The Middle Passage (24 page)

I showed him how much.

‘Gee, I sure am sorry about that.’ But he was smiling. ‘It just looks like I drunk more than my fair share.’ I confessed about my beer.

‘It sure did taste good. Boy! I am sure looking forward to getting back to Georgetown. I’ve got two bottles in the fridge. Boiled. Keeping in the fridge for one whole week. Two bottles. As soon as I get back I’m gonna drink an awful lot of water.’

‘No beer?’

‘Never touch alcohol. But I sure love water.’

I
N 1669
a citizen of the island of Barbados (166 square miles) wrote in a letter of ‘a place much cried up of late, taken from the Dutch, called New York’. The contempt was justified, for even fifty years later Barbados was exporting to England nearly as much as all the American colonies put together. What had happened was that in 1667, by the treaty of Breda, the Dutch had surrendered New York to the British and taken Surinam in exchange. The Dutch thought then they had got the better bargain, and think so still, because, as Dutch school children are taught, the British have lost New York while the Dutch still have Surinam.

Surinam, former Dutch Guiana, lies next door to British Guiana on the north-eastern coast of South America; and although the Corentyne, British Guiana’s easternmost region, and Nickerie, Surinam’s westernmost, have much more in common with one another than with their respective capitals, to fly in one hour from Georgetown to Paramaribo is more unsettling than to fly from London to Amsterdam. For suddenly Holland, almost unknown in Trinidad and British Guiana except as the exporter of beer and powdered milk, becomes important, far more important than England is to Trinidad or British Guiana. It isn’t only the surprise at hearing Negroes and East Indians, to all appearances just like those of British Guiana and Trinidad, speaking Dutch; nor seeing, in a West Indian setting, the
Ingang
and
Uitgang
and
Niet Rooken
and
Verboden Toegang
signs one had before seen only in Holland; nor the sedate Dutch buildings of the administration in Dr J. C. de Mirandastraat. The talk everywhere is of ‘Hol-lond’ and ‘Omsterdom’. In Surinam Holland is Europe; Holland is the centre of the world. Even America recedes. ‘The first thing you’ve got to get out of your head,’ an American official said to me, ‘is that you’re in Latin America. Why, no shutters even went up over the windows at election time. The most that happened was that some members of the opposition who lost left the country. And they went to Holland.’ Notwithstanding that since 1955 Surinam has been virtually independent, an equal partner in the Netherlands kingdom with the Netherlands Antilles, New Guinea and Holland itself, Surinam feels only like a tropical, tulip-less extension of Holland; some Surinamers call it Holland’s twelfth province.

Nearly every educated person has been to Holland, and the affection for Holland is genuine. There is none of the racial resentment which the British West Indian brings back from England. The atmosphere is relaxing. With Negroes, East Indians, Dutch, Chinese and Javanese, Surinam has a population more mixed than that of British Guiana and Trinidad. Yet it does not have the racial problems of these territories, though there is inevitably a growing rivalry between the Negroes and the East Indians, the two largest groups. With Dutch realism the Surinamers have avoided racial collision not by ignoring group differences but by openly acknowledging them. The political parties are racial, but the government is a coalition of these parties. Every group is therefore committed to the development of the country. The Dutch complain of Negro hostility, but the complaints, like the demonstrations of hostility, are muted; and in spite of all that has happened in Indonesia and Holland relations between the Dutch and Javanese are cordial.

With no inflammatory political issues, no acute racial problem, and with the Dutch Government contributing two-thirds of the money (one-third gift, one-third loan) for the development of the country, nationalism would seem an unlikely and perverse growth. But a nationalism has arisen which is unsettling the established order, proving that the objection to colonialism in the West Indies is not only economic or political or, as many believe, simply racial. Colonialism distorts the identity of the subject people, and the Negro in particular is bewildered and irritable. Racial equality and assimilation are attractive but only underline the loss, since to accept assimilation is in a way to accept a permanent inferiority. Nationalism in Surinam, feeding on no racial or economic resentments, is the profoundest anti-colonial movement in the West Indies. It is an idealist movement, and a rather sad one, for it shows how imprisoning for the West Indian his colonial culture is. Europe, the Surinam Nationalist says, is to be rejected as the sole source of enlightenment; Africa and Asia are to be brought in as well. But Europe is in the Nationalist’s bones and he feels that Africa and Asia are contemptible and ridiculous. The Dutch language is to be rejected – since ‘my soul frets in the shadow of his language’ – and its place taken by – what? A limited local dialect which used to be called
talkie-talkie
.

Corly met me off the plane and welcomed me formally on behalf of the Surinam Information Office.

‘You are a writer and a poet,’ he said.

‘Not a poet.’

‘I knew at once it was you. I felt a sort of trembling.’

