OSO. Tijdschrift voor Surinaamse Taalkunde, Letterkunde en Geschiedenis. Jaargang 3
(1984)– [tijdschrift] OSO–
Auteursrechtelijk beschermd
[pagina 63]
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To every thing a season: the development of Saramaka calendric reckoning
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But Schumann also noted (ibid.) that Saramakas began their year at a different moment from Europeans, marking ‘the end of the Long Dry Season or the beginning of the Short Rainy (or Planting-)Season, with the previous months considered as belonging to “last year”.’ And he wrote that this ‘New Year’ point usually fell about the end of October (ibid.). Since most of the original Saramakas fled from Portuguese Jewish plantations (Price 1976, 1983), it seems likely that this eighteenth-century Saramaka New Year's date was influenced by the September-October dating of Rosh ha-Shana, the Jewish New Year celebrated on those plantations. 
Figure One: Schematic Diagram of Seasons and Calendars.
The diaries kept by Schumann and his fellow missionaries (Staehelin 1913-19) make clear as well that Saramakas used a lunar calendar; indeed, Schumann (s.v. jara) declares directly that ‘months are reckoned from one new moon to the next.’ Yet this calendar clearly puzzled the missionaries, as only certain months had names at all, and Saramakas did ‘not even know how many moons/months compose one year’ (ibid.). My reconstruction of this system, as described by Schumann and his confreres, may be summarized as follows (see also Figure 1): the first (lunar) month of the Saramaka New Year (usually about November) was called Dann, and its coming was ‘recog- | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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nized’ by the fact that it was supposed to mark the beginning of the Short Rainy Season. The next named lunar month (usually about April) was Sebentera (the Pleiades), ‘recognized’ by the fact that the Long Rainy Season was supposed to begin during it. The following three rainy-season months (about May, June and July) were also named: Hondiman (the Hunter), Bali-matu (Sweeps the Forest), and Tanfuru-watra (Still High Water).Ga naar eind2 The Long Dry Season months which followed were, again, unnamed, with the cycle beginning again (about November) with the coming of the small rains, with the moon then in the sky designated as Dann. The problem of intercalation - adjusting this eighteenth-century lunar calendar to the solar year - was not left solely to the somewhat unpredictable seasons (the coming of the small rains around November and the coming of the large rains about April). Saramakas today say that the Pleiades (today called Sébítaa) are supposed to sink below the horizon as the month now called Sébítaa-líba finishes;Ga naar eind3 and Schumann (s.v. Hondiman) tells us that in the eighteenth century (as today), Hondiman - which is a constellation composed of the three stars of Orion's belt (and considered to be the hunter, his dog, and the game) - disappears below the horizon during the month so named. (Though Schumann is not explicit about why the month called Sebentera had this name, which Saramakas did tell him meant ‘the Pleiades’ [s.v. Sebenterra], the fact that modern Saramakas know that this constellation sinks below the horizon during that month makes it almost certain that their eighteenth-century forebears did as well.) Saramakas today ‘etymologize’ the names of two of the three other months mentioned by Schumann - Bali-matu and Tanfuru-watra - and their explanations fit perfectly with Schumann's understanding of the seasonal place of these months. In Baí-mátu-líba (Sweeps-the-Forest-Month), the last really large rains of the year sweep the forest floor clean; in Tanvúu-wáta-líba (Still-High-Water-Month), the river is often high, though the rains have considerably diminished. Today, as in Schumann's day, these are the final two months of the Long Rainy Season. The only other named month in the eighteenth century, Dann, remains an etymological mystery; it is the only one of Schumann's Saramaccan month names to have disappeared entirely today.Ga naar eind4 The workings of the modern Saramaka calendar may illuminate some of the features of its eighteenth-century ancestor (see Figure 1). The Saramaka calendar is today composed of twelve named lunar months. Saramakas believe it to be fully compatible with the Western calendar; there is no awareness that the Saramaka total of twelve lunar months is shorter (by ca. 11 days) than the solar year. Indeed, Saramakas assume that if only they were able to count more correctly, their calendar and the Western one would end on New Year's eve (December 31) together.Ga naar eind5 My own observations and interviews suggest that the modern Saramaka calendar ‘begins’ according to the following (unstated) rule: If on January 1 (a holiday now widely celebrated in Saramaka, timed to coincide with the Paramaribo event, and the only calendric-based Saramaka ritual of the year) the moon in the sky is between one and twenty-one days old, that moon is designated to be Jái-líba (New Year's Moon), the first moon of the year. If, however, the moon on January 1 is 22-29 days old, the next moon will be designated Jái-líba and it will be considered simply to have been ‘a bit late this year’). This rule for beginning the 12-month count implies that, were it followed strictly, the twelfth moon would end somewhere between October 31 and November 29 each year (depending on the precise date on which Jái-líba had been a new moon, sometime between the past December 10 and January 7, the two extreme possibilities). Table 1 shows the possible range for the beginning of months, according to this rule. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Table One: Range of Month Beginnings, If Strict Seriality Obtained (using 29.53 days per lunar month)
