Thresholds of Hospitality in Dutch-Surinamese Relations, 1667-2000
Andrea Cole
A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts
Graduate Program in Social Anthropology York University North York, Ontario
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Hosts and guests are in league by the movement of one's crossing a threshold, of entering
upon invitation or of transgressing a boundary. That boundary - one that marks one
space as 'mine' and 'not yours'; of'yours' and 'not mine' - is itself moveable,
interpretive, and ambiguous; and by that so are the host-guest identities located on either
side and even in between the territorial line. Hospitality permeates Dutch-Surinamese
social and political history; forces of travel and movement have compelled individual
subjects to decide on which side of the host/guest line they will fall - though always with
some ambiguity. This decision comes with subjective reflection on the part of participants; their individualized understandings of self, nationhood, and belonging.
A sense of hospitality ('true' or otherwise) between Suriname and Holland is traced through international migration, past and present. Data for this thesis has been collected through historical review and participant observation.
IV Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Kenneth Little, for his enduring patience,
guidance, and enthusiasm throughout this project. I would also like to acknowledge
Professor Teresa Holmes for the support and wisdom provided to me as a graduate
student. Malcolm Blincow and David Lumsden were influential and inspiring academic
leaders. My friends in the Department of Anthropology have been incredibly supportive and encouraging. I would like to thank my parents for their unconditional support towards this goal, and especially my father, Douglas R. Cole, for his example in critical inquiry. Thanks to all.
V TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 1: Introducing Hospitality and Suriname 1
1. First Impressions 1
2. Taking a Second Glance 8
3. Methodology and Motivation for Research 12
4. A Brief History Exploring Hospitality between the Netherlands and Suriname 23
Connections 23
Hospitality and Movement: Significance of Migration between Suriname and the Netherlands 28
Home and Away 29
Chapter Two: Hospitality 34
Defining Hospitality 34
Working Definitions, Practical Examples of Hospitality 37
Defining Hosts 38
Defining Guests 41
Motivations for Hospitality 41
Limits of Hospitality 43
The Questioned Place of the Foreigner/Stranger 47
Tension of Hospitality in Mongoe 49
Transitions 53 Ambiguity and Tension in Camus' The Guest indicating the Dilemma of Law and Duty in Hospitality 58
Chapter Three: Migration and Hospitality Between Suriname and the Netherlands, 1667-2000 64
1. Tensions in Hospitality 64
2. Hospitality and Territoriality 67
3. Host-Guest Transitions: The "Hebrew Nation" in Suriname 75
4. Movement, Mobility, Freedom: The Early Days of Restricted Hospitality 79
Recalling the Laws and Limits of Hospitality 80
Slavery in Suriname: Can slaves be'guests'? Can slaves be'hosts'? 81
Maroons 84
Hospitality and Indentured Labour in Suriname:
The Transition of Guests to Hosts 86
Language 91
Flux Capacity 93
Suriname's Independence Movement 96
'Our' Own Thing 99
Chapter Four: Migration and the Ties that Bind 108
1. From the Open Door to Reluctant Hosts 108
2. Unity, Belonging, and the Decision to Become a Host in the Words of Surinamers 115 3. November 24, 1975 117
4. Anthem 119
5. Becoming/Choosing 'for' Suriname 121
6. Choosing for Holland 122
7. Back to Suriname: Coming'home'for Independence 125
8. 'She's our Mother' 132
Chapter Five: Tracing Hospitality in Dutch Surinamese Literature 135
Writing from the Threshold 148
Conclusion 152
References 162 CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCING HOSPITALITY AND SURINAME
1. First Impressions
Shall one tell you the truth about this country and about its poor children, when he does not possess the love that makes eyes to see? Without your love, without the love which is your duty - for all colonial property is voluntarily undertaking a duty - salvation will never be possible.. .If you only knew, how beautiful this country is, how intimate life is there...
From Albert Helman's Zuid-Zuid-West (1926)1
There is well-known postcard image sold in Paramaribo shops and hotel lobbies.
It pictures a mosque and a synagogue standing side by side on the Keizerstraat, emblematic of the supposed peaceful and harmonious cohabitation of Suriname's multicultural population. This familiar trope runs through Suriname's promotional tourism material, articles in the foreign press, and conversational self-image, of Suriname as a 'multicultural world in miniature', a place where diverse cultures exist side-by-side in an agreeable manner, where a synagogue and a mosque can peacefully co-exist on the same street without the kinds of ethnic tensions often associated with certain other cities.
For Suriname, a nation of under four hundred fifty thousand residents, the cultural mosaic motif is a carefully constructed identity marker , widely boasted at least in its capital of
1 Cited in Meel 1990:275 21 conducted fieldwork in Paramaribo and parts of the interior of Suriname from July through September of 2004, and lived with a host family in the capital from May through November of 2002 as a Canadian Crossroads International volunteer. During both visits, initial encounters and polite conversation between Surinamers and myself (a Canadian visitor) frequently included a discussion of the 'many cultures of Suriname', which would often be listed off for my benefit "you have the 1 Paramaribo, where approximately half of the total citizenry reside. Utopic words and images differ however from the actual difficulties encountered between 'hosts' and
'guests' who meet on this particular piece of the Guyana Shield today. Despite claims that "we are all Surinamese", the unifying process of nation-making in this small country has always included a carving out of identity and political struggle along ethnic lines in the formal political sphere3, while racial slurs and stereotypes can be overheard on the street corner, in the workplace, and around the domestic front. A continuity in
Surinamese political history might be that the Surinamese (national) 'whole' is comprised of various (ethnic) 'parts', and within those parts are found an individual's legacy, personal histories defined and understood by origins, the land from which one's ancestors came, and the social position contemporarily held. That Suriname was a colony of the
Netherlands from 1667 until 1975 is a critical and ongoing part of this legacy.
To say that Suriname is a country where the various cultures coexist peaceably fits superficially with the tourist lore used to sell the place, with a certain nationalist political rhetoric, and within the hint of pride that boasts Suriname's multi-ethnic complexion in both of these. Superficially because if it is true, then 'peace' must be
taken as a relative term: Suriname has seen two civil wars fought on its soil in the last
quarter-century since its independence4. Defining a nation, a sovereign state, and indeed
the desire for becoming such a state necessarily involves a carving out, a construction, or
Javanese, you have Hindustani people living here, you have Amerindians, the Chinese, the Maroons - Aucauns, Saramacans...many, many cultures living here in Suriname". 3 See for example, Hans Ramsoedh, 'Playing Politics: Ethnicity, Clientism, and the Struggle for Power' in 2Cf Century Suriname: Continuities and Discontinuities in a New World Society ed by Rosemarijn Hoefte and Peter Meel (Kingston: 2001) pp 91-110 4 For more on politics of the civil war in Suriname, see: Chin & Buddingh' (1987) 2 at the very least, an awareness of unity. This also necessarily requires a concept of self hood, the potential for self-sufficiency, and a vision of independence. It requires that a nation define itself as distinct, that it operate its own borders, defend itself under threat, and determine its own role in foreign affairs. Once these conditions of nationhood come into effect, that said 'nation' - that spot of land with people in between - may be
considered 'host' to outsiders who cross the threshold onto its soil. Keeping with this
conventional understanding of the nation, those outsiders -'guests' - are those individuals
who are equipped with an other nation's citizenship, outside of the "own home that
makes possible one's own hospitality.. .Anyone who encroaches on my 'at home'.. .on
my power of hospitality, on my sovereignty as host, I start to regard as an undesirable
foreigner, and virtually as an enemy. This other becomes a hostile subject, and I risk
becoming their hostage" (Derrida 2002:53-54). So it is 'between hosts and guests' that
this thesis investigates the ramifications of hospitality for Suriname. As an exercise in
'hospitality', both literally and figuratively, this thesis invites the reader to travel through
the theory of hospitality, exploring the questions: When does a guest become a host?
When does a host become a guest? I call on Derrida's words to set the tone:
The master of the house 'waits anxiously on the threshold of his home' for the stranger he will see arising into view on the horizon as a liberator. And from the furthest distance that he sees him coming, the master will hasten to call out to him: "Enter quickly, as I am afraid of my happiness" (Derrida 2000:123).
The first time I traveled to Suriname, that small country on the mainland of South
America (between Guyana and French Guiana, above Brazil), was in May of 2002. I
3 went as an international volunteer5. I would live with a local 'host family', strangers at first, who I would later come to know as Jaime and the kids, Lisa (age 10), and Georgio
(age 5), for six months. I would live in the upstairs room in Jaime's modest colonial style house in urban Paramaribo. I would make local friends, work in a downtown office,
attend family parties, weddings, and funerals. Kittens would be born under my bed during sleep. I would take the kids to a local hotel on Sundays so we could use the pool; we would swim with foreigners (usually people from Holland), and be served by locals.
At home I would do the dishes, or sometimes make dinner - like spaghetti or
grilled cheese - until I would begin to make meals in the local style, like brown beans and rice ("bb met r"), or the bitter melon called sappropo. It was just easier to cook those
local foods, more 'normal', and those other foods like spaghetti and grilled cheese
seemed foreign and out of place, like a novelty, and not seeming to suit the climate.
Cooking Surinamese was like a test: My host family and Surinamese friends liked to
question the foreigner cooking local Surinamese food, with a curious, skeptical eye. At
first, if I did a good job, if it tasted authentic, the reaction was one of surprise, enjoyment,
and a bit of suspicion turned into delight: "When I saw you cooking that, I didn 't know
what to expect. 1 thought: What is she doing? How is this going to be? Then I thought:
Okay, that girl really can cook! " my friend Daphne said to me once, laughing. She told
5 Canadian Crossroads International is a non-profit volunteer work exchange program that facilitated this six-month volunteer placement. Surinamese counterparts would visit Canada as well, reciprocating hospitality in a kind of delayed exchange. My host family would be categorized as ethnic "Creole" (of 'mixed African' descent) 4 me she didn't think I would make Surinamese food6. At first it was sort of a right of passage. Assimilation. Then it became normal. Once Jaime discerned that I was adept - or at least adequate - at making a common dish, certain staples became my assigned job for parties. Like baka bana (fried banana), for instance. I began to 'fit in' - sort of - to be incorporated into the cultural and familial landscape.
The kids would lean up the steep steps to my room in the mornings. At first they made toast for the guest (me), with peanut butter and mango jam or chocolate paste in the shape of a smiling face, and sweet (really sweet) instant coffee with milk while Jaime was at her job and before I'd started mine. The kids were excited to have a stranger in the house. Someone new to get to know, to compare to the other Canadian volunteers, to see in what ways I was the same as the others, and in what ways I was different.
With passport and visa I traversed three countries before arriving in the capital city of Paramaribo, Suriname. Vancouver - Toronto - Miami - Curacao - Paramaribo:
"I'm here!" I remember wanting to yell these words: "I'M HERE!" as if the nation had been anxiously anticipating my arrival (after all, it had been months of fundraising,
5 This is interesting in light of a short film I saw recently entitled 'Three Shorts for Suriname: the rain, the food, the birds" (2005) in which the following dialogue between Surinamers is presented under a section subtitled "the food": "I'm a Hindu but, back home I also make bami, I make salty soup, I make ah chop suey" "Huh?!" "YES! You think 1 can't make chop suey?" "Why, why we didn 't know that? How long we know you ? Hey how long do we know you and we didn 't even know that? [lots of laughter and commotion] "Because you are the real Chinese here you can make the chop suey better than I do " (Three Shorts for Suriname 2005 Toby Millman http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycJ_6vVlDww&mode=related&search Retreived March 28, 2007). Evidently, discernment and an element of surprise takes place between ethnicities in Suriname regarding one's ability or simple interest in making a culinary item outside the stereotyped culinary realm. People are grouped into ethinicities grouped into boxes of characterized or stereotypes of expected behaviors. When Brazil won the World Cup soccer match in 2002, the streets of Paramaribo were in a heightened state of excitement and celebration. We drove around as host-sister Lisa held a Brazillian flag out the window. Upon seeing a Chinese-Surinamer wave such a flag: "Even the Chinese are excited!" was exclaimed. 5 education, correspondence with the host agency and host family). We took the steps off the plane onto the tarmac. The air was hot, tropical; it smelt green. At first it was hard to breathe; the air was so humid. And I had never pictured Suriname at night before.
Somehow in all of my imaginations and expectations of 'me-in-Suriname' it was always daytime. I had always pictured it in the daylight. And here it was, being night: A negative image of the positive in which I'd imagined it - it felt like a dream, it felt surreal.
I looked up and saw silhouettes of Surinamers (I assumed they were Surinamers) - those people awaiting the arrival of our plane's passengers: Friends, relatives, and colleagues.
Thrilling that some of those people would turn out to be our hosts! In a few hours we would be in their homes, transitioning from strangers into friends. Maybe. One can hope. At customs there were two lines: One for residents and one for aliens. We stood in the line for aliens. Consciously, perhaps unconsciously, the eye wanders between the two lines. Observing, scanning to observe whether there are any noticeable differences, grouping, characterizing, categorizing the people in their respective lines. Looking for differences and sameness between and within. I wondered if people were looking at 'us'
(the Canadian volunteers) the same way. I believed we stood out the most, fit in the least, of all the aliens. I passed through customs - without a glitch - to meet my host(s).
In the airport we exchanged U.S. for Surinamese currency, then went to collect our luggage. All of the passenger bags from the plane were piled in a big heap in the middle of the room, as there was no luggage carousel at the Suriname airport at that time.
I spotted my bag in that heap. Amidst the chaos a porter ended up carrying my bag to the front gates. How that arrangement took place I'm not sure, but I went with it (not about to have an argument with a local in front of my host, whom I had yet to meet but whom I felt sure was watching). The porter put my bag down at the car and waited for remuneration. Me - staring at some multi-coloured currency fanned out in my hands, the money I'd just exchanged, the notes I was completely unfamiliar with and seeing for the first time. Confused, I saw numbers on the notes and passed an orange note with some 5s on it to the porter. The porter handed it back to me. What? I look back down at the money in my hand. "That's like five cents" I heard one of my greeters say. Oh (stupid foreigner). "Here, give him this much". Great, I realized I had probably just insulted him with pennies instead of dollars. But these are the cultural mistakes of the foreigner, not adept in the language or cultural currency (in this case, literally) of the host.
Previously, in Canada, I had been trained, and upon arrival in Suriname I would be considered an expert. Expert on what? It didn't matter. All the Canadians were
'experts', and while my arrival - from a personal perspective - was unique and a
milestone, from the perspective of Surinamers I was simply another volunteer ('expert')
foreigner here to really see, to understand, and to transfer my knowledge (whatever that
meant) from guest to host: "To make a difference." These were the principles that I and
three other Canadian volunteers carried with us to a six-month venture 'to make a
difference'. Well indeed, the difference - or, 'differance' (Derrida 1973) - had already
been made, for us and through us, and continues to do so with every exchange between
people called 'hosts' and 'guests'. And so it was that I would arrive that night, a stranger
in a foreign land. We were volunteers - that was our purpose - but our positionality was
certainly of stranger-guests, subject to the hospitality of a people and of a nation that may or may not welcome us. Had we considered that they wouldn't? (we were volunteers,
'do-gooders'^. Did they not have an obligation to receive these strangers in a foreign land? Faced with the reality of the encounter, that between hosts and guests, what lies beneath is more often a subtle tension, an acknowledgement of the difficulty of hospitality that slips between what is said, thought, felt, and acted. There is a discursiveness found in the gaze, discursiveness that is the trace7 - an absence that defines a presence - and the step of hospitality.
2. Taking a Second Glance
We are considering here the question of the foreigner: Who is a foreigner and, once identified as such, how is the foreigner to be received (if at all)? 'Hospitality', much like anthropology, deals directly with the milieu of cross-cultural human interaction, specifically with how a community answers the call of strangers, visitors, and guests. Involved in this also is the crossing of a perceived territorial line and how visitors respond to a perceived host. The concept 'hospitality' can be understood as hypothetical, even utopic; it has a peculiar quality that allows it both an auspicious universality and a
delicate particularity. We are talking on a theoretical level, but the theoretical
consideration of 'hospitality' has its praxis. We see international bodies such as the
United Nations, or the European Union and other 'global' organizations jostle and upset
the sovereignty of the Nation State while, in reaction, the Nation State tightens its borders
7 Derrida discusses the trace as both the mark of the future and the past in a present moment which is neither. The idea of our present (a meaning-M] present) depends on this trace, which is an effect of writing. He asserts that the concept of the trace is inseparable from the concept of difference. (http://web.utk.edu/~misty/Derrida376.html) 8 in fear of the Golden Hordes - whomever they may be: Tourists, migrants, refugees, terrorists, market traders - all of these groups and activities are those which international travel and communications systems mediate. According to a globalist perspective, related impacts of movement puts ideas of sovereignty and nation-statehood at a
"crossroads" (Cavallar 2002:17-27) - an apt metaphor for conditions of hospitality. So in dealing with a so-called "free" movement of goods and people, how is hospitality practiced? For, from, and to whom does it operate? By considering the interaction that hospitality requires of its participants, this thesis maintains that the concept of hospitality is rarely easy and often contested, confused, bemoaned, and celebrated.
Furthermore, considerations of statehood come to the fore, with related concepts of Law and laws (see Derrida 2000: 57, for example). Certain 'laws of hospitality' can be state sanctioned (as in the law of nations theory) or culturally understood (as in the rituals particular to a culture when welcoming foreigners). Boundaries in hospitality are
symbolic, movable, and operate to legitimate the affectations of the host and the othered guest. Thus hospitality operates as a way of identifying self and other among inhabitants
of a place. Conceptions of hospitality in this thesis refer largely to the Anglospheric
tradition; Western-European based assumptions about rights to space are understood and
enacted politically through land ownership. Such understandings are taken up by
colonialists and later Surinamese nationalists in order to legitimize space as 'theirs' (i.e.,
'host-hood'). In essence, this is modern European-style territoriality at work, taken up
and operated as a mode of power and identity marker for Surinamese statehood.
