹⁷

Therefore, to specify functions of languages in a nation-building process is a problem common to the Netherlands Antilles and Surinam, one that also must be considered in the historiography of literature. Not only do their authors keep an eye on the process of decolonization, they also heed the multi-linguistic construction of the literary heritage, and let these two elements play a part in their evaluations. The titles of their books already reflect their involvement with these matters: Autonomous, With a Voice of Our Own, Antillean Literary Log, Creole Drum, and Lelu! Lelu! The Song of Alienation.¹⁸ These are not titles one associates with the historiography of European national literatures, and they imply that the Caribbean literary imagination is oriented towards other elements than those customary in Europe.

Nevertheless, the instruments with which Europeans set out for the New World were precisely European languages. As early as the sixteenth century, many Dutch ships plied the route to the Venezuelan coast, where more than a hundred oceangoing vessels a year called in at the salt pans of Punta de Araya. According to Chris Engels, the doctor-author-painter from Curaçao, it is impossible during that era to distinguish Dutch from Spanish interests:

… [I]t has come to look as if the Netherlands did not start to play a role here until it occupied Curaçao and Surinam. That is mere chitchat. It wasn't in the seventeenth century but in the sixteenth that the Dutch played a larger role here. In his Nederlandsche Historien Hooft is right. He said that the Eighty Years' War lasted much longer than eighty years, because it started behind us. At the salt pans of Araya. When the Dutch were thrown out of there, the struggle began. … The old Netherlands dictated what was to happen in the Americas. Charles V, as is often forgotten was Lord of the Netherlands. Adrianus van Utrecht introduced the Inquisition into the Americas. For a long time Dutchmen dominated the Council of the Indies. The University of Leuven plays an enormous role here. Where does Hernán Cortés go after conquering Mexico? To Madrid? To Valladolid? … To Brussels! That is, to the capital of the NETHERLANDS! Those are slight symptoms, but a doctor heeds symptoms. And now they call it all Spanish.¹⁹

Engels refers to the close relations between the Netherlands and the Spanish Empire, which resulted in Caribbean contacts long before 1634 and 1667 when Curaçao and Surinam, respectively, became Dutch colonies. These contacts were apparent from journals and books published in Antwerp, the biggest and most prosperous port in Northern Europe at the time. It was not uncommon for someone travelling the seas to write down his adventures so as to entertain his readers with stories about remote countries and unknown phenomena. In general these communications did not match the literary quality of those written in Spain, where for instance the poet Juan de Castellanos sang the heroic feats of the conquerors. From his own experience he also knew the peaceful situation in the islands of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao, where according to him giants had lived and a kind of caquetío was spoken.²⁰ But there also have been Dutch poets who set their experiences in the “West” to verse, although they were rare and are now mostly forgotten.²¹

After the fall of Antwerp in 1585 the publishing houses and printers moved to Amsterdam and continued to invest in travel books, mainly about voyages to Asia, but also about voyages to America. Because their urban clientele had vital interests there, they liked to read, for instance, about Piet Hein's heroic exploits, the pleasures of smoking tobacco, or the stories about the “carefree” life in the tropics. De Amerikaanse Zeerovers (The Buccaneers of America), the book by A. O. Exquemelin published in 1678, was an instant bestseller and was translated into several languages.²² The author was an impoverished Huguenot refugee from France who had worked in the colonies on a contract basis and had then signed on as a buccaneer with the English pirate Morgan. With Morgan he participated in the recurrent looting of the Spanish port of Panama, among other adventures, but once back in Europe he studied to become a surgeon and probably spent the rest of his life practicing in the Netherlands. Books about the Dutch colonies appeared in England, France, and Germany, but authors paid more attention to other aspects of Caribbean reality. In her book Oroonoko: or the Story of the Royal Slave (1688),²³ the English author Aphra Behn, who in the seventeenth century could already make a living from her writing, was particularly critical about the sad fate of the African slaves. The hero referred to in her title is of royal blood and is taken from the West African coast to Surinam where he turns against the unjust treatment of those who share his fate. In Voltaire's Candide ou l'optimisme (1759),²⁴ the image of the Dutch colonies in Europe is a very negative one. Candide is a kind of eighteenth-century Don Quixote who roams the world with his servant. After a stay in paradisiacal Eldorado, they end up in Surinam where they meet a Negro slave. His left leg and right hand have been amputated, and he is employed by Mr. Vanderdendur, a scoundrel and a cheat, the epitome of the narrow-minded miser. This Dutchman closely resembles another inhuman character, Mr. Van Koek, in Heinrich Heine's poem Das Sklavenschiff.²⁵

Of course in Dutch literature the self-image was altogether different; here, authors preferred to recommend the “lazy life” of the planters with their mulatto sweethearts.²⁶ But such a way of life did not at all accord with Christian morals, an issue that in many cases led to dramatic moral conflicts. A book devoted to these contrasts is the voluminous epistolary novel Reinhart, of natuur en godsdienst (1791-1792), in which the author, Elisabeth Maria Post from Arnhem, reflects on the life of her brother, Hermanus Lillebertus Post. Inspired by the difficult financial position of his family, he had made a life for himself as a planter in Guyana. In her fictional story Elisabeth reconstructs a correspondence between two brothers, Reinhart the planter and Karel in Holland, on the possibilities of treating slaves as a “good” master.²⁷ Although this did sometimes occur, as in her brother's case, reality generally was rather different, and Narrative of an Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, a book that was published a little later, is closer to the truth. The author was the Scottish soldier John Gabriel Stedman, who, after retiring to Devonshire on a pension, recounts his experiences during an expedition undertaken between 1772 and 1777.²⁸ Stedman was a learned man, as is evident from his frequent citations from Pope, Milton, Ovid, and Socrates, and from his vast knowledge of the country's natural resources. He pays much attention to the daily habits of the planters and their slaves, both in the country and in Paramaribo. His description of this town is very similar to Carpentier's,²⁹ but is in many respects more precise. In his autobiography the Scotsman describes his indignation on behalf of the slaves maimed or murdered by the surgeon. He also physically experiences the Caribbean pattern of behavior. He meets the winsome slave Joanna, the daughter of the respectable “gentleman” Kruythoff, who, in addition to her, has four other children by his black concubine. Stedman tells us that he comes to live with Joanna, and that a son is born to them. Moreover, he wants to redeem her, but for lack of money he cannot. In order to make the tragic circumstances in the Surinam of those days quite clear, Stedman emphasizes Joanna's noble character and thus creates a literary personality who to this day inspires authors of many nations other than the Dutch.³⁰ It looks as if Stedman invented his Joanna so as to put into words his hidden critique of colonial exploitation and its consequences on human relations, a critique he also expresses openly:

Notwithstanding, however, the immense wealth that the West Indies in general afford, it will ever be my opinion that the Europeans might live as comfortably, if not more healthily, without them; the want of sugar, coffee, cotton, cocoa, indigo, rum, and Brazil wood, might be amply supplied by honey, milk, wool, Geneva, ale, English herbs, British oak, & c.³¹

Through this protest, Stedman created the typical Caribbean literary personality long before it came to occupy its place in Hispanic literature. At the same time it becomes clear that due to her stereotypical role, his Joanna can never be described as a penetrating personality. She is there mainly to demonstrate by her presence the conflicts in colonial plantation society which corrupt human relations and gradually become central to a Caribbean literature with nation-building impulses. Thus Stedman unwittingly becomes the first “Caribbean” author who as a European shapes his profound solidarity with colonial Surinam.

