The Middle Passage (25 page)

Below the shuttered afternoon calm, however, passions were engaged. A fortnight before, an ‘advisory council for cultural cooperation between the countries of the Netherlands Kingdom’, had been set up with the aim, in Surinam, of promoting ‘interest in and a knowledge of Western culture, especially in its Dutch manifestations’. The Nationalists had responded vigorously; and their four-page manifesto, issued while I was there, contained their denunciations and resolutions, together with the text of a radio talk by Dr Jan Voorhoeve. It is typical of the fairness and urbanity of the Dutch-inspired administration (which has produced the only incorruptible police force in the Western Hemisphere) that the Nationalists should have access to a radio station; and not surprising that Dr Voorhoeve is himself a Dutchman, a member, moreover, of the Netherlands Bible Society. Voorhoeve’s intelligent, temperate talk was especially interesting for its analysis of the colonial society.

Controversy at this level could scarcely become public in the British West Indies. True, there is talk about West Indian culture, but this is ingenuous where it is not political, and is rooted in the colonial attitude which rejects as barbarous all that does not issue from the white mother country. That a colonial society might be one without an élite is too frightening even to be perceived. One reason for this British West Indian passivity is that the British have never attempted to turn their colonials into Englishmen. They have in fact been irritated by the assumption, made so easily by the Dutch or French West Indian, that equal opportunities existed in the mother country. In their empire the British were ‘Europeans’, and the West Indian conception of the mother country has caused amusement, dismay and alarm in England. The Dutch have latterly encouraged Surinamers to think that they could become Dutchmen; and I was told of a club in Amsterdam where, over their
genever
, these Surinamer Dutch speak with regret of the loss of Indonesia. The paradox is that Dutch idealism is leading to rejection, while out of British cynicism has grown a reasonably easy relationship between colonials and metropolitans.

The Dutch have offered assimilation but not made it obligatory. Their tolerance and understanding of alien cultures is greater than the British, and the very reverse of the French arrogance which makes the French West Indian islands insupportable for all but the francophile. And one cannot help feeling it unfair that the Dutch should have their own cultural offerings spurned by their former colony. Surinam has come out of Dutch rule as the only truly cosmopolitan territory in the West Indian region. The cosmopolitanism of Trinidad is now fundamentally no more than a matter of race; in Surinam diverse cultures, modified but still distinct, exist side by side. The Indians speak Hindi still; the Javanese live, a little bemused, in their own world, longing in this flat unlovely land for the mountains of Java; the Dutch exist in their self-sufficient Dutchness, the Creoles in their urban Surinam Dutchness; in the forest, along the rivers, the bush-Negroes have re-created Africa.

Despite all the talk of culture, however, Surinamers have little idea of the diversity and richness of their own country. My recurring exclamations at the Javanese costume made my Creole friends laugh. The Creoles know only Europe; they have made no attempt to get to know the Javanese or the Indians and it is only recently, under the Nationalist stimulus, that they have tried to understand the bush-Negroes. One Nationalist even suggested that the existence of Javanese and Indian culture in Surinam was a barrier to the development of a national culture! This pointed to the confusion and the unexpected racial emotions that lie at the back of the Nationalist agitation. The cultural problem in Surinam is mainly a problem for the Negro; it is only he who has rejected his past, all that attaches him to Africa.

For the Negro of the islands Africa is no more than a word, an emotion. For the Surinamer Africa is almost in his backyard. Beside the rivers the bush-Negroes have maintained their racial purity, their African arts of carving, singing and dancing, and, above all, their pride. Rediscovery was not hard.

At Home.
The minister, big and black and bluff, played bush-Negro songs on the record-player in the greenheart-floored drawing room of his fine new minister’s house. ‘You wouldn’t have heard these songs in a drawing room a few years ago,’ he said. Afterwards, as if emphasizing the new era, he told jokes in the local language, which is
talkie-talkie
for the irreverent,
negerengels –
Negro English – for the correct, and
Surinam
for the nationalist. Later he took the two other ministers, of different races, to the bar in the corner of the room for a political confabulation. While this was going on the three wives made little jokes about politics and the ways of politicians.

The Nationalists hope to replace the Dutch language by Negro English; and Mr Eersel, who has done much work on the language, explained the possibilities to me in his
Volkslecturing
office. I put Mr Eersel in his forties; he was grave and very gentle, with one of those sculptured Negro faces in which every feature appears to have been separately cast, so that one studies the face feature by feature. He said that Dutch was not properly understood or spoken by the majority of Surinamers, while everyone understood Negro English. They had already compiled a dictionary of Negro English; and the language was growing: they made up new words in conversation every day. I said that the adoption of this language would mean that every important book in the world would have to be translated: did they have the resources? They would manage. But what about the writers? Was it fair to ask them to write in a language spoken by only a quarter million people? That was no problem, Mr Eersel said; if they were good they would be translated. Was this language capable of subtlety? Was it capable of poetry? Mr Eersel asked me to test him. From a faulty memory I wrote:

He at once translated:

My memory had mutilated and simplified Wyatt’s simple lines and Mr Eersel had simplified them further, but there was no denying the sweetness and rhythm of the language. I would have liked to see how it would handle something more abstract, but my memory failed me altogether.