9 So what precisely is hospitality? Perhaps it is a taken for granted term. We may consider it as being comprised of two complementary agents: That of hosts and guests - a seemingly binary opposition. According to this binary, hosts can be identified as the locals, natives, and citizen residents of a defined political region; guests are the visitors who carry foreign citizenship, belong to a separate sovereign state and culture. In an easy rendition, each agent of the binary is considered immovable, clearly identifiable, and easily understood. Indeed, 'hosts' and 'guests' have been taken as a priori categories, the starting point from which considerations of travel, movement, and hospitality can proceed. This thesis investigates an alternative rhetoric to the host/guest binary by exploring the concept of 'hospitality' in the Derridian frame, which demonstrates the blurry, shifting dimensions of subjects in the midst of trans-national travel, migration, and post-colonial encounters. You see, when a person or group of people travel and encounter a new space, there is always some tension between those would-be-guests and a presumed or assuming host. This tension is inherent in all hospitality, which is why
Derrida claims that true hospitality is an impossibility (Derrida 2000; 2002). The tension lies in the fact that host-guest boundaries are porous, and that these malleable, fluctuating identities become obvious when examined over time while its tension becomes evident during individual encounters among people. As subjects move around in space there is potential for their identities as so-called 'hosts' and so-called 'guests' to change. What anthropologist Kathleen Stewart (1996) refers to as "the space of the gap" is a way of sourcing a discursive recognition or 'happening' wherein things change. There is an absence that defines a presence. Applied to hospitality, this is where identities shift, alter, 10 solidify, slip away, or merge. In the gap of the dialectic is where these ambiguities become apparent. The tension, the ambiguity, and the possibility for both friendship and enmity - the possibility of both host and guest - typifies the relationship between
Suriname to the Netherlands that has been ongoing from the seventeenth century. The hosts/guest identities in this relationship are always incomplete, there has always been and certainly always will be the potential for subtle change to take place, and this is evidenced in both the colonization and decolonization process (Hoefte 2001 :XIV) of
Suriname.
Thus, we will see in this thesis how hospitality in the frame explored by Jacques
Derrida - that blurry, ambiguous and tense frame - is directly applicable to a particularly complex relationship - a personal, political, and historical relationship - between the small South American/Dutch-Caribbean Republic of Suriname and the European
Kingdom of the Netherlands. Surinamese citizenship and identity formation are correlated with that nation's independence movement of 1975, a consideration of
'origins', and a relationship with the Netherlands that reaches back to the seventeenth century colonial expansion and continues today through the affect of diasporic movement, diasporic imaginations, and in/out migrations.
Colonial and post-colonial migration patterns, their subsequent effects on personhood, concepts of "home", "away", and "belonging" are integral to this understanding: The dynamic host-guest identities that exist today between Suriname and the Netherlands. Dynamic because one could always contemplate and indeed question the
'legitimized' identity of self or other, as host or guest. Surinamese migration history, as 11 well as a literary repertoire of poems, anthems, languages, novels, confessions, utterances, and landscapes affected by such history will demonstrate the ways in which hospitality is cause and creation for an ever-changing ethic of 'hospitality' that continuously calls to disrupt the certainty of clearly demarcated host and guest categories.
The proceeding analysis explores hospitality - its limits and cultural transitions and transgressions. It does this in Chapter Two by first sampling some classic limits and boundaries of hospitality written about by classical studies scholar Julie Kerr and by the social/structuralist anthropologist Julian Pitt-Rivers. It then takes these definitions and applies them to the history of Surinamese-Netherlands relations in Chapter Three, with a
Derridian or post-structuralist theoretical approach towards understanding hospitality and thus demonstrating a way of seeing hospitality as always in flux. Chapter Four takes up
Suriname's political and migratory history surrounding its independence movement from the Netherlands - and illustrates the vacillating, ambiguous character of hosts and guests over time and space. An illumination of themes of 'troubled hospitality' - whereby hospitality is belayed and betrayed thematically in Surinamese literature and ethnographic detail is then examined in Chapter Five.
3. Methodology and Motivation for Research
It is about time that anthropology recognized its duty to deal with de- stabilization...largely ignored because it has an unsettling effect upon theory which is predicated on a more settled way of life (Hastrup & Fog Olwig 1997:6)
12 A limitation in research methodology lies in my own unilingualism, which results in dependence on available English language translations of Dutch and Surinamese in literature and at the field site. Fortunately, resource materials written in the English language on topics of the history and politics of Suriname are growing, as are translations into English of original Dutch and Surinamese literature and literary criticism. While many Surinamers speak and understand English, it is of course, not the first language8 of any Surinamese person. Dutch remains the official language in the political and educational spheres. However a Surinamer's first language could be Dutch, or
Surinamese (Sranan), or Sarnami (Hindi-Surinamese Creole), or Javanese, or any of the dozens of Maroon and Amerindian languages, or Hakka (Chinese)9.
Six months of living with a host-family in Suriname in 2002 as a volunteer with a
Canadian development organization provided me with preliminary insights into
Surinamese culture, a bridge to social networks in Suriname, and incentive to conduct the current analysis that comprises this thesis.
Participant-observation informs this work through six weeks of fieldwork conducted in Paramaribo (Suriname's capital and primate city) during August through
September of 2004. This allowed for the gathering of research data (ethnographic material), usually through formal introductions followed by informal conversations.
8 "In 55 per cent of the households in Paramaribo, Dutch is indicated as the main language; among Creoles it is 77 per cent, Hindustani 28 per cent, and Javanese 40 per cent. Besides Dutch, Sranan, Sarnami, Surinamese-Javanese or Chinese are spoken, while Sranan functions as the lingue franca. Among Creoles, 21 per cent mainly use Sranan, among Hindustani, 61 per cent use Sarnami and among Javanese, 43 per cent use Javanese. Among all groups, though least among the Hindustani, Dutch is mainly spoken by those with a higher education" (van Pitou 2001:39). 9 For more on the languages of Suriname see: Eithne & Arends (2002) 13 Much of the informal interviewing took place in social settings - in households, on patios, by the well-known 'Waterkant' (waterside), and at the guesthouse where I stayed for the duration of fieldwork. Research subjects ('informants') were aware that I was conducting research for a master's thesis and indeed gave informed consent. This study began as an investigation into Suriname's fledgling yet quickly advancing tourism industry. As my tourism-related research was in pursuit, the thesis topic gradually morphed into 'hospitality' as I experienced and observed its recurring, unshakable theme in nearly all of my interactions with historical data and 'ethnographic material' at the research site. "Ethnographic material" also includes myself as participant-observer (as guest who sometimes fleetingly encountered the lines blurring toward host), interacting with Surinamese subjects. Fieldwork in Suriname also allowed for the gathering of a collection of scholarly books and journals that would not have been possible to collect from 'home'.
Many works of literature inform this thesis as data: A set of works of fiction, particularly of short stories and poetry written by Dutch-Surinamese authors are incorporated into analysis of how their authorship and content imply hospitality.
Published interviews with noted Dutch-Surinamese authors and poets have been cited to
offer example of how the authors reflect on the topic of hospitality as it pertains to their
(writing) subject and (personal) subjectivities. Finally, an informative body of literature
written by those I will name "Suriname scholars"10 whose works are published in the
10 Regarding anthropology's relationship with Suriname and notable scholarly works in English see: Richard and Sally Price, Peter Meel, Rosemary Brana-Shute and Gary Brana-Shute, 14 English language and pertain to Suriname's social, political, and economic history critically inform this thesis. The incorporation and analysis of these types of literature is done for the simple reason that ".. .they enable other kinds of sociological information to emerge.. .thus it often teaches us, through imaginative design, what we need to know but cannot quite get access to with our given rules of method and modes of apprehension"
(Gordon 1997:25). In the words of Avery Gordon, "I have tried to make the fictional, the
theoretical, and the factual speak to one another" (26).
The library-based research conducted for this thesis is comprised from a variety of
sources. Review of scholarly books and journals pertaining to Suriname's political and
economic history have provided historical background, particularly as it relates to
migration and host-guest relations during the post-colonial and independence period11.
In terms of published scholarly material informing the theoretical side of
hospitality for this thesis are works that occupy distinct academic disciplines, yet which
each pertain to hospitality in important ways. The writing of Jacque Derrida (2000,
2002), Julie Kerr (2002), Julian Pitt-Rivers (1977), and Albert Camus (1958) each
discuss tension, ambiguity, and potentiality of both friendship and enmity in hospitality
and are used here as a way to situate the complexity in Dutch-Surinamese relations.
Rosemarijn Hoefte, Edward Dew. Gary Brana-Shute with Bono Thoden van Velzen and Wim Hoogbergen devised a panel to present a series of papers on Suriname at the 1988 American Anthropological Association meeting in Phoenix (1990:1). Also, see the annual review of Caribbean Studies undertaken by Oostindie (1987a, 1986 and 1985) and Hoefte (1988) which surveys scholarly works about Suriname. 11 But note that anthropological, historical, sociological writing is also a kind of fiction. Claims to knowledge best described by Gordon as 'fictions of the real': 'The real itself and its ethnographic or sociological representations are also fictions, albeit powerful ones that we do not experience as fictional, but as true" (Gordon 1997:11). Also see Strathern (1988) for social science as fiction.
15 The writings on hospitality by the late philosopher Jacques Derrida, in particular a book he authored entitled Hospitality (2000), is regularly referenced. Derrida uses a post-structuralist approach to present hospitality as a complex impossibility, distinguishing between the utopic ideal of 'true' hospitality, which can never be achieved, and the hospitality that is practiced in every day life that entails an underlying potential for violence and precarious relations between (blurry) host-guest identities.
The anthropologist Julian Pitt-Rivers, and a classical studies scholar, Julie Ken- are two other scholars whose works are folded into this study of hospitality. Pitt-Rivers
(1977) examines hospitality as he observed and experienced it in Andalusia as well as how it was written about during antiquarian and ancient Greek times; my own study of hospitality comes from participant-observation of hosts and guests in Suriname, from historical accounts of relations between Surinamers and Netherlanders, and from the experiences of hospitality expressed in Surinamese poetry, prose, and dialogue.
Hospitality is such an amorphous topic that perhaps it finds its best expression - and understanding for scholars - through literary works of fiction, folk tales, epics and myths;
a kind of literary material culture from which an anthropologist can hope to understand
more of the practice, and how it relates to culture.
Pitt-Rivers presents the contested ways that hospitality practice has been
interpreted through scholarly readings of Homer's Odyssey and during Classical
Antiquity. Pitt-Rivers' analysis colludes here with the methodological approach of my
own thesis research, when he says that: " The anthropologist is entitled to take the story
as it stands and attempt to relate it to what he can discover of the law of hospitality in 16 general and of the code of hospitality...in particular" (Pitt-Rivers 1977:94). Pitt-Rivers searches for the 'principles of social conduct' illuminated from hospitality practice and writings; these include epics, fables, literary works, and ethnography12. For example, he says of Homer's Odyssey that: "The whole work may be viewed as a study in the law of hospitality, in other words, the problem of how to deal with strangers" (94).
Julie Kerr also examines 'hospitality' this way. Kerr reads into the writings from medieval lais in order to extract the practical rules, rituals, and decorum of hospitality. A fourth author used to enhance understandings of tension and potentiality in hospitality is the existential philosopher Albert Camus, with his short story titled The Guest from the book Exile and the Kingdom. Camus explores tension, hostility, and potential for both friendship and enmity in hospitality during a colonial setting which I demonstrate is apt for understanding hospitality in general, and Surinamese-Netherlands hospitality in particular.
The question could be posed: Why these four authors? Derrida, Pitt-Rivers, Kerr, and Camus appear a disparate bunch of writers from a range of academic disciplines, experiences, eras, and research fields. Derrida is a contemporary Deconstructionist philosopher working out of a post-structuralist, post-modernist framework. Pitt-Rivers is a structuralist anthropologist practicing a relatively 'classic' tradition of anthropological fieldwork in Andalusia. Julie Kerr is a Classical Studies scholar investigating hospitality in a time and place seemingly unrelated to Suriname or Holland, and finally, Camus is a
12 The last of these includes the ethnology of Frans Boas as well as Pitt-River's own ethnological experiences as participant-observer in Andalusia (94). 17 writer of existential philosophical import whose fictional vignette, The Guest, is also apparently isolated from Suriname and Holland. Yet these four authors have very strong resonance to this thesis and were chosen specifically for their disparate yet complementary and therefore relevant studies in hospitality. It is because of their disparate applicability to the same topic that they have been selected for inclusion.
Derrida's work on hospitality came to my attention during a seminar on anthropological theory in 2003. At that point Derrida's explanations of hospitality
(2000,2002) seemed the missing link to understand the tension and ambiguity I had perceived in Suriname's capital, Paramaribo. The city's obvious colonial past and its influence on present relations intrigued me; for instance, amongst locals whose migration histories diverged and intersected, and amongst said locals with visitors from the
Netherlands (whether they be of 'native Dutch' or Surinamese descent). There were also larger questions of how nations 'perceived each other' if such personification is possible to entertain (since really it is people within nations who perceive). For example, are
Surinamers perceived as Other to individuals visiting from Holland and vice versa? Or considered the same, parts of a whole, on account of such an interconnected past? In a crude manner I wondered how a colonial past was expressed or experienced today, and how relations were examined, understood, in essence personalized as a history between nations and embodied national identities. In short, how the past history between nations eventually brought people together in very real ways so that lives intersect and interact. I wondered who were hosts and who where guests in those exteriorized instances, and how did these relations materialize and change? Crudely in my initial impressions, I had 18 condensed and overlaid a centuries old past (consisting of the period of slavery and indentured labour migration through to Suriname's independence and just-post) directly onto present circumstances. I believe this tendency to filter the past onto the present came (obviously, from my experience as a tourist to an environment that was new to me) and because the urban landscape of Paramaribo indicated times of slavery and colonialism in very direct ways. This appears most overtly in the colonial-era architecture, from preserved pillared and whitewashed wooden plank buildings to the stone fort and cannons from the seventeenth century. It also comes through urban legends that may or may not be true, like a dilapidated brick building on Dr. Sophie Redmonstraat which a Surinamese friend told me was used as a courthouse during the colonial period to try escaped slaves. This building is so overgrown with trees and vines on what remains of the rooftop and windows that city workers periodically have to cut everything back
(reclaiming the space from the invading growth). Local suspicion has it that the building is haunted and it is for this reason that no one will use it13.
In terms of hospitality, Derrida's observations regarding the relationship between power, take-over, hostility and genuine welcoming fit so well with my impressions and initial questions about the place. Largely, this was because Derrida did not come up with or offer an easy answer or explanation; he left hospitality as an aporia. The aporia was, ironically, refreshing: To know that there are not always easy resolutions and that the past can indeed 'haunt', in seen and unseen ways, the present reality. His work became the starting point and the lens from which I would begin to examine post-colonial
1 For more on haunting and signs see Stewart (1996) 19 relations in Suriname in a more nuanced way, with the concept of hospitality and aporia becoming the filter. Derrida problematizes relations between host-guest boundaries, bringing attention to the space in between, and his was the first academic work that I had read to do so. This is the reasoning behind using Derrida's writing on hospitality as a main theoretical filter in this thesis.
From Derrida I began a literature search for other writings on hospitality. Adding balance to the Derridian approach, Julian-Pitt Rivers' (1977) work informs this thesis because I liked his methodology of using stories, fables, literary works, and ethnography to comprise his data since I took a similar approach (plus added political and migration history) to examine hospitality in Suriname. Pitt-Rivers also uses hospitality as a lens for viewing all social relations within a given space. Anthropologists may question his universalizing approach, but I contend that Pitt-Rivers' work offers a very applicable and broad understanding of cultural relations though its structure. At the same time it is not
stagnant; within the rules, regulations, and procedure of Pitt-Rivers' hospitality, there is room for change. Pitt-Rivers acknowledges the slippery continuum of 'the rules' that
offer a framework for hosting and guesting, and the allowance that change occurs within
and through hospitality, that identities are indeed precarious and transitional.
As a classical studies scholar, Julie Kerr examines hospitality in the High Middle
Ages (12th Century) England. Twelfth Century England - four centuries prior to any
European venture into Suriname and before the state formation of the Netherlands; I
chose her work partly because of its seeming isolation from Suriname and Holland
temporally, geographically, and culturally. Incorporating twelfth century findings serves 20 to demonstrate the peculiarly common characteristics of hospitality, despite various times and places. Kerr's work is used to demonstrate that hospitality is not just about Suriname or the Netherlands in particular but about its malleability which actually requires negotiation, spaces of ambiguity, re-negotiation, tension, the appearance of stability, and then its dissolution. As Kerr gleans 'rules' of hospitality from literature contemporary of
England's twelfth century, it gives a sense of the time and culture of hospitality and maybe something of the 'structure of feeling'14. Her findings demonstrate that an individual, household, or community's status is at play, negotiated through acts of hospitality (or hospitality's remission). We find that motivations for hospitality (giving and/or receiving it) are similar for twelfth century England, and seventeenth-to-twentieth century Holland. By way of compare and contrast, commonalities about hospitality as a cultural practice implicating power, respect, honour, and duty are found. This demonstrates that the questions of hospitality that had been asked 'yesterday' are still as
The term Structure of Feeling is apt for this thesis. Structure of Feeling "describes the actual living sense of a culture in a particular historical period or in the experience of a particular generation. It is the area in which the official consciousness of a period, as codified in legislation and doctrine, interacts with the lived experience of that period, and defines the set of perceptions and values common to a generation. The structure of feeling of an epoch operates in the most delicate and least tangible realms of human activity, and is not uniform throughout society, being most evident in the dominant social group. It is a matter of feeling rather than of thought, and supplies values that are communicated between individuals without being taught in any direct way. The privileged area for the study of structures of feeling are literary and dramatic texts which, without being directly related to or influenced by one another, display common patterns or impulses or tones" (Macey 2000: 366-367). In this sense, the structure of feeling applies to pre and post- Independence Suriname. A consciousness of 'nationhood' was developed (say 1950 to the present- day) out of political strategies of the elite Surinamese stakeholders and larger international backlash against colonial imperialism. The effect of 'de-colonization' for Surinamese subjects has meant an intensification of interaction with the Netherlands while simultaneously developing an independent 'Surinamese' consciousness. Following this line, the migration of thousands of Surinamese to the diaspora in the Netherlands has created a Structure of Feeling evidenced in Surinamese letters (literature and poetry) penned on both sides of the Atlantic. Many of these works indicate common themes of hospitality, belonging, unity (Macey 2000:246-247). 21 relevant today; questions such as: Just how open is the door to be? What are the limits?
