Creole Drum: And Anthology of Creole Literature in Surinam by Jan Voorhoeve; Ursy M. Lichtveld; Vernie A. February Review by: Ian Hancock Language in Society, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Apr., 1977), pp. 99-103 Published by: Cambridge University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4166910 . Accessed: 04/02/2014 12:20

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This content downloaded from 128.83.205.53 on Tue, 4 Feb 2014 12:20:45 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions REVIEWS

REFERENCES Le Page, R. B. (eci.) (I96I). Proceedings of the conference on creole language studies. Creole language studies, 2. London. Hymes, D. (ed.) (1971). Pidgintzation and creolization of languages. London: Cambridge University Press. DeCamp, D. (1971). 'Toward a generative analysis of a post-creole speech continuum.' In D. Hymes (ed.) Pidginization and creolization of languages. London: Cambridge University Press. 349-70. Daeleman, J. (I972). 'Kongo elements in Saramacca Tongo.' Jnl of Afr. Lgs iI (i). I-44. Reviewed by JAN VOORPOEVE Faculteit Der Letteren Rijksuniversiteitte Leiden (Received 28 April I976) The Netherlands

VOORHOEVE,JAN AND URSY M. LICHTVELD,with English translationsby Vernie A. February. Creole drum: and anthology of creole literature in Surinam. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975. PP. 308. The editors of this book have between them collected over 150 songs, poems, essays, tales and plays in Sranan,the English-relatedcreole which is the principal language spoken in Surinam. The earliest of these is traceableto distant origins in West Africa, while the most recent is a chapter from a novel published in I969. The only other existing Sranananthology is Herskovits'Suriname Folklore (New York, 1936, reissued by AMS Press, New York, I972), which deals exclusively with traditional oral literature. Like Herskovits, the editors also include a discussion of the origins of Surinam Creole. The book consists of an introduction, nine chapters and three appendices, plus a bibliographyand index. The introductionpresents a concise geographical, historical,demographic and social introductionto Surinam,and gives an account of Sranan'srise to 'respectability'.A decade ago such a volume would probably only have found its way into the librariesof a few creolists, for whom such an introduction would have been superfluous. Today the potential readership is considerably greater, and for those interested in Afro-American literature the introduction serves a valuable purpose, for although African language and cul- ture survives in the western hemisphere most vigorously in Surinam, little is known about that country in the United States. The chapters are in chronological order, dealing with separate genres or groups of genres, and each is prefaced with an explanatory essay. With the exception of the works of Johannes King in chapter IV all the contributions have been put into a regularized orthography, explained in Appendix 2, and facing-page translationsinto English have been made throughout by the South African poet Vernie February. Though these are stilted in places, giving the impressionthat the translatormay not be a native speakerof English, the overall impressionis that a difficultjob has been very adequatelydone. The tacit beauty and sadness of the poems of Schouten-Eisenhoutand Slory in particularcomes 99

This content downloaded from 128.83.205.53 on Tue, 4 Feb 2014 12:20:45 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions LANGUAGE IN SOCIETY across particularlywell in translation.In two instances,alternative versions have been provided by Douglas and Jacques Taylor. Chapters I, II and III deal with traditionaloral literature,chapter IV with the igth century writings of the Djuka wise man Johannes King, chapters V and VI with that of the twentieth-centuryauthors Koenders and Bruma,chapter VII with four members of the nationalist/culturalmovement Wie Eegie Same, 'Our Own Thing' (Bruma, Eersel, Rens and Trefossa), chapter VIII with the writings of Trefossa (Henry de Ziel) in particular, and chapter IX with the 'new generation': three writers (Schouten-Eisenhout, Slory and Cairo) chosen from several, who were influencedin particularby Trefossa, and who have been especially instrumentalin bringing Srananliterature to the status it now enjoys. Appendix 3 consists of one poem in Dutch and Srananby Hendrik Schouten - a quarrel between a Dutchman and his local sweetheart with their respective languages in alternatinglines. The body of the book, its literary content and related discussion, has been extremely well chosen. Such a representativeselection exists in published forn for no other creole literature. This review, however, is confined to the non-literary sections of the book. Here, several points bear discussion. For instance to say that Sranan has risen from 'a despised ghetto language to a language of great sophistication and subtlety' (inside front dust jacket) seems to be pandering unnecessarily to American-orientedpop militant sentiment. A ghetto is, by definition,'the quarter in a city to which Jews were restricted'(SOED); the 200 originalJewish inhabi- tants of Surinam,and the modern interpretationof the word aside, it is straining things somewhat to suggest that an African populationwhich within the first 50 years of settlement constituted 99.9 per cent of the entire colony (3) inhabiteda ghetto. It might be added too that ghetto speech itself need not be devoidof its own sophisticationand subtlety. We are told in the preface that Surinam Creole ...is a young language, which did not exist before i6 x' (vii). Here, and in Appendix i where the asser- tion is repeated,the writersappear stubbornly to be ignoring the earlierworks of Cassidy, this reviewer and others who have posited a pre-I6si African origin for the English-related Surinam creoles. Their works are not acknowledgedin the bibliography,and in fact on p. 276 it is maintainedthat 'this short formation period (I65I-I68o) might give rise to the hypothesis that an English pidgin had already been acquiredby the slaves in Africa', as though the hypothesis had not already been put forward. The argument continues 'There is no historical support for the existence of an English pidgin in Africa at such an early date, however [276]... Thus it is possible that an English-basedpidgin was not spoken by the newerslaves in Surinambut that they adaptedtheir Portuguesepidgin to the languageof their masters,and of the earlierslaves, and at the sametime converted it to a more generaluse as their own mothertongue. This processby which a pidgin

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This content downloaded from 128.83.205.53 on Tue, 4 Feb 2014 12:20:45 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions REVIEWS develops into a pidgin or creole with a differentbase may be termedrelexification' (277). It actually was termed relexification,as long ago as 1962, and of course Voorhoeveexplicitly addressesthe issue in the context of its history in a technical paperin this journal, 'Historicaland linguistic evidence in favourof the relexifica- tion theoryin the formationof creoles'(2 (I). 133-145 (I973)). Sranan, or its forerunner,is assumed by the editors not to have been spoken before i65I on the ground that there is no documentationof it from that time. By such reasoning we might also assume that it was not spoken before 1718, the date of the first actual written samples of the language. An earlier Dutch account from I693 claimed that it was English which was 'lnog meest bij de slaven gesproken'('mostly spoken by the slaves'), although a Dutchman knowing no English might well have taken Sranan to be that language. There is some reason to believe that Sranan, and Saramaccan,another Suri- nam creole, had separateorigins each in Africa, ratherthan Sranan being a local relexificationof Saramaccan,for which the editors do allow an African onrgin. In fact the reverse may have been the case: Saramaccanrelexifying - or better, supralexifying- from Sranan; an original Portuguesepidgin which expanded its lexicon by drawing from the coexistent English-related Sranan. Creolists have been misled by thinking that the sixteen years (I65-67) of English rule, even extended to i68o, alone account for Sranan. While this is certainly long enough for a creole to become established, a more likely possi- bility is that the Dutch themselves brought not only the PortuguesePidgin (later Saramaccan)but an English pidgin or creole (later Sranan)too, into Surinam. The Dutch monopolized the Caribbean slave trade until the i66os. Slaves were being importednot only from Angola by the Dutch, but also from the Gold Coast. This is of some importance, and needs further examination. Le Page (in his JamaicanCreole, London, I960, p. 35) notes that 'the Dutch islands of Curacaoand St. Eustasius became great slave dep6ts for the Caribbeanin the i7th century, supplying all other colonies there, including Jamaica,either legally or illegally, and it is probable that most of the Dutch slaves at this time came from the Gold Coast ... up to the middle of the i8th century the Dutch were the most successful exploiters of the Gold Coast trade'. Even before I650 the Dutch also had castles and large fortified posts at Goree (in Senegal), on the Grain Coast (Sierra Leone/Liberia)and after I65o at Whydah (Dahomey), and smaller factories at Benin, Bonny, Calabarand Cameroons.The principal Dutch forts and factories on the Gold Coast were at Axim, Takoradi, Shama, Elmina, Nassau (Moree), Kormantine, Apam and Accra. The English also had forts on the same coast at Sekondi and Takoradi. Whether the English arrived here in the seventeenth century with staff brought from English settlements further north along the coast bringingsome kind of Coast English with them, or whether the languagewas simply introduced anew from the ships at that time we do not know. It is known though that some kind of English was in use there in the

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This content downloaded from 128.83.205.53 on Tue, 4 Feb 2014 12:20:45 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions LANGUAGE IN SOCIETY seventeenth century: cf. Barbot's report of 'good English' near Elmina in 1679. An earlier-establishedCoast English could have been introduced from up the coast; B. O'Neil (RePorton the Castks and Forts of the Gold Coast, London, 1922, p. 7) indicates that 'the first traffic in human bodies between Europeans and Africanson the Gold Coast was the sale of African slaves [from other parts of Guinea] by Europeansto Africans on the Gold Coast who wanted porters'. If the Dutch were responsible for selling most of the slaves to the English up until c. I665, it is quite possible that it was they who were responsible for introducing a pidginized, or perhaps even creolized, Coast English into the Caribbeanand the Guianas, rather than the English. A substantial native English-speakingEuropean population had established itself in Barbados,from which island the English supplied Surinamwith slaves between I65r and I667, before a Black population was establishedthere. Many of the Africansarriving in Barbadosprobably spoke no English at all, and finding themselves in an environmentinhabited by a native English-speakingpopulation they would have learnt English from them without creolizing, like any minority immigrantgroup anywhere. This is discussed in greaterdetail in this reviewer's paper 'Gullah and Barbadian: origins and relationships', Proceedingsof the Honolulu Conferenceon Pidgins and Creoles(tentative title), edited by Richard Day, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu I977. It is not unlikely then that the first Africans brought into Surinam from Barbadosor Africanspoke a non-creolizedEnglish, or no English at all, and that the demetropolitanization,and/or the introductionof a creolizedCoast English in Surinam took place later when Creole-speakingslaves were brought in from Guinea, and came to constitute the vast majorityin a comparativelyshort space of time (cf. the general thesis of Whinnom (1971: 104)). The fact that the first slaves were from Barbadoswould account for this. The Angolan slaves taken into Surinam by the Dutch probably carried the essentials of a Portuguese-relatedpidgin with them, which with later reinforce- ment from the Dutch slaves brought from the Gold Coast speaking a related Portuguese pidgin, developed into modem Saramaccan.The concentrationof both KiK6ongo (Congo/Angola)and Ewe (Gold Coast) derived lexicon in that creole supports this possibility. The ancestors of the English-derived Sranan may have come in later with the Dutch from the Gold Coast. There is no record of any kind of creole being spoken in Surinambefore 1817, but if the possibility of its importationby the Dutch ratherthan by the English is accepted, this will allow us to extend the period of Sranan'sintroduction into Surinambeyond the date of the end of English control there in I667. That the Congo/AngolaPortu- guese was a pidgin rather than a creole may account for Saramaccan'shaving creolized after being brought to Surinam,in the directionof the English-related Srananof the coast. Even duringthe periodof Britishcontrol (I65 I-67) it mightbe added, the English were purchasingtheir slaves for Surinam from the Dutch.

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This content downloaded from 128.83.205.53 on Tue, 4 Feb 2014 12:20:45 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions REVIEWS A number of other miscellaneous points may be mentioned. On p. 3 a quote is given to illustrate the Surinam situation, but in fact refers to Jamaica,and is wrongly page-referenced(as xii instead of xli). A clearer definition of 'Creole author' (p. viii) would have been welcomed; is it any individual writing in Creole?Is a Sirinamerstill a Creole authorwhen he writes in Dutch? It would also be interesting to know what a 'sort of local Dutch' (p. viii) is; does this mean a particularvariety of Surinam Dutch, or simply Dutch as spoken in Surinam. In a couple of places referenceis made to Srananwords as being creolizations of English words: posu a creolization of 'post' (209), basya a creolization of 'overseer' (i69), etc. One wonders whether this wording is necessary in a book striving to present the languageas a discrete entity. And if etymologicalexplana- tions are needed, why stop here? Even the original volume of Cairo's novel Temekoecontains an appendix of archaismsand newly coined words. Although explanatoryfootnotes are given throughout, a glossary might also have clarified meanings not readily apparentfrom the parallel translations. CreoleDrum seems to be directed at two audiences. Its texts and translations succeed for the literarily inclined, but it falls short in trying to explain to the same audience what Sranan actually is. The linguistic materialin the appendix, largely a condensationof Voorhoeve'searlier works, compressestoo much in too little space, and is unevenly treated. The whole Srananverbal paradigmis given, for example, but no other grammar. For the reader already sufficiently familiar with creole linguistics to know what Krio, Macao Creole, Negro Dutch, etc are - all listed without explanation- the linguistic appendix,like the introduction,is unnecessary,containing nothing that has not alreadybeen published elsewhere except the Nepveu manuscriptof 1I765(28o-2). There are a few spelling errorspassim: 'caster oil' (267), 'Jahn-Heinz John' (I53), 'Sarmaccan'(278). This is altogether a very welcome contribution to the growing body of pub- lished Creole literature, and the editors are to be heartily thanked for their diligence and commitment in collecting and putting the work of so many fine creativeauthors, writing in a little-knownlanguage, before the world. And through it telling another story - the story of a transplanted people who against great odds have emerged with a new and vital culture.

REFERENCE

Whinnom, K. (197i). Linguistic hybridization and the 'special case' of pidgins and creoles. In D. Hymes (ed.), Pidginization and creolization of languages. London: Cambridge University Press. Reviewed by IAN HANCOCK Department of English University of Texas (Received I2 November 1975) Austin, Texas, 78712 103

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