The Low Countries. Jaargang 7
(1999-2000)– [tijdschrift] The Low CountriesDutch-Language Caribbean Voices in EnglishKenneth Ramchand, author of the famous study The West Indian Novel and its Background, had the surprise of his life at the July 1997 literature conference in Paramaribo, capital of Surinam. He had never realised how many cultural and historical links Surinam has with the rest of the region, and how strongly Caribbean the country is. In thirty years of literary studies, the Trinidadian had apparently not understood that there is more to Caribbean culture than its Anglophone and Francophone elements. Limited perspective is a common fault in many Caribbean studies. But from now on, lack of familiarity with the language will no longer be a credible excuse. A special issue of Callaloo was published at the end of 1998, entitled Caribbean Literature from Surinam, the Netherlands Antilles, Aruba and the Netherlands.. And the second volume of A History of Literature in the Caribbean, the chief editor of which is James Arnold, will be published shortly, and will be devoted to English and Dutch-speaking areas.1 The special issue of Callaloo is a hefty tome; 287 large-format pages in small typeface, with three portfolios of beautiful reproductions of work by 13 artists. The issue contains translations of prose by 13 writers, literary criticism by 11 writers, and poems by 34 poets, plus a song of the Trio Indians. Guest editor Hilda van Neck-Yoder, Professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of English at Howard University in Virginia, must have puzzled long and hard as to how she was to put all this material into some sort of order. In the end, she has not done so: there is no ordering by genre, theme or writer's age. In her introduction she makes a virtue of necessity by indicating that the best way to read the issue is by random selection: ‘Such a way of reading, invited by the layout, may suggest the construction of a Caribbean poetics that propels this rich and diverse conversation of voices in a multiplicity of languages’. For readers who do not want to read the chaos as chaos, she suggests reading the contributions by genre, or relying on the four introductory essays based on different languages. It seems logical that the Netherlands Antilles, Aruba and Surinam should be dealt with together. However, when we look more closely, they do not have very much in common. These regions were important in the colonial era, were ruled for centuries by the same colonial power, and have therefore acted as a preservative for the Dutch language in the area. Yet in demographic, cultural and linguistic terms they are very different. There is enormous ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity in independent Surinam. The Antilles, which still belong to the Netherlands, are divided, roughly speaking, into the large, black Catholic population which speaks Papiamento, and the small white Jewish or Protestant population who communicate mainly in Dutch. The plantation colony of Surinam, long threatened by Indians and Maroons, and from the end of the last century by a large influx of Asians, has produced a totally different literature from the Antilles and Aruba. While Dutch is still the most important written language in Surinam, and Sranantongo (a language of the Creoles) and Sarnami (a creole language of the Hindustanis) have been accepted as literary languages, the Netherlands Antilles still appears to be in the final phase, with literary Papiamento producing few great new talents so far. It is no coincidence that the tone of Curaçao native Frank Martinus Arion's introduction takes a sombre view of black culture on his island. The Callaloo issue offers the reader a treasure of literary texts from Caribbean Dutch, and the various everyday languages of Surinam, the Antilles and Aruba. There is beautiful work by Leo H. Ferrier, Boeli van Leeuwen, Ellen Ombre and Hugo Pos, and fine poetry by Charles Corsen, Edgar Cairo, Trudi Guda, Elis Juliana, Michaël Slory and Bernardo Ashetu. Unfortunately, however, the issue does not give the reader a balanced picture. There are three reasons for this. The first is that Callaloo is a journal of African-American literature, which means that the emphasis has been placed authors of creole (i.e. African-American) origin. The work of Albert Helman, for example, is represented by three of his Sranan poems, but none of his Dutch poems are included, although many more of his poems were written in that language. The balance is even more bizarre when we see five poems by Frank Martinus Arion, but only one by the far more important poet Shrinivási. Major Antillean literary figures such as Tip Marugg (arguably the most famous prose writer), and the poets Luc Tournier and Oda Blinder, are not included at all. A second reason for the imbalance is the overemphasis on diaspora literature, work by Surinamese and Antilleans in the Netherlands. The issue contains no less than three translations of Astrid Roemer's poems and two interviews. In contrast, there is not a single interview with an author living in Surinam. Paul Marlee - the first author to have a Surinamese book translated into English (Guinea Pig, 1990) - is totally ignored. The third reason for the imbalance is that the contributions have been measured against that gruesome American norm: political correctness. As a result of a misplaced need to pamper (read: render infantile) | |