Motivations? Duties? And how does hospitality operate to change how hosts and guests see themselves and relate to each other? In the presence of foreigners, should and do 'we' retract, expand, or attempt to remain the same? The answer points to a dissolving of the us/them boundary and the possibility of peace, hostility, and inverted power relations.
Citations and descriptions of Albert Camus' story titled 'The Guest' from Exile and the Kingdom (1958) are included in this thesis because I have come across no other work that demonstrates so intricately the complexity that is hospitality. Camus' story practically brings to life the paradox of duty, identity, and questionable host-guest
relations in hospitality. Camus seems to emphasize, much like Derrida, the impossibility
of 'doing' hospitality. Most of all, Camus' story is about the line blurring between
strangers, enemies, friends, hosts and guests. It is also about the contingencies of doing
what is 'right' and doing what is 'good' in hospitality (which are not necessarily
compatible), and how these concepts relate to actual relations which are ambiguous.
The central point I try to make is that hospitality in Dutch-Suriname relations is
unstable, ambiguous, and ongoing, and characterized by an oscillation between 'players'
as hosts and guests, which highlight the precarious nature of such a binary. Rather than
go over hospitality's entire academic profile, I have selected four authors who explicate
the ambiguity and potential of hospitality. Through these four authors one can extrapolate
applications of the presence, potentiality, and tension of hospitality in nearly any
encounter. Hospitality is a kind of power dynamic, to be sure, but it is not just 'power
over' (i.e., domination or suppression of the Other). Such an understanding of hospitality 22 in this way would tend to betray the subtleties and the subjectivity of the topic, the way that hosts and guests see each other as potentialities for each other, this includes the insecurities, the anxieties, and the clinging to the idea of something solid - either/or - when all the while movement is there. Hospitality has very real implications and actions that indicate complexity in every of human interaction and in particular are evidenced in
Suriname-Netherlands relations. The applicability of each of these four seemingly
disparate pieces of philosophy, anthropology, and classics is meant to illustrate the
centrality of this hospitality as a theme in ongoing relations amongst groups, over time
and place, and to postcolonial Suriname.
4. A Brief History Exploring Hospitality between the Netherlands and Suriname
Connections
"...people who are mobile, and therefore not immediately present in the research site while the ethnographer is paying his or her fleeting visit, have often been ignored, even though they are in fact of great importance to the more settled people.. .the fact of travel and migrancy may be a strong parameter in the self-definition of people in either place" (Hastrup & Fog Olwig 1997:5-6)
A 2004 article in the Toronto Star titled "The Dutch Transformation" chronicles
the difficulty faced by some Netherlands residents in a current era of belayed hospitality.
As one foreign-born resident of the Netherlands confides: "/ am Dutch, I have a Dutch passport so it's strange emotionally because I'm made to feel like an allochtoon (a foreigner) here" (Toronto Star October 1, 2004: A6). This sentiment expresses an
23 aporia15, where the speaker holds official inclusion through the passport, yet unofficial
(perceived) exclusion through the culture of a place. Thus we see illustrated the repercussions of human migration and its accompanying, implicit questions of hospitality: The so-called foreigner remains feeling just that, like a foreigner, though official channels should in theory make "all one".
During the 1970s, on the eve of Surinamese independence from Holland, the
government of the Netherlands offered welcome by inviting Surinamers to join that
country - the 'motherland' - to maintain Dutch citizenship, to live and work amongst the
host, and perhaps even to become the host. Implied in the welcome and its offer of
citizenship is an ability - a possibility - for the foreigner to be transformed post-
threshold. This is potentially a transformation where the 'guest' is no longer a guest -
rather, the guest becomes entitled to a place now theirs, the guest becomes the host and is
in a position to then invite. That government of the Netherlands that not only accepted,
but invited Surinamers to join and live in the Netherlands would later revoke the
invitation by calling a moratorium on the unconditional welcome of such subjects16
(Schilling 2004:9-11), thus symbolically relegating them to the realm of the visitor, guest,
or enemy. Currently, more than three hundred thousand residents of the Netherlands are
of Surinamese origin. For an idea of scale, this is a number equal to more than half of
Suriname's entire population today. Most Surinamers in the Netherlands still belong to
the first generation (185,000 persons) but the second generation (125,000 persons),
15 Aporia meaning a dilemma or paradox, an unanswerable question and a difficulty even in where and how to begin to ask a question due to the irresolvable nature of the 'truth'. Also meaning a gap, rupture, or opening. 6 Part of the Independence agreement between Suriname and the Netherlands 24 according to Niekerk, is "growing fast" (Niekerk 2004:161)17. Surinamese constitute only two per cent of the total population in the Netherlands, yet comprise one of the largest immigrant groups there and have largely concentrated in the major Netherlands cities18.
The symbolic and material connection between Suriname and Holland should not be underestimated. First and foremost is the legacy of its colonial past. From the seventeenth century thousands of Africans were transported and enslaved by Dutch imperial forces to work on plantations in Suriname. These were followed by successive waves of imported Chinese, Indian, and Javanese labourers who were also violently oppressed by the colonial apparatus19. People traveled across oceans - between Suriname and Holland - for centuries. But of significance too is the fact that during the twentieth century Suriname experienced for the first time a net out-migration: People migrated for the most part from Suriname to settle (or re-settle) in Holland. This latter profile of migration has created notable diasporic communities of Surinamers in the former metropole (Gowricharn & Schuster 2001:161) so that relationships between residents of both places continue to cultivate strong transnational ties. This scenario sets the stage for understanding the ambiguity of host-guest relations when Surinamers now visit the
17 First-generation immigrants are defined as persons who are foreign born and have at least one foreign-born parent. The second generation consists of persons who were born in the Netherlands and have at least one foreign-born parent. This definition does not allow for a third generation, and subsequent descendents are classified as native Dutch. According to Niekerk, "If we were to single- out a third generation now it would be very small and still very young (there are now some 11,000 Netherlands-born persons with at least one Surinamese-born grandparent) (Niekerk 2004:161) 18 Surinamese account for 10% of the population of Amsterdam and The Hague (Niekerk 2004:161). Rotterdam is also home to a significant Surinamese population. 19 See for example, Ankum-Houwink (1974) 25 Netherlands and vice versa. How do people relate? Define their selves? Who are the guests and who are the hosts between two countries whose histories are so intertwined?
Where the two actually form and inform one another's mentalities20; and where in a sense, one comes from the other. How is the question of Otherness played out? How does it operate mutually? Who is'other'?
Today fewer than four hundred fifty thousand people live in Suriname, all considered to be Surinamese today, individually each Surinamese citizen is considered to be part of a specific 'ethnic' enclave: Chinese-Surinamese, Creole-Surinamese, Maroon,
91 Javanese-Surinamese, Hindu-Surinamese, Amerindian. Indigenous (Amerindian) inhabitants notwithstanding, the majority of the population arrived in Suriname through their ancestors' forced or indentured labour. The Dutch colonial rule, which began in
1667 and reached its height in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is said to have been one of the most violent systems of slavery carried out by Europeans in the New
World (Price & Price 1988:XIV). This is a nation with a recent colonial past, and indeed, was created for the sole purpose of commodity production through forced (slave) or coerced (indentured servitude) labour. As mentioned, Suriname was populated for the
The concept of mentalities here refers to "collective mental experiences with their own rhythms and causation". The term comes from the French school of historiography associated with the journal Annales; "The idea of a history of mentalities derives from the idea of a 'collective consciousness' associated with the sociology of Emile Durkheim, but can also be compared with Raymond William's notion of a Structure of Feeling" (Macey 2000:246-247). 21 Published literature (in the English language) on the Amerindians of Suriname is disappointingly sparse. General information can be found regarding Indigenous peoples of the lower Amazon or the Guianna shield. But published work in English pertaining to geopolitical relations between Amerindians in Suriname and the Dutch or Surinamese state is slim. For anthropological writings in English, see: (Kloos 1970; Riviere 1969). most part by slaves and later (post -1863) migrant workers whose transit was facilitated by Dutch Colonialism from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries . Robert
Cohen notes that during the Eighteenth Century, "Government officials, planters and merchants both Jewish and Christian, mulattoes, freed slaves24, soldiers, and plantation overseers...formed together a multi-racial, ethnically varied mix" (Cohen 1991:80).
African slaves began arriving on Dutch slave ships to work on the plantations, and when Emancipation finally took hold in 1863, slave labour was replaced with successive waves of Chinese, East-Indian, and Javanese indentured labourers. Surinamese nationalism began to take shape in the 1950s. In 1954 the colony became an internally self-governing member of the Kingdom of the Netherlands (along with the Netherlands
Antilles and the Netherlands) (Brana-Shute 1990:9). At official political independence, granted in 1975, Suriname was a Parliamentary Republic. Overthrown by a military coup d'etat in 1980, and host to a Maroon insurgency in 1986, Suriname spent the first decades of independence in political and economic turmoil. Eventually the country was cut off from receiving foreign aid from the Netherlands and the United States of America during
Between 1667 and 1826 and estimated 300,000 to 325,000 Africans were sold to Suriname planters at auction in Paramaribo. Percentage of African-born slaves on the plantation or in Paramaribo overall was high (due to death rate always being higher than birth rate and that mostly adult male slaves were imported). In 1740, 90% of the slaves had been born in Africa; in 1770 the figure remained at 70% (Price 1976:12). However Postma's numbers disagree with this figure, putting the number of slaves imported to Suriname between 1650 and 1830 at approximately 220,00 (Postma 1990:186-212). 23 For more on the history of the Dutch slave trade, see Emmer, P.C. (1972) "The History of the Dutch Slave Trade: A Bibliographical Survey." Journal of Economic History 32(3): 728-747. 24 In Suriname, slavery was not abolished until 1863. However some slaves were manumitted after helping to fight the maroons and were allotted a plot of land in the city. Furthermore, a small number of slaves (mostly women and families) were able to achieve manumission through legal channels of the colonial courts. Less than one per cent of the slave population was ever freed in any year during the eighteenth century through these channels. For more on this see Brana-Shute (1990: 119-136) 27 the period of military rule. Democratic and diplomatic relations have returned to the region since 1990, along with foreign aid. Today, a sizable number of Brazilians25 occupy the space of "the foreigner" in Suriname, along with some Guyanese and Dominican citizens. A small number of Surinamese also are of Lebanese descent.
Hospitality and Movement: Significance of Migration between Suriname and the Netherlands
Hospitality includes a consideration of how to treat others, the idea of offering welcome, and indeed must consider who is an other (then by correlation: who is the self; who is treated as 'the same'?). Increased global mobility makes it apparent that drawing hard and fast lines between who is a 'host' and who is a 'guest' is not adequate. Like the character of translocality today, identities of hosts and guests are in flux and ever shifting.
The words of representatives at the International Organization for Migration (IOM) express this dynamic well with the following statement: "International migration today is...increasingly temporary, circular and multi-directional. People can receive an education, work, raise a family and retire in several different countries. This mobility has in turn led to an evolving sense of individual identity and a feeling of belonging to more than one country or society among many migrants"26
Estimates of the number of Brazilians currently living and working in Suriname vary from 20,000 to 50, 000 (Hoefte and Meel 2001: xv). Brazilian migration to Suriname relates to Suriname's informal gold mining economy taking place in the interior, has resulted in a growing Brazillian community in Paramaribo as well. 26 http://www.iom.int/jahia/Jahia/newsArticleEU/cache/offonce?entryId=8533 retrieved July 18, 2006. 28 It is precisely because of this kind of migration that hospitality between Suriname and Holland becomes complicated, contributing to an 'evolving sense of individual identity and a feeling of belonging to more than one country or society among many migrants'27 - in this case between 'many migrants' in both Suriname and Holland, and how they relate to each other. A sense of hospitality ('true' or otherwise) between
Suriname and Holland is motivated by international migration past and present. With a diasporic population of Surinamers in the Netherlands equal to more than half the size of the population still residing in Suriname, the relations are significant in terms of scale and meaning.
Home and Away
In early 1999, all flights from the Netherlands to Suriname were fully booked
(Gowricharn and Schuster 2001:155). Gowricharn and Schuster contend: "by far the
most important reason for this rush was that many Surinamese living abroad wanted to
celebrate the turn of the millennium in Suriname". The authors go on: "It was a special
moment that had to be shared with family and friends.. .the magical year 2000 accounted
for this desire to (temporarily) return 'home'" (155). The same authors note that the
large-scale return illustrates an "expression of sentiment or nostalgia" and also signifies a
significant shift in migration patterns between the two nations; whereas before the mid-
twentieth century Suriname was an immigration society, movement during the post-war
27 http://www.iom.int/jahia/Jahia/newsArticleEU/cache/offonce?entryId=8533 retrieved July 18, 2006 29 years demonstrates the transition of Suriname becoming an emigration society. Today we
see a net migration rate of-8.76 migrant(s) per 1,000 persons in Suriname28.
There has always been some migration from Suriname to the Netherlands since colonial times. For instance, a small number of slaves accompanied their 'owners' to the
Netherlands, working as briefly as household servants during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. Most of those migrants returned to Suriname after a short time.
Shortly after this, the sons of planters - often being of mixed European-Dutch and
African descent (identified ethno-culturally as 'Creole') - were sent to the Netherlands
for education. Many of this lot stayed in the Netherlands, adding to a professional class
of doctors, educators, and legal professionals. Still, their numbers were very small.
During the early twentieth century, a small number of Creole elite were sent to the
Netherlands for education, and while this gradually increased through to the war years -
and afterwards included the migration of semi-skilled labourers of varying Surinamese
ethnic backgrounds - it was the Surinamese independence movement in 1975 that marked
a mass exodus of Surinamers choosing for life in Holland. Gowricharn and Schuster have
termed the move to Holland by so many Surinamers a "socio-economic and political
escape-hatch" (155). All social strata and all ethnic groups were part of the exodus,
which is often described as 'dramatic' and even 'hysterical' by commentators. The
movement is justified in being termed dramatic, for when all was said and done some two
hundred thousand Surinamese sought refuge in the Netherlands during the 1970s and
28 2006 estimate from CIA factbook: https://www.cia.gOv/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ns.html#People 30 1980s (159). More than fifty thousand people left Suriname for the Netherlands in 1975 alone. Another thirty thousand immigrants arrived in 1979-1980, shortly before the
Netherlands introduced a visa requirement (Niekerk 2004:161). Those who emigrated represented every ethnic group and social strata in Suriname. Virtually every person I met in Suriname, when asked, revealed that they had family and/or friends in Holland (and would also reveal that they had been to Holland, or that they "intended to go").
As much as this is a thesis about hospitality then, this is also a thesis about movement. Hosts and guests are in league by the movement of one's crossing a threshold, of entering upon invitation or of transgressing a boundary. That boundary - one that marks one space as 'mine' and 'not yours'; of 'yours' and 'not mine' - is itself moveable, interpretive, and ambiguous; and by that so are the host-guest identities located on either side and even in between the territorial line. We will see within this context one concept that permeates Dutch-Surinamese social and political history, wherein forces of travel and movement have compelled individual subjects to decide on which side of the host/guest line they will fall - though always with some ambiguity.
This decision comes with subjective reflection on the part of participants; their
individualized understandings of self, nationhood, and belonging. The obstinate phenomenal lens for understanding the peculiar relationship cultivated between hosts and guests in Suriname and the Netherlands can only be one thing, and that is: Hospitality!
Once again, this thesis investigates an alternative rhetoric to the host/guest binary by exploring the concept of 'hospitality' in the Derridian frame, which demonstrates the
blurry, shifting dimensions of subjects in the midst of trans-national travel, migration, 31 and post-colonial encounters. The thesis backs up the claim that true hospitality is an impossibility (Derrida 2000; 2002). It purports that tension between hosts and guests is rooted in the fact that these boundaries - this dialectic - is porous, and that fluctuating identities become obvious when examined over time and during individual encounters.
The space of the gap is where identities shift, alter, solidify, slip away, or merge. The tension, the ambiguity, and the possibility for both friendship and enmity - the possibility of both host and guest - typifies the relationship between Suriname to the Netherlands that has been ongoing from the seventeenth century. The hosts/guest identities in this relationship are always incomplete, there has always been and certainly always will be the potential for subtle change to take place, and this is evidenced in both the colonization and decolonization process (Hoefte 2001 :XIV) of Suriname.
Looking ahead, Chapter Two will take up definitions of hospitality, hosts, and guests. It will present some limits of hospitality in practice. It discusses the place of the foreigner/stranger and the potential for the stranger to become a guest or a host. It will introduce ideas of reciprocity, altruism, and self-service in hospitality, along with limits, rights and duties, and the perpetual potentiality for violence. Chapter Two closes with a consideration of Camus' 'The Guest', which accentuates these potentials.
Chapter Three examines the history of hospitality between Suriname and the
Netherlands from 1667-2000, presenting it as a history of hospitality. It demonstrates how hospitality is ambiguous. It traces the colonial processes that brought disparate cultural and geographical groups together onto one soil, and how hospitality was contested by those I have categorized as 'guests', because the terms of hospitality were not satisfactorily met by colonial hosts. I suggest that 'the step' of hospitality for
Suriname coincides with its achievement of political independence from Holland in 1975
- a transition that occurs after a series of developments, actually challenges, of hospitality and uncertain host-guest continuums. However the chapter also serves to demonstrate how hospitality is a constantly changing, continual tension, a becoming that is never quite there. Even when categories of host and guest appear fixed and stable, hospitality is always at play.