Corly himself was a poet. He had just that day published – at his own expense and in a limited edition of four hundred copies – his second book of poems. He had a parcel of them in his office and promised to give me one as soon as we got to Paramaribo. With Corly at the airport was Theresia, a tall pretty girl of mixed race with beautiful hands and ankles. She, somewhat to my surprise, spoke little English; and as we drove in the moonlight along the straight, smooth American road (built during the war) Corly explained the language problem in Surinam and the general cultural struggle, about which the rest of the world knew nothing. Corly loved Holland, Dutch literature and the Dutch people and was in trouble with the Nationalists for writing in Dutch, and not in the local dialect, on themes that were not specifically of Surinam. Matters had not been made easier for him by the Dutch newspaper
Elseviers, which
had described his work as ‘an enriching of Dutch poetry’.

It wasn’t late when we got to Paramaribo but the town seemed asleep. We found a
pension –
the Negro proprietress looked a little startled – and then went on to Corly’s office. On one desk I saw a miniature Surinam flag: five stars, black, brown, yellow, white and red, to represent the various races, linked by an elliptical black line, on a white field. I asked Theresia which star was hers. She pointed uncertainly to the brown star; and, indeed, in one of the handouts which Corly gave me I read: ‘In a way perhaps the brown star is the star too with a hidden meaning because its colour could represent also a successful experiment, the harmonious blending of many races into a people; the mainstay of the population of Surinam.’ At last Corly undid a brown paper parcel and pulled out his book. An uncomprehending glance showed that the criticisms of the Nationalists must have had some effect. Surinam was frequently mentioned in the poems. Corly also told me that he had invented a name for the ideal Surinam woman. It was ‘Surinette’, and was the title of one of the poems.

Meeting the Press.
Perhaps because of his work, Corly believed in the value of publicity and wanted me to have my fair share of it in Surinam. He thought my arrival was news, important enough to make the morning papers; and after we had taken Theresia home he took me to a newspaper office in a quiet palm-lined street. The office stood, I believe, next to a bakery. We went through a side gate and along a passage to a small brightly-lit room, where a tall pipe-smoking Dutchman in shirtsleeves, holding proofs and a red pencil, shook my hand with an air of surprise. Corly spoke; the Dutchman replied. We were too late. The paper had gone to press. And true enough, at the end of the cluttered room, beyond some bits of machinery, the paper was printing, a gate-like grill flapping back and forth, printing one side of a sheet at a time. So I didn’t make the morning papers.

It was unfortunate for the British West Indies that British imperialism coincided with a period of poor British architecture. Trollope was appalled by Kingston, but commented: ‘We have no right perhaps to expect good taste so far away from any school in which good taste is taught; and it may, perhaps, be said by some that we have sins enough of our own at home to induce us to be silent on this head.’ The Dutch colonies have been luckier in the Dutch; and though Paramaribo is not as handsome as Georgetown, it has a run-down provincial elegance, with its palm-lined streets and dusty side-walks, its close-set wooden houses and their verandaed top floors, its calm main square overlooked by official buildings,
the
hotel and
the
club.

In architecture as in so many things these West Indian territories have a mother country fixation, and – compare Rotterdam with any new British town – the results continue to be as disastrous for the British territories as they are happy for the Dutch. Federation Park in Port of Spain is an example of tastlessness which is almost like cynicism; so too are the buildings of the University College of the West Indies in Jamaica. Paramaribo, on the other hand, has half a dozen modern public buildings of which any European city might be proud. But these buildings suggesting the metropolis are incongruous in the heat and dust and afternoon stillness. For Paramaribo is provincial. Paramaribo is dull.

I had a little provincial excitement on my first morning, when I was awakened by a military band. The small procession of white and black soldiers in white, and black policemen in chocolate, passed three times in the street below. The streets never offered anything like that again. In fact, very little happens in the streets of Paramaribo after midday. Because of the heat offices and shops open at seven in the morning and close for the day at half past one. As a result, everyone goes to bed early, and throughout the morning people are to be seen eating in offices.

A roof garden had been opened on the new Radio Apintie building. It was a club, Corly said; but as a foreigner I would be admitted without any trouble. There was no trouble. We were welcomed by the barman, who had no other customers and was glad of our company. We looked over the silent city. At the back of most private houses, grand and not so grand, there were whole ranges of ancillary buildings: the big house and tenants, in one yard: a relic of slavery, which was abolished here only in 1863.

‘What,’ Corly asked, ‘do the Surinamers do when they are doing nothing?’

In Georgetown I had longed for the liveliness of Port of Spain. Now I longed for Georgetown, and the people of Paramaribo told me I didn’t know what dullness was: I should go across the border to French Guiana.

The C.I.D. Man.
I had met the Inspector of the C.I.D. Special Branch in one of the fine new banks where I was disadvantageously changing my British West Indian dollars for guilders. He invited me to visit him at headquarters, and when I did so I found him in a small white office which was full of newspapers from various West Indian territories. The Inspector read these newspapers diligently. His concern was the security of Surinam and it was his duty to study political trends in neighbouring territories. He was going to British Guiana to ‘observe’ the elections.