Creole drum

(1975)–Ursy M. Lichtveld, Jan Voorhoeve– rechtenstatus

An Anthology of Creole Literature in Surinam

Introduction

The Country and Its Inhabitants

Surinam is the middle of the three Guianas, which with Venezuela form the upper northern ridge of the mainland of South America. We may assume that it was sparsely populated by different Indian tribes (mainly of Carib and Arawak stock) before 1651, when permanent European settlement began. Early in its European history, in 1667, it became a possession of the Netherlands, producing sugar, coffee, and cacao for the world market. Surinam in those days consisted of no more than the coastal area along the borders of the Surinam River and its affluents, Commewijne and Para. The remaining part of the area between the borders of present-day Surinam remained uncultivated and largely unknown for a long time. The far western part was unoccupied until 1800, when the most northerly ridge was cultivated. Beyond the coastal area chaos reigned, in the eyes of the Europeans. The eastern part became the domain of bands of fugitive slaves, called maroons, who remained dependent for their subsistence on the coastal area, which they raided in search of iron, arms, ammunition, salt, and women. These bands organized themselves in different bushnegro communities - Matuari, Saramaccan, Djuka, and others. Beyond the coast and the more inland fugitive settlements wandered the often nomadic remnants of the former masters of the land, the Indians.

The Early History of Surinam

Three different stages of European contact with Surinam followed each other. The first might be called the period of trade colonies. European traders bought products from the Indians and shipped them to Europe. During the second period - plantation settlement - European farmers themselves started to cultivate the most valued products (mainly tobacco) with the help later on of some African and American Indian slave labor. The farmers in this period were settlers who intended to stay if conditions were favorable. In tropical Surinam, they were not. Moreover, the introduction of the sugar industry eventually led to a completely different type of colony - the slave colony - in which a few whites directed the labor of a great many African slaves. The three stages were not clearly dis-

tinct from each other. Traders, for example, continued their activity during the period of plantation settlement. The last two phases especially overlapped to a considerable extent, though the ratio of masters to slaves (.31 in 1661 and .08 in 1702) reveals a definite trend in the direction of a slave colony.

Surinam was occupied by different and successive groups of Europeans before Francis, Lord Willoughby, governor of Barbados, planted a colony in 1651, called originally after him Willoughby Land. French settlements were established in 1626 and 1639, and an English settlement under Captain Marshall in 1645 was ‘cut off in one day’ (Rens 1953:13f.). There is no evidence that survivors of any of these settlements remained in 1651. Willoughby was appointed governor of Barbados at a time when the expanding sugar industry created a shortage of land there. He explored new possibilities and in 1651 sent a hundred men to settle a new colony in Surinam. Fifty more people came the following year. Slaves are not mentioned as part of the oldest settlement, but it seems highly unlikely that the first settlers did not take with them a few African slaves. There could not have been many, however, because Barbados itself had a shortage of slaves at that time.

The English influence was of rather short duration, increasing until 1665 and then rapidly diminishing from 1666 onward, but it was more powerful than any other during the time of slavery. The white masters were almost completely English speaking up to 1665. In that year a group of 200 Portuguese Jews got permission to settle in Surinam and later became one of the most important and stable components of the society. The colony was captured by the Dutch in 1667, recaptured by Barbados the same year, but handed back to the Dutch in 1668 in accordance with the peace treaty of 1667 between England and Holland. Before the colony was handed over to the Dutch, 67 of the most important English planters left the colony with 412 slaves. In 1671 a group of 517 people left, followed in 1675 by 250 whites with 980 slaves. In 1680 the last group of 102 Englishmen and slaves left, leaving only 39 Englishmen behind. The English planters were not allowed to take with them the slaves acquired under Dutch rule, which means that it was principally the old, experienced slaves who left.

On the basis of historical documents, both English and Dutch, and of old maps (see Rens 1953 and 1954, Voorhoeve 1964(b), Renselaar 1966), the following table can be constructed.

	Europeans		Africans		American
	British	Non-British	Old	New	Indians	Total	Ratio Eur./Non-Eur
1652	200		200		90	490	.41
1661	1,000		2.000		230	3,230	.31
1665	1,500		3,000		400	4,900	.31
1666	2,000	200	2,400		400	4,200	.33
1668	820	250	1,850		300	3,170	.34
1671	500	300	1,300	1,200	410	3,710	.22
1675	200	350	200	1,600	350	2,700	.20
1679	60	400	100	900	100	1,560	.29
1680	38	400	10	1,000	50	1,498	.29
1684	30	700		4,000	50	4,780	.15
1702	20	700		7,500	50	8,270	.08

This population table can be supplemented with relevant information of a different nature. During the English period the influence of indentured servants on the slaves was even more important than that of the white masters. ‘The main contact of the Negro slaves was with these indentured servants and poor whites, who acted as bookkeepers and overseers on the plantations, rather than with the planters themselves’ (Dictionary 1967: xii). The indentured servants were English speaking before 1668. (The institution of indentured labor was not known in Holland.) In the English period also the plantations were scattered over a wider area (Renselaar 1966), which favored contact between slaves and whites.

Slave Society

The slaves had different ethnic backgrounds, but this did not mean that they arrived in Surinam without any means of communication. The existence of an Afro-Portuguese pidgin on the African coast in the sixteenth century is amply documented. Its influence may have been diminishing during the seventeenth century, but there is no evidence that it had disappeared. We may assume that Africans from different ethnic backgrounds made some use of this language, acquired at home, in the slave depots, or on the ships. The first mention of the language used by the slaves in Surinam dates from 1693. A Dutch traveler reported that they spoke English (Voorhoeve 1973: 140). There are still traces of Portuguese in the Creole language. The Swadesh 200-item list, a widely used list of basic vocabulary items first used by Morris Swadesh, shows 118 items of English origin 25 of Dutch origin, 7 of Portuguese origin, and 4 of African origin.

The Portuguese items may have come into the language through the Portuguese Jewish masters. The Saramaccan bushnegro language, however, shows 72 items of English origin, 6 of Dutch origin, 50 of Portuguese origin, and 6 of African origin. The high proportion of Portuguese items cannot be explained by the linguistic influence of the Portuguese Jews (Herskovits 1930).

Masters and Slaves

A slave colony is essentially a two-caste society of masters and slaves. In 1702 the slaves in Surinam outnumbered their masters in a ratio of 92 to 8. This 8 percent of the population forced 92 percent to hard labor without offering much reward. The two-caste society was one of the most effective means of keeping the slaves under control. The entire society was based on the conception that slaves could never become masters and masters never slaves. One was born a slave and thus had to work for the man who was born a master. The society tried very hard to make the slaves accept this state of affairs as inevitable. The cultural policy therefore discouraged assimilation, and the two groups were kept as distinct as possible. Slaves had to speak a different language, wear different clothes, believe in a different god, perform different jobs, enjoy a different kind of music, and so forth. Cultural assimilation would have constituted the greatest threat to the slave colony.

The clearest example is to be found in religion. In a slave colony, missionary activities are well-nigh impossible. A slave had to remain a pagan and could never become a Christian. This attitude is seen clearly in events surrounding the life of the Protestant minister Kals, who arrived in Surinam in 1731 and was sent home in 1733 as unworthy of the ministry. He came to Surinam with the ardent wish to preach the gospel to the slaves. When he expressed his wish before the church council of Paramaribo, he got - according to his own description - the following reaction:

They interrupted my speech in the middle, jumped up in rage, ran away, ridiculed me, and screamed at me: Well Pastor! Let us convert those who have the same skin as we, and are of the same color as we, and ... let the cursed children of Ham go to the devil; they have been created in order to plant coffee and sugar for us.

The institution of manumission is an anomaly in this type of society, because it creates a group of colored people who are neither slaves nor

real masters. Yet it was unavoidable. In general one employed youthful Europeans in the lower ranks as overseers or bookkeepers or even as craftsmen. They were not allowed to bring wives and children to the plantation. They could not afford them, in any case, on the low salaries they earned. Even directors could not marry before they had served on the plantation for some years. Sexual intercourse between masters and slaves was therefore a regular phenomenon. The master's concubine occupied a special position on the plantation and had a special name, sisi. She was the natural intermediary between the slaves and the plantation director. Complaints came to the master via his concubine. The first story in chapter 3 shows that a married director could also have a sisi.

Children, however, received the status of the mother. Thus in many cases children of the master were born slaves. The only solution to this problem for the master was to buy the freedom of his own children and leave the mother a slave or to free the mother before the children were born. The practice of manumission created a group of free colored men in the colony, who should have been considered part of the group of masters but were not in fact accepted by them on an equal basis. A case in point is that of the rich free black woman Nanette Samson, who married a European of rather low social standing in 1767. The colonial administration was at a loss what to do. There were no laws prohibiting such a marriage. Therefore they sent a letter to the directors in Holland in a last effort to prevent it. In this letter they stated their case as follows:

The objection against such a marriage is that it is repugnant and repulsive, utterly disgraceful for a white person, whether out of sexual perversion or for food, to enter into such a marriage, which has always been despised here. It is also true that, in order to maintain our upright position in the middle of such a perverted and twisted people, we must rely more on the feeling of the negroes for our preeminence over them, as if we are of a better and nobler nature, than on our real power. What will they believe about that excellent nature if they see that they need only to be free in order to join with us in a solemn bond of marriage and thus have their children the companions of our own? Should not the laxity of whites who so debase themselves be singled out for criticism? (Lichtveld and Voorhoeve 1958: 177-78)

The directors in Holland did not agree with this reasoning, thus

giving Nanette Samson the distinction of being the first colored woman to marry a white man. The letter to the directors, however, shows clearly how the two-caste society operated to keep masters and slaves apart and what the basic reasoning behind the system was.

The two-caste society had great influence on the formation of a Creole culture. As a slave language Creole remained relatively pure and did not undergo a destructive influx of Dutch lexical items and grammatical constructions. A new religion was constructed in relative isolation without overt signs of syncretism. A new culture came into being with an extensive oral literature, reflecting the conditions of slavery (see chapters 1, 2, and 3). In the later stages there was also a clear contribution from the free colored people, who often held important positions in Creole cultural societies and could devote time and energy to them. We also have the impression that the more elaborate cultural forms originated in the capital, Paramaribo. There the slaves (often house slaves or craftsmen) had more leisure time and more money to spend than on the plantations.

Toward Emancipation

The two-caste society gradually disintegrated after 1800. Before that date, as we have seen, missionaries could barely reach the slaves. It is said that the Moravian Mission bought slaves in order to be able to preach the gospel. In reality, most missionary activities before 1800 were directed toward the American Indians and, after the peace treaties of 1761, also toward the bushnegro tribes. After 1800 they gradually received permission from individual plantation directors to give religious instruction on the plantations.

In 1844 missionaries received permission to teach slave children to read in Creole. Instruction in writing was not allowed until 1856 (Hellinga 1955: 13). With prohibition of the slave traffic after 1820 the condition of the slaves gradually improved. The possibility of emancipation was debated in Holland, and this forced the Surinam slave owners to defend their cause. In any case, written texts in Creole got into print after 1800. The first printed Creole text (for use by Creoles) dates from 1816 and consists of a selection from the New Testament. The first printed and complete New Testament in Creole (with Psalms) was published in 1829. The first Creole primer was published in 1832. The missionaries produced a spate of religious material and even published a Creole monthly called Makzien vo Kristen soema zieli (Magazine for Christian souls) from 1852 to 1932.

(For other publications see Voorhoeve 1957(b) and Voorhoeve and Donicie 1963(b).)

The first partly Creole poem was written by a Dutchman, Hendrik Schouten, married to a colored woman, actually a cousin of the well-known Nanette Samson mentioned above. He had written a beautiful sonnet, ‘De geele vrouw’ (the yellow woman), in Dutch in defense of his colored wife against a prejudiced society (Lichtveld and Voorhoeve 1958: 187-88). The partly Creole poem, called ‘Een huishoudelijke twist’ (a domestic tiff), was published in 1783. It portrays a Dutchman and his Creole concubine reviling each other in their respective languages. (It should not be interpreted as symptomatic of his own marriage.) The poem is given in full in appendix 3 to this volume, not because of its literary value (though it is not without literary value), but because it was the first Creole poem ever seen in print.

Later on, in the nineteenth century (in 1836 and 1837), but still before emancipation, the Njoejaari-singi voe Cesaari (New Year songs of Cesar) were published in loose leaflets. The song of 1837 (see Lichtveld Voorhoeve 1958: 276-83) shows great poetic skill and cleverly exploits Creole proverbs. It was reprinted in 1843 in a Dutch literary periodical, Braga, with a Dutch translation by the poet J.J.L. ten Kate. Presumably these songs were sold in Paramaribo by a deaf-mute named Cesaari. The clever use of Creole proverbs seems to point in the direction of the Creole lawyer H.C. Focke as the possible author. Focke lived from 1802 to 1856 and in 1855 published an excellent Neger-Engelsch woordenboek (Negro-English dictionary), which is still one of the best sources for the Creole language and its proverbs. His study of Creole songs and music was published posthumously (Focke 1858).