I know no Dutch and relish it for its improbability, its air of recent and arbitrary manufacture.
Oost woost thoos boost, you
utter, or sounds like that, and you’ve said, ‘East west, home’s best’. While English breeds dialects that are recognizably English and scarcely modify the standard language, Dutch, because of its difficulty or improbability, breeds new and separate languages which very soon destroy Dutch. There is the kitchen Dutch of South Africa, the Papiamento of the Netherlands Antilles, the
negerengels
of Surinam. A passion for bad grammar is one of the singular features of regional pride in Dutch territories. The Surinam district of Nickerie, which is noted for its independent spirit, has a cyclostyled newspaper called
Wie for Wie.
The paper is written, no doubt impeccably, in Dutch; but its name, which is simply ungrammatical dialect English – ‘we for we’ – proclaims the dialect as an exclusive possession.

The importance of English in Surinam dialect is puzzling until one remembers that British Guiana is next door – in Nickerie they even play cricket – and that Surinam was British until 1667. It is in fact the English left behind three hundred years ago, in the minds of the slaves, which is the basis of Surinam Negro English. And this is the true wonder. Though Trinidad was Spanish until 1797 and thereafter, with immigration from the French islands, French-speaking for three-quarters of a century, Spanish in Trinidad is dead and French survives only in a few phrases and constructions. In Surinam, however, after three hundred years, a form of English survives. At first the English element in Mr Eersel’s translation seems negligible; but this is largely the effect of corrupt pronunciation.

Ah dee day day we.
This, improbably, is nearly all English, and from English-speaking, sophisticated Trinidad. Unscrambled: I did there there, oui: I did find myself there (to there, to find oneself, to be), yes: I
was
there. Considering the English the Surinam slaves must have spoken in 1667, and considering the pronunciation of the time in England, it is remarkable that so many words are still recognizable. We can tell how the language had developed a hundred years later, in the 1770s, from Stedman’s
Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam.

In one of the minor actions of the war a military detachment was cut to pieces in the forest by the rebellious slaves, who, following the custom of the time, began cutting off the heads of the dead soldiers. One soldier was only pretending to be dead, however; and before his turn came, the head-cutter put away his cutlass, saying,
‘Sonde go sleeby, caba mekewe liby den tara dogo lay tamara. –
The sun is going to sleep. We must leave these other dogs till tomorrow.’ During the night the soldier escaped. Though the sentence has been twice reported, first by the Dutch soldier and then by Stedman, it needs only to be spoken quickly to be recognized as English, English in the mouth of a West African.

You no sabi waar she iss?
Dutch sounds so made up that at times it brings on a light-headedness in which you feel that anything said in a Dutch accent would be understood. In a restaurant in Arnhem I once found myself, with perfect seriousness, speaking pure gibberish to a waitress who continued misleadingly to smile. And something like this happened when I went to call on Theresia one afternoon. A woman from one of the tenements in the backyard (relic of slavery, I remembered) told me Theresia was out. Improvising an accent, the words coming from I know not where, I asked, ‘You no sabi waar she iss?’ ‘
Ik weet niet waar ze is,’
the woman replied in careful Dutch, and tossed her head. ‘
Ik spreek geen talkie-talkie, mijnheer. I
do not speak talkie-talkie, sir.’ So I hadn’t spoken gibberish; I had spoken
negerengels.

It may be smart for ministers and others to speak
negerengels
, but for the proletariat, to whom it comes naturally, it remains a degradation. Until recently, according to Dr Voorhoeve, children whose mothers caught them speaking
negerengels
were made to wash out their mouths.

Sixty miles south of Paramaribo, at a place called Brokopondo, an American aluminium company is building a hydro-electric station for an aluminium smelting plant. There is more in the project for the company than for Surinam, but it is regarded as part of the country’s development, and the Information Office laid on a tour in a large American motor-car of the ‘estate’ type.

At an important hotel we picked up an important Negro official from Aruba, and his photographer. In a dusty palm-lined street, at a
pension
less imposing than mine, we picked up Alberto. Alberto was an Italian magazine photographer who was making a whirlwind tour of South America. I had read in the Georgetown newspapers of his arrival in British Guiana a few days before I left that country; and his departure, I believe, preceded mine. Now he was in Surinam for a few days, on his way to French Guiana; he was hoping to reach Rio in time for the Carnival. Alberto was slender, of medium height, and his movements were of Italian ‘elegance ‘. He had thick wavy brown hair, which he combed continually, a thick moustache in a plump reddish face, and busy eyebrows over large bright eyes. He was in his early twenties but – the moustache perhaps, and his journalist’s self-possession – he looked at least thirty-five. His voice was hoarse.

We were settling down for the long journey when we stopped at a middle-class suburban housing development and three women ran happily out of a house towards the car. They were coming with us; and Alberto, the Aruban photographer and I were made to leave our comfortable middle seats and sit cramped in the back, facing the road. There were no compensations. One of the women was Brazilian, fat, with ugly white tights and an ugly white-and-yellow straw hat fastened with innumerable hairgrips to untidy brown hair. One was Dutch and young and ponderously girlish. One was tall and grave, married, older than the other two and slightly motherly towards them; she too was Dutch.