MAROONS AND REPUBLICANS

It is unlikely that Stedman could have imagined the maroons against whom he had to fight as a nation-building element in the European sense. Of course he was familiar with the ideas of the French Revolution, which as a result of the French government's expansionist policy at the time, held all of European society in its grip. But by no means did this imply that friends of the French Revolution were also friends of the first independent republic in the Caribbean, Haiti, which as a frightening example of cruelty and “primitivism” also influenced literature for a long time. Warnings to planters as well as the founding of an association of Surinamese Friends of Letters by P. F. Roos in 1804 in Amsterdam testify to this: especially if one knows that this poet's work is direct propaganda for plantation economies with African slave labor, although of course held in check by the Christian spirit. However, there are various signs that the maroons of Surinam had relatively frequent contacts with the Haitian rebels. Perhaps there was even a vast communication network among Caribbean maroons, but this is difficult to prove. Evidence is hardly available in written form, because these “secrets” were passed by word of mouth, and of course would never be written down—written communication representing precisely the element of contact with colonial rule against which they were fighting. True, there are similarities between Surinamese winti customs and Haitian voodoo, but these may equally result from common African ancestors as from Caribbean connections. This “secret” Caribbean history still remains to be written; but that it existed and still does exist is evidenced by the survival power of voodoo, winti, or other secret societies such as the ñañigos of Cuba still have in today's society.³²

Around 1810, after the French had occupied Spain, everywhere in the Spanish colonies in America the independence movements arose. Particularly in Caracas their supporters could be found, people who inspired this resistance in various ways. One of them was Simón Bolivar, who became the most important political leader to advocate a Latin-American unity that would enable the southern countries to form a fully-fledged counterweight to the North. From his native city, a busy commercial center, Bolivar was accustomed to contacts with Caribbean islands. When he needed money and other support for his liberation struggle, he appealed to Jamaica as well as to Haiti and Curaçao. Several young men from Curaçao had already studied in the Netherlands, had written their dissertations there, or had even become involved in the political events surrounding the Batavian Republic. After their return, their “republican” spirit did not seem to be extinguished, certainly not in Brion's case. He personally offered Bolivar his hospitality and apparently also felt himself bound to Bolivar's political ideal.³³

This orientation of the inhabitants of Curaçao toward Latin America mainly became an issue later, during the brief period of literary flowering at the end of the nineteenth century. Young talents who oriented themselves towards Romanticism and wrote mostly in Spanish gathered around journals such as Poemas y Letras.³⁴ That they regarded not only Spanish but also Papiamento as a literary language is evident from the example of one of the most important members of this group, Joseph Sickman Corsen, who lived from 1855 to 1911. He wrote his most famous poem “Atardi” (“Evening Twilight”) in Papiamento, and this is not as insignificant as it may at first seem. This poem is often associated with Heinrich Heine's Lorelei poem because of its first two lines which, taken alone, are suggestive of European Romanticism; but actually the poem exudes the atmosphere of Latin American modernismo then current in poetry. This poem put into words the same interiorized mentality that revealed—especially as evening approached—a heightened sensibility, premonitions, and a profound melancholy.³⁵ The republican ideals from the beginning of the century now hardly mattered, and by the 1920s they finally became “antiquated,” as is proved by John de Pool's work. In 1935 this polyglot published Del Curazao que se va, a personal report on the pleasant life in the island in the days when “modern” life with its radios, cars, and telephones was still far away. De Pool's entire story is interlarded with quotations in Papiamento, descriptions and anecdotes in which Papiamento plays a part, and this feature gives full scope to his bilingualism. In addition, twenty years later De Pool wrote a psychopathological portrait of Bolivar in which he once again expressed the link between the Hispanic republican tradition of the people of Curaçao and the ideals of independence.³⁶

At the turn of the century Surinam had no equivalent for this bilingual literary tradition that had developed from the republicanism. In Paramaribo, a relatively busy theatrical life had begun but few playscripts survive. Furthermore, Johannes King,³⁷ the first important author to write in Sranan Tongo, had published his diaries. He lived from about 1830 to 1898 and had family ties with the Matoeari and Djoeka, the former maroons. After a serious illness he abandoned his former habits and religious ideas and apparently at his own request was baptized by members of the Moravian Community of Brethren in Paramaribo. King learned to read and write. He described in diaries the life and customs in his village, Maripaston, and told about his visions and about the secrets of plants and herbs. This testimony from the life of an inhabitant of the regions which, throughout the colonial period, had been dangerous to colonists was first (and only partially) published in this century and made accessible to the reading public. It is unlikely that they were known to the Roman Catholic priest François Henri Rikken, who from 1901 onward wrote several novels on Surinamese historical themes. His books were in Dutch, and although he had worked in various remote regions of his country, they were nonetheless written from a literary perspective that was oriented more toward Europe.³⁸

MODERN OPINIONS ON SOCIAL MOBILITY

In 1898, the year Johannes King died, Anton de Kom was born in Surinam. At an early age he went to Holland to work and study. There he became acquainted with nationalist Indonesian students and with the international socialist movement. This inspired him to reflect systematically on the history of his homeland. Beginning in 1926 he worked on his book Wij slaven van Suriname,³⁹ which was published in Amsterdam in 1934. Here De Kom recounts the history of the region from the Spaniards' discovery of the “Wild Coast” of America until 1933, the year in which he returned to Surinam for an extended stay. He mixes into his historical analysis considerable autobiographical data, and in particular draws attention to the poverty and misery of the majority of the inhabitants of the colony, a situation for which he holds the Dutch government responsible. De Kom's work, well documented with material from archives and libraries, was the first to offer a “modern” view of Surinam's history. Central to this view are the injustice of poverty and the need for social mobility of the early slaves and coolies. The author was certainly not very familiar with the maroons' life and thought, but some parts of his work indicate that these were known to him:

When in our youth my father returned from the gold miners' camp, he often brought Djoeka friends with him, and Djoekas later were guests at our little farm when they came to town. As children we looked up to them with a certain frightened curiosity, as to savages from whom one could expect anything. When they were talking, we did not understand their language. At school we told the interesting bit of news that Djoekas had been to see us. We mocked their stupidity. We felt superior by far to the maroons, because we had learned the noble art of reading and writing, and because we wore European clothes. And yet this noble art of writing later merely served to sign the hated military service records of the “Belata Companies Surinam and Guyana,” with which the laborer De Kom or Bidoew or Lichtveld degraded himself into number x of series y. And yet in those European clothes we merely played the monkey among masters, often unwittingly so. And the Wild West films in the cinemas, the tinsel pleasures of the town, were only a cheap substitute for the eternal beauty of nature in which those despised Djoekas lived. And our contempt itself was one of the strongest shackles in the chain that bound us to the Western system of production.⁴⁰

De Kom also knew the stories about the maroons' brave opposition, the heroes Joli Coeur, Boni, and Baron, the continuous guerrilla warfare in the days of slavery. He didn't learn these stories at school, which he criticizes as spoilt by Dutch influences. In his poems he shaped these symbols into those of struggle, as signs that there had been a force against injustice, as in Vaarwel Akoeba, Vaarwel and De Bosneger (The Maroon).⁴¹ The nostalgia for Surinam can be heard in every line of his work. He often quotes his countryman Albert Helman with whom he shares this love.

Helman is a bit younger than De Kom, and lived in Holland during the same period. There he started to write and was published. For an understanding of his very substantial and little studied oeuvre, the first book, Zuid-Zuid-West,⁴² is still of fundamental importance. In these lyrical recollections and impressions of Surinam, which he characterizes as something approaching paradise, he introduces the town as a place where “all peoples of the world live together.” In the reconstruction of his youth, the Djoekas play a part, as they did for De Kom. Helman considers them happier than the town negroes, displaced persons who are always telling each other about their nostalgia for Africa. His intimate unburdening, “that which was dearest to me (I have) shown to you here, as if it were a cinema,” ends in a fierce epilogue in which he blames the “Sunday-decent merchants” for the lack of socio-economic progress in Surinam.

Helman revealed himself to be a Surinamese Naipaul who, during his countless travels through North and South America, Europe, and North Africa, recorded his impressions in his literary work. He made no attempt to disguise his political opinions, a fact which cost him a lectureship at Leiden University.⁴³ He was opposed to the harshness of a world that thinks exclusively in materialistic terms, and he always tried to find a political alternative for his beloved Surinam. In that sense his recent study, De Foltering van Eldorado⁴⁴ (The Torment of Eldorado), also results from the same attitude. In it he records an ecological history of the five Guyanas. As an option for the future Helman envisions the unification and integration of the entire region, considering this possible on ecological, ethnic, historical, and socio-economic grounds. To him Great Guyana, an American Mesopotamia, means an “inspiring myth; the continued dream of Golden Man, pondering a Golden Age that has yet to begin.”

In this return from current reality to a distant past in which Indian customs still play an important part, Helman in his development most resembles Cola Debrot who is of the same generation: he was born in Bonaire in 1902, a legendary year in the Caribbean. (In the oral tradition, and long since in the history books, one finds recollections of the unexpected eruption in 1902 of Mont Pelé in Martinique that caused many deaths but—miracle of miracles!—also liberated the island's sole prisoner from his underground cell.⁴⁵) Like De Kom and Helman, Debrot goes to Holland at an early age and meets many important intellectuals there. His acquaintance with communist ideas lends to a satire on totalitarian systems, and inspires him to write the novel Mijn zuster de negerin⁴⁶ (My Sister the Negress), which is still his most popular book. The story is familiar. After an absence of many years, Frits Ruprecht returns home and inherits his father's plantation. But he does not follow entirely in his father's footsteps, because he doesn't start an affair with the dark girlfriend of his youth, but lives with her in brotherly fashion. True, this arrangement does not come easily to him, but he consciously chooses it, and thus leaves the beaten track of the old planters' tradition in the Caribbean. Debrot attacks the theme of the black woman as the white man's “natural” mistress, seeing it as the crucial issue that in the Caribbean context best characterizes socially discriminatory relations. In that sense he writes in Stedman's vein, and links Antillean literature with Surinamese tradition. In his other work, too, Debrot has frequently adapted this theme, the “confrontation with the various races, individually or in groups,” that “like a fugue is heard throughout his work.” In his political career he also became directly involved in this question when the events of May, 1969, which resulted in several deaths, articulated plainly the protest against the racial discrimination which was experienced by black laborers who had come to the Netherlands Antilles from all over the Caribbean to work for Shell.

Debrot resigned as Governor, and went to live in Holland for the rest of his life. There in his final years he wrote De Vervolgden⁴⁷ (The Persecuted), in which he once again summarized his opinions on the history of the region from the Spanish colonization to the present. He described the attitude of the authorities and the Church towards the commandment of “limpieza de sangre,” the root of all evil that even today leads to continuous abuses, and demands “biding one's time,” or possibly even provokes “escape.”⁴⁸

It is important to emphasize that both Helman and Debrot turn to the (pre-)colonial past to seek a solution for current problems and in this context assign a particularly important place to the aboriginal Indians. To some extent this orientation resembles indianismo, which at the end of the nineteenth century caught on in several Spanish-speaking islands. They contemplated the Indian character of the Caribbean, but in so doing largely excluded African cultural influences from the process of shaping a national identity.⁴⁹

From the twenties to this day both authors have had an important bridging function. In this period Antillean and Surinamese literature developed very rapidly, and in particular the multi-lingualism in these societies has had repercussions for literary products. Magazines showed the way, for even if they soon folded they always gathered a group of interested authors around them and offered a chance of publication. Since the Second World War Antillean writers have founded and edited De Stoep, Simadán, Antilliaanse Cahiers, Ruku, Watapana and Kristòf. Each of these authors favored a different cultural concept and wrote in Dutch or in Papiamento. In Surinam, too, a similar process evolved, although with less continuity. For ten years (1946-56) “Papa” Koenders, a teacher who was strongly opposed to the far-reaching Dutch influence in the teaching methods used in Paramaribo, directed the journal Foetoe-Boi that fundamentally influenced the cultural movement Wi égi sani, Moetete and also many authors. Koenders opposed the suppression of the “Negro language” and the “Negro past,” and his favorite motto was a quotation from the poet Trefossa: “Yu kan kibri granmama, ma yu no kan tapu koso-koso” (You can hide your grandmother, but you cannot prevent her from coughing). This impulse brings us full circle from Johannes King to the present day: increasingly, Sranan Tongo is accepted as a literary language, and as an author Trefossa paved the way for this recognition. During a stay in Holland he published a collection of poems, Trotji (Introit) (1957), made a Sranan version of the Surinamese national anthem, and published the writings of Johannes King. Since 1957 Sranan Tongo has become a literary language, and younger authors have gained a framework of examples against which to react in order to find their own path.