In 1858 a ‘Lofdicht na tappoe Hernhutter kerki’ (Praise poem on the Moravian church) was published. On the eve of emancipation, in 1862, there appeared one issue of a Creole weekly, Krioro Koranti (Creole paper), which contained a Creole poem on the pending emancipation. This is about all the traceable literature in Creole. The work of the Matuari bushnegro Johannes King was written between 1862 and 1894 and reveals a close affinity with oral traditions. Samples of his work are produced in chapter 4.

Emancipation and Assimilation

The colony lost its economic value in the nineteenth century. With emancipation in 1863 and the end of the subsequent ten-year

period of state supervision over the former slaves in 1873, the cultural situation in Surinam changed radically and became more complex. The colonial government tried to keep the plantations going by importing contract laborers from Asian countries, mostly from China, India, and Java. About 34,304 British Indians came to Surinam between 1873 and 1916 on five-year contracts. About 32,976 Javanese came on similar contracts between 1891 and 1939. Many remained after their contracts expired (Speckmann 1965: 29; Waal Malefijt 1963: 22). Half of the population of Surinam today is of Asian descent. Where the Asian immigrants constituted a minority in the Creole community, as happened for instance in Coronie, they were easily assimilated. More often than not, however, they preserved their own language and culture and thus added to the cultural diversity that is so characteristic of modern Surinam society.

When the slaves became free, and the old distinction between masters and slaves ceased to exist, the slaves were expected to acquire the culture linked with their newfound status, i.e. of their former masters. Thus they were expected to become Christians, learn Dutch, get instruction, and behave like Europeans - in short, become assimilated.

The assimilation policy of the colonial government was especially noticeable in education. Before emancipation all instruction of slave children had been in Creole. In 1856 the governor of Surinam protested against the fact that the medium of instruction in a Dutch colony was a foreign, non-Dutch, language, to wit, Creole. His remarks anticipated the emancipation. The mission schools, however, had difficulty changing to Dutch. Their instructional material had been printed in Creole, and their teachers were often not familiar with Dutch. Pressure from the government, which stipulated Dutch as the medium of instruction from 1877 onward, and no doubt also the wish of parents who desired instruction in the official language for their children forced the schools to capitulate. Only in the mission schools in bushnegro communities was Creole the medium of instruction for a long time.

The general change in attitude is reflected in the Creole grammar, Wan spraakkunst vo taki en skrifi da tongo vo Sranan (A grammar to talk and write the language of Surinam) published in Creole by J.N. Helstone in 1903. The author had to defend himself in the introduction against those who criticized his work as hampering the cause of the Dutch language in Surinam. He explicitly stated that his purpose was primarily to teach Dutch to illiterates.

In the early twentieth century the educational authorities were confident that they would be able to eradicate the Creole language from Surinam in only one generation. Their campaign was based on the strong conviction that Creole prevented the children from acquiring a good command of Dutch. Some educators were aware that the campaign was contrary to new ideas about the value of a mother tongue as a medium of instruction but rejected this for the West Indian colonies because, as one of them said, Creole languages are mutilated languages that could survive only because of unnatural conditions in the past (Kesler 1927).

Creole children were severely punished if they used Creole in school, and the cooperation of the parents was sought to prevent them from using it at home. The result was that today most Creoles in town have a fairly reasonable command of Dutch. The old slave language, however, did not cease to exist. A new situation emerged in which Creoles learned to deal with two cultures simultaneously. According to the pressure of the situation, they could act in one way or another. A Creole may participate actively in the Christian religion, but this does not mean that he may not also become possessed by non-Christian gods. He is quite capable of expressing himself in Dutch and may even take part in a Dutch literary movement, but this does not mean that he will shy away from any form of expression in Creole. In fact he has become bicultural. For this special type of cultural situation Herskovits coined the term socialized ambivalence (Herskovits 1937: 292-99).

The old slave language and culture continued to exist, but they were regarded as a mark of low social status and a sign of lack of proper schooling. Creoles may still be offended when addressed in Creole, as if the addresser underestimates their social status and educational level. The same holds true for other types of social behavior. In a colonial society the cultural norms are set by the colonial elite, which in this case consisted almost completely of Dutch people. Thus Dutch culture and language were normative in the society, all other cultural expressions betraying a lower social status. This situation influenced the way Creoles thought about their own socially stigmatized language and culture. The psychological effect led in many cases to a complete lack of self-respect and a waste of creative talents.