In fact, modern Saramakas are no more accustomed to counting or considering months serially, as a lockstep series of twelve, than were their eighteenth-century ancestors.Ga naar eind6 Rather, their calendar remains geared to seasonal events, and it is adjusted and readjusted during the course of the year to correspond to the ‘expected’ correlations between named moons and these events. At Jái (January 1) the calendar is supposed to begin, as indicated above. The Short Dry Season (Pikí-deéwéi) is the next expected major marker. The (usually quite sudden) beginning of the Long Rainy Season is supposed to come in Sébítaa-líba, and the month count is readjusted at that point to fit this expectation. For example, in mid-May 1967 a man who had told me several days before that it was Hôndima-líba (the 6th moon of the year) told me that he had been mistaken; the heaviness of the rains in the previous three days had made clear to him that this was, rather, Sébítaa-líba (the 5th moon). In addition to this climatic readjustment, both Sébítaa-líba and Hôndima-líba have astral correlations (see above) and these may also be called upon in the rhetoric of argument about which month it presently is. Nevertheless, climate - rain and sun - seems the most often-cited indicator by Saramakas discussing what month it is. And the calendar matters. The cutting of new gardens must be done when the long rains have pretty much ended, but undue delay will not allow sufficient time for drying out and burning before the rains begin several months later. Tanvúu-wáta-líba, the fourth and last month of the Long Rainy Season, is the expected time to begin cutting gardens, and people take note of the morning haze that gathers during this month, signalling the onset of hot dry weather. Likewise, choice of the correct moment to burn new fields is crucial; a delay can mean the coming of rain and the ruin of the garden while premature burning can cause tremendous extra labor in clearing an incompletely-burned field later. Arguments about the calendar are - at many moments of the year - common conversational events. People refer to 1) their own authority (‘I have been a headman for 15 years and never once has the District Commissioner said I was wrong about what month my paycheck should come’ [note here also the indirect reference to the authority of the Western calendar]; 2) to the weather; 3) to the stars; 4) to the Western calendar (e.g. Maisipasi - the city celebration of July 1 as Emancipation Day - is supposed by some to come at the very beginning of the Long Dry Season); 5) to what people in other | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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villages or regions say (at certain times of the year, different regions of Saramaka - Lángu, Pikílío, etc. - may each generally be ‘agreeing’ that it is a different month); or 6) to other seasonal events, e.g. in Wajamáka-líba (‘Iguana month’ - the 9th month of the year), iguanas lay their eggs but by the 10th month the eggs have hatched. Many of these arguments are expected to be settled post-facto: if, for example, the Spring rains do begin, it must be Sébítaa-líba, not Pikí-deéwéi-líba, etc. And the ultimate once-a-year arbiter is the coming of January 1, the calendric celebration keyed to New Year's on the coast. The identity of the final two months of the year seems to matter little, horticulturally, and people begin to look ahead to New Year's to figure out which of these months they are currently in. One further adjustment mechanism: there are some rituals that cannot be performed during certain months (i.e., they are ritually prohibited); should such a ritual be needed (for sickness, misfortune, etc.) during a prohibited month, people may decide it is not, in fact, that month. For example, in 1967, Pikílío people had at first disagreed on whether a moon was Sébítaa-líba or Hôndima-líba and then, on the basis of heavy rains, opted for the former. But when an apúku (forest spirit) ritual was needed, and the ‘priests’ for the ritual insisted that it was then Hôndima-líba (as apúku ceremonies are prohibited in Sébítaa-líba), everyone agreed that it must indeed be Hôndima-líba. By much argument, negotiation, and readjustment - processes typical of Maroon life more generally - modern Saramakas work their way through the calendar (‘repeating’ an occasional month, as necessary), using it largely to order their major horticultural activities. (Any Saramaka can give a rather precise month-by-month ideal list of which crops should be planted at what time, which ripen when, and so on.) Turning back to the eighteenth-century calendar, it would seem that at least part of the calendrical arguments that now rage would then have been absent - those stemming from the current (and apparently relatively new) awareness that the year is composed of 12 named months, with the corollary that these should somehow match the Western ones. But the old system, with its four named consecutive rainy-season months surrounded by longer (undivided) seasonal periods - a Short Dry Season and a Long Dry Season - and with the only other named month (Dann) also a climatic marker, probably had its share of argument too. For as long as climatic conditions failed to be absolutely regular, risks had to be taken about when to fell trees, cut underbrush, burn sites, plant gardens, and so forth. Some people would have been ‘early’, and some ‘late’, and as today, who in the end was ‘right’ about what month it was would probably have depended on later climatic events. There seem to have been two major changes between the eighteenth-century Saramaka calendar and that of today. 