The Middle Passage (26 page)

As soon as we started off the women burst into some incomprehensible song. We stared resentfully at the road. Asphalt gave way to dirt, and soon we were on the red road through the forest. We didn’t see the forest; we saw only red dust. It blew into our faces and we turned up the glass. Red dust slid down the window, staining it, and presently little view-obstructing dust-drifts and dust-banks had formed, which we all three tried to clear by continually banging on the window with our palms, a discordant accompaniment to the songs at our backs. Fine dust had been coming through the rubber-insulated crevices and settling on us so gently that we didn’t feel it. We didn’t look powdered; we looked dyed, and the dye was getting deeper. The two younger women were now attempting close harmony. Whenever they failed they broke into girlish giggles.

In spite of all our pleas the women had their windows turned up to protect themselves from the dust created by the occasional passing car. We stifled. Alberto lost his fresh, brushed look of the morning. Dust reddened his neglected hair. He ceased to talk of his travels (‘ ‘Aiti was something disgusting’) and sat hunched in his corner. ‘I am suffering,’ he said, his hoarse voice fruity with anguish. I thought he wanted the car stopped and was too embarrassed to ask. But at that moment the fat woman in the straw hat started on a Portuguese song; and Alberto, turning his eyes slowly to one side and frowning, the dust flaking off his forehead, cried out, ‘Goodness, I’m suffering!’

A drink at the Brokopondo guest house refreshed us. Alberto recovered his journalist’s energy and ruthlessness. He was full of questions and requests. Could he cross the river? Were there bush-Negroes in the neighbourhood? Could he be taken to a bush-Negro village? And while the man from the Information Office broke off a few needles from the Honduras pine in the garden of the guest house and offered them to the Aruban official – the Aruban photographer snapping away – and myself, to smell, Alberto was scrambling here, there and everywhere, taking photographs. Once I saw him far below on one of the rocks in the wide shallow river.

When he came back to us we drove on to the dam. On the river bank the fat woman stepped into some mud and lost her shoe. She uttered girlish cries of discomfiture. Alberto gave her a look of annoyed contempt and was off, up the steep mound, moving briskly and well for all his Italian elegance and hair-combing. ‘No photographs!’ the man from the Information Office cried. ‘It is forbidden.’ Alberto didn’t hear; he had disappeared. When we saw him again he was at the far end of the site, squatting, rising, a tiny figure moving rapidly in short steps, knees close together, legs working from the knees down.

Two bush-Negroes, purple-black and shining and naked except for red loincloths, came up in a canoe and tried to sell us a watermelon. I hadn’t seen any bush-Negroes before, but these were familiar: I had seen them on innumerable postcards in Paramaribo.

We waited in the shade of the huge new bridge for Alberto. At last he came, and was told of the bush-Negroes. ‘But
I
want to see bush-Negroes,’ he said, peeved. And the words became a refrain: ‘Can’t you take me to see bush-Negroes? I want to see bush-Negroes. Is that a bush-Negro?’

Back at the guest house, we both had showers before lunch, which was eaten rapidly. The fat woman with the straw hat ate mounds of potatoes. Conversation became general. Introductions were made – the Aruban photographer clicking away – and professions revealed.

The Dutch girl, still energetically girlish, said she had twelve children.

‘Twelve children,’ Alberto said sympathetically, refusing to see the joke. ‘That’s something dreadful.’

The girl tried again. ‘I know a writer,’ she said. ‘In Rio.’

She scored. Alberto, passionate for helpful South American names and addresses, softened. He took out his notebook. ‘Is he nice?’

‘He is fifty.’

Alberto lost his temper. ‘I cannot understand you,’ he said, putting away his notebook. ‘I ask you whether ’e is nice and you tell me ’e is fifty.’

The Aruban photographer photographed the Aruban official, who was now relaxed and picking his teeth, his dark glasses reflecting the wild landscape of forest, rivers and rocks.

