Creolization and Contraband: CuraCao in the Early Modern Atlantic World

6 Language and Creolization

6 / Language and Creolization In 1775 a young man named Abraham de David de Costa Andrade Jr. poured out his heart to a member of his synagogue, Sarah de Isaac Pardo y Vaz Farro: My diamanty no laga dy skirbimy tudu kico my ta puntrabo—awe nuchy mi ta warda rospondy (“My diamond, do not fail to write me everything I am asking you—tonight I await an answer”). Apparently Abraham shared more than his feelings with Sarah. She was expecting a baby, probably not fathered by her dying husband, a prosperous merchant who was also her elderly uncle and was, according to the sworn testimony of his doctors, impotent. Abraham’s marriage, like Sarah’s, was childless. With Abraham’s encouragement Sarah tried unsuccessfully to abort the fetus, using herbal remedies provided by her slaves. “Write to me how you are and what that negress says, when you will throw it,” her lover implored, to which the pregnant women replied, “Davichy is very tough, he refuses to fall.” In due time, Sarah gave birth to a healthy boy, apparently none the worse for his exposure to abortifacients . After the birth, synagogue elders excommunicated the two adulterers. Whether the excommunication should hold and what restrictions , if any, there would be on Sarah and her son, caused a scandal that rocked Curaçao’s Sephardic community and led to litigation in secular and religious courts on both sides of the Atlantic for twenty years. It divided the congregation to such an extent that some historians believe it was the catalyst for an eventual permanent split. Several interested parties sought the intervention of the States General of the Netherlands and of the elders of Amsterdam’s Sephardic community. A few years after language and creolization / 213 his birth, upon orders from Dutch authorities, Sarah’s son finally was circumcised as the legitimate offspring of her long-deceased husband, whose name he bore. Sarah remarried and was whisked off to the Danish island of St. Thomas, at the Curaçao congregation’s expense. Abraham, disgraced, moved to Jamaica.1 Of greater historical significance than the tragic love story of the young Abraham and Sarah and their successful, if illicit, procreation, is the fact that their letters are the earliest known documents written entirely in Papiamentu. The incriminating correspondence, which was described in court records as being written “in black speech” (negers spraake) or “in creole speech” (crioolse spraake), was the primary legal evidence of the lovers’ adultery and the basis for their excommunication .2 Why did two Sephardic Jews from respectable merchant families choose to communicate their most intimate feelings in a creole language ? How were Curaçao’s Sephardim involved in the genesis and diffusion of what was to become one of the Caribbean’s most successful creoles—a language genre that usually is associated with the transatlantic slave trade, plantation society, and people of African descent? Why did Curaçao’s Sephardim and people of African descent speak Papiamentu , which is clearly based on Iberian tongues, instead of a Dutchbased creole? Answers to these questions lie in the specific conditions of the commercial economy and society of the port city of Willemstad during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and in the exchange networks that Curaçao’s inhabitants developed via maritime trade. The emergence and consolidation of Papiamentu across lines of social class and race/ethnicity provides clear evidence of the dynamic processes of creolization that occurred around Curaçao’s maritime economy at the height of the island’s success as an Atlantic and Caribbean trade center. This creolization process took place alongside, intertwined with yet also somewhat independent of, the official Dutch colonial structures, and it imprinted the very character of local society. Like other aspects of creolization in Curaçao, the development and consolidation of Papiamentu was tied to the contraband economy. If creolization by its very nature transgressed clearly marked sociocultural boundaries, then the development of a successful creole language that was accepted beyond the confines of slave society—especially one that was not even based on the dominant language of the colonizer and which was spoken by whites as well as blacks—was a particularly egregious violation. 214 / sociocultural interactions “In creole speech” Although there has yet to be a comprehensive historical study of Papiamentu, we can begin to piece together some of the evidence of its early existence in Curaçao. This evidence...