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blacks, anything which has vaguely unpleasant connotations must be glossed over. Authors who have written painful - but nonetheless true - things about the Caribbean, such as the Curaçao critic Aart G. Broek and Leiden professor Gert Oostindië, are omitted from this issue of Callaloo. By contrast, the issue includes a respectable piece on Madame Bovary by the region's most critical essayist, Anil Ramdas, which could not possibly offend anyone. One would think that Marugg, Marlee, Blinder and Tournier are not included because they write in Dutch. Yet when one sees the forced motivation with which the work of a poet such as Hans Faverey - a large number of poems, plus an essay devoted to him - is pushed into the issue, then one begins to ask even more questions. On the basis of a single sentence in quotation marks in the work of Hans Faverey, Hilda van Neck-Yoder claims that his work is ‘deeply informed by his Caribbean and African heritage’, and that Surinam is present in his poetry as ‘unspoken text’. She places him on a par with authors such as Edgar Cairo and Astrid Roemer, who use creolised language. This is, of course, an absurd piece of reasoning, given that Faverey has never alluded to Surinam in his work, and that his entire oeuvre has functioned exclusively within the literary circuit in the Netherlands. This classification of Caribbean literature has failed in other respects too: the guest editor devotes half of her introduction to My Sister the Negress (Mijn zuster de negerin, 1935). ‘the first Caribbean novel in Dutch’ by Cola Debrot. Van Neck-Yoder gives a fine interpretation of this book about the white Curaçaoan, Frits, returning to his native island only to find that colonial relationships no longer exist. The book ends abruptly and ‘creates a space that elicits Caribbean voices’. This sounds fine in an introduction to an anthology of Caribbean voices, but is something else when we know that Debrot's book was preceded by at least ten other Dutch-language Caribbean novels, including Albert Helman's renowned The Silent Plantation (De stille plantage, 1932). Callaloo introduces ‘firsts’, but Trefossa was not the first to write poetry in Sranan, and Edgar Cairo was not the first to write about the poor of Paramaribo. According to the guest editor, this issue of Callaloo is already a historic one, because it is the first to present the Antilles, Aruba and Surinam together - and as Caribbean. I wish the journal all the best, but neither claim is true. English-speaking readers can choose from a wide selection of texts (largely well-translated) from the Dutch-speaking Caribbean region, and Hilda van Neck-Yoder deserves every credit for that. Alice van Romondt also points the way with a stimulating bibliography of work translated into English. But readers must be aware that this issue of Callaloo is not a true reflection of the literature of the Antilles, Surinam and Aruba, but a selection which distorts the total picture. In other words: there may well be a great deal of ‘unspoken text’ in Caribbean literature, which is contained in this issue in another form. I know of at least one poet who would have protested against such a partial selection: the avant-la-lettre feminist Johanna Schouten-Elsenhout. On 9 February 1999, America's First Lady Hilary Clinton chose a poem by Schouten-Elsenhout - the ‘Grandma Moses’ of Surinamese literature - to open her speech at the population conference for non-governmental delegations. I do not know where she found the poem - it was not published in Callaloo - but she must have been moved by the closing words: Woman you are sublime
You shine
You do not surrender
in the middle of the battle
of every day
michiel van kempen Translated by Yvette Mead.
Hilda van Neck-Yoder (ed.), Callaloo: Caribbean Literature from Surinam, the Netherlands Antilles, Aruba and the Netherlands. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Vol. 21, no. 3, Summer 1998. issn 0161 2492.
Armand Baag, Mama Sranan. 1985, Canvas, 115 × 95 cm.
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