THREE AUTHORS BETWEEN PAST AND PRESENT

The literary boom of the past few decades has stimulated important authors such as Boeli van Leeuwen, Tip Marugg, Yerba Secu, Henry Habibe, Dobru, Shrinivasi, and Bea Vianen, a list one could extend considerably. There is a differentiated process of nation-building in this literature—whether it be published in Holland or in the Caribbean—a process to which far too few studies have been devoted. Most younger authors were influenced in particular by the Zeitgeist of the sixties, the post Statuut (or Charter) era, which was rife with debates on decolonization, social justice, autonomy, and self-determination. Models for these preoccupations are the novels Atman by Leo Ferrier,⁵⁰ a Surinamese, or Sherry of een nieuw begin by Diane Lebacs⁵¹ from Curaçao. Both works may be viewed as direct reactions to the search for new alternatives in one's own society. Within this development one may distinguish three authors who consistently demonstrate a typically Caribbean link in their novels in particular and, contrary to Stedman or Debrot, one that is projected from a modern, pluralistic society. This tendency is ushered in by a volume of poetry, Stemmen uit Afrika (Voices from Africa) by Frank Martinus Arion,⁵² in 1957, the year in which Trefossa published Trotji. In Martinus Arion's book the first-person narrator, “black-black,” “tourist guide,” a “poet,” leads his guests/readers from the “civilized” world all the way into the deepest jungles of the African continent. In simple poems, sometimes in the form of spirituals, he explains the soul of the “primitive, wild, primordial people,” praising their disinterestedness, their childlike innocence, their naïveté and guilelessness. In these natural surroundings all those qualities have an obvious function, whereas in the solitude of the cities they don't come out at all. The cities are doomed, and it is Martinus Arion's aim to demonstrate that only this Africa offers a way out of the western world's dead-end sterility. In this Africa there is neither separation nor discord nor struggle; on the contrary, people strive for the reconciliation of opposites, and nobody exceeds the established limits from egocentric motives. With these poems Martinus Arion places himself in one fell swoop in the tradition of negritude, of Haitian indigénisme, of looking for the “missile and capsule” theory of Edward K. Brathwaite or the poesía negra of Guillén.⁵³ His tourist poet guides his travellers back through time to the Old Testament, in order to prove that the interpretation of Ham's curse was merely a lie to secure western man's peace of mind, which according to Paasman was one of the main issues of the Christian debates on slavery during the Enlightenment.⁵⁴

This tricky question may have been one of the reasons for this collection's “terribly enthusiastic welcome.” Arion tells us that he at once suspected that he was being “hedged in by the whites,” and started looking for another point of departure for his literary work. Typical of this is the guideline of the magazine Ruku which he founded in 1969. He writes most of it himself, aiming for a liberation from his former orientation:

Publishing a journal is more than simply an act of liberation; liberation from sterile, unproductive, uncreative Dutch barbarism. It means seeking to join the slave huts down there in the valley. It means knocking at those windows, the small green windows of those skewed and clumsily built houses, painted after motifs from the old country of origin.⁵⁵

This magazine offers Arion the chance to determine directly his position toward the political, cultural, or economic events in his own region, such as those of May, 1969, and this “training” results in his first novel, Dubbelspel⁵⁶ (Double Play Dominoes) in 1973. The plot is situated entirely in the Willemstad suburb of Wakota which occupies a very special place in the island. Its strategic points are the seventeenth-century Jewish cemetery, the Catholic church, the prostitutes' camp, Campo Alegre, the posh residential quarter of Prinsessendorp, where the Shell employees live, and the local airport, all easily accessible and fixed options in the world of those who live there. In this book with its classical three-part structure, four men play dominoes all afternoon, a game that in itself already has a theme that is a Caribbean reality: it is always ambivalent. The two pairs of players symbolize the “old-fashioned” and “modern” approaches to securing one's existence in the island.

The two elder players, one might say, have “succeeded.” They have steady jobs as bailiff and taxi-driver, and a regular though small income. The neighbors accept them as authorities in their fields. The fact that they have big families contributes to this recognition. The two younger players are not yet settled, and are still looking for a fixed aim in life. During the preparations of the game, and while they are playing, in the course of discussions and events, an enormous amount of information is given about the material, political, and personal problems of the players and their acquaintances. Thus the most varying personalities emerge. What matters is the lack of money for the children's expensive schools, the meaning of a good pair of shoes as a status symbol, the interior decoration of their homes in different tastes, or the difficult conversation of lovers. With the outcome of the thrilling domino doubles which even sets a world's record according to the principle of Brathwaite's “Super Caribbean” or Glissant's “relation planétaire,” or Guillén's “Gran Zoo,” Martinus Arion reveals the intention of his book. The seniors lose the game that they actually should have won, considering their reputation and ability. Not surprisingly, at the end of the day their fate is sealed by their violent deaths. In contrast, during the game and through their unexpected success, the younger men find an aim in life. With the money he earned in Curaçao, the Windward Islander from Saba plans to go home to make a life for himself and the family he wants to start. The other player decides to live with his sweetheart and start a furniture factory on a cooperative basis. Only in this latter initiative is there any influence of “progressive” Western ideas about working methods that are not exactly capitalistic. These ideas are introduced into this Caribbean society by Solema, who had studied in Europe. She also advocates woman's right to sexual freedom, a right that her neighbors, by the way, exercise as a matter of course, for financial reasons. On the island Latin America is symbolized by the Campo Alegre hotel, where “broken campo-Spanish” is spoken, and the women all come from neighboring Spanish-speaking countries. But there are no longer any prostitutes from Cuba, because they have all been retrained as bus drivers and earn a living in that field. Europeans don't play any part at all in this novel. Everyone has a dark skin that is compared to the hues of various kinds of wood, the material with which the first cooperative enterprise—the furniture factory—will operate.

This wood also plays an important part in the same author's novel Afscheid van de koningin (Farewell to the Queen).⁵⁷ In the republic of Songo, a wood-exporting country on the west coast of Africa, the black president opens the ball with the white queen from Europe, who is on a state visit. Though the government has a fair amount of money at its disposal, it apparently fails to bring about structural improvements in the country. The discord among the population grows, and then there is a coup in which the President is killed. The Antillean journalist Sesa Lópes travels through this restless African landscape for a Dutch weekly, trying to gather information on the political and economic situation in Songo. He scarcely succeeds, especially after the coup, and it is not until he flies home that a Dutch woman on the plane gives him information he can use for an eye-witness report. Moreover, this discussion is also determined by the situation in South Africa, a country where racial discrimination is coterminous with the political system, and where the European colonial past is also a major reference point. In this book Arion sees a possible improvement of these African problems in the active and courageous attitude of an average Dutchman who knows the situation there and is not afraid to risk his own life into the bargain.