1) The named moons/months were increased from 5 to 12, in an attempt to match the Western calendar. The new first two month names and the new last three month names of the year are explicitly intended to do this: Jái-líba (New Year's Moon, i.e. Western New Year's), Bákajái-líba (Moon-Following-New Year's Moon), and Ténimun (Tenth-), Élufumun (Eleventh-), and Twálufumun (Twelfth Moon). The third moon, Gaán-líba (Big Moon) is named, according to Saramakas, after the fact that the moon appears to be especially large during this month, like an American ‘Harvest Moon’. The ninth moon, Wajamáka-líba (Iguana Moon) is, as we have seen, also named after a seasonal event. And the name for the fourth moon, Pikí-deéwéi-líba (Small Dry Season Moon) is probably a transfer of what used to be a seasonal term (Small or Short Dry Season) into a month name; Saramakas are well aware that this season in fact usually lasts about a moon/month and a half. 2) The development of a 12-moon calendar brought intercalation problems. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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These were resolved not, for example, by the addition of a thirteenth 11- or 12-day month or the addition of a 30-day month in certain years - each of which would have come closer to ‘fixing’ of ‘locking’ the Saramaka and Western calendars together - but rather by making intercalation a matter of ongoing negotiation and argument. The new system maintains, I would argue, the same flexibility in terms of human action which the old system possessed, the possibility to adjust and readjust to climatic variation. While it looks, from a Saramaka perspective, considerably more ‘Western’ than the old system, the additions are almost cosmetic. The two calendars, 200 years apart, serve similar essential needs in similar ways. A note on Saramaka day reckoning may be useful here, as it also testifies to intriguing processes of development; and it is a signal example of much more general processes of cultural syncretism and creativity among eighteenth-century Saramakas. Schumann reports (1778, s.v. sabba), that ‘the [Saramaka] Negroes have two “sabbaths” each week, the first called pikin sabba which corresponds to our Wednesday, and the second grang sabba which is our Thursday’, and this same source (s.v. domingo) indicates that the day Saramakas called domingo (or dimíngo) corresponded to Friday. These are the only day names recorded. A comparison of the modern Saramaka sequence of day names with those from the mid-eighteenth century, the early nineteenth century, and that apparently in use on the Portuguese Jewish plantations from which many of the original Saramakas escaped suggests that the early maroons maintained the series (order) of day names but somehow ‘lost’ two days during their long period of relative isolation in the forest. The sequence Pikí sabá-Gaán sabá-Dimíngo, which on the plantations referred to Friday-Saturday-Sunday, came in the forest to refer, instead to Wednesday-Thursday-Friday, and the rest of the sequence was kept in order, simply shunted two days backward.
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Table Two: Day Names Through Time
I can think of three alternative explanations, none fully persuasive as yet, for how this two-day-shunt could have occurred. 1) Since day names were conceptualized as a series and, unlike month names, were ‘arbitrary’ (not tied, for example, to seasons or the movements of stars), people in the forest may at some point during the war years have lost track of the correct day and, by process of argument, agreed that it was, say, Dimíngo when in fact it was Friday.Ga naar eind7 2) The shift may have been somehow related to the 1752 change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar that caused people in England and the British colonies to ‘lose’ 11 days (although the Saramaka shunt is one day too many to be fully explained in this way). 3) The shift may have been an attempt by Asante-descended Saramakas to coordinate the Suriname plantation day name sequence with one of the new ‘laws’ promulgated when the Golden Stool descended in the early eighteenth century - that Thursday was to be observed as a Holy Day, with no farming permitted, and so forth (Kyerematen 1969: 4). Whatever the reason for this shift, the fact that outsiders - military men, postholders, missionaries - used a different (Dutch or German) set of day names from the Maroons apparently permitted a simple and unambiguous correlation - Dimíngo for Friday, and so on, without apparent conflict. Very little that Suriname slaves took over from their masters remained unchanged. The Saramaka day count is a striking example of the ways that a central bit of plantation culture was appropriated, and then rapidly molded and integrated, so that its original function and meaning (in terms of regulating work and worship) were already transformed by the mid-eighteenth century to become fully ‘Saramaka’. Biblical quotations, missionary linguistics, long-term changes in Saramaccan word use and behavior - all were subjects dear to the heart of Jan Voorhoeve. May the example of his scholarship and integrity inspire all of us who follow in his footsteps for very many years to come. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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References
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