Tip Marugg - The Roar of Morning

Marugg has been called “the most Latin American of Dutch writers.” 13In terms of content his books, particularly The Roar of Morning , powerfully evoke Caribbean and Venezuelan nature and culture (see Chapter 2, where the hostile landscape of the mountain is tangibly present, and in Chapter 4 the scene where the curandera places two doves that have been slit open against the soles of the narrator’s feet to draw out the fever).

It is stylistically, however, that the latter book is most reminiscent of Latin American magic realism and surrealism. Its ending is unashamedly apocalyptic. Unsurprisingly the original title was “The Destruction of South America.” 14The tone is equally reminiscent of the biblical world of Marugg’s Protestant heritage. In Chapter 8 the narrator’s repeated phrase “And I see. .” is a clear paraphrase of St. John’s “And I saw. .” in Revelation 5:21, while at the end of Chapter 7 the narrative moves from a realistic account of a pet dog bitten in a fight to Old Testament rhetoric:

I rubbed lots of red ointment from the magic tube onto the wound and the bleeding stopped. Of course, I should have hosed the pool of blood off the path at once, but I didn’t bother. When the cruel tormenting spirit passes through the land on its tenth circuit and sees this bloodstain, it may pass over my house in silence and proceed to my neighbour’s, where it will slay the eldest son.

The protagonist’s mystical yearning to “create myself anew” (Chapter 1) and “free(ing) myself. . from time and space” (Chapter 3), usually with the aid of drink and sex, is a recurring theme. It has been suggested that the climactic hour of 3 am may be an inversion of the time of Christ’s death on the cross at 3 pm, while the image of the protagonist stretched Gulliver-like across the whole South American continent also evokes a crucifixion.

The combination of drink (“anyone who reflects on life needs alcohol” was the author’s watchword), 15brooding nature and violence has led some to suggest parallels with Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947), set in Mexico.

The Dutch scholar J. Oversteegen, attempting to account for Marugg’s appeal in the Netherlands, which is at least as great as in his native Antilles, wondered whether this suggested some “deep rapport in the Dutch reader, still in thrall to Calvin, with this attitude to life, which is imbued with guilt and predestination.” 16

Marugg’s style, with its substratum of Papiamento, 17vivid imagery and striking compounds, was widely praised in the Low Countries; in the Antilles the emphasis was more on his sociological analysis of race relations on the island. Cola Debrot went so far as to see the main character of The Roar of Morning as “a black man in a white man’s skin.” 18This seems very sweeping: in certain respects the character may have “gone native,” but his pessimism and self-knowledge transcend race. Alienation, as is seen in Chapter 1, extends across the racial divide:

The white man isn’t white and the black man isn’t black; both are aliens in this land where their umbilical cords are buried.

The outsider figures he has created in his fiction have clear autobiographical traits, but this has sometimes led to overfacile identification of author and characters: Tip Marugg was not a total recluse, despite his admiration for the hermit-like behaviour of J. D. Salinger. 19One acquaintance described him as “secretive but not reclusive.” 20Nor was he a professional failure or a suicide, but first and foremost a highly original, visionary writer and an accomplished stylist.

Notes

1. A. G. Broek and W. Rutgers (eds.), Tip Marugg. De hemel is van korte duur. Verzameld werk 1945–1995 (Amsterdam, 2009), 669.

2. Collected with his Dutch poems in Afschuw van licht (Horror of Light) (Amsterdam, 1976).

3. R. Wester, “Een vreemdeling op aarde,” Vrij Nederland , 3 March 2001, 45. W. F. Hermans visited the Caribbean and Surinam in 1969 and described his experiences in De laatste resten tropisch Nederland (The Last Remnants of the Tropical Netherlands) (Amsterdam, 1975). Although Hermans in his article (142) is generous in his praise of Frank Martinus Arion’s novel Dubbelspel (1973; tr. Double Play , 1998), he does not appear to have read or met Marugg.

4. H. E. Coomans, “Biografie van Silvio Alberto (Tip) Marugg,” in Drie Curaçaose schrijvers in veelvoud , ed. H. E. Coomans et al. (Zutphen, 1991), 277–284.

5. Weekend Pilgrimage , tr. R. Edwards (London, 1960), 5 and 180.

6. Ibid., 190.

7. Wester, “Een vreemdeling op aarde.”

8. Ibid.

9. C. Zoon, “De heremiet van Pannekoek,” in Tip Marugg. De hemel is van korte duur, Verzameld werk 1945–1995 , ed. A. G. Broek and W. Rutgers (Amsterdam, 2009), 652. See also Wester, “Een vreemdeling op aarde,” 47.

10. “De leguaan en de overlevende” (The Iguana and the Survivor) and “Groeizame aftasting” (Fertile Exploration), both in Tip Marugg. De hemel is van korte duur, Verzameld werk 1945–1995 , ed. A. G. Broek and W. Rutgers (Amsterdam, 2009), 427–430 and 431–434.

11. P. Possel (ed.), Niemand is een eiland. Het leven van Tip Marugg in gesprekken (Amsterdam, 2009), 119.

12. C. Zoon, “De heremiet van Pannekoek,” 642.

13. Netherlands Foundation for Literature, http://www.letterenfonds.nl/en/book/872/the-roar-of-morning.

14. H. M. van den Brink, “De dunste schaduw van het eiland,” Cultureel Supplement NRC Handelsblad , 2 August 1985. In fact, this was the title given to a section of Chapter 9 published in a magazine.

15. H. J. Vaders, interview, in Tip Marugg, De hemel is van korte duur, Verzameld werk 1945–1995 , ed. A. G. Broek and W. Rutgers (Amsterdam, 2009), 627–633.

16. J. Oversteegen, “In de val,” in Drie Curaçaose schrijvers in veelvoud , ed. H. E. Coomans et al. (Zutphen, 1991), 335.

17. See P. Heuvel, “Van aanloeien tot zielstuimel. Over taalgebruik in de romans van Tip Marugg,” in Drie Curaçaose schrijvers in veelvoud , ed. H. E. Coomans et al. (Zutphen, 1991), 358–364.

18. The Dutch phrase is “van binnen vernegerd.” Quoted in J. de Roo, Antilliaans literair logbook (Zutphen, 1980), 39.

19. Possel, Niemand is een eiland , 25.

20. H. J. Vaders, Tip Marugg , 71.

TIP MARUGG (Curaçao, 1923–2006) wrote both in his native Papiamento and in Dutch. However, for most of his poetry and all three of his published novels he uses Dutch, a language that he loved and that in his hands becomes a powerfully expressive tool for rendering his stark and, in the case of the present book, his masterpiece, The Roar of Morning , apocalyptic vision.

PAUL VINCENT studied at Cambridge and Amsterdam, and taught Dutch at the University of London for over twenty years before becoming a full-time translator in 1989. He has translated a wide variety of poetry, nonfiction and fiction from Dutch, including work by Achterberg, Couperus, Elsschot, Mulisch, Mortier, Martinus Arion and Van den Brink. He is a member of the Society of Dutch Literature in Leiden. In 2012 he was awarded the Vondel Translation Prize for his version of Louis Paul Boon’s My Little War (Dalkey Archive Press, 2010).