In Arion's most recent novel, Nobele Wilden (Noble Savages),⁵⁸ this possible change in consciousness in Europe is again directly linked to the Caribbean. Now it is not Curaçao that plays the principal part, but Martinique, the birthplace of the protagonist, Julien Bizet Constant. He is familiar with the theories of Frantz Fanon, the psychiatrist who wrote about the “wretched of the earth,” and interprets his theories without appealing to the factor of violence and physical repression. Here Arion argues in favor of “power to the imagination,” a slogan taken from the French student uprising of May, 1968. The hero was studying in Paris at that time and with his Hindustani⁵⁹ girlfriend Mabille he was making all kinds of plans for the future of their island. During a stay in Lourdes he discovers an entirely different European reality, that of the poor and the sick, all hoping for miracles that will improve or extend their lives. So well can Julien identify with their expectations that despite his rational explanation of the Virgin's apparition to little Bernadette Soubirous, he does not condemn the activities at the shrine. He accepts both the rational and the irrational side to French society, and assimilates these into a view of Martinique's future from a Caribbean perspective. He even decides to become a priest—of course not a celibate one—and seven years later, as bishop of Lourdes, he carries on a correspondence with his two girlfriends about their practical efforts to effect changes in insular society. One of them helps by investing her Swiss capital in a banana estate, the other by her political activity. Even tourist trips to Cuba are on the agenda, yet what is central to the entire book is the blacks' position in the Caribbean world. It is in this context that Arion's solidarity with Surinam's fate—right from his first works—must be considered. His first volume of poetry was inspired by the poet Trefossa. In his first novel the socio-economic plan is worked out through his availability of wood as a raw material (something that does not exactly abound in Curaçao); in his second novel a wealthy wood-producing republic, only recently independent and with strong African roots, is of paramount importance. This latter book was published in the very year of Surinam's independence; since then Arion, in his most recent novels, has looked for nation-building models that can also be linked with Surinam:

For me, too, the dream of '68 still survives: an independent Martinique, later united with Guadeloupe and Guyana—which I also visited—the real condition for a united Caribbean realm that no doubt one day must arise, whether or not (as one Antillean author has written) with Cuba as the seat of government!

When I was in Guyana (to find out about the possibilities there for the accommodation of refugees), I could not resist the temptation to cross the Maroni near the little border village of St. Laurent where the ruins of the former prisons still testify to French barbarism, in order to visit the idyllic village of Albina in the ex-Dutch colony of Surinam that recently gained its independence. An exciting country, because so many people come together there: Indians, Blacks, Maroons, Javanese, Hindustanis, Chinese and Whites. Just as among us (békés), the whites have special names here: boeroes and macambas, though as I was told, the latter term is mainly the name they have in the other Dutch colony, the so-called Dutch Antilles. The Maroons are the guerrillas from the days of slavery who, relatively early in history, managed to force the far more powerful Dutch to their knees.⁶⁰

Surinam, wood, maroons, and independence are all Caribbean themes and constitute a nation-building element in the Caribbean literary imagination. It is this aspect that renders Arion's works comparable in content to those of Astrid Roemer and Edgar Cairo. However, while the Antillean author ignores the urban life in the capital of Paramaribo, and thus far in his critical approach has mainly indicated Cuba as the Caribbean model of social mobility, the two Surinamese authors precisely emphasize the metropolitan element as a connecting factor for the whole country.

Astrid Roemer knows the mulatto woman of Paramaribo to be a person “beautiful enough not to succumb to the Third-World stereotype,”⁶¹ and she refuses to treat the female characters in her novels in this stereotypical way. In Over de gekte van een vrouw (A Woman's Madness)⁶² she tells the story of the brief marriage of the teacher Noenka to Louis from Curaçao. The question of why this relationship failed runs through the whole book and its causes reach way back into the past of the little “coastal state.”

In Noenka's Paramaribo all families are familiar with the so-called Shell drama: “… the poor uncle who had migrated to Curaçao and who in a short time had managed to become a well-dressed man with an American car, a Venezuelan wife and dollars.” But the young leading character experiences this Curaçao dream in a very different way. She wonders why Antillean men so often come and look for a wife in Surinam, as Louis had done in her case. Behind the scenes of the “deluded aesthetics,” she suspects some deep-rooted frustrations:

Curaçao women were black and frizzy. Unlike the blacks in Surinam, those over there felt so much attracted to each other that they hardly had any need to get rid of their dark color and frizzy little curls through assimilation—a pursuit which in Surinam led to absurd and inferior behavior by black men and girls, and for instance caused oil-rich Surinamese to look for a wife in their own country. The range of options remained unsatisfactory: beautiful black virgins and young women of a lighter complexion who through a black man tried to gain money and status, or girls who boasted Oriental features and aimed at a husband with a lot of money—preferably not earned by daily labor—money with which they themselves could fulfill the myth of a rich Chinese father. Anyhow, white remained beyond the natives' reach.⁶³

Louis simply cannot understand that Noenka's problems stem from a Surinamese past which has decisively influenced her parents and her family life. Noenka's father was from the Para region. He would tell her about the “freshly green” and “shining” woods, with deer or flocks of wild boar, and black, clear water. But the relations between the people there, and also between those at home were still entirely determined by the neuroses resulting from the slavery era during which, for example, the snake as a fatal threat played an important part. After breaking off with his parents, her father goes to town, where he meets the girl he is to marry. She comes from Nickerie and has a Protestant background. Because of a mutual lack of understanding of the other's background, their marriage is not a happy one, and Noenka decides she doesn't want another cool, erotic relationship like this in her family. However, it is precisely in this respect that the wedding night with Louis is a failure. He is far too rash and careless, because Noenka just happens to be having her period. His lust for her menstrual blood startles her, and deeply shocked she runs away, back to her parents. Another relationship, with a Surinamese orchid grower, also ends dramatically, and the young woman only finds peace in an intimate friendship with Gabrielle, a woman of Indian-French-Dutch descent. This friendship is not appreciated by those around them, who would rather see Noenka reunited with her husband. But after an attempted reconciliation, which proves impossible, the two friends “murder” the man. The murder appears to be a symbolic act, denouncing unequivocally the lack of communication about sexual frustrations that result from undigested neurotic relations inherited from the past. This “execution,” one hundred years after the last death sentence was carried out in Surinam, takes place in the year of independence. Thus, it seems, the author wants to indicate that independence must be the first step in liberating the various ethnic groups in Surinam, French Guyana, and Curaçao, so that in the future the problems of a colonial past will no longer impede personal development.

