Vernacular Literature in Suriname

I. Land of Many Tongues

For centuries preceding Columbus, indigenous people trekked, unhindered by borders of any kind, from place to place within the Greater Guyanan region and even beyond, across the sea, to the Caribbean islands. Their subjugation by the Spaniards and Portuguese resulted in one of the most grievous genocides in the history of man. However, greatly reduced in size, they still survive in small communities in Suriname: Caraib, Arawak, Trio and Wayana. When the native populations proved unwilling and unable to meet the inhuman demands made on them by colonial slavery, Africa was discovered as a new source of labor: English and Dutch ships transported cargo after cargo of Africans in chains to the Guyanas to work on the plantations. The slaves were not permitted to write, but they brought their traditions with them in their minds. These traditions were kept alive among the Matuari, Saramacca, Djuka and Aukan—the Maroon communities established deep in the interior by runaway slaves—and, after the abolition of slavery in 1863, among the plantation workers who settled mainly in and around the capital Paramaribo and also along the coast. Sranantongo, or Sranan in short, is the language traditionally spoken by the descendants of enslaved Africans, the so-called Creoles, but Sranan also serves as lingua franca, as contact language, for all groups of the population. After the abolition of slavery, thousands of indentured laborers were imported from China, Java and India. Sarnami is the language spoken by what is currently the largest ethnic group in the country: the so-called Hindustanis. After 1890 indentured laborers also started coming from the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia; the Javanese presence in Suriname is unique in the whole of South America. All these groups took their cultural traditions with them to Suriname, where they were exposed to a continuing process of interaction which led in due course to the emergence of new cultural variants typical of Suriname.

Dutch is the official language of Suriname and the primary written language, followed by Sranan and Sarnami. Literary texts in other languages rarely occur in written form, and not at all outside the field of poetry. The indigenous languages (those spoken by the Caraib, Arawak, Trio and Wayana) are indissolubly linked with oral literature, which comprises, in addition to stories, songs for shamans and alemi songs (sung to ward off disease caused by animals). Not all this material is old: here is a Trio song that was inspired by an airplane flying low over a village:

Jësinaewa ëhtëkëeirë	Weep and wail
jekanawaimërë serë	for this is the giant canoe,
jarëtono jarëtono mëëre jënëtono mëëre	the cannibals are coming to get
	you; they’re coming to eat you up
Jepananakirii jesaututao tïrïkë	Let’s put some salt on him, the pananakiri says.

(Translated by Francis R. Jones) ¹

To ask how this song originated is no doubt to put yet another question rooted in Western notions of authorship. We simply don’t know.

The culture of the Creoles living on the plantations and especially in Paramaribo adopted new, local forms of expression, as is illustrated by the well-known “Anansitori,” tales about the clever spider Anansi who spun himself across the ocean from Africa to the New World. Several collections of these stories have been published to date, and the Trickster genre in the West Indies as an expression of self-awareness and resistance has been widely studied. ² An amusing genre in Hindustani story-telling centers on Birbal the wise man, who invents the most ingenious solutions to the great riddles his king puts before him. These stories are still told today and are a popular subject for children’s books. The realization of how much is in imminent danger of being lost has led to extensive material being recorded on tape ³ ; subsequent transcriptions have resulted in a number of important publications. ⁴ In Suriname, then, there has not been a gradual transition from an oral tradition to a literature of books. However, the oral tradition has influenced the writers. New variations...