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  • Dutch Caribbean Literature
  • Wim Rutgers
    Translated by Scott Rollins (bio)

In 1934, Surinamese author and freedom fighter, Anton de Kom (1898–1945) published his rewriting of the history of his country, Wij slaven van Suriname [We Slaves of Suriname].

For thousands upon thousands of years, our mother Sranan has slumbered between coastline and mountains. . . . There are hardly any people to enjoy this beauty. In the lowlands live the Waraus, the Arawaks and the Caribs—Indians now dying out, the enfeebled descendants of the original population, driven out of the most fertile lands by the whites. In the uplands are the Trios, Oianas and Marrons. The wide plains of the savannahs, the forests, and high, granite mountains of Mother Sranan have slept undisturbed for millenia.

At the age of twenty-two, Anton de Kom left Suriname for the Netherlands where he became active in left-wing circles. In 1932, he returned to Paramaribo for family reasons. Very soon after arriving, he discovered how dehumanizing the situation had become in the Dutch colony with its disgraceful living and working conditions, poverty and even famine. The global depression had hit Suriname hard, the poor its biggest victims. From the moment he stepped ashore, the authorities followed De Kom’s every move. Soon after he set up an informal consultancy, the colonial administration, in fact, arrested and deported him as an undesirable person, exiling him to the Netherlands. There De Kom decided to write the history of his country from the perspective of the colonized, the downtrodden who throw off their shackles, a history that had not yet been written:

Though unrecorded in the history books of the whites, the ill-treatment of our fathers is engraved in our own hearts. Never has the misery of slavery been brought home to me more insistently than through the eyes of my grandmother when she told us children stories of the old days in front of her hut in Paramaribo.

(34–35)

He therefore dedicated the account of the enslaved woman to his grandmother.

Anton de Kom was the first Dutch Caribbean author of any significance to offer such forceful resistance to the colonial authorities. That resistance was expressed in a sharp protest against the physical exploitation of slave and laborer, but also against the spiritual brainwashing methods of the Euro-centric education system:

There is no better way of making a race feel inferior than giving its members lessons in which only the sons of another people are extolled. It took me a long time to rid myself of the feeling, that a black man must always yield pride of place to a white man. (49) [End Page 542]

Published in 1934, this kind of history and this kind of tone were badly needed. In the Netherlands, De Kom remained active in Europe as well, joining the resistance in the Second World War. He died in April 1945 in the concentration camp Neuengamme (Roemer and Leistra 105). Even though he left behind only two books, his influence has been significant. The Surinamese poet R. Dobru (1935–1983) commemorated Anton de Kom on the eve of Surinamese independence in 1975 in a poem dedicated to de Kom’s daughter, Judith:

voor judith de kom for judith de kom
kom zit met ons mede aan de dis come and join us at the table
want wij hebben uw vader gekend for we knew your father
judith le judith
als je terug bent in Nederland when you are back in Holland
ga naar het graf van je vader go to your father’s grave
zeg hem tell him
dat wij zijn boodschap opnieuw that we have heard his message once more
     hebben gehoord
zeg hem dat wij bezig zijn tell him we are busy
wij zijn nog niet gereed voor zijn we are not yet ready for his bones
beenderen
de grond is nog niet van ons the land is not ours yet
de ziekten zijn niet alle genezen the diseases have not been cured yet
de armoe is not niet uitgelepeld they have not stopped ladling out poverty
maar wij hebben alvast de gereedschappen but we have gotten the tools ready
klaargezet
het kan niet lang meer...

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