Roemer's second novel Nergens Ergens (Nowhere Somewhere), is also about such problems, this time in a Dutch setting.⁶⁴ Because of a personal disappointment—his girlfriend finds someone else—the leading character Benito leaves Surinam with a return ticket and two months' leave pay. He has a Surinamese passport but hopes to stay in Holland so as to work, study, and gain prestige. He can't agree with the “new order” introduced with his country's independence: “It has robbed me of everything and has confused my mind.” In Benito's own memories and those of his countrymen, Surinamese development plays a constant role and determines the most divergent political positions, resulting in broken marriages and children being separated from their parents. But in Holland Benito does not find the peace he is looking for. As the son of a “reddish brown plantation negro with his broad allegories,” he has most affinity with the singer Bessy, a drug addict born in Harlem. She tells him about the racism among her own people. When she dies, there is nothing to keep Benito in Holland. There he is “nowhere,” and he leaves for the airport to go “somewhere,” to find a happier future. In Astrid Roemer's novels it is hard to pin the leading characters down to a motive for what they do and refrain from doing. By means of her evocative language the author takes pains to impart to every event in the plot various associations at the same time, thus presenting to the reader a variegated image of the recounted reality. Her figures are never simple or easy to understand, and though their socio-historical situations are not paramount, these do not have a decisive influence on their character.

In Edgar Cairo's work the ratio is precisely inverse. In his substantial novelistic oeuvre he describes the situation of a contemporary Surinamese who grew up in the “yards” of Paramaribo, a description undertaken from the most diverse perspectives, ranging far beyond the Surinamese horizon. In the process the multi-ethnic aspects of society as the focus for current problems are raised with penetrating care. Vernie A. February has written an article on this, appropriately entitled Boesie sa tek' mi baka (Let the bush receive me once again).⁶⁵ This return to the “bush” is prepared in the roman à clef entitled Jeje Disi/Karakter's Krachten (This Here Soul/Character's Forces),⁶⁶ which offers a comprehensive view of Paramaribo from the highest to the lowest levels of population, around the time that the Charter for the Kingdom of the Netherlands was proclaimed. The leading character is little Mandwe-boi who lives with his grandparents, who are nearly always quarreling because the grandmother believes in winti forces, whereas her husband hates this belief from the bottom of his heart because it is a symbol of the backward “folk culture,” “Negro idolatry,” or the “Negro drama” that by tradition is “strictly forbidden.” This conflict is synonymous with the situation in the entire urban community where everyone is familiar with this tradition, but no one openly mentions it because of a collective self-hatred attaching to its existence. Paradoxically, a Dutch researcher emerges who tackles precisely this aspect of folk culture and starts to question people about it. The “Negro language” and “Negro customs” serve as material for his dissertation. With his wife he lives in their midst, studying Lakoe-prés and oral etiquette. That is how, in connection with former colonial relations, the culture's taboo comes fully alive in Cairo's book. This is demonstrated in particular by the street songs everyone knows and which serve as a public newspaper on which everybody makes comments. The Dutch researcher tries unstintingly to date the following song:

These lines have many double meanings, both erotic and associated with the slavery era and the inhuman treatment of disobedient individuals. The extent to which relations had been ruined is shown by an instance from 1780, when the song originated in the village of Parmurbo, where both recaptured slaves and the planter's wife were terribly beaten because they had helped each other. Cairo takes on the problem of communicating with whites about such past histories even today and uses the example of the mulattos to bring them up for discussion. The scientist who, through the horrors of the Second World War, has been disappointed in Western civilization, delves into Surinamese culture to find a new alternative. In so doing, he imagines the mulattos as the only true cross between two people each representing a lost culture, doubly the most profound misfortune of the soul. Once they “have fused into the newest Man, the most beautiful mulatto woman … (Again, the glimmer of a smile on the side of his cheek) … the body will also bear the beauty of the souls' fusion. Of harmony born of discord.” At the end of his book, Cairo clearly shows that these views are not at all shared by the local population. The scientist seduces the girl next door and begets her child. But when during a large-scale Lakoe-pré the community hears of this, they immediately abort this “mulatto child.” In addition to losing the child, the man is punished with the loss of his wife who on a plantation in the interior dies of a snake-bite, the symbol of violent relations between a master and his slaves.

The “Negro culture” applies all defense strategies against the “intruders” in its territory so as to emphasize the contrast between the scientific aim—to study the traditionally hidden language and customs—and the real situation, namely their repression in public life. This public aspect is highlighted in particular in the person of the Dutch pedagogue, a professor who is the other researcher's superior. This educator designs the “rapid teacher-training colleges” where as many Surinamese as possible can be crammed by Western methods to provide autonomous Surinam with trained managers. But such a plan is diametrically opposed to the efforts of Surinamese intellectuals to reform the school system in a way that is more in line with their own traditions. Here the main thing is the use of their own language, Sranan Tongo, which everyone speaks differently according to its relation to one's own mother tongue.

Because of their dependence on the Dutch colonial system, both scientists cooperate actively or passively in suppressing that language, and the professor is punished as well. He cannot avoid the magnetic influence of the “dangerously fantastic beauty of the Mulatto woman,” the “Countess Guyave, the Mulatress, the pear, the treacherous fruit” who works in his home, and his conduct seriously jeopardizes his marriage and career.

Of course there are parallels in this roman à clef with very many real persons, but they are not involved in it as individuals; rather their ideals and work are placed in the historical perspective of a particular Caribbean country, so as to make it recognizable, with all its typical conflicts. From this rationale Edgar Cairo's motives in his later works become clear. He returns to the “bush,” the Para, and on to an Africa of times past, which in current Surinamese culture is still of great importance.⁶⁷

SUMMARIZING REMARKS

As has been demonstrated, one might indeed say that over the centuries a Caribbean image-forming process took place in Surinamese and Antillean literature that was derived from a nation-building idea. This is proved by the existence of the stereotypical mulatto woman who in the literary imagination simultaneously personifies both the awareness of socio-economic dependence, and the protest against it.

Stedman introduces her because of his confrontation with the maroons and the modern European ideas at the end of the eighteenth century. But as a European he finds no alternative in his work to effect any change in the existing relations. In contrast, Debrot describes how, after returning from modern Europe, a new start can be made by living together in a “sisterly” way that breaks out of traditional erotic models. But he brings this up for discussion as a personal decision and does not deal with its consequences at the social level. Cairo, on the other hand, proves that this peaceful model is entirely out of the question as long as social relations in a Caribbean country continue to suppress the traditionally “hidden” culture and try to exclude it.

