Anton de Kom - We Slaves of Suriname

We Slaves of Suriname still holds a mirror up to us today. The book delivers a message about might versus minority, capital versus poverty. Finding present-day parallels is easy enough; just look at the wretched circumstances of refugees in the Netherlands and other Western countries. Or Chinese shopkeepers working from early in the morning until late at night, in the clutches of a cartel. Or the drug rings in Latin America that extort money from ordinary citizens, or trafficking in women, or child labor in Asian textile factories. It is always systems that create the framework, and within them there are individuals who profit.

Oppression also depends crucially on stereotyping: us against the strange, unknown other. The rise of right-wing leaders around the world is, in large part, based on this us-and-them thinking. The Other is lazy or criminal, or both. “Do we want more or fewer Moroccans?” Dutch populist politician Geert Wilders has asked. Even firmer language was used in the Dutch campaign slogan “Act normal or go away.” 1“America First,” but who does America really belong to? All these sound bites suggest a presumed right of ownership. De Kom was only too able to see through this type of spin. He followed the anonymous word “slaves” with the phrase “our fathers.” Our fathers, not mere nameless creatures.

In the world after Anton de Kom, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, and Nelson Mandela, where are the human rights activists who will stand up to fight for rights that seem self-evident? Are the voices of opposition loud enough? Anton de Kom exposed the mechanisms of unfreedom. And of poverty. Therein lies the enduring power of his work.

On the sidewalk in front of Paramaribo’s most famous hovel, the old man’s flower is drooping in the heat. He stands and shuffles out into the street in his oversized slippers.

1 1 Translator’s note (TN): This 2017 slogan, a warning to immigrants, was part of a successful election campaign by the VVD, which presents itself as a mainstream right-wing libertarian party. After the March 2021 elections, the VVD remains the largest party in the parliament, with the large populist right-wing anti-immigrant PVV party led by Geert Wilders in third place.

My work as a professor of American literature in England focuses on African-American writing. I am sometimes asked to say something about Dutch literature, and this led me to wonder: are there any well-known Black Dutch writers from the 1920s or 1930s? In the United States, that was the time of the Harlem Renaissance, the dawn of African-American literature, known for authors such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston. When I asked Dutch literary scholars if these writers had any counterparts in our country, the answer was, “Not that we know of.”

An hour later, I was practically glued to my computer screen because, thanks to Google, I had found something. On the DBNL website, a digital database of Dutch-language literature, I had discovered We Slaves of Suriname , and I devoured it. Why hadn’t I known about this book? De Kom combined the themes and style of Du Bois, the outrage of Frederick Douglass, the probing analyses of Langston Hughes, and Harriet Jacobs’s struggle to share her story with the world. And all this in my own Dutch language, in a book about Suriname and about my country’s own suppressed history of slavery.

My astonishment grew as I explored the analyses of We Slaves . I work in the academic context of literary theory with an emphasis on postcolonial and African-American theory, as formulated in classic studies by Henry Louis Gates ( The Signifying Monkey , 1984), Paul Gilroy ( The Black Atlantic , 1993), and Toni Morrison ( Playing in the Dark , 1996). But We Slaves has consistently been brushed aside as a strange hodgepodge of history, sociology, and a pinch of autobiography, and faulted for De Kom’s heavy reliance on earlier authors. We Slaves of Suriname , genuine literature? No, the scholars concluded, the term just didn’t fit.

It reminds me of the words of Du Bois: “Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it … How does it feel to be a problem?” ( Souls of Black Folk , p. 9).

Yet by placing We Slaves in the context of African-American literature and theory, I intend to show that it is, in fact, a major work of Dutch literature. The “problem” of We Slaves as literature lies not in the book, nor in Anton de Kom, but in the prevailing perspectives on and framing of Dutch literature itself: what form it takes, who can write it, and how to read it.

We Slaves begins with a poetic ode to Suriname, interlaced with autobiography. This is directly followed by the historical narrative, from the beginnings of colonization to manumission (the release of enslaved people by their “owners”) in 1863, the new wave of immigrants, and, lastly, De Kom’s visit to and banishment from Suriname. It almost seems more like a collection of essays than a well-crafted story, and in a few places, De Kom directly addresses “the white reader,” as if he knows some readers will respond to what they read with skepticism.

What are we to make of this blending of genres and the autobiographical approach? Note how De Kom links the history of slavery in Suriname to his own individual self: “the right to use and abuse one’s living chattels, to buy and sell our fathers and mothers ” (p. 54, italics DvO). This turns history into autobiography. In the African-American literary context, the form is practically traditional. Take, for example, W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903), which sheds light on African-American culture from many different angles – history, economics, anthropology, biography, fiction, autobiography, and cultural history – emphasizing each time how the alternative perspective can overturn received ideas. Du Bois underpins every one of his claims with detailed historical accounts and facts. Each chapter is rooted in his now-famous concept of double consciousness : “One ever feels his twoness, – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body” (p. 11).

That same inner struggle, and the rewriting of the experience of double consciousness, come to the fore magnificently in We Slaves . Having grown up with the conventional Dutch history of Suriname as enshrined in the Winkler Prins encyclopedia, De Kom rewrote it by reinterpreting history and fictionalizing it from the perspective of the enslaved Black people. For example, he tells the story of Flora, Séry, and Séry’s daughter Patienta, taken captive on a 1711 expedition. The child is torn from Séry’s arms by “rough white hands.” Séry trembles with fear but “no scream came from her lips; she simply gazed at Ensign Molinay with fire in her eyes and then rose to her feet, displaying her pride to the white soldiers, defying them all without the slightest fear” (p. 95). The story is told from the women’s perspective, with Séry’s gaze fixed on the eyes of the white colonizer, rather than from the point of view of the soldier. Then De Kom quotes a long passage from a classic work of history accepted by scholars as authoritative, J. Wolbers’s Geschiedenis van Suriname (“History of Suriname,” 1861), choosing to italicize some phrases, such as these from a report quoted by Wolbers: