MARKETPLACE

What follows is abrief, re-edited introductory essay on Dutch literature in the Caribbean, which has kindly been placed at the disposal ofMatatu by the Dutch publisher In de Knipscheer (jounded in Amsterdam in 1976 and now one of the most progressive curators of translations from the new literatures in English and the major publisher of Dutch Caribbean literature). As an appendix to the essay, I have edited selected synopses from the publisher's 1993 rights catalogue in order to provide more information on same of the writers mentioned. I This Marketplace entry can be regarded as aprelude to a forthcoming Caribbean number of Matatu, which will be inviting contributions on the literature and culture of Surinam, Sint-Maarten, Curafao and other areas of the Netherlands AntilIes. - GoRDON COLLIER

WIM RUTGERS

Dutch Caribbean Literature

Six small Caribbean islands and a fertile coastal area on the South American continent came under Dutch control during the seventeenth-century drive for conquest and colonial power. The three A.B.C. islands of Aruba, Bonaire and C~ are situated offthe South American coast, the three even smaller S.S.S. islands of Saba, Sint-Eustatius and Sint-Maarten (half of which is French) are nearly a thousand kilometres to the North in the archipelago that forms the northern border of the Caribbean Sea with the Atlantic Ocean. For the Dutch, the Antillean islands served as regional centres for trade and privateering, from which to inflict losses on Spain in the New World during the Eighty Years War

I In the notes to Wim Rutgers' essay and the fiction synopses, considcrable use bas been Made of CsnibbemI Writm: A Bio-Bibliogrrtphiazl-Critiad Encyclopedia, cd. Donald E. Herdeck et al. (Washington DC: Three Continents, 1979). 186 MARKETPLACE of Independence they had been fighting at horne. Tbe islands tumed out to be great repositories of satt needed for the herring trade, and they served as a clearing-house for the slave trade. Surinam was such a flourishing plantation colony that, during the Peace of Breda in 1667, the Dutch considered they got a good deal with the English when they traded New Amsterdam (present-day New York) for the South American possession. With a few brief interruptions - internal European squabbling and wars were not infrequently fought out in the colonies - these areas remained in Dutch hands. In 1954 they were granted internal self-rule. In 1975 Surinam declared itself an independent republic. In 1986, Aruba seceded from the Dutch Antilles, declaring "separate status" for itself, though still remaining part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Trade, plantations, and slavery - this is what historically characterized the Dutch colonies. With the emancipation of the slaves in 1863, Surinam supple• mented the subsequent shortage of labour by importing Hindustani contract labourers from British India and Javanese from the Dutch East Indies. In the twentieth century, the multinationals Shell and Lago (Exxon) located their oil refineries on Cura~ao and Aruba, while Alcoa and Billiton developed their mining companies in bauxite-rich Surinam. Tbe consequence of this economic development and the resulting labour migration was that both countries became multiracial, multicultural and multi• lingual societies. The Dutch colonizer and the official use of the Dutch language formed a unifying factor. Since there was no alternative in the lin• guistically so divided Surinam (more than twenty languages spoken, four of these by five large groups), Dutch took root there, albeit with its own Suri• namese-Dutch variant - a development comparable to what took place in the seventeenth century in South Africa. Dutch remained the socially domin~t language on all levels of society in Surinam even after independence. In the Netherlands AntilIes and Aruba, Dutch, considered the language of the Euro• pean colonizer, never really enjoyed official status as the national tongue; both Papiamento and English were widely used, and were the languages of prefer• ence in higher forms of culture.2

2 Ge: Surinam has a variety of English-based creoles: Ndjuka, Saramaccan, and Sranan (also known as Sranan-Tongo, Ningre-Tongo, or Taki-raki). Ndjuka developed among maroons or nmaways from plantation slavery in the eighteenth century (here, the Eastem Bush Negroes, among them the Aucan or Ndjuka). It is closely related to Sranan, the lingua franca of the coastaI population. The oldest Surinam creole is Saramaccan, which developed among seventeenth-century maroons, was originally a West African-Portuguese admixture, involved little subsequent contact with English, and is now spoken by the Central Bush Negroes (Saramaccans and Matuari); it preserves an African system of pitches. Sranan started as a plantation pidgin based on English, developed a West African-Portuguese admixture, and has a strang Dutch overlay. Some 45% of Surinam' s population are ethnically African (of these, 100/0 are Bush Negroes or Bosneger). About 90% of Surinamese 1cnow creole, some 500/0 are able to use Dutch; other major languages used are Hindi (over 30%) and Javanese (under