These three Caribbean stages are also part of a different literary tradition that likewise links Surinamese socio-cultural relations with those of the Antilles. In his day Stedman wrote under the influence of European progressive ideas, which had hardly caught on in Dutch literature of the period. Debrot believes the Caribbean situation can be solved by personal integrity. But considering the further orientation in his work, this approach fails in the present as well. He increasingly orients himself towards the past, towards the Spanish colonization as the heart of the matter, a tendency he shares with Albert Helman. However, Cairo does not consider this backward look to be an alternative. He concentrates on today's problems which, by constant suppression of the “hidden” cultural symbolism, lead to violent actions. This links him to the work of Astrid Roemer and Frank Martinus Arion who write about exactly the same things, though from very different points of departure. These “Doubles” are a heritage of the colonial past that the Caribbean has in common with the Netherlands. Hence it is not surprising that in the novels of the aforementioned writers Holland is almost exclusively studded with negative symbols.

At the linguistic level, the emergence of a threefold Caribbean development is clearly visible. Stedman wrote in his native language, English, and names and explains all “foreign” words with precision. Debrot and his generation write in Dutch, which they regarded as their mother tongue; but in the content of their works, they oriented themselves entirely toward the conflicts in their own regions. The last three writers I have discussed write in several languages, but in their novels they address themselves most clearly to Caribbean conflicts. For that purpose Martinus Arion uses Dutch, though in his professional capacity he is the most important advocate of integration of Papiamento at all levels of Antillean society. Astrid Roemer's bilingualism does show clearly in her novels. She often uses Sranan Tongo words or expressions to describe certain moods. This particular use of Sranan Tongo has a function within Dutch that the author transforms in her own way into an imaginative force. Quite deliberately, Edgar Cairo uses Surinamese-Dutch or Dutch-Surinamese to evoke reactions from his audience for whom these different languages are their mother tongue.

Thus it can be said that the strategy presented in this essay tends to a paradigmatic approach to the “national” history of Dutch Antillean and Surinamese literature. The Caribbean imagination is considered as a source which reveals the varieties of regional problems in a typical national context. In relation to the so-called Caribbean stereotype—the ambivalent mulatto woman—deduced primarily from the specific view of some Spanish-speaking authors of their own Caribbean environment, the linguistic problem is seen to be closely linked with finding one's own center as a nation. Perhaps on this point Surinam and the “Dutch” Antilles resemble most closely the Haitian experience, in which the combination of Creole language and the aesthetic model of the non-European-looking woman are already present in the national literary tradition in the nineteenth century.⁶⁸

Notes

1. Astrid Roemer in particular has often discussed the problems confronting the Surinamese author, e.g., in OSO (a magazine for Surinamese language and literature published in Nijmegen, the Netherlands) 1.2 (1982): 32-38. See also her article “And in the Beginning Was the Word and after that the Analphabets. About the Power of Literature,” El Caribe y América Latina/The Caribbean and Latin America, ed. Ulrich Fleischmann and Ineke Phaf (Frankfurt a. M.: Klaus Dieter Vervuert, 1987) 239-44.

2. CARAF, Department of Caribbean Studies, Royal Institute of Linguistics and Anthropology, P.O. Box 9515, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands.

3. STICUSA, Foundation for Cultural Cooperation, J. J. Viottastraat 41, 1071 JP Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

4. Jean Franco, Spanish American Literature Since Independence (London: Ernest Benn Ltd., 1973) 1-17. Also Frantz Fanon, Les Damnés de la terre (Paris: Maspero, 1961), especially chapter 4 “Sur la culture nationale.”

5. In this context its most important representatives are Nicolás Guillén (Cuba, 1902), Manuel del Cabral (Dominican Republic, 1907), and Luis Palés Matos (Puerto Rico, 1898-1959).

6. V. S. Naipaul, Finding the Centre (London: Penguin Books, 1985) 11.

7. Donald Herdeck, A Bio-Bibliography of Caribbean Literature (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1979), v.

8. Anton de Kom, Nosotros, Esclavos de Surinam (La Habana: Casa de las Américas, 1981).

9. Research project at the Latin American Institute of the Free University in West Berlin, 1983-85, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation in Hannover, GFR. Results have appeared in several publications. For information, write to: Breitenbachplatz 2, 1000 Berlin 33, GFR.

10. Ineke Phaf, “Women and Literature in the Caribbean,” Unheard Words, ed. Mineke Schipper (London: Allison & Busby, 1985) 168-200.

11. Alejo Carpentier, El siglo de las luces (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1965) 246.

12. Gabriel García Márquez, Cien a'nos de soledad (Buenos Aires: Suramericana, 1969).

13. Gabriel García Márquez, Crónica de una muerte anunciada (La Habana: Casa de las Américas, 1981).

14. Gabriel García Márquez, El amor en los tiempos de cólera (Barcelona: Ed. Bruguera, 1985).

15. Paul Brenneker, Sambambu (Curaçao: Instant Printing Service, 1979) 798-801.

16. An entire issue of OSO 4.1 (1985) is devoted to the problems of Saramaccan, Sarnami, and Surinamese Javenese.

17. An interview by Roy Khemradj with P. Seuren, J. Voorhoeve, and J. Defares during the first colloquium on Surinamese language and literature in Amsterdam published in OSO 1.1 (1982): 15.

18. Complete references to these titles follow: C. G. M. Smit and V. F. Heuvel, Autonoom: Literature in Dutch in the Antilles (Rotterdam: Ed. Flamboyant, 1975); Andries van der Wal and Freek van Wel, Met eigen stem (The Hague: Uitgave Kabinet voor Nederlands-Antilliaanse Zaken, 1980); Jos de Roo, Antilliaans Literair Logboek (Zutphen: De Walburg Pers, 1980); Jan Voorhoeve and Ursy M. Lichtveld, eds., Creole Drum. An Anthology of Creole Literature in Surinam (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975); Edgar Cairo, Lelu! Lelu! Het lied van vervreemding (Haarlem: In de Knipscheer, 1984).

19. De Roo (1980) 25.

20. Cola Debrot, “Verworvenheden en leemten van de Antilliaanse Literatuur,” Cultureel Mozaiek van de Nederlandse Antillen (Zutphen: De Walburg Pers, 1977), 100-02.

21. Such as the physician Willem van Focquenbroch (Amsterdam 1635-St. George d'Elmina 1675). After the war Willem Frederik Hermans published an anthology of his work that I have not been able to trace.

22. John Esquemeling, The Buccaneers of America, 2 vols. (London: Dover Publications, 1967). Albert Helman quotes this book in Waar is Vrijdag gebleven? (Zutphen: De Walburg Pers, 1983) 47-48.

23. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko of de Koninklijke Slaaf, translation and epilogue by A. Helman (Amsterdam: Arbeiderspers, 1983).