After lunch Alberto had his wish. We went to a bush-Negro village. It was in a clearing off the main road, a short dusty street with neat weatherboard boxes on either side, not at all what we had expected: no carved doors, no sign of the African-style handicrafts we had read about, only glimpses of radios in dim interiors, sewing-machines and one or two well-kept bicycles. The man from the Information Office reminded us that the village was near a modern project; the men worked on this project and wore proper clothes. But there were naked children rolling in the dust and the women had their breasts uncovered, pendulous things like squashed pawpaws. Alberto started clicking away. The women fled, smiling, into their boxes. The Aruban official looked about him with benevolence and was luckier. He had no camera, and a guilder persuaded a woman to do a dance with a dog behind her house. At the approach of Alberto and myself, non-paying visitors, she stopped.

‘I must get a picture of these bush-Negroes,’ Alberto said. But he was unable or unwilling to pay. We walked between the houses, women scattering before us, naked breasts swinging and flapping. ‘That girl is completely idiot. Is he nice? ’E is fifty. Is completely idiot. Shh!’

Carefully he approached a woman at a sewing-machine. She took up her sewing and disappeared.

He rejoined me. Then he was off again, camera at the ready, his high fluffy hair bobbing with his quick little steps. This time he was more successful. I saw him enter a hut. Just then the girls bounded up. The Dutch girl gave a shriek, ran into the hut after Alberto, and Alberto instantly emerged, intensely irritated.

‘God, I am suffering! But ’ow I am suffering!’

We started back, Alberto disconsolate. ‘Goodness, I wanted a picture of these bush-Negroes.’ And all the way to Paramaribo he worked off his irritation in talk. ‘Did you ’ear that man at the dam? No photographs. But why? It is a completely idiot rule, and when something is so completely idiot the Italian says all right, but let me try to come to some arrangement to enable me to take photographs. I thank goodness I am Italian. Why are we going so slow? The road is empty. Why are we going so slow?’

‘The speed limit,’ the Aruban photographer said. ‘And this is a government car.’

‘Is an idiot reason. In Italy we would say
because
it is a government car—’ He broke off and commanded, ‘Stop!’ He jumped out and photographed a bauxite crusher. ‘I wish I ’ad more time,’ he said, returning. ‘Then I would take good photographs. ’Ello!’

A slip of paper had been put into his hand by the Dutch girl, who was staring ahead and smiling. The paper carried a schoolgirl’s drawing of a woman’s profile.

‘What do I do with this?’ he asked. ‘I was just ’olding the ’and here and in comes this letter. What do I do?’ He stuck it in his red-striped sock and whispered, ‘Is this an insult?’

‘God,’ he said later, ‘ ’Ow I ’ave suffered today!’

Little boy lost.
The West African calls himself a black man. For some West Indians, continually striving to make black white, this is too blunt: it suggests that evolution is impossible. Euphemisms vary from territory to territory, and in Surinam I was told of the description of a Negro boy which appeared in the Lost and Found column of a newspaper:
een donkerkleurige jongen met kroes haar, a
dark-complexioned boy with curly hair.

The leader of the Nationalists and possible the most discussed person in Surinam is Eduard Bruma, a Negro lawyer in his middle thirties. He is dark-brown, of medium height and build, with an unusually striking face: his brow puckers easily above the nose-bridge and he has high eyebrows that slope steeply outwards over deep-set intense eyes. When he drives around Paramaribo in his monster green Chevrolet boys and men wave, and there is a hint of conspiracy in their greeting. For though the Nationalist agitation is carried on openly, the Nationalists have as yet no official positions and the movement has a touch of the underground. I once saw a middle-aged woman pluck Eersel’s sleeve in the street and whisper congratulations.

It was in Amsterdam, a city known to every educated Surinamer, that the Nationalist movement started. Bruma himself spent seven years there. He enjoyed his stay and claims that the movement has no basis in racial resentment and is not directed against any racial group. Not all of Bruma’s supporters, who are mainly Negro, would agree; nor would the Dutch in Surinam. And it is hard to see how racial feeling can be avoided, for the cultural problem that exercises Bruma and his followers is essentially a problem for the Negro in the New World. In Trinidad and British Guiana there is no widespread realization that such a problem exists, and it is to the credit of the Nationalists in Surinam that they have made it a public issue without going to the extremes of the back-to-Africa Ras Tafarians in Jamaica or the Black Muslims of the United States. There is much in their thought, however, to frighten the respectable and excite the cry for the
jehad.
Their view of Christianity is historical: they see it as much a part of European culture as the Dutch language.

But how can Christianity – for the West Indian more than a faith: an achievement – be replaced? By the adoption of the survivals of African religion found among the bush-Negroes? By the adoption of Islam? Religions cannot be replaced by decree any more than languages can. Negro English is no substitute for a developed language. The bush-Negroes are interesting and in some respects admirable, but between these forest-dwellers and the sophisticated Continental Surinamer there can be no deep sympathy. It would appear then either that the solution to this problem has to be violent and extreme, or that there is no solution at all. And perhaps no solution is necessary, and all that is required is a profound awareness that countries and cultures exist beyond the white mother country, beyond Europe and America. To create this awareness is not easy. For just as Christianity is more fervently adhered to in Jamaica, say, than in London, so the provincialism of the mother country finds a more extreme expression in the West Indian colony: to the respectable black West Indian Italy is as foreign and ridiculous as Japan or Nigeria.

Whether the Nationalists can create this awareness in Surinam without slipping into a futile black racism is problematical. That they have seen the problem so sharply is due, I feel, however paradoxically, to their Dutch inheritance and above all to their possession of the Dutch language. English belongs to all who speak it. Dutch belongs so clearly to the Dutch that the colonial who speaks it as his mother tongue cannot fail to be struck by the oddity of a situation which for the British West Indian is natural and proper. Speaking a language little understood by the outside world, the Dutch have become great linguists. So have the Surinamers. English, Dutch, French,
negerengels:
these are the languages spoken by the educated Surinamer; and to this list the Indian adds Hindi, the Javanese Javanese. Having access to so many worlds, the Surinamer is not as colonial-provincial as the British West Indian and is able to have a more objective view of his own situation.

A growing language
. I showed Corly Eersel’s translation of the lines by Wyatt and I could see that in spite of his differences with the Nationalists he was impressed. He read the translation again.
‘Gendri,’
he said at last. ‘What is that word? I don’t know what that word means. It has been in existence for only twenty-four hours.’

Not far from the international airport at Zanderij there is a bush-Negro village called Berlin. Corly, Theresia and I drove there one Saturday afternoon. Not to see the bush-Negroes, who, living so close to the capital, are citified and corrupted and not genuine forest-dwellers. We went there for the black-water creek, these forest creeks, black water in snow-white sand, being the Surinamer’s substitute for the bathing beaches which the muddy South American coast does not provide. We paddled in the lily-spotted creek, sunlight striking through the trees, turning the Coca-Cola water (the Surinamer’s description) into wine. Theresia, more beautiful than Rembrandt’s model, completed the Rembrandt picture.

Later we walked through the village, which had nothing to mark it as a bush-Negro village. Wooden houses in the Dutch style lined the dirt road, here and there were hedges; and there was even a refreshment shack with one or two advertisements. Two children rolled about in the dusty road, naked; but everyone else was clothed. Towards the end of the street we heard drums. Theresia was at once aroused. She ran into a yard and made inquiries in
negerengels;
she got offended replies in Dutch and came back to us, saying what sounded like
‘Hit iss in de bos.’
So we made for the bos.

The bush began just at the end of the street. And there, beyond a short wavering path through high grass, were the dancers, in a small shed roofed with corrugated iron. Corly was nervous; he said he heard people saying, ‘Who are these
bakra
(whites, foreigners) coming to see? What do they want?’ But the men and women who were not dancing were friendly enough, and we sat on a bench outside the shed and watched. Whisky was passed around from spectators to dancers and back; beer, too, in glasses. The drummers, stick-beaters and tin-beaters sat at one end of the shed and before them, as before an altar, the dancers performed, each person absorbed in his individual dance: one man doing something like a cossack dance, another squatting and dancing only on his toes, an old woman, her eyes closed, going through stylized sexual motions. The dancers’ dusty feet were continually brushed with wet twigs by the spectators.

So far each dancer had been keeping to his corner of the shed, but now one thick-set man began throwing himself to the ground, rolling and groaning. I thought this was done for our benefit, but the sweat that broke out on his face was real enough. He rolled to where an old woman in a blue frock was sitting. She got up to give him room, and gave us a friendly smile. ‘I don’t like this,’ Corly said, his face blank with distaste and alarm. Two men shammed a fight with nothing of play in their expression or manner. Corly wanted us to leave, but Theresia, tapping her feet to the drumming, was unwilling.