How Creole Became Respectable

Almost everywhere a Creole language is regarded as a mongrel

product unworthy of attention. It is therefore important to describe the special conditions in which one of the Creole languages, Surinam Creole, reached a stage of respectability.

During the Second World War the Creole teacher J.G.A. Koenders, a man of great intellectual integrity, started a one-man campaign against the lack of self-respect that threatened his pupils as a result of the then existing educational policy. He had always been a rather unorthodox teacher, refusing to mutilate the self-esteem of his pupils, but now he decided to remedy the damages of the educational system on a wider scale. For a period of ten years (1946-56), he issued a monthly paper, Foetoe-boi (Servant), in Creole and Dutch, illustrating on almost every page his ardent wish to bolster the self-esteem of the Creole part of the population. Some of his articles are reproduced in chapter 5 of this book. With deadly irony he attacked every official statement that tried to minimize the value of the Creole culture and language and unmasked the absence of sound intellectual arguments behind it.

Koenders was a rather lonely man. Amidst the jubilations accompanying partial independence in 1954, he had to sell his basic idea that self-respect was the only way to freedom. The Department of Education was firmly opposed to his ideas. Political independence did not change their policy. His fellow countrymen thought him rather crazy and were even sometimes offended by his ironic reactions. He had a much more willing ear in the younger generation.

The young intellectuals had been raised under colonial conditions. They had adapted themselves so well to Dutch culture that they were invariably sent to Holland to complete their studies at Dutch universities. They had done brilliantly and were much applauded at home. In Holland, however, they discovered that their fellow students did not quite appreciate their adaptive talents but on the contrary expected from them a new and original contribution to the students' cultural life. A man who could sing Creole ballads was most applauded, although he was despised back home for his interest in the culture of the uneducated.

In this way many Creole students in Holland became conscious of their different, non-European culture, which was not inferior at all, as was suggested under colonial conditions. This realization came to some individuals in a dramatic way and to others as simply a confirmation of deep-rooted beliefs. In both cases, the ideas were strengthened by the writings of Koenders in Foetoe-boi, which had a wide distribution among Creole students in Holland.

They soon started to question the old cultural hierarchy in a more systematic way. Why should Dutch be considered a superior language? Why should a knowledge of Creole retard their progress? Why should European marriage practices be preferred to lower-class concubinage? Why should Christianity be more respectable than the voodoo-like religion of lower-class Creoles? How did one arrive at a true Surinam culture that united all racial groups in Surinam? The students in Holland founded a new cultural movement, Wie Eegie Sanie (Our own things), in which intellectuals and laborers for the first time met on an equal basis. At the same time, they tried to unite the different racial groups in Surinam. Their aim was to give Surinam its own cultural identity, in which all people could identify themselves. Clear political aims were absent, but the basic ideas were social dynamite. They could blow up the existing social hierarchy.

The greatest achievement of the group has been in the realm of language. Once the students had decided that there were no sensible arguments for the inferiority of the Creole language, they trained themselves to use it under all circumstances, even in their writing. It was quite clear that Creole was and still is the most widely used language in Surinam. A population survey undertaken in 1950 showed the distribution of knowledge of the main languages of Surinam to be the following (taken from an unpublished book by Douglas McRae Taylor): Creole, 85-90 percent; Dutch, 50-55 percent; Hindi, 30-35 percent; Javanese, 15-20 percent. This shows clearly that the students' choice was a very sensible one from the point of view of reaching the greatest number of people. It was, however, rather differently motivated: for them, Creole was best suited to become the national language because it was the only language spoken in Surinam that had indigenous roots.

It has been said that Creole might be a nice language to tell jokes in or to boss your maid around in but that it could not possibly be used as a vehicle for more refined speech and that Dutch should therefore be preferred. Could one ever imagine the beautiful sonnets of the famous Dutch poet Willem Kloos (the Shelley of Holland) in Creole? When this point was raised in a public speech, Koenders translated one of the most beautiful poems of Kloos into Creole in a completely convincing way. He just wanted to prove that the arguments were false. In his typical way he stated: If Surinam people with creative talents are not able to produce poems in Creole, they must be blamed, not the language.

The Surinam students in Holland started to write original poems

in Creole and to explore the poetic possibilities of their language. Not surprisingly, support came from Friesland, an area that has also steadfastly campaigned for its own Frisian language and literature. In 1952 the Frisian cultural magazine De Tsjerne (The churning tub) devoted an issue to the new Creole literature, publishing Creole poems and one Creole short story in Frisian translation. At that time only a few poems existed in Creole. The oldest one must have been written in 1949, as far as can be ascertained, and was published for the first time in 1951. These poems of the first hour have been reproduced in chapter 6.