Chapter Four examines the mass out-migration that occurred following
Suriname's 1975 independence and the significance of this for hospitality. It interprets testimonials by Surinamers on their decision to stay in or "choose for" Suriname rather than immigrate to Holland as the embodied act of re-imagining and re-claiming host- hood. It also looks at the testimonials of some Surinamers speaking of their experience living in Holland. The point of this chapter is to explore the subtleties of hospitality-in- progress. Surinamers left for Holland en-masse after the imagining of a nationalist sentiment was established. The migratory movements highlight the fact that hospitality is always being practiced, and that longing and belonging are sentiments expressed in a structure of feeling for being Surinamese as a result of colonialism - the absence that defines the present.
Chapter Five is a literature chapter, which presents various excerpts and analysis of Surinamese literature that expresses nostalgia and a theme of complex and tense hospitality which cannot be ignored or forgotten by the authors. The act of writing operates to reify the tension and paradox of hospitality by appealing to an audience 33 whose identity is itself liminal -neither here nor there (since here or there could be either
Suriname or Holland).
CHAPTER TWO
HOSPITALITY
1. Defining Hospitality
Hospitality is often a taken for granted term. Georg Cavallar, a theorist of international law, uses the Oxford English Dictionary definition of hospitality in his book, The Rights of Strangers, and this is a good place for us to begin to define hospitality as well. Hospitality then, refers to the "offering or affording welcome and entertainment to strangers, visitors, or guests" (Cavallar 2002:2). Cavallar says that this definition can also be extended: When it includes "out-groups, cultures, or communities", this constitutes international hospitality (Cavallar 2002:2). Meanwhile,
Jacques Derrida perceives the question of hospitality in a more pensive vein, as
something that even precedes the question 'of, imagining a concept of hospitality as an aporia: In order for it to be, hospitality cannot have pause to consider whether or not to give this offering. 'True' hospitality to Derrida is something that is betrayed in the moment the question of hospitality is considered (Derrida 2000; 2002). The practice of receiving guests, offering entertainment, lodging, food, drink, and other provisions, as 34 well as the expectation that - as a guest - one should receive these things represents an interaction, perhaps an exchange, that can range in scale from something that takes place between two individuals, two households, two 'cultures', even two nations.
Two aspects here require further examination: The idea of giving, and the idea of service. Both may enhance considerations of hospitality for this thesis. To give and to serve - where reciprocates of these would be to receive or accept - may be two aspects of hospitality for which the visitor-guest arrives in expectation of (in fact literally in tourism, this is what the tourist pays for). Yet it should be understood that the concept of hospitality goes against the accepted market value convention of an economic exchange29. In part, this is due to the fact that the giving of hospitality falls more closely in the category of a service than a commodity. Though services are certainly not exempt from market values (in fact in tourism and other venues such as social clubs, hospitality is
"what the guest pays for"), hospitality as a concept has a quality that elides the familiar capitalist market system. Consider the 'weekend houseguest' or a short-term visitor.
Does such a guest offer payment for the host's hospitality? Should a host accept such an offer? This would be unlikely. To commodify the exchange in this way might betray hospitality and even insult the host; insult the relationship. Often a houseguest will bring a gift to leave with a host, but not cash. Derrida comments on this essential character of hospitality as well: "For to be what it "must" be, hospitality must not pay a debt, or be
29 For more on social relations and the gift, see Mauss (1967) who examines the question of reciprocity and delayed reciprocity, concluding that gifting creates sets of relations and social obligations, that gift exchange is less about commodities/utility as it is about the social relationships that gifting maintains. This thesis recognizes the contribution of Mauss to understandings of reciprocity and exchange, and goes beyond his seminal 1967 work to apply ideas about the gift exchange to hospitality itself. 35 governed by a duty: it is gracious, and, "must" not open itself to the guest [invited or visitor], either "conforming to duty" or even, to use the Kantian distinction again, "out of duty..." (Derrida 2000:83).
When one enters from the outside, into a place that is foreign, there will always be
an interaction that takes place between hosts and guests. The interaction (perhaps it is an
exchange though we are not sure of this as of yet) operates to qualify or arrange a relationship, and it's not exactly what you pay for, but what you feel - the embodied experience of being a guest, or of being host - receiving or giving 'hospitality'. So what is
it in this exchange, what is this ephemeral quality that allows us to consider hospitality as
something beyond, beneath, between, or in breach of 'exchange'? This is where the
French word hote fits in so appropriately in the discussion. Hote refers to one who gives
and one who receives. The host provides hospitality and receives a guest. Hospitality is
a transaction between persons; hospitality is the gift, in this sense: / give thanks for the
gift of your company.
It is through 'hospitality' even, that the distinction between self and other
becomes reified amongst individuals and groups30. Furthermore, practices of
'hospitality' between individuals and between cultures can determine the terms of the
relationship that will follow. In a basic way, it is particularly during the moment when
two individuals (or groups of individuals) meet that hospitality begins, thus setting the
stage for, though not determining, what might follow. Often during such meetings there
30 Marilyn Strathern, when discussing opposition between gift and commodity states that that difference in this dichotomy is "expanded as a metaphor base on which difference itself may be apprehended and put to use.. .yet remains rooted in Western metaphysics" (Strathern 1988:7). Since Strathern also uses Mauss as an academic lineage, her book Gender of the Gift is worth noting here. 36 is a tacit understanding between the parties for who is the guest and who is the host. The host offers welcome, often through the provision of food, lodging, and at least an earnest
modicum of safety for the guest. A stranger who comes to the door with an anticipation
of being received could become the guest. But the stranger/guest/visitor could also be
perceived as an enemy. In this case, where there is a potential threat to the host, do the
laws of hospitality still apply? Likewise, if the borders of a territory towards which the
guest approaches with intention to cross the threshold are clearly understood, recognized,
and respected as such, then indeed, residents within that territory could be considered 'the
host'. With such an identity comes an expectation, almost a 'duty', on the part of the host
to provide hospitality to the stranger/guest. However what if the conceived borders are
questioned? What if they are questionable? Is it possible that more than one claim as
'host' can be made in regard to a given territory? And simultaneously, could a guest
consider him or herself as host of a place while their claim is made from the outside?
That is to say, can an individual be host and guest simultaneously? What is the nature of
the relationship that ensues between the visitor and the one who has moved towards the
provision of hospitality? How are these roles recognized and understood? How are they
defined and operated? What, if any, are the tensions and from where do they originate?
How do they change?
Working Definitions, Practical Examples of Hospitality
The communication about hospitality, as we will see, becomes blurry rather fast
when it starts to be applied. Within any culture, society, or place, the reception of guests 37 becomes a conscious act mediated by individual subjectivities, interpretations, and will.
In hospitality one finds an oscillation between theory and practice: Between what one ought to do and what one chooses to do in a particular circumstance. Hospitality can be motivated by feeling; for how else is it determined that one ought to do x or y but through a philosophy of morals, which are then reduced to emotion (Freve 1971). So it is important to begin at least with some boundaries, some basic tenets of the concept of
'hospitality' from where we can examine hospitality-in-practice. Hospitality-in-practice is never as clear-cut as any definition can allude to, and this is even demonstrated from the Latin, word hostis refers to both guest and enemy.
For now, our working definition of the concept, the one from which we began, comes from Oxford English Dictionary definition under which hospitality is: Offering or affording welcome and entertainment to strangers, visitors, or guests (Cavallar 2002:2).
We can add to the aforementioned definition that hospitality's offer is provided "either without reward, or, with kind and generous liberality" . That is to say that hospitality should not ask, require, or expect anything in return. Hospitality should be practiced as a sort of free gift, if there is such a thing32.
Defining Hosts
So far we have attempted to define hospitality and examine the terms and limits of its practice generally. But what is hospitality without its assumed components: Hosts and
31 Adapted from www.dictionary.com search word: hospitality; retrieved May 18, 2005 32 For considerations on the free gift, see Laidlaw (2002) 38 guests. Furthermore, how are these components to be understood? We can now examine hospitality by taking a closer look at 'hosts' and 'guests'.
In addition to one who "receives or entertains guests in a social or official capacity"33, the term 'host' can have a number of meanings harmonious with the principles and practice of hospitality in culture. From biology, the host is "the animal or plant on which another organism lives"34. One example is that tree is host of an air plant growing upon it. While the aspect is zoological, the definition itself is reminiscent of cultural hospitality's hosting in the sense that the house, space, territory or land provides shelter. Recall too that the human/cultural 'host' provides shelter plus nourishment (food and drink) to the 'guest'. Definitions of this type of 'hosting' note that the 'guest organism' may be parasitic and actually harmful to the host.
In medicine, the host is the recipient of a transplanted tissue or organ. Here the
'host' is one who receives. It is a simultaneous and active receiving, actually an exchange: The host receives something (an organ or tissue) and the 'guest' (the organ or tissue) receives something (a home). In other words, the host's receiving is both active and passive; give and take. And taking this synergy even further, if the host is the
"recipient of a transplanted tissue or organ" then the analogy stands that the host takes in the 'guest' as a part of the self. As a part of itself, perhaps taking it in as a part of its
33 host. (n.d.). The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Retrieved March 07, 2007, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/host, entry 4(1); 4(5) 34 host. (n.d.). The American Heritage® Stedman's Medical Dictionary. Retrieved March 19, 2007, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/host 35 host. (n.d.). The American Heritage® Stedman's Medical Dictionary. Retrieved March 19, 2007, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/host 39 whole. The cultural host might receive a guest as a body receives a transplanted organ or tissue. Note the flexibility in this analogy too: There is always the possibility for rejection. There is always the possibility that the host won't 'take' (accept), that the guest takes too much, and that the reception of the organ/tissue (guest) is not sustainable for the host-body.
Finally, in computer science, host refers to a computer containing data that another computer can access through a network3 . This final aspect of 'hosting' reminds us of the flexibility of hospitality, the permeability of its boundaries. The computer is the host and others can enter the space of the host, taking benefit of the amenities that the host provides. Is such a host in computer science like the host in cultural hospitality?
That is, does such a host also stand to benefit? Or, does the host (computer) simply provide its kind of hospitality openly, assuming the risk without conditions and without
'reward'. Is there an exchange (of data) possible? All of these definitions are important to and reminiscent of hospitality practice among humans.
According to each of these definitions, hospitality entails or even requires a part of one self that is shared with another. The line between self and other is melded. There is a unity, yet simultaneously a persistent separation and autonomy of entities involved. It implies a symbiotic sharing. Still, host-guest relations can involve a parasitic element as we saw in biological definitions, and in another definition still, that sees the host as an
host. (n.d.). The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing. Retrieved March 19, 2007, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/host 40 army. Perhaps most telling is the etymology of the word from Middle English, from Old
French, and from Late Latin: 'hostis', meaning enemy.
Defining Guests
Guests are the counter-part of the host and as such the two are complementary. Can one exist without the other? Definitions of guest are in many ways simply the flipside of the host. For example, the computer that is hooked up to the computer network as a client or node is a guest. Likewise for the commensal organism that lives in or on or off of another species is the guest of that host. More direct definitions of guest include:
1. One who is a recipient of hospitality at the home or table of another. 2. One to whom entertainment or hospitality has been extended by another in the role of host or hostess, as at a party. 3. One who pays for meals or accommodations at a restaurant, hotel, or other establishment; a patron. 4. A distinguished visitor to whom the hospitality of an institution, city, or government is extended. 5. A visiting performer, speaker, or contestant, as on a radio or television program37.
Motivations for Hospitality
Insight into the rules of hospitality can be gleaned from classical studies scholar
Julie Kerr who studies hospitality practiced in twelfth century England. Hospitality then was not exactly done altruistically. From the perspective of a host it was deemed advantageous to show generous hospitality for practical reasons, such as when a
guest, (n.d.). The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Retrieved March 07, 2007, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/guest 41 stranger/guest was suspected of being "well-born" (Kerr 2002:324). Showing generous hospitality to such a stranger/guest could increase the host's own standing and reputation, and avoid negative repercussions such as dishonour and shame (demonstrating instead worthiness, esteem, reputation, rank) (324)38.
As Kerr examines the concept of the 'Open Door', a practice of hospitality in twelfth/early thirteenth-century England (High Middle Ages), the author inspects works of fiction - romances and lais - produced during the period39. It is from these works that
Kerr gleans insight into contemporary ideals and reasons for the practice of hospitality during that time (Kerr 2002:323). Readings of twelfth and thirteenth century works of fiction suggest that hospitality among secular clerics, laity and royalty, and monastic hosts was practiced for a variety of incentives.
Kerr finds that demonstrations of generous hospitality could gain a host acceptance and approval of others in the host's community or 'peer-group' (in one instance, knights, as in Marie de France's lai, Lanval). Individuals were judged on their willingness to receive guests, on the limits to their generosity, and the potential negative repercussions to an outsider's rejection of hospitality. Other incentives included obligation, friendship, fear of repercussions, and concern for one's salvation. If showing
" In one example, the 'host' Philip of Barri contemplated his efficacy as a host in terms of his own salvation. Faced with increasing numbers of passers-by who were requesting hospitality, "Philip had turned away lesser visitors, but fearing that his reception of the rich might not be as effective as that of the poor in earning him a heavenly crown, he sought advice from the Roman Curia. However, Philip was assured that God would judge on the spirit of the welcome, and not the person received" (323). This telling of the tale, which emphasizes the importance of the 'spirit of the welcome', is reminiscent of Derrida's (2000) writings on Hospitality, where one should do, or one ought to do, because simply put, this is 'true' hospitality. Kerr examines hospitality in the works of Chretien de Troyes, the Anglo-Norman Romance of Horn, the Lais of Marie de France, and Berouls's Tristan (Kerr 2002:323). 42 hospitality to others in twelfth century England could increase a hosts' own standing, then hospitality could therefore be advantageous to both guest and host. As a sort of reciprocity, the guest receives food, shelter, perhaps entertainment for the night, and the host receives a boost in his or her own reputation, even rank in the community.
Derrida would likely contend that acting hospitably under such a guise as Julie
Kerr outlines - of anticipation or out of concern for one's own personal gain - would not be 'true' hospitality at all. One should not, according to Derrida, practice hospitality with the expectation of receiving anything in return. The host should show generosity, irrespective of their own personal gains or losses (Derrida 2000; 2002). However as
Kerr's presentation of hospitality demonstrates, this is not always the case in practice.
Hospitality could be practiced for a variety of reasons, least of which it seems would be altruism.
Limits of Hospitality
Hospitality often presents itself as a system of 'oughts' and 'shoulds'; one ought to offer and afford welcome to strangers, visitors and guests, for in so doing, the host may accrue honour, fulfill an obligation, welcome the possibility of friendship, negate enmity, or even, it was believed, bring one closer to god. Yet twelfth century practitioners of hospitality -just as contemporary scholars today - asked relevant, practical questions pertaining to the limits of hospitality like: "Just how open was the door to be, did the refusal of guests inevitably result in loss of honour, were there times when it was commendable to close the door?" (Kerr 2002:323). 43 Kerr finds that hospitality practiced during the twelfth and thirteenth century did indeed have its limits. If a host lacked the resources to provide, was approached during a period of turmoil, or was "faced with other difficult circumstances" (329) then withholding hospitality did not necessarily negatively affect one's honour. Under such conditions, the decision to turn away guests was forgiven. On the other hand, providing hospitality during trying circumstances was, though perhaps limited in scale, still considered a demonstrated "largesse of spirit" (330) and could actually enhance the host's reputation. Such conditions apply as much to twelfth century English lords as to international hospitality in the present day, and as we will see, between sixteenth and
twentieth century Suriname and Holland.
Kerr writes that another circumstance where hospitality could be refused without penalty to the host's honour was made possible in the event that the would-be guest had
"erred"; "the host was usually justified in refusing those who had erred and thus forfeited
the right to be received" (330). It was also generally agreed that hospitality could be
refused if a would-be guest attempted to take it by force. It was understood that
households, towns and communities had the right to refuse those who attempted to take
lodging through coercion and, in such an instance, the host had a legal prerogative to act
violently against such an 'intruder' (330-331). When the safety of the host might be in jeopardy, it was understood and even expected that the host should act prudently and to
close the door.
Anthropologist Julian Pitt-Rivers suggests similar limits in host-guest relations in
his study of Andalusia: "But if he [the guest] aspires too assiduously, then his insistence 44 implies a threat and at that point the host is liberated of all moral duty [and instead of gaining honour by his charity he loses it through submitting to duress, for freedom of will is the first condition of honour]" (Pitt-Rivers 1977: 102). In other words, you can't force someone to be hospitable, you cannot force someone to welcome you, you cannot assert or claim guesthood (as seems possible through host-hood) but, rather, it must be given.
The significance of the encounter lies in the spirit of the welcome and of the request.
On the other hand, it reveals that the role, power, position, and identity of the host can in fact be threatened. Pitt-Rivers is in fact outlining the step of hospitality (Derrida
2002) itself, for potentially in hospitality the host "instead of gaining honour
[could]...lose it through submitting to duress" (Pitt-Rivers 1977:102). This is a power
dynamic where the host is conveyor of will, which if lost then relinquishes the
conditionality of host-hood. How does the host maintain - or attempt to maintain - power
that is relinquishable and precarious? Suriname-Netherlands relations demonstrate how a
host can maintain power though state or institutionally sanctioned means; via law, physical force, language, economy, and symbolic identity markers, which operate to
defer meaning and in a sense buy (the host) more time in the inevitable circuitry of host-
guest relations.
Hospitality becomes even more interesting when one considers a final key
element of its complex. Kerr finds an obligation on the part of the host to protect the
safety of the guest. Safety becomes a consideration for all involved, especially when host
and guest are at first 'strangers'. The significant element is that hospitality requires
mutual trust. The host must trust that the guest will not harm the household (community, country), and vice versa: "...hospitality necessitated mutual trust, and the stranger who dismounted, disarmed and entered another's house thereby placed himself in a vulnerable and potentially risky position, and entrusted himself to his host's protection" (Kerr
2002:331). Protection of the guest is here considered a duty, expected and required.
Furthermore, if the host could not fulfill this duty, that is if the host felt that he or she could not adequately protect the guest, it was acceptable to "refrain from embarking on a host-guest relationship"40 (331).
Finally, limits existed on the other side of the spectrum, stipulating that a host
should not be excessive in providing hospitality; the host who was overly liberal with food, entertainment, lodgings, would be criticized (332). Kerr re-tells a fable in which
the frugal reputation of an Abbott incited him to remove the doors of his courtyard
altogether, instructing his doorkeeper to allow all to enter, to shut out no-one, in an
attempt to convert his perceived negative image into a positive one of generosity. In
effect, the Abbott was removing the barrier, the territorial line between host and guest.
And here of course, one would still be sure of who the host is - the one who opened the
door (or at least ordered it open). Removal of the doors, it seems, did not remove the
identities of host and guest, since it was the host's own honour that was poised to be
transformed positively. Residency and ownership/land-claim appear to be a critical factor
for host/guest categorization and identity (the plan backfired, as he was then accused of
extravagance) (325). The context of twelfth/thirteenth century England shows us that
40 In one given example, Gerald of Wales explains that during his rift with the archbishop of Canterbury, he was refused entry by his former friend, William FitzAlan, for William feared that he would not be able to protect Gerald from the plunder and molesting of certain of the archbishops allies" (Kerr 2002:332). 46 there are limits to hospitality on both sides: One can be under and over hospitable.
Hospitality thus entailed boundaries that required mindfulness on the part of the host so that hospitality was neither remiss nor aggrandized.
According to Pitt-Rivers, a host "infringes on the law of hospitality" if: He insults his guest "by any show of hostility or rivalry; he must honour his guest. If he fails to protect his guest or the honour of his guest41, if he fails to attend to his guests, to grant them the precedence which is their due, to show concern for their needs and wishes or in general to earn the gratitude which guests should show. Failure to offer the best is to denigrate the guest. Therefore it must always be maintained that, however far from perfect his hospitality may be, it is the best he can do" (Pitt-Rivers 1977:110). These guidelines for hospitality match with those described by Kerr's 'spirit of the welcome', and are what Derrida argues for when he discusses "true hospitality". Such guidelines should be kept in mind as we continue to examine hospitality between Suriname and
Holland.
The Questioned Place of the Foreigner/Stranger
An enigmatic feature within hospitality study and practice is, time and again, the inscrutability of the foreigner/stranger. It seems that a familiar narrative, and one that actually gains mythic proportions, is the possibility that the stranger contains a certain cache for being, a stranger: The host knows not where the stranger is from or the relative
41 For this reason, though fellow-guests have no explicit relationship, they are bound to forego hostilities, since they offend their host in the act of attacking one another. The host must defend each against the other, since both are his guests (Pitt-Rivers 1977:110).
47 importance he/she maintains in the place of origin. The stranger is simply potential to be
other things: A friend or an enemy, in the crudest perceived dichotomy. Notably, the
stranger has only the potential to become a guest and is not so outright. Kerr notes that, in
twelfth century England, since the stranger is unknown and potentially dangerous "it was
necessary to convert the hostis to a hospes, the stranger to a friend" (Kerr 2002:331).
In classical antiquity, the stranger had "no status in law nor in religion" (Pitt-
Rivers 1977:96). In order for the stranger to gain protection from local laws and gods,
the stranger required a patron which would ally the two: "to offend the newcomer was to
offend his patron, since by the code of hospitality the two were allied in this way" (96).
Interestingly, Pitt-Rivers draws the line - one that appears again and again in hospitality
studies - between morality and practicality. He says that when a stranger enters a
community, he or she is incorporated by way of the patron. Only through a personal
bond, by association with an established member, does the stranger accrue 'quasi' status.
The stranger is still a stranger, until mediated by an established community member
(patron) where "in relation to his patron he possesses.. .a clearly defined status, that of
guest or client. Stranger is transformed then, and "the status of guest therefore stands
midway between that of hostile stranger and that of community member" (97). Yet still
of great importance is the potentiality of the relationship; the guest stands on the
threshold as potential to be other things. The guest implies a promise - or a threat - of
things to come, relationships to come, and the introduction of the stranger signifies an act
of becoming that may alter relations within. Even with a patron the guest is still limited to
accrue only 'quasi'status, as the instability is there at first along with potential. 48 Tension of Hospitality in Mongoe
I can recall from my time in Suriname a potentially hostile situation that occurred during a weekend spent in Mongoe, a coastal town built around the Bauxite industry and site of Suriname's civil war of the 1980s. Mongoe is known as sort of a rough town. I and another Canadian volunteer, Marnie, were invited to spend the weekend in Mongoe after accompanying some youth on an outreach project. Our local hosts suggested that we might like to explore the town, and we were interested to visit the riverside. We were told that the river in Mongoe was the 'deepest river in Suriname', not to be missed. So we sat on the riverbank just before dusk, having a friendly conversation with some locals there.
Motorboats carrying work crews began to return to the docks and with the mood changing along with the sunset, Margie and I decided to make our way back to the home of our hosts. I remember being glared at as though we were suspicious foreigners (which
I suppose we were indeed) by some of the crew stepping off the boats. Not the kind of playful glare that was common in the city - this was something else - this was a
suspicious glare. As the workers were leaving the boats and as we were already en route our paths had no choice but to cross - one road, one path up the bauxite hill back to town.
Why hadn't we left just one minute earlier? I asked myself that while feeling a visceral tension in the air, and my stomach was tying into knots. I had been living six months in
Suriname and until that point, never felt anything so intense and hostile as a foreigner/stranger there, even as no words were exchanged. Everything was silent except for the sound of bauxite crunching under feet. Some of the guys glanced at each other, 49 then over us, seriously, heavily. Where was our patron to justify our presence? To give us quasi-status instead of occupying as (potentially) threatening strangers? The air was still, sun going down, and I could sense the members of the other group were eyeing each other for unspoken cues on how to proceed. I felt vulnerable hearing their heavy boots crunching the earth, tools clanging, and us in our relatively wimpy flip-flops. I overheard one person in the group mention something about bakra (foreigner) and this was the moment of the step -1 looked in their direction and met the gaze of that speaker. I looked directly, stating: "We're not from the Netherlands, we are Canadian girls". I think that confused the group (based on the facial expressions of a few) because most of the
Caucasian foreigners who come to Suriname are from the Netherlands and because I spoke to them in Dutch to tell them that I wasn't Dutch! It was confusing42 but it also broke the silence, the tension of hospitality in the presence of strangers who are uncertain guests and possible enemies. Until that silence was broken, I was quite sure we would meet violence. That moment on the hill, on the threshold between enemy and friend, the
'step of hospitality' is extremely volatile. It is auspicious always, and something potentially dangerous.
The encounter reminds me of Emmanuel Levinas' subjectivity-as-hospitality (Macey
2000:229). Levinas' phenomenological ethics found in Totality and Infinity (1961)
42 If I spoke their language I would have used it to say the same phrase, yet this is also the signpost of 'the foreigner', to be surrounded in a language that is foreign. For more on this predicament, see Derrida 2000. The above scenario now reminds me of this passage in particular: "Among the serious problems we are dealing with here is that of the foreigner who, inept at speaking the language, always risks being without defense before the law of the country that welcomes him; the foreigner is first of all foreign to the legal language in which the duty of hospitality is formulated..." (Derrida 2000:15). 50 presents the critical aspect of the greeting, the welcome, under which the face-to-face encounter recognizes the existence of the other as fellow, as another subjectivity to be cared for; "to look into the face of the other is to hear the injunction not to kill" (Macey
2000: 230). All of this sounds slightly over-dramatized, however it is the primal
injunction that Levinas writes about and which I believe occurred between two sets of
strangers in Mongoe. It "inaugurates the possibility of an ethics" of hospitality from
which human interaction proceeds; "For Levinas, the naked face of the other appeals to
the subject in a way that cannot be ignored or forgotten..." (Macey 2000:285)43.
The encounter also speaks of transformation, at least the potential for transformation,
which is necessarily experiential and embodied, where "...change begins slowly with
individuals who are unsettled and haunted by the forces that are much greater than
themselves and barely visible" (Gordon 1997:202). It speaks of Walter Benjamin's
"profane illumination"44, a way of encountering the ghostly presence, the lingering past,
the luminous presence of the seemingly invisible (205). The presence of hospitality's
tension, which is at the same time necessarily invisible yet always there, is a way of
understanding the experience we had in Mongoe. I wonder if it was like a mimesis for
every encounter between hosts and guests, foreigners and strangers in Suriname over the
past hundreds of years and continuing onwards. Avery Gordon goes on: " When you
have a profane illumination of these matters, when you know in a way you did not know
43 See Levinas (1961, 1972) 44 "profane illumination", Walter Benjamin's (1978) term, describes the "materialist, anthropological inspiration of the surrealists' experience of Parsian urban everyday life and its new, outmoded, and sometimes forlorn object world.. .explosive forces concealed in everyday things. Frightening and threatening; they are profane but nonetheless charged with the spirit that made them" (Gordon 1997:204)
51 before, then you have been notified of your involvement. You are already involved,
implicated, in one way or another..." (205).
The following day we experienced the other side of potentialities in hospitality as we prepared to head back to the capital, Paramaribo. Our host, Bianca, is an astute and self-
assured woman. She gives us a lift to the bus stop on the side of the main east-west road
in Suriname. A drive three hours west on this road will get us back to the city. I recall
there are a lot of people waiting there. The bus schedule is loose, privately owned and
operated. Who knows how long we will have to wait. Bianca waves down a passing car.
We see her talking to the driver of a grey four-door through the passenger-side window.
She returns to us: "he will take you back to the city" she says, motioning over to the car.
We see the thin, thirty-something driver give a wave with his hand from the steering
wheel. Marnie and I look at each other and back at Bianca: "Really?" "YES" she says,
as if it was obvious. Believing this is how things are done, that she must know him from
a few degrees of separation, we go for it. Trust, again, in the critical aspect of the
greeting. We are at the mercy of our new host - the driver - who turns out to be a
complete stranger to us and to our former hostess Bianca who effectively then released
herself of her duty. We have a fun drive back to the city with our new
stranger/driver/friend. Marnie even takes a turn driving. We arrive safely. Our driver
continues on, I think to the coastal town of Nickerie. Luckily for us, Levinas was right:
"to look into the face of the other is to hear the injunction not to kill, and the naked face
52 of the other appeals to the subject in a way that cannot be ignored or forgotten..." (Macey
2000: 230.285)45.
Transitions
Kerr and Pitt-Rivers both express the significance of the stranger as one for whom no status exists, save that of 'stranger'. Out of context with the host culture and customs, the stranger can only be (potentially) transformed into an entity with ('quasi') status - in other words, into a guest. This occurs as the stranger is received, via the actualization of hospitality: The offering or affording welcome. Thus, the essence of the stranger is, tautologically enough, that he is unknown. He remains potentially anything: Valiant or worthless, well born, well connected, wealthy or the contrary, and since his assertions regarding himself cannot be checked, he is above all not to be trusted...in any case his social standing in his community of origin is not necessarily accepted by the people of another (Pitt-Rivers 1977: 97).
Pitt-Rivers contends that the only way to overcome this (lack of) trust issue is to welcome, and thus the stranger becomes a guest and moves from the extra- to the intra- ordinary world (101). The stranger "...must be socialized, that is to say secularised, a process which necessarily involves inversion" (101). There could be more than potentiality for a simple inversion at work here though: If the stranger can become a guest - by way of a patron or by familiarizing with or taking on the host culture and customs etc., can the guest eventually become a host? If so, we see more of a cyclical process, hospitality operating on a circuit, rather than a simple binary inversion.
45SeeLevinas (1961, 1972) 53 Pitt-Rivers' structural analysis is succinct, tidy. But one should also be keenly aware that these positions, the 'inversions' he speaks of such as that from stranger to guest, are always temporary. One could always slip out of favour as the guest to become an enemy of the host (the laws of hospitality demonstrate this). And couldn't that slippage into the realm of enmity cause threat to the position - the power - of the host?
The host's overt purveyance of power is always precarious in the dynamic. Perhaps the host role rests on the ability to keep the guest happy, not so much out of altruism or ethical purpose, but rather only to maintain or suspend one's position. If the guest is satisfied, perhaps he/she/they have not reason to upset (invert, subvert) the dynamic.
Once again: A precarious balance. If the guest is not satisfied, perhaps the host will be inclined to defend his/her/their status through means other than the provision of food, lodging or entertainment, such as through the law or language as examples.
Perhaps we should consider the possibility of this transition: The stranger can become a guest, the guest then a host: From hostile stranger (hostis) to hospes (and what then of the host? Can there be more than one? Can host be expanded?). This is perhaps suggestive of another transformation that occurs simultaneously: We can call again on the French terminology, we can conceptualize I'hote, the one who is both host and guest
at the same time. The paradox of the Western binary of hospitality's host/guest configuration is that its conception of host and guest as distinctly separate identities negates the fluidity and the ambiguity that underlies hospitality practice. For every guest has the potential to become a host as well. While Pitt-Rivers defines the hosts and guests
as complementary opposites, Derrida goes into the binary, deconstructs the binary, until 54 what is left is the aporia, wherein host and guest are not really divided at all. Though Pitt-
Rivers may contend to maintain clearly demarcated categories of host and guest with statements such as: "Host and guest can at no point within the context of a single occasion be allowed to be equal" (102), there is still a trace of the oscillation that necessarily takes place between these two 'categories': ".. .their reciprocity resides, not in an identity, but in an alteration of roles" (Pitt-Rivers 1977: 102).
This is reminiscent of Derrida's 'step of hospitality' (Derrida 2000), that within
'hospitality' is the threat of violence. This, Derrida says, underlies all host-guest relations in hospitality. Picking up Pitt-Rivers again, "...the laws of hospitality transpose the conflict to a level where hostilities are avoided" (102). There is consanguinity here between what Pitt-Rivers and Derrida say on hospitality, even though the former emphasizes the binary and the latter its deconstruction. Underlying violence (i.e., those
'hostilities' Pitt-Rivers speaks of) results from two seemingly contrary concepts: host/guest. This is the threshold from which hospitality operates. Speaking now of the beggar-stranger and the limits of hospitality: "By pressing his claim too hard the would- be guest destroys its basis and falls back into the role of hostile stranger" (102). It is this potential that characterizes Suriname-Netherlands relations. Always the potential for friendship, enmity, and violence because it operates on the threshold and the deconstruction of the binary is more visible than in other sets of relations.
Derrida talks about this transition, this fluidity of host-guest identity by
addressing that 'violence' that is said to be avoided through hospitality. Derrida actually hones in on that violence which Pitt-Rivers leaves as something abated. Derrida's 55 hospitality goes straight for the tension that underlies the exchange, suggesting that it does not go away and is in fact ever-present in hosts and guests. He suggests this by asking us to consider that the violence of hospitality comes in the appropriation of place.
"After peace, after the peaceable and peaceful experience of welcoming there follows.. .a more violent experience, the drama of a relation to the other that ruptures, bursts in or breaks in..." (Derrida 2002: 364). In this sense, the host becomes a hostage to the guest's demands.
Cross-cultural hospitality, including international hospitality (Cavallar 2002), involves the matter of customs as well. How does a stranger, a foreigner, realize the
customs of the host culture? And how does a 'member' of the host culture recognize a
foreigner? The ancient Greeks made the distinction on this account, between Xenoi,
strangers who were nevertheless Greeks (and therefore 'insiders' ?), and Barbaroi,
"outlandish foreigners who spoke another language" (Pitt-Rivers 1977: 97). Notice the
distinction too, that sees the former as simply a stranger, and the latter as the 'barbarian',
that is, more other, more unknown, and more unlike 'ourselves'. Xenois can perhaps be
more readily incorporated into the host community and share a oneness with the 'native';
at what point could the same occur for the barbaroi, if at all? Much of one's foreignness
comes from the factor of being foreign-born. And of course, language seems
fundamental to that distinguishing characteristic which causes us to consider the line
between 'us' and 'them'. The stranger is one who has neither kin nor friends in the
community to where he or she appears (Pitt-Rivers 1977:98); "even when not suspect as a
vampire or child-stealer, the stranger is always potentially hostile" (Pitt-Rivers 1977:99). Derrida writes about the symbolic importance of language and birthplace when understanding culture and potential hostilities between strangers, guests, and hosts.
Modern, Western citizenship seems able to manipulate or construct these factors as primary, yet malleable. A person born on soil with one or more foreign (non-citizen) parents can retain and obtain citizenship of more than one place. He or she may belong to the place of birth (the 'foreign land' which because of being born there is both foreign and local) as well as the place from which one or more parent descends. To the extent that one 'belongs' in either, both, or more geo-cultural-national areas is relative and particularistic. It depends on the hospitality of the 'host' culture, as well as the individual histories of the persons involved. This sense of belonging (either personal or national) is often constructed from narratives - personal and historical - and an associated sense of nostalgia.
Hence an inversion: When stranger becomes guest, the one who was viewed with
suspicion becomes revered. The guest is then given precedence, honoured, "His
transformation into the guest means therefore that.. .no longer to be suborned, he must be
succoured; from being last, he must be first, from being a person who can be freely
insulted he becomes one who under no conditions can be disparaged" (Pitt-Rivers
1977:101). Of course this too is temporary.
Pitt-Rivers contends, "The law of hospitality is founded upon ambivalence" (Pitt-
Rivers 1977:107). The same author goes on to say that:
...the custom of hospitality invokes the sacred and involves the exchange of honour. Host and guest must pay each other honour. The host requests the honour of the guest's company...he gains honour through the number 57 and quality of his guests. The guest is honoured by the invitation. Their mutual obligations are in essence unspecific, like those of spiritual kinsmen or blood brothers; each must accede to the desires of the other. To this extent the relationship is reciprocal (107).
In regards to rights and responsibilities,
Those of host are paramount where those of guest are nil.. .for, while a host has rights and obligations in regard to his guest, the guest has no right other than to respect and no obligation other than to honour his host.. .He incurs however the right and obligation to return hospitality on a future occasion on territory where he can claim authority.. .The reciprocity between host and guest is thus transposed to a temporal sequence and a spatial alternation in which the roles are reversed" (Pitt-Rivers 1977: 109).
Furthermore,
The roles of host and guest have territorial limitations. A host is host only on the territory over which on a particular occasion he claims authority. Outside it he cannot maintain the role. A guest cannot be guest on the ground where he has rights and responsibilities. So it is the courtesy of showing the guest to the door or the gate or both that underlines a concern in his welfare but only as long as he is a guest. It also defines precisely the point at which he ceases to be so, when the host is quit of his responsibility (108).
Ambiguity and Tension in Camus' The Guest indicating the dilemma of Law and Duty in Hospitality
'Hospitality' has been written about by political theorists and philosophers in the
Western tradition and this generally refers to how we treat our guests, how we treat
strangers, how we should treat strangers, what are the "rights" of each host and guest (if
any), whether such rights can be universal, and can these universal rights be qualified?
Furthermore, hospitality entails decisions of who gets to enter, when and for how long,
and under what kinds of conditions. In Of Hospitality (2000) Jacques Derrida suggests
58 the impossibility of hospitality, where for one to be truly hospitable one must accept the stranger before even contemplating the possibility of acceptance. The host accepts the other without invitation or request. Derrida makes explicit too, the fluctuating capacity of host and guest: Once inside, once the guest crosses the threshold, the host is at the mercy of the guest's demands. Hence, there is an underlying violence in hospitality:
.. .to be hospitable is to let oneself be overtaken, to be ready to not be ready, if such is possible, to let oneself be overtaken, to not even let oneself be overtaken, to be surprised, in a fashion almost violent, violated and raped, stolen...precisely where one is not ready to receive - and not only not yet ready but not ready, unprepared in a mode that is not even that of the 'not yet' (Derrida 2002:361)
The Algerian writer Albert Camus has authored a short story entitled The Guest published in the collection Exile and the Kingdom (1958). In the story, the main protagonist faces a dilemma or paradox of "duty": Should he deliver a prisoner who
arrives at his door to police headquarters and obey the Law of the State, or should he
abide the laws of hospitality and provide welcome, a safe place for his (prisoner) 'guest' ?
Camus' story demonstrates the ambiguity, the humanity, and the ephemerality of the
practice of 'hospitality'. The main character, 'Daru', embodies the dilemma of
hospitality and through Camus' writing it becomes clear that hospitality entails the
possibility and the impossibility of an ethical choice, a moral obligation, a matter of
etiquette, and a legal duty - simultaneously. Set within the parameters of an occupied
state, the presumed colonial administration of French Algeria, the protagonist Daru is
obliged by the extension of his State-sanctioned position as a 59 teacher/schoolmaster/'master of the house' to act according to this duty: Deliver the stranger/guest to police headquarters on the following morning.
As well, Daru as host is obliged to fulfill the expectations and request of his second guest, the gendarme 'Balducci', who delivers the prisoner to Daru's remote schoolhouse. Considering Balducci's role as a state functionary, privileged and institutional, upholder of 'the Law', it could be considered that there is no room for hospitality in the State. That is to say: The law that implies and requires one to behave out of duty has no cause for hospitality other than as a means for upholding the Law. It is rather the personal, subjective side of Daru that is obliged to serve the guest, who is drawn to the practice of 'hospitality'. Is this a duty towards a fellow human that Kant would argue? Camus' brilliant short story encapsulates the possibility and the impossibility of hospitality.
Daru's prisoner/guest arrives uninvited and Daru welcomes the guest, performs
'true hospitality' not only by providing food, shelter, and other amenities, but also in that he suspends distain, distrust, and judgment of the stranger for the sake of hospitality.
Daru practices the kind of hospitality that Derrida invites here:
Let us say yes to who or what turns up, before any determination, before any anticipation, before any identification, whether or not it has to do with a foreigner, an immigrant, an invited guest, or an unexpected visitor, whether or not the new arrival is the citizen of another country, a human, animal, or divine creature, a living or dead thing, male or female (Derrida 2000:77).
60 Repeatedly in the story, the host provides welcome and tends to the guest out of duty - not entirely altruistically or of good will, in fact Daru is oft distraught by his imposed position as host. In Derrida's words, "It is as ifthe stranger or foreigner held the keys..." (Derrida 2000:123). There is some fear that comes with the foreigner because, as we have seen, the foreigner is an unknown. But it seems that Daru's reservation comes less from fear of the foreigner - although the unpredictability of this is continuously at play in the story - as from the paradox of duty. It is a double and irreconcilable duty that Daru is faced with: The law vs. the laws.
In other words, there would be an antinomy, an insoluble antinomy, a non- dialectizable antinomy between on the one hand, The law of unlimited hospitality...and on the other hand, the laws (in the plural), those rights and duties that are always conditioned and conditional, as they are defined by the Greco-Roman tradition and even the Judeo-Christian one, by all of law and all philosophy of law up to Kant and Hegel in particular, across the family, civil society, and the State (Derrida 2000:77).
Daru's distain for the visitor comes from the knowledge of his crime (the stranger/guest had killed his own cousin), but also forming a discomfort is the knowledge that the enactment of hospitality entails a bond. As he is doing these things, these acts of hospitality - baking bread, breaking eggs, sharing tea, preparing a bed - intimate things that hospitality cultivates and that cultivates hospitality, Daru is also keenly and distraughtly aware of the duty imposed and transmitted on him - a double and insoluble duty: The Law obliges him to surrender his guest to the State; an act of Duty. Yet to turn the visitor in would be to betray his guest, to disobey the 'unconditional law' of hospitality and the bond that hospitality cultivates more and more through those acts of
61 eating, sharing, sheltering, as he is nonetheless called on out of duty to deliver his guest to the enemy. The enemy then is the one on the outside, and how that gets defined is incumbent on who or what is inside; and these are situational boundaries. In this aporia we see the implied ambiguity in the Latin word: hostis, meaning both host or enemy
Derrida conjures the paradox of hospitality, this aporia, which is also reflected in the story and felt through Daru's character:
Shouldn't we also submit to a sort of holding back of the temptation to ask the other who he is, what her name is, where he comes from, etc.? Shouldn't we abstain from asking another these questions, which herald so many required conditions, and thus limits, to a hospitality thereby constrained and thereby confined into a law and a duty. And so into the economy of a circle? We will always be threatened by this dilemma between, on the one hand, unconditional hospitality that dispenses with law, duty, or even politics, and, on the other, hospitality circumscribed by law and duty... (Derrida 2000: 135).
Something happens between hosts and guests in hospitality, an uneasy gratitude, a kind of welcome-tension and a culled familiarity. When the character Daru and his guest share the schoolhouse room for sleep, Daru's character expresses this tension that fuses and confuses hosts and guests:
He listened to that breath so close to him and mused without being able to go to sleep. In this room where he had slept alone for a year, this presence bothered him. But it bothered him also by imposing on him a sort of brotherhood he knew well but refused to accept in the present circumstances. Men who share the same rooms, soldiers or prisoners, develop a strange alliance, as if, having cast off their armor with their clothing, they fraternized every evening, over and above their differences... (Camus 1970: 77).
62 This chapter has presented definitions of hospitality, hosts, and guests and provided examples of hospitality. It also discussed possible motivations and limits for hospitality and suggests that these motivations and limits can apply cross-culturally. It then examined the place of the foreigner or stranger and finds that the foreigner/stranger is of an ambiguous position and represents the potential to become something else: guest, friend, enemy, or possibly even a host. The chapter then hones in on the tension existent in host/guest relations and the fact that hospitality operates on a threshold and can always transition and alter the relations and identities between hosts and guests. The presentation of Camus' 'The Guest' is meant to represent this tension as a dilemma of hospitality's 'laws' and 'duties' that are incumbent on the host and which actually stand to transform the identities of both host and guest so that power between them may oscillate or shift.
63 CHAPTER THREE
MIGRATION AND HOSPITALITY BETWEEN SURINAME AND THE NETHERLANDS, 1667-2000
1. Tensions in Hospitality
In the 'step' that takes place between 'host' and 'guest', which Derrida describes in Of Hospitality (2000), the boundary is not so static: One's guest contains the potential to be an enemy, " and so the master (the one who invites) becomes the hostage.. .and the guest becomes the host's host" (2000:123). For understanding this pivotal step Derrida
(2000:123, for example) prefers to use the word hote to describe someone who is not either host or guest, but has the capacity to be both, therein illustrating the sense that these categories are blurry, contested, destabilizing, and complicating.
Indeed the tension, the ambiguity, and the possibility for both friendship and enmity of I 'hote that we have seen exemplified in the writing of Derrida, Kerr, Pitt-
Rivers, and Camus - the possibility o/merging host and guest - typifies the relationship 64 of Suriname to the Netherlands and vice versa from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Rosemarijn Hoefte and Peter Meel actually note that: "Dutch-Surinamese relations have been particularly unstable and have emphasized the incompleteness of the decolonization process" (Hoefte 2001 :XIV). I would add that it is this 'incompleteness' of the decolonization process that contributes to, perhaps even causes, confusing hospitality issues between the two. Certain questions arise about when, how, and why a colonizing 'host' might become a guest. When does a colonized 'guest' become a host?
And, how do these sets of people get along with each other after 'the step', which may or may not be 'complete'?
Colonialism and post-colonial processes blend very well into hospitality processes. The obvious allegory to consider is that of the dubious 'host' and 'guest'.
During the preceding chapters of this thesis we have seen various manifestations of the tension between hosts and guests, and tried to show that threshold of 'hospitality' existent between individuals and groups. To be a host implies the claiming of space as one's own. It affords one the opportunity to invite, receive, or deny guests. To be a guest implies a temporary inhabitation of that space. The guest does not really have 'rights' as such. These are the onus of the host, the one who carves out or claims space as one's own. This can really only be done by exerting some form of power; not necessarily violent, but power nonetheless. Derrida says that 'true' hospitality is an impossibility because it requires one to relinquish all control before accepting the guest - at which point, the line between host and guest becomes aporic and the boundaries, the identities, become blurry. To be truly a host means that one must give up that power over space that 65 (in)effectually characterizes him or her as host in the first place, and at this point, the host looses the power therein. According to Derrida, it is the moment that power is relinquished that the opportunity for 'the step' occurs. That is, it is in the moment when power is relinquished where identities may become something else; the roles may
'reverseVcombine/blur and the guest may become the host. Temporally this step could take place in an instant or, it could take place over a matter of years or even centuries and so on.
These kinds of temporal dimensions of hospitality play out between Suriname and the Netherlands as well. Colonialism is apart of this understanding, so far as it contextualizes and formalizes the conditions which brought individuals and groups together in Suriname from the year 1667. It should be understood that hospitality is the larger theme which encompasses interactions, and that the allegory between colonizer and colonized and host and guest are not interchangeable or analogous assemblages.
There may be associations between host and colonizer; colonized and guest, and I do make a point of these similarities46, however these pairings are in no way frozen, stagnant, or synonymous. In fact the very crux of this thesis is to show how these identifiers fluctuate and alter, mix and match. I suggest that 'the step' of hospitality for
Suriname coincides with its achievement of political independence from Holland in 1975
- the moment when power is relinquished, then replaced by another. However, 1975 is
46 1 draw loose parallels between colonizers as hosts, and colonized as guests during the colonial period, because as explained there are associations there, but I associate these labels also to demonstrate that the associations change, and how they are able to change (through subtle shifts in power and perception) so that and identity of 'colonizer' colonized' mean less in this understanding than host or guest, since hospitality is the overarching frame for [a picture of] social relations and colonialism is the scenery within. 66 also a symbolic transition and one that occurs after a series of developments, actually challenges, of hospitality and uncertain host-guest continuums. So I will examine hospitality in the long duree and the microcosm within it. This is hospitality between
Suriname and the Netherlands, 1667-2000:
2. Hospitality and Territoriality
Before examining hospitality in the historical dimension, this conversation about hospitality as overshadowing colonial processes intersects in a very interesting way with something Robert Sack calls 'human territoriality'. This is an overlapping lens we will use in understanding hospitality's lot between Suriname and the Netherlands.
Territoriality is "a human strategy to affect, influence, and control" (Sack 1986:2).
Territoriality is socially and geographically rooted: "Its use depends on who is influencing and controlling whom and on the geographical contexts of place, space and time. Territoriality is intimately related to how people use the land, how they organize
themselves in space, and how they give meaning to place. Clearly these relationships
change, and the best means of studying them is to reveal their changing character over
time" (2). Sack maintains that "territoriality in humans supposes a control over an area or
space that must be conceived of and communicated [and] one can argue that territoriality
in this sense is quite unlikely in most if not all [non-human] animals" (1).
67 When the Dutch arrived in Suriname in 1667, they shortly thereafter imported enslaved Africans who laboured in the colony for the next two hundred years. When slavery was abolished in 1863, the Dutch facilitated the importation of indentured labourers from China, India, and Indonesia through to the early twentieth century.
Amerindians first occupied the area before all of these 'foreigners' arrived. Before the
Dutch formally took hold, Jewish planters were also tilling the soil and commissioning slave labour in Suriname. The question arises then: During the colonization process in
Suriname, where all persons involved are 'foreigners' save for the indigenous inhabitants
(and we will come back to this), who are the hosts and who are the guests?
Hospitality - not unlike territoriality - 'depends on who is influencing and controlling whom and on the geographical contexts of place, space and time' (Sack
1986:2). During the colonial era, spheres of control over space and the inhabitants in
Suriname were largely in the hands of the Dutch colonialists. Dutch administrators organized the land into plantations, which operated to support and benefit the Dutch economy and its global sphere of influence. In effect the territory (even including its slave inhabitants during slavery) was owned by the Dutch State and wealthy Dutch conglomerates. Recall the idea of host as 'master of the house', or host as quite literally an army, or host as one who provides lodging and subsistence. All of these are aspects of hospitality to be considered. Hospitality and assumed power on the part of the host, its inferred threat of violence, seems conspicuously tied to the concept of ownership (over land, people etc) as colonialism is concerned.
68 No doubt there are countless ways in which the ideal conditions of hospitality are betrayed in this analogy but nonetheless, the Dutch can be framed as 'hosts' in this territorial context. Be it crude and perhaps disturbed, the enslaved or indentured population can be considered 'guests' - those who are the recipients of lodging and subsistence etc., those who are the recipients of (a troubled, and imperfect) 'hospitality'.
Recall also that, according to Pitt-Rivers, guests have no rights, as rights are accorded to the host, and this constituent also fits with the conditions of slavery (and in some aspects, indentured servitude) in seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century Suriname.
However, these sorts of binary identities - hosts and guests - contain a great deal of variability and fluctuation, especially over time (as Sack's territoriality indicates a
temporally contingent component as well). In the abridged version of Suriname's history:
Some slaves escaped the plantations to establish autonomous villages in Suriname's
interior; these people became known as the Maroons, of which five distinct tribes exist
today. Other slaves achieved manumission through legal channels, or by helping the
Dutch militias attempt to fight and re-capture Maroons. Indentured Asian immigrants
organized protests to garner 'rights'. Amerindians fled to interior regions of Suriname,
beyond the reach of Dutch hands. Eventually, each of these groups fragmented enough to
form political parties of their own and finally expelled the (Dutch administrative) 'host'.
Framing colonial processes in terms of hospitality and territoriality highlights the
structures of 'power' (i.e., who's in charge, who is the host or who has power: host or
guest?) and the fluctuating capacity of its character. While colonialism could be
considered a forced kind of 'power over' an other, hospitality highlights the subtle 69 tension and tendency for power to 'travel', to move and flow. Furthermore, colonialism involves a time period rather bounded and fixed ("the colonial period") and connotes
domination by direct political control through force, and subordination of an other.
However hosts and guests are not analogous to colonizer/colonized because host requires
submitting power to the guest, serving the guest, and giving something of the self. It is in
this way that power is ambiguous and not in character with colonizer/colonized
renditions. Hosts and guests change over time within a given space - even under
colonialism. Hosts, guests, and hospitality were ongoing phenomena before colonial
powers landed in Suriname and continue after Independence. Colonialism is merely the
context for part of the larger picture. I struggle with the task of how to present the
intricate, socially complex and multi-angled history of hospitality between Suriname and
the Netherlands. However the history will show that a guest may become a host; a host
may become a guest with the passing of time and political movements, as well as with the
physical movements of people across borders.
The history of Suriname is a history of hospitality. Suriname's multi-ethnic
society is a result of colonization that peopled the place by importing its residents (we
could say 'guests') from elsewhere. Dutch colonialism - a demonstrated operation of
'territoriality' - in Suriname began in the seventeenth century when Dutch explorers
established settlements along what was then referred to as the 'Wild Coast'. That was in
1616. These settlements were more like short-lived outposts, sporadic, and small-scale,
having been set up by independent frontiersmen in search of the mythic El Dorado. It
70 would be another fifty years before Dutch colonial expansion in the form of a plantocracy47 would begin to take shape.
During the interim (1616-1667) the British sent planters and slaves from
Barbados to set up sugar plantations, claiming the area now known as Suriname as their own. That was in 1650. Some fifty British-owned sugar plantations were in operation by the time the Dutch48 invaded in 1667 and conquered the British. As the British planters left the territory with their remaining slaves, those plantations were ransacked - sabotaged by the British themselves - and the Dutch began from the ground up. The
Dutch established plantations, excavated canals, raised levees and locks to facilitate the cultivation of (primarily) sugar, plus coffee, cocoa, and cotton (Hoogbergen 1990:69).