24. Voltaire, “Candide ou l'optimisme,” Romans et contes (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966) 221-25.

25. Heinrich Heine, Heines Werke, vol. 1 (Berlin and Weimar: Afbau-Verlag, 1972) 347-51.

26. A. N. Paasman, “Wat bezielde de LITERAIRE kolonisten?,” OSO 1.2 (1982): 44-62. An anthology with literary selections from this period was edited by Ursy M. Lichtveld and Jan Voorhoeve, Suriname: Spiegel der vaderlandse kooplieden: een historisch leesboek. (Zwolle: Ed. Tjeenk Willink, 1958).

27. Elisabeth Maria Post, Reinhart, of natuur en godsdienst, 3 vols. (Amsterdam: Johannes Allart, 1791-92). See on this subject A. N. Paasman, Reinhart: Nederlandse Literatuur en Slavernij ten tijde van de Verlichting (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984). This dissertation compares the novel's contents with the author's actual family relations. See also A. N. Paasman, Elisabeth Maria Post (1755-1812) (Amsterdam: Ed. Thespa, 1977).

28. John Gabriel Stedman, Narrative of an Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam and Guiana on the Wild Coast of South America from the Years 1772 to 1777, ed. R. A. J. van Lier (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972).

29. Noel Salomon also points out this similarity in his article “La source de l'évocation de Paramaribo et son élaboration littéraire dans ‘El siglo de las luces,’” Mélanges à la mémoire d'André Joucla-Ruau, vol. 1 (Aix-en-Provence: Ed. de l'Université de Provence, 1978) 355-69.

30. In his preface to Stedman (1972), Van Lier mentions his influence on the following works: in 1824 a story, “Joanna or the Female Slave” was published in London, based on extracts from Stedman's work. It also became material for a German play by Frantz Kratter, “Die Sklavin in Surinam” (Frankfurt a. M., 1804), and a French novel by Eugène Sue, Aventures d'Hercule Hardi (Paris, 1840) which was widely read.

31. Stedman (1972) 173.

32. Gert Oostindie and Emmy Maduro, Antillianen en Surinamers in Nederland 1634/1667-1954 (Dordrecth: Foris Publications, 1986). For their description of the Caribbean context, see pages 153-55. For a long time the ñañigos of Cuba probably had the best organized secret societies in the entire region. See Enrique Sosa Rodriguez, Los ñañigos (La Habana: Casa de las Américas, 1982).

33. Oostindie and Maduro (1986) 187-89.

34. Debrot (1977), 116. See also Schrijvers Prentenboek van de Nederlandse Antillen (The Hague: STICUSA, 1980) 4-5.

35. Modernismo: Spanish-American literary movement at the end of the nineteenth century. The volume Azul (1888) which the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío published in Chile is regarded as its first representative work.

36. John de Pool published this book in Spanish, in Panama, in 1946.

37. Concerning Johannes King, see Voorhoeve and Lichtveld (1975) 116-33.

38. Some fragments of Rikkens's work appeared in an anthology compiled by Thea Doelwijt, Kri, Kra! Proza van Suriname (Paramaribo: Bureau Volkslectuur, 1975) 48-53.

39. Anton de Kom, Wij slaven van Suriname (1934; Bussum: Het Wereldvenster, 1981). On de Kom see also Oostindie and Maduro (1986) 66-76.

40. De Kom (1981) 70-71.

41. Anton de Kom, Strijden ga ik, an anthology of poems published by the “Stichting tot behoud en stimulatie van Surinaamse Kunst, Kultuur en Wetenschap,” pages 21, 32.

42. Albert Helman, Zuid-Zuid-West (Amsterdam: Querido, 1976).

43. Tony van Verre, Ontmoeting met Albert Helman (Bussum: De Gooise Uitgeverij, 1980) 25.

44. Albert Helman, De foltering van Eldorado (The Hague: Ed. Nijgh and Ditmar, 1983).

45. Mrs. Debrot spoke about this at her husband's funeral. Text in Sticusa-Journal, The Hague 81.12 (1982): 2-3.

46. Cola Debrot, Mijn zuster de negerin (1935; Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1978).

47. Cola Debrot, De Vervolgden (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1982).

48. Debrot (1982) 84-85.

49. This is the subject of Doris Sommer's article “La novela en el desarrollo de la sociedad de la República Dominicana 1880-1970” in La Literatura Latinoamericana en el Caribe, ed. Alejandro Losada (Berlin: Lateinamerika-Institut der Freien Universität Berlin, 1983) 195-242.

50. Leo Ferrier, Atman (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1968).

51. Diane Lebacs, Sherry of een nieuw begin (The Hague: Leopold, 1971).

52. Frank Martinus Arion, Stemmen uit Afrika, 2nd ed. (Rotterdam: Flamboyant, 1978). In his introduction, p. 6, Martinus Arion discusses Trefossa's influence on his work.

53. Caribbean negritude is identified with the work of Aimé Césaire from Martinique. His long poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal was originally published in a Paris magazine in 1939. It was first published as a volume in Cuba, in Lydia Cabrera's translation, in 1943. The first Paris edition in book form was published by Bordas in 1947.

54. On Ham's curse see Paasman (1984) passim.

55. See STICUSA, ed. (1980) 39.

56. Frank Martinus Arion, Dubbelspel (1973; Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1980).

57. Frank Martinus Arion, Afscheid van de koningin (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1975).

58. Frank Martinus Arion, Nobele Wilden (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1979).

59. Hindustani: a descendant of the Indians who were brought to the West Indies as cheap labor after the abolition of slavery in 1848 (Ed.).

60. Idem. 51.

61. See interview with Astrid Roemer in Mineke Schipper, ed. (1985) 168-200.

62. Astrid Roemer, Over de gekte van een vrouw (Haarlem: In de Knipscheer, 1982).

63. Idem. 39-40.

64. Astrid Roemer, Nergens Ergens (Haarlem: In de Knipscheer, 1983).

65. Vernie A. February, “Boesi sa tek' mi baka—Let the bush receive me once again,” OSO 3.1 (1984): 39-62.

66. Edgar Cairo, Jeje Disi/Karakter's Krachten (Haarlem: In de Knipscheer, 1980).

67. Edgar Cairo, Dat vuur der grote drama's (Haarlem: In de Knipscheer, 1982). Edgar Cairo, Nuymane/Uit mensennaam (Amsterdam-Houten: Agathon; Uniboek, 1986).

68. In this context G. R. Coulthard refers to the Haitian poet Oswald Durand (1840-1906), who belongs to the first generation of poets to effectuate the “aesthetic revaluation” of their own cultural elements. See G. R. Coulthard, Race and Colour in Caribbean Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962) 87-90.