There are reasons for singling out two poets for separate treatment in chapters 7 and 8. Eddy Bruma has had the greatest political and theoretical impact of any Surinam poet. In a way he shaped the cultural ideals of Wie Eegie Sanie and can be regarded as the leader of this cultural movement and the natural successor of Koenders. He has written poems, short stories, and dramas in Creole. During several successive years he produced in conjunction with the drama association of Wie Eegie Sanie new original dramas, based mostly on the history of Surinam. The period of slavery is the main source of inspiration for popular drama in Paramaribo, which is often based on a fixed theme but performed without a written text. Bruma brought the drama to a higher level by writing out the texts and by perfecting the technical side of production. He often did not have enough time to write a well-balanced play. The production time was often extemely short, a few weeks only, including the writing.

Henny F. de Ziel, writing under the pseudonym Trefossa, should be regarded as the most important poet, who proved for the first time that poetry of very high quality was possible in Creole. He is the author of a very small number of poems, each one, however, being a perfect jewel. His first poem, ‘Bro,’ was published in a teachers' periodical and immediately reprinted by Koenders in Foetoe-boi . (It is reproduced here in chapter 7.) The poet arrived in Holland in 1953. He agreed with the general ideas of Wie Eegie Sanie but never took an active part in the organization. In the following years more of his poems were published in Foetoe-boi. In 1957 he published a small collection of Creole poems under the title Trotji. This collection showed such consistently high quality that it really dealt a major blow to all those who were still convinced that Creole could never become a sophisticated language. The educational authorities were caught off guard by this publication. How could

they go on preventing their pupils from speaking Creole if the language lent itself to expressions of such unadulterated beauty?

While Creole was at that moment still regarded as vulgar, it was not excluded from use in more elevated circles, such as the church. Creole had survived in church as a respectable language used in Bible reading, in devotional literature, and in the pulpit. It could survive there only by developing a specific pronunciation, as far removed as possible from the everyday language of the street. Thus there really existed two different varieties of Creole: the vulgar variety used by uneducated people and the church variety, which apparently was purged of all vulgarities. The church variety was characterized to a great extent by a foreign accent (no doubt originally in imitation of the speech of foreign missionaries) and by the absence of vowel elision (Voorhoeve 1971(a)). The rules of vowel elision give the language a natural rhythmic flow but make it difficult for foreigners to speak and understand it. Church Creole avoids all vowel elisions and therefore gives the impression of a very emphatic and stilted pulpit language.

All early attempts at Creole poetry were (naturally) based on this stilted literary language. The great value of Trefossa as a poet is that he succeeded for the first time in breaking away from the literary tradition by using the common language of the street, as if he were not bothered at all by its so-called vulgarity. By doing this he could convey subtle shades of meaning and use more complicated rhythmic patterns. It seemed as if he had freed the language from unnatural chains and had given free reign to all the possibilities locked up in it. Today one cannot very well imagine what a major cultural achievement this was, but in his time such a bold step was stupendous. It was as if he confirmed for a great many people things they had always subconsciously known. He was enthusiastically followed by others, who also exploited the new possibilities of the common Creole. Today there is a regular flow of literature produced in Creole. This new generation of poets is treated in chapter 9.

A remarkable side effect should not be left unmentioned. The policy of assimilation had created a type of personality that regarded imitation as the highest possible accomplishment. The literature produced and sometimes published in local periodicals consisted of cheap imitations of nineteenth-century Dutch models. The new literary movement in Creole seems to have freed creative possibilities altogether. The young generation did not feel frustrated any longer by foreign models when using Dutch. They started to use local varieties of Dutch and really tried to go their own way.

Literary achievements in Creole have undoubtedly raised the social status of the language rather dramatically. Creole has become a cultural language in a very short period of time. It has gained acceptance in the broadcasting system, on the stage, in society, and even in school, although not as a medium of instruction. Part of the national anthem has even been rendered into Creole. The birth of a new Creole literature has made Surinam Creole one of the very few Creole languages in the world that has gained social status and respectability. While the multiracial setting of Surinam will perhaps prevent the language from becoming the national language, its influence is still comparable to that of any other national language. Its speakers have gained the proud confidence that through this medium they have been able to contribute to and enrich world literature.

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