Already then, by the year 1667 we have seen 'host' and 'guest' identities change hands through territoriality. The British arrived and claimed the territory for themselves, proclaiming the British as 'hosts' and assuming for themselves the rights and responsibilities entailed. Recall here again the meaning of host as an army, the hostis as
'Plantocracy' is also known as a plantation economy or "exploitation colony". Described by van Lier (as defined by Kellar) in the following way, and this characterizes colonial Suriname to a tee: "Plantation colonies are agricultural colonies in tropical zones. Migration to a colony of this type takes place on a small scale only; the colonists are few in number and are mostly men.. .The colonists do not work the land themselves, but force coloured labour to till the soil for them. There is frequent intermixing between white men and coloured women. Agriculture is the economic backbone of the plantation colony; it is focussed on the production of staple commodities for export to overseas markets. Production has to take place on a large scale in order to be profitable, and has to have a large labour force at its disposal. All this requires a relatively high capital investment in the colony.. .entirely dependent on the mother country because of its dependence on overseas capital and overseas markets"(van Lier 1971:5-6). For more on plantation economies, see Kellar A. G. Colonisation: A Study of the Founding of New Societies. Boston, 1908 48 At that time, Holland was not the unified Kingdom it is today and was actually comprised of the "Seven United Provinces". It was in fact the Dutch Province of Zeeland that bombarded the fortress 'Willoughby' (British) and renamed it Fort Zeelandia, which exists today as a museum. The battle was part of the Second Anglo-Dutch War (there would be a third). Many colonial territories changed hands between the two European powers during this time. 71 enemy. When the Dutch usurped the British 'hosts' in 1667, as foreigner-strangers they betrayed the possibility of hospitality through the forced invasion. The Dutch became the new 'hosts' through territoriality, assuming that their rights as such were 'paramount'
(recall Pitt-Rivers 1977:109).
Assumed territoriality, presumed 'host-hood', on the part of either the British or the Dutch seems to have operationally and institutionally nullified that of any pre-existing hosts. For during this changing of hands among European powers, the area was not vacant of human inhabitants. Arawak and Carib tribes had indeed been living in the region before either the Dutch or the British arrived; before even the Spanish arrived in
1499, before the French attempted to claim and build their own settlements in the early seventeenth century, and even before Columbus first sighted the area that Dutch explorers would later call the 'wild coast' in 149849. Those early European colonialists were 'territorialists' - a movement of 'foreign hosts'. I say 'foreign hosts' because a host must be autochthonous, meaning, something that originates or is formed in the place it is found to be. Indigenous things. That is to say that the 'true' (human) hosts in this rendition would be the indigenous inhabitants, the Carib and Arawak Indians50.
In an historiographic context, scholars of the day were divided on whether or not indigenous inhabitants had 'rights' at all (see Cavallar 2000). And indeed, it is perhaps
49 http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/l 893.htm 50 The Amerindian population of Suriname is among the most marginalized of all the commonly identified ethnic groups in the country. That is, economically, politically, geographically, and socially. Demographically they account for less than 4% of the total population. Academic literature of the indigenous tribes is sparse and that written in the English language even more difficult to come by. For an outline of the eight Amerindian languages spoken in Suriname, see Carlin(2001). 72 questionable whether those seventeenth century indigenous inhabitants should be considered as part and parcel of the same territorial ideology of which the Europeans conceived. Literate, map-making European colonizers "used territory to define and organize its own membership" (Sack 1986: 15), but we cannot assume that Arawak and
Carib Indians did the same, or if they had the same medium for organization. Speaking about territoriality and the European colonization of North America, Sack notes:
"Territories were created and used to support ['white man's'] complex hierarchical society which was based on private property (15). Yet, "in contrast to the Chippewa
[Native American group], who was born into a Chippewa community and was accepted socially and culturally by the Chippewa people, a Wisconsinite was simply someone who resided within the boundaries of Wisconsin." (15). We know little of how territoriality was invoked by the Indigenous people of the region of Suriname, but in consideration of
Sack's contrast between the Chippewa and European sense of territoriality, we should not presume Amerindians' territoriality in Suriname to be of the same ideological premise as that of the Dutch or English in Suriname (i.e., state versus non-state societies' conceptions of 'territoriality').
We begin to see that hospitality, hosts and guests, is not employed merely as a metaphor here, but as a very real set of relations which accounts for the way people experience and express these relations. We do know that some of the coastal natives
attempted to hinder European's settlement during those early years of colonization, and in some instances they succeeded. For example, Hoefte and Meel note that Amerindians eradicated a French settlement in 1645 (2001:1). But as increasing numbers of European 73 planters arrived in Suriname, and interactions became more frequent, other natives were killed or forced into slavery to work on the plantations51. Could we say that these enslaved natives became hostages in their own 'home'? Most of the natives moved to the hinterland to remain as 'hosts', out of reach of the European invaders and their ideologically grounded notions of private property/ownership correlating to a violent but precarious host-hood.
Part and parcel of the establishment of private property is the division of saleable land, and thus the requirement of political jurisdiction in territoriality and/or 'hosting'.
This is the Europeanized or 'Western' use of territoriality, which was also employed in
Suriname by the European colonial powers. This implies devices of and for control through demarcating and claiming space as means to assert authority [i.e.,' host-hood'] over an area (15). In other words, this is the seventeenth and eighteenth century way in which the European colonialists invoked territoriality, enframing 'hosts and guests' in terms of (uneven) power relations. In this sense, ownership of land is a form of host- hood in the same way that a landlord produces territorial control over land to create his/her private property is true of the Europeans over their colonies. When the Dutch
(Province of Zeeland) conquered the British on Surinamese soil in 1667, the property was passed -'hostedness' was passed - over to the Dutch. The Treaty of Breda was the legal
During this English period (beginning in 1650), approximately 400 Amerindian slaves toiled on the plantations, along with 3,000 African slaves brought by the English who numbered about 1,500 on the colony (Hoefte 2001:7) 74 negotiation of territoriality that allowed for this to happen , the Dutch in fact traded the colony of Niew Amsterdam (New York) for Suriname.
In 1682, the Staten van Zeeland (parliament of the Dutch province of Zeeland) sold the rights to Suriname to the West India Company (WIC) for a sum of 260,000
Dutch florins (Lierl971:17). The WIC then took on two partners: The city of Amsterdam and the family of Cornelis Aerssen van Sommelsdyck. This tripartite arrangement formed the Charter Society of Suriname and controlled the administration and defense of the colony as set out by the charter granted by the Netherlands parliament (States
General). Sommelsdyck would become the governor of the colony until his family sold its shares in 1770. In 1792 the WIC disbanded and shortly thereafter the Society of
Suriname was liquidated and the authority over the colony was transferred back to the
Dutch state. In short, Suriname (then Dutch Guiana) was controlled by the Dutch from
1667 until Suriname's independence in 1975 (except for a brief period under British rule in the early nineteenth century). These political maneuverings indicate something about hospitality (or rather, hospitality's absence, which is to say this is hospitality's denial).
Yet these acts of take-over and re-take-over are where power flows are directed and redirected; the hosts are affiliated with seats of power. We have seen how historically spaces hosts and guests move and are contingent on the authority both present and absent within such transitions.
Suriname remained a Dutch colony until independence in 1975, except for a brief period where it was again under British rule from 1799 and 1816 during the Napoleonic Wars. For more, see (van Lierl971) 5 Or, Geoctryeerde Societeit van Suriname (1682-1795) 75 3. Host-Guest Transitions: The "Hebrew Nation" in Suriname
"Government officials, planters and merchants both Jewish and Christian, mulattoes, freed slaves, soldiers, and plantation overseers...formed together a multi-racial, ethnically varied mix" (Cohen 1991:80).
Because the power enacted through territoriality is continually changing, hospitality with its 'hosts' and 'guests' will change as well. Another layer of host-guest
fluctuation is demonstrated with an illustration of the "Hebrew Nation" (Brana-Shute
1990:20) that existed in Suriname from before the time of the Dutch conquest in 1667.
Sephardic Jews from Cayenne and Sephardic Jewish refugees from Brazil54 joined the
region to set up plantations shortly after the British plantations were established. In
addition to this, a significant number of Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews arrived in the
colony from Amsterdam in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries55.
Robert Cohen writes about the impact of environment (Suriname) on Jewish life
in a colonial society during the second half of the eighteenth century. The book Jews in
Another Environment (1991) explores the ways that 'community' adapted to, tweaked,
manipulated, and dialogued within the 'foreign' environment of Suriname. Cohen
explores the way a culture adapts, basically, when working from the ground up - in a
This group was fleeing the Inquisition after Spain's annexation of Portugal (Chin and Buddingh' 1987:3). 55 Their numbers have dwindled radically and today there is barely a Jewish community to speak of (although, a synagogue remains functional today and is a prominent landmark on Paramaribo's Kaiserstraat, noted ad nauseum for its close proximity to a mosque). The location of each the synagogue and mosque in relation to each other is something Surinamers cite as a proud example of their ability to 'all get along peaceably'. Is often displayed on postcards, in tourist lore, and part of the national narrative about 'Surinameness'.Jn the late 18th and 19th centuries many 'free people of color' and, later, Creoles were Jews" (Brana-Shute 190:20). For more on the history of the Jews in Suriname also see Van Lier (1971) and Cohen (1991). 76 very material sense. Described by Cohen, the European Jews who moved to Suriname met a "harsh, uncouth frontier with an even harsher climate" (1991:1). Yet:
Legally, Surinamese Jews formed perhaps the most privileged Jewish community in the world. Economically, they were not only traders and merchants, but often also plantation owners and slave-owners. Demographically, they were not, as elsewhere, a minute minority in overwhelmingly non-Jewish surroundings, but a sizable proportion of the
White population throughout the eighteenth century. Finally, they had their own village with extensive religious, judicial and administrative rights (1991:1).
During the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Jewish immigrants to
Suriname were voluntary, choosing for life in the colony where they perceived they would have an attractive set of rights and privileges. These European Jews made the move to Suriname and maintained important economic links with the 'mother country'
(Cohen 1991:11). However in the second half of eighteenth century, Suriname became
"a dumping ground for the Jewish poor of Amsterdam" (12). So a transition from voluntary to forced migration occurred and this accounted for "a considerable percentage of the total migration"56 (12). The Jewish community in Amsterdam paid the poor to leave the Netherlands and migrate to Suriname, often on the condition that the migrant had to stay away for a period of twelve to fifteen years (22). This was an active emigration policy introduced after Amsterdam experienced a significant influx of largely poor Jewish migrants from other parts of Europe. Cohen notes that Holland was widely
56 Numbers of Jewish arrivals in Suriname 1771-1795: Of total 332 passenger arrivals, 283 came from Holland (276 of those from Amsterdam) (150 were from Ashkenazim communities; 133 were from Sephardim communities); 42 came from Caribbean; 7 from North America (Cohen 1991:17). 77 recognized for its "Dutch tolerance" towards foreigners (part of hospitality) so that many people fleeing adverse conditions elsewhere headed for Amsterdam to become the new stranger-foreigner-guests (and potentially, hosts). In theory, the Dutch 'hosts' accepted the other without question; its borders were open to the migrants who were not accepted elsewhere.
However, in 1752 the leaders of the Ashkenazi community proclaimed "that the community bears great expense in supporting the poor of our city, while poverty increases daily." They noted, "Many foreign poor come and live here, and even enjoy some support from the charity fund." Therefore, "all foreign poor must depart hence before the coming of winter" (19). The community leaders (i.e.,'hosts') decided to curtail hospitality: "If they chose to stay behind, they would not be admitted to the infirmary, nor receive medication and food" (19). Thus we see hospitality denied under the same justifications utilized in Kerr's analysis of the limits of hospitality: If a host lacked the resources to provide, was approached during a period of turmoil, or was "faced with other difficult circumstances" (Kerr 2002:329) the decision to turn away guests could be forgiven.
Following increased immigration to Holland, the Jewish communities in
Amsterdam were faced with a dilemma or paradox of duty. There was the duty to provide hospitality by welcoming these guests and providing them with the necessary amenities, yet at the same time it was felt that extending this welcome would stretch the community resources too thin, transforming hospitality into a perceived burden whence it would become difficult to provide for those already 'inside'. We can recall that this was indeed 78 one of the limits of hospitality stipulated in twelfth century England (when a host cannot afford to supply the guest with amenities to the extent that the host himself would then suffer or be without, the duty to provide hospitality is forgiven). Here we see these same stipulations appear in an eighteenth century Dutch-European context and in this latter case, the result being that the Jewish poor were sent from Amsterdam to Suriname. In
1748 a contemporary commentator, Issac De Pinto, justified the act of sending Jews to outside the geographic and symbolic territory of the 'host' with the statement: "The
[Jewish] Nation would have sunk of its own weight without migration to the colonies"
(Cohen 1991: 21). De Pinto wrote about his perception of the need to discourage further immigration to Amsterdam by refusing to support the foreigners. He wrote that: "To give to the Foreigner what must be given to the Brother is not charity: it is injustice and robbery" (21). We can see that hospitality becomes perceived as a fine balance and a continual effort towards equilibrium so that hosts and guests can get along 'peaceably'.
So those Jews who arrived from Europe were actually the unwanted guests of
Amsterdam, expelled by the Jewish community there. Interestingly then, the same unwanted 'guests' in Holland would become prominent 'hosts' in Suriname. Again, we see how across time and space, hospitality is a component of human territoriality and causes hosts and guests to alter.
4. Movement, Mobility, Freedom: The Early Days of Restricted Hospitality
79 There was no free movement in the early days of the colony of Suriname. There were strict rules for people arriving in or leaving Suriname. All passengers leaving the colony needed a valid permit. Exit permits were duly checked and recorded by a government official (Cohen 1991:12). Departures were as common as arrivals in the mid-late eighteenth century; 1771-1795 passenger lists show 311 departures and 332 arrivals. "Amsterdam, the most common place of origin, was also the destination of most departing passengers" (24). The motivation for those moving across these borders was economic, stimulating commercial activities between Holland and the Suriname Colony
(24). Of 311 departures from Suriname, 157 went to Holland in the 1700s (24).
In Suriname there was also a practiced defensive strategy against strangers. Far from Derrida's 'unconditional welcome', by the mid-eighteenth century any ship that passed the 'new' fort of Niew Amsterdam "on the corner of the Suriname and the
Commewijne rivers", without anchoring and showing its documents was to be shot at"
(13). In 1747 all departing ships were required to have a pass from the governor. "An anonymous planter writing in the 1740s carefully noted all the rules and restrictions for passengers. Nobody could leave the colony without a passport for which one paid fl..7.10. All departing passengers had to show that they owed no taxes and to have their passes properly approved" (13). These security concerns established by the colony were largely economic (poll taxes) (13) but also allowed the government in Paramaribo to deny access to any "undesirables" (14).
Recalling the Laws and Limits of Hospitality 80 We have seen that one of the limits of hospitality stipulated in twelfth century
England could be met when a host cannot afford to supply the guest with amenities to the extent that the host would then suffer or be without. We see this stipulation appear again in a European context as the Jewish poor were sent from Amsterdam to Suriname in the eighteenth century. Hospitality becomes perceived as a fine balance requiring continual effort towards equilibrium. Practiced limits of hospitality were responsible for Jewish planters arriving in Suriname during the eighteenth century; its contentions and dilemmas were evident in the political, social, and economic discussion which took place amongst
Jewish 'hosts' in the 'mother country' (Holland) and the end result of their considerations on the matter of hospitality resulted in a sizable Jewish migration to Suriname during the early years of the colony.
Yet an interesting claim to territoriality is made in an 'Historical Essay on the
Colony of Suriname' written by David Nassy in 178857. The author defends 'host-hood' for the part of the Jews in Suriname and his proposal indicates the fluidity with which host-guest subjectivities can alter or be altered:
Do not Jews, rich or poor, always remain in the places in which they have once settled? Does not the contrary happen everyday with the individuals of other groups? The latter, as soon as they find themselves a little better off, go to spend their money in their fatherland.. .it is only with the Jews who are indeed the true citizens and inhabitants of Surinam.. .(Cohen 1991:259).
Nassy, David (1788) Historical Essay on the Colony of Suriname. Translated by Simon Cohen and edited by Jacob R. Marcus and Standly F. Chyet. Cincinati, NewYork 1974. 81 So we see again, the transition from perceived guests to hosts moving across the spatial and temporal plane. The claim for who should be the 'rightful hosts' is justified in this instance through the conjuring of a sense of commitment to place (i.e., the Jews were the 'most committed' to the place Suriname, and should therefore become rightful
'hosts'/owners, overseers, landlords, masters etc.).
Slavery in Suriname: Can slaves be 'guests'? Can slaves be 'hosts'?
I suggest that the relationship between Suriname and the Netherlands can be understood in terms of hospitality. Hospitality issues were unavoidable from the 'first contact' between Dutch colonialists and natives in the 1600s. Hospitality continued to be at play and shown to be a mutable balance between colonialists and the Africans they enslaved and brought to live amongst each other in Suriname58 shortly after. Between
1667 and 1826 an estimated 300,000 to 325,000 Africans were sold to planters at auction in Paramaribo59. By the mid-eighteenth century, Suriname's population stood at approximately 49,000, and ninety percent of that population was enslaved60 (Brana-Shute
1990:7). The percentage of African-born slaves in Suriname61 overall was high due to the
More figures: In 1684 the colony had 4200 slaves. Twenty years later 1705 there were 10,000, 60 years after that "some 50,000 dispersed over Paramaribo and 591 plantations" (Hoogbergen 1990:69) 59 Postma's (1990) numbers disagree with this figure, putting the number of slaves imported to Suriname between 1650 and 1830 at approximately 220,00. See: Postma (1990:186-212) 60 Anthropologist Richard Price notes a striking demographic in that "Between 1668 and 1823, some 300,000 to 325,000 African slaves were imported into the colony; yet at the end of this period the total black population of Suriname was only about 50,000." (Price 1976:9). 61 Among the slaves, about one-third of them were Loangas, originating from the area between Cameroon and Angola. An equal number came from the Goldcoast (Ghana), in Suriname these slaves were known as Kromanti. The Mende or Mandingo (from present-day Guinea, Sierra Leone, 82 death rate always being higher than birth rate and that most of the slaves brought to
Suriname were adult males. So in 1740, ninety per cent of the slaves were 'born foreigners' (Derrida 2000) - had been born in Africa - and in 1770 the figure remained at seventy per cent (Price 1976:12).
