An Interview with Astrid H. Roemer
- An Interview with Astrid H. Roemer
This interview occurred at the Bali Theater in Amsterdam, on Sunday, April 10,1988, at 3:15 in the afternoon.
You are from Suriname and now here you are in Holland, and you have lived here for some time. Could you talk about that background in relationship to your writing career?
I started writing in Suriname, where the only language the people speak is Dutch; and my family are all teachers, physicians, and civil servants, so the only way for me to express myself is in Dutch. In Suriname they speak fourteen languages, and Dutch is the official one. I started writing and was published in the newspapers there when I was twelve, so writing was just something very natural for me and being published also was normal, but I could not imagine being an author, because there were no authors in Suriname. The only professional writers were journalists. Before I came to Holland, I won different local awards, but still there was no reason for me to think that I would become a professional author. Then I came to Holland, when I was about twenty, and I discovered other professional authors; I would read about them in the newspapers here in Holland and then slowly in my mind thoughts grew about being a professional author. I liked the way the authors were reviewed and the way they were promoted and the way their novels were bought. Then to inspire me there was Bea Vianen, the first black woman to have an official publisher in Holland, because there were no publishers in Suriname.
You were publishing your own texts.
Yes. I was thirty-three at the time and was some sort of journalist with the embassy of Suriname, here in The Hague. A young man (Jos Knipscheer) was writing reviews about black Dutch and American women writers in Dutch papers here in Holland, and he noticed my work and also Edgar Cairo’s and was the first to write about us. And then two or three years later he had his own publishing house and he asked us to bring all our work to him. When Jos Knipscheer published my first novel in Holland, I was already a very well-known author in Suriname, because I had published three books “in eigen beheer,” “under our own management” as we called it, without a publisher. We wrote the book, paid the printer and sold our works.
Would you say that your reception as a novelist by the reading public in Holland, which is a small country, is good?
Yes, but the problem they say is that the way I use words and the Dutch language is very abstract, so the average black woman in Holland and in Suriname can’t read it. That is [End Page 508] the other side of the story with Edgar and Astrid Roemer, but let me only speak for myself. What’s happening in the book scene here is very different from what is happening in the Suriname book scene. So while I may have a very good review of my novel or a poem or a drama in Holland, the Suriname readers say it is difficult to understand, it seems so far from them. And that is a dilemma here in Holland. What should we do, go on with what’s happening there or try to be part of the immigrants here?
What do you consider to be the purpose of your novels? I guess ultimately I am asking, “why do you write?”
Why do I write? I hate the way society is structured; it seems there is no way out for black people, and this is my way to build a world I would like to live in. So my novels are just like music—they give comfort to blacks and to others who are not part of the status quo.
Do you see yourself as being very different from other writers from Suriname?
Yes, I am, because the first Suriname novelist was Albert Helman, but his work was published in Holland...