While most Africans remained as 'enslaved guests'62, some were able to negotiate their own freedom via the Laws of the host. Rosemary Brana-Shute notes that escape from the institution of slavery was never a very realistic option for slaves in the city because of the importance of staying with kin and loved ones. However, it was possible for those slaves to be freed by manumission63 wherein the slave owner would agree to relinquish their 'property'. Some plantation slaves were manumitted by their owners after helping to fight rebel slaves (Maroons), and were allotted a plot of land with which to subsist. Remarkably, a small number of other slaves were able to use the colonial courts
"to force both the law and owners to recognize limits to their (ab)use of enslaved kinsmen" (Brana-Shute 1990:123). These slaves challenged the slaveholder's right [the host's right] to control, own, and exercise power over the 'guest'. The guest thus challenged the host's hospitality and challenged its limits.
Also of note is that the conditions of hospitality in the capital of Paramaribo were notably tense. In Paramaribo there were more manumitted slaves than on the plantations; the ratio of free to enslaved was about 2:7 in 1787. A sign of tense hospitality is seen
Liberia, and Ivory Coast) accounted for twenty five per cent of the slaves and the rest were Papa slaves from Togo, Benin, and western Nigeria61 (Hoefte 2001:7). 62 The term is paradoxical to be sure, but intentional, to incite the paradoxical reality of hospitality itself 63 "Less than 1 percent of the slave population was ever freed in any year during 18th Century" (Brana-Shute 1990:123) 83 with the urban militia units that "patrolled all the urban neighborhoods every night, on guard against both rebellion and fires, whether set by accident or arson" (Brana-Shute
1990:121).
Among those free and enslaved persons living in urban Paramaribo64, hospitality must have been continually at play within the everyday and on the micro-scale. In the urban setting slaves often lived on the same property in small cottages in the backyard of their owner-hosts whose house was in front. Since Paramaribo was a small multicultural, multiracial, multilingual city in mid-late eighteenth century, we can imagine the malleability between hosts and guests: "Rich and poor free blacks and whites generally lived next door to each other; Whites in the street-front houses, slaves in the yards behind them" (Brana-Shute 1990:122). Once again, we see that hospitality is more than just metaphorical in this context but plays into very real relationships throughout Suriname's postcolonial history.
It should be clarified that even though White settlers numbered less than two per cent of entire population (Meel 1990:263) from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, these Whites were (as well) not an "undifferentiated monolith" (Brana-Shute 1990:122).
Europeans were divided by class and spoke a number of languages (although all spoke the Creole lingua franca, Sranan Tongo). Variation among the White population was keen: "The majority of Whites around late 1700s were probably Jews, not Christians, meanwhile Christians themselves were divided into a number of different Protestant
64 "In town, slaves were active in transporting, mostly by river, the various plantation products destined for export, and in skilled and semi-skilled jobs ranging from carpentry and wig-making to hawking goods along the streets and taking in laundry" (Brana-Shute 1990:121) 84 denominations" (Brana-Shute 1990:122). At that time also, the African or African- descended majority was neither Europeanized nor Christianized in the eighteenth century
(122).
Maroons
Other early Surinamers rejected enslaved-guesthood altogether and rebelled, taking flight to the interior where for two hundred years territorial wars of hospitality were at play. These 'rebel guests' were the Maroons, runaway slaves who escaped the inhospitable environment of the plantations to establish villages along interior rivers. By
1770 there were "already five to six thousand Maroons living in the jungle" (Hoefte
2001:8). After ongoing wars launched by colonial armies to destroy Maroon villages - and Maroon raiding parties against the latter - a peace treaty was established in 1763 (100 years before slavery was officially abolished in the colony). The flight and fight of the
Maroons is indicative of an inhospitable environment where tensions and troubles over host-hood surfaced in the form of resistance, refusal, retreat, and often violence.
'Guests', if one can call that of slaves, were uncooperative to their 'host's' demands choosing instead to escape the misery of life on the plantations and from the mercy of their paradoxical owner-hosts. They left. For two hundred years they left. Became hosts of their own, defenders of territory claimed as rightly theirs, fending off invader/enemies65. Finally, when a peace treaty was signed and the two battling sides
65 For more on the history of Marronage in Suriname see Brana-Shute 1990; Hoogbergen 1990; Price 1976 85 agreed that each was entitled to host-hood , each side agreed not to battle each other any longer, each side would have a respected 'right' to be host of their own domain.
An interesting paradox of hospitality with regard to this peace was that within the treaty, Maroon leaders agreed to turn away any escapees who arrived at their villages post-treaty. Thus, the existing Maroon tribes would have their territorial host-hood respected by the colonists upon the agreement that they would 'betray' the ethic of hospitality that is supposed to offer welcome to strangers who arrive at the door.
However, marronage by slaves continued without interruption even after the peace treaties in 1760s. The 'post-treaty' Maroons were known as the Bonis, and fought the
Dutch militias themselves in what became known as the 'Boni Wars' (most of the Bonis were either killed by Dutch militias or escaped into neighboring French Guiana). Today there are five major Maroon groups: The Djuka, Saramaccaner, Matuwari, Paramaccaner, and Quinti. Together these 'tribes' account for approximately ten per cent of the total population of Suriname, or between 40,000 and 50,000 individuals.
Hospitality and Indentured Labour in Suriname: The Transition of Guests to Hosts
When the Dutch abandoned slavery in 1863, a new labour supply was sought and found in the form of indentured (contract) workers from China, India, and Indonesia. All of these groups were set into conditions where hospitality - with its volatile relations
53 See Price (1983) for detailed history of the peace treaty process between Dutch colonial and maroon forces
86 between hosts and guests - was in motion. In the mid-1800s, 4,500 Chinese were contracted as indentured labourers . From 1863 to 1916, 34,304 East Indians were contracted to live and work in Suriname (of that number 11,700 returned to India once their labour contracts expired). And from 1893 until the start of the Second World War,
32,956 'Javanese' from Netherlands East Indies (mainly Java) arrived in Suriname (7,684 repatriated). These indentureds added even more plurality to the already existing groups of Maroons, Creoles (who are of mixed European and African ancestry), Amerindians,
Buurus69 and Dutch/Jewish planters. Together they formed a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, and class stratified society. Recall again that the White population never comprised more than two per cent of the total population of Suriname, yet just as with the relationship between colonialists and slaves, that between colonialists and indentureds was marked by intense host-guest complexity.
The planter class and its associated Dutch colonial apparatus were involved in the duty of hosting by way of the fact that indentureds had been 'invited' to Suriname for a temporary contract (usually a period of five to ten years) and subject to the laws of the colonial administration. The Dutch colonialists became 'hosts' through their institutional power and claimed territoriality. We will see this relationship questioned over time as
The Chinese group of labourers were predominantly Kejia-speakers from the eastern Pearl River delta in the south of China (Carlin 2001:223). 68 In Suriname, those of East Indian descent are known as 'Hindustanis', although some among them are Moslem. 69 Buurus were small-scale Dutch farmers. Several hundred Buurus migrated to Suriname during the mid-nineteenth century, and mainly supplied the city with produce grown on their periphery farm plots. Also, during the 1920s, Christian Lebanese entered sporadically and voluntarily. 87 many among those indentured would demand rights in their position as guests, thus beginning that transition through to host.
How did all of these groups negotiate hospitality amongst each other? What were the politics of territoriality like in Suriname, and how did these politics play out over time? For how long might the indentureds remain as 'guests' in a foreign land? What would, or what should the positionality of the contract labourer become after the contracts expired?
Hoefte notes that during the period of indentured labouring in Suriname "justice was dispensed the 'European way', adhering to European values and enforcing the rules of the plantation owners, thereby frequently ignoring native customs and traditions of the immigrants" (Hoefte 1990:139). Neglect or refusal to work could actually result in jail sentences for the indentured workers (Hoefte 1990:139) and this was enforced through the institution of the plantation hierarchy that consisted of directors and managers, overseers, and drivers. This illustrates the way that State sanctioned Laws can override the more subjective 'laws of hospitality', just as we saw exemplified previously in
Camus' The Guest, so that territoriality gets defined and enacted in (Western-European) juri-political terms to complement the power of the host.
However the indentured workers protested the conditions of hospitality provided by the host70. Specifically they protested their restricted movement and working
70 Protest took the form of desertion, resettlement and passive resistance (Hoefte 1990:140). Organized resistance to the working conditions on the plantations occurred through the form of mass uprisings by indentured workers in the following years: 1868,1873,1879,1884,1891,1902,1908. Then again during the 1930s (142)
88 conditions as set out by the colonial State (Hoefte 1990:143). Another illustration of belayed hospitality: Indentureds were not free to travel of their own will within the colony. The plantation workers needed a pass, administered by the director, in order to leave the plantation (Hoefte 1990:139). However, many of the guest workers would challenge the role and power of the host under this accord. One such challenge was the revolt of the worker-'guests' in 1884 at the estate Zorg en Hoop when forty-seven
Hindustani left the estate without permission. The protesters "blockaded the entrances of the estate and prevented the passengers of the boat with several officials and policemen from disembarking" (Hoefte 1990:143). Thus the 'guests' challenge the 'hosts' and the lines get blurred. Derrida indicates in the following passage how the host-guest relationship is contested:
It's as z/*the master, qua master, were prisoner of his place and his power, of his ipseity, of his subjectivity (his subjectivity is hostage). So it is indeed the master, the one who invites, the inviting host, who becomes hostage - and who really always has been. And the guest, the invited hostage.. .becomes the master of the host. The guest becomes the host's host. The guest (hote) becomes the host (hote) of the host (hote) (Derrida 2000:124-125).
For nineteenth and twentieth century Hindustani and Javanese workers, "a major object of protest was the poenale sanctie (penal sanction), a legal clause practically degrading the contract-laborers to a position of a population without legal rights" (Meel 1990:262).
Recall here Pitt-Rivers (1977) and Derrida (2000) in their discussions of guests
characterized as being without rights in the land of the host. The kinds of insurgencies that took place within the Asian labour force tended to be modest in scale; revolts did
89 take place but "failed to produce mythical leaders, memorable battles, not to speak of autonomous communities" (Meel 1990: 262). Unlike the rebellions of their slave-maroon counterparts, which produced all three of these aspects, indentureds did not launch an
'independence movement' per se. The situation between guests and hosts was tense, though not revolutionary. Instead of forming autonomous communities in the hinterland, these groups opted to work with the space in hospitality with room to maneuver - the threshold - and disrupt the status quo of the Dutch colonial authority as host.
This rupture is seen in the unrest among immigrant workers in the years 1868,
1873, 1879,1884, 1891,1902, and 1908. Each immigrant group (first the Chinese, later the East-Indians, then Javanese, and later, combinations thereof) staged revolts that would often become violent. In the 1900s indentured worker-guests began organizing for better working conditions, usually for higher wages and less work. Examples of organized protest groups included the Hindustani immigrant union called 'Vrijheid en
Recht' (Freedom and Justice) founded in 1911, and the Javanese organization called
'Tjintoko Muljo' (Miserable but Honourable) in 1918 (Hoefte 1990:148-149). The names of the organizations in themselves are telling of the strained sense of hospitality and shifting power relations between the 'guests' and 'hosts'.
The colonial planters seemed most aware that their position as 'host' was a precarious one: "Despite the usually harsh measures by the authorities, the white elite and the planters in particular perceived every sign of unrest as a major threat, for they did not know who to trust anymore" (Hoefte 1990:152). Not knowing who to trust illustrates the unsteadiness of hospitality: "Stereotypes to describe the contract labourers quite suddenly 90 could change from 'docile' to 'barbarous'. As a consequence, the white elite often overreacted with heavy-handed responses. It justified the use of violence and even bullets as self-defence in the face of mutiny" (Hoefte 1990:152).
Protest against their lack of freedom of movement in the colony operated to disturb indentured's 'fallback role' of submissive guest-without-rights, and also demonstrates that host-guest relations are a fine balance that the guest has the power to upset. Hoefte is quick to note however that: "such massive rebellions [among indentureds]...should be called 'conflicts' rather than 'struggles', since they "did not challenge the system of exploitation. Most of the revolts seemed spontaneous and had short-range goals, such as immediate amelioration of material conditions or a thirst for vengeance directed more at specific people than at plantation society in general.
Moreover, the rebellions were almost always isolated incidents" (Hoefte 1990:151). This illustrates how hospitality plays out 'on the ground', between individuals and according to small-scale interactions as opposed to larger systems (from which hospitality is seen to trickle down). Nonetheless, any such protest, even if isolated and lacking in an all-out
'revolutionary' intent, demonstrates an environment of tense hospitality and the potential for 'the step' where those roles of host and guest are ambiguous and contingent on change.
Language
Another issue relating to contentious hospitality between indentured 'guests' and colonial 'hosts' (and the law) is the matter of language; a matter that Derrida explores at 91 length in Of Hospitality (2000). He speaks about the hospitality issues that arise from language differences, from foreigners having to operate in a language not their own in the language of the host:
Among the serious problems we are dealing with here is that of the foreigner who, inept at speaking the language, always risks being without defence before the law of the country that welcomes or expels him; the foreigner is first of all foreign to the legal language in which the duty of hospitality is formulated.. .its limits, norms, policing, etc. He has to ask for hospitality in a language which by definition is not his own, the one imposed on him by the master of the house, the host, the king, the lord, the authorities, the nation, the State, the father etc. This personage imposes on him translation into their own language, and that's the first act of violence. That is where the question of hospitality begins: must we ask the foreigner to understand us, to speak our language, in all the senses of this term.. .before being able and so as to be able to welcome him into our country? If he was already speaking our language, with all that that implies, if we already shared everything that is shared with a language, would the foreigner still be a foreigner and could we speak of...hospitality in regard to him? (Derrida 2000:16-17).
During the period of indentured labouring in Suriname, where 'guests' of course arrived speaking the 'foreign' language of their places of origin, "immigrants experienced major communication difficulties [and] interpreters were often not reliable..." (Hoefte
1990:139). Interestingly, the matter of language is pervasive in hospitality pertaining to
Suriname and the Netherlands because, until the late nineteenth century when a formal policy of 'dutchification' was introduced with mandatory education for school-aged children, foreigner-guests (be they indentureds, slaves, or free Creoles) were not permitted to learn or speak Dutch, the language of the host. Language then, in this capacity was a way for the Dutch hosts to maintain control, a kind of linguistic territoriality. Resulting from this was both the persistence of the indentured's original 92 languages (Javanese, Chinese-Hakka, Hindi) as well as the creation of a new language, the lingua franca or creole language of Sranan Tongo (literally, meaning "Surinamese
Language"). Sranan became the lingua franca through which indentureds and colonials and slaves and former slaves communicated with each other.
This is a language distinctly Surinamese, formed and created by conditions that brought foreign-guests into one place; that is, formed and created out of the conditions of hospitality. The appearance of 'Sranan' may be among the first indications of a 'step' of hospitality where guests are becoming hosts. Creating a linguistic space in this way is perhaps a form of shifting territoriality at work. In terms of hospitality, we can surmise that the hybridization of language here implies a blurriness: A host can attempt to use language as a definitive marker of one's place, one's power position in relation to the guest. But when the guest's language begins to recombine with that of other guests and that of the host, we see blurriness between the host-guest distinction. Doesn't this allow for the guest to become a little bit more of a host? And likewise, would not the host succumb to a bit of the guest's suppressed power? In other words, the host' subjugation of the guest gives way. Thus allowing for the space to shift, host-guest identities are in flux; in fact there is a melding of the two identities, power dynamics become confused, challenged, and change shape: One becomes a little bit more like the other, and they form something new in a space unforeseen. Adding to this complexity is the fact that
Before 'dutchification' and the mandatory Dutch-based education policy came into effect, East Indians were even allowed to have their own separate schools, taught in Hindi, and could practice traditions specific to their culture. In particular, Hindustani marriage ceremonies were considered legally binding under Dutch colonial law. 93 Sranan Tongo would give way to the formation of other Creole languages, such as
Sarnami (Suriname-Hindi), and Surinamese-Javanese, and this creates further flexibility.
Flux Capacity
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, relations of hospitality between worker-guests and owerseer-hosts were strained. Hosts had to go to great lengths to maintain their privileged position as such (as we saw enacted through the law, penal sanctions, language policies) and there was often a degree of paranoia on the part of the
Dutch planter class about the possibility that their role as hosts could be overturned. In the 1930s, with the support of certain radical leftist writers and leaders in the
Netherlands, Suriname workers (in Suriname) organized the Surinaamsche Arbeiders en
Werkers Organizatie (Suriname Labourers Organisation SAWO). At that time there was a great deal of uneasiness and unrest between guest-workers and their host-bosses. While
Hoefte notes: "On balance, the popular protests of the early 1930s were important, yet they never profoundly threatened the stability of the established order" (Hoefte
1990:150). Nonetheless, the same author writes: ".. .the staff at Marienburg [plantation] lived in great fear since one labourer apparently had said that if the Javanese would come to power no white man would stay alive" (Hoefte 1990:150).
Because the Dutch came from Holland and the slaves and indentured labourers from various other localities in the world, all were foreigners at some point in time.
Recalling territoriality, one could suggest that the 'host', "the one who holds the keys"
(Derrida 2000) becomes determined and most easily recognizable as one who has the 94 power. In this case, violence of colonial power and brute force and oppression indicated that the Dutch were 'hosts' during the colonial period. Simply by proclaiming it so - and by having the force and systemic mechanisms to back it up - by making themselves hosts as owners and 'rightful' overseers of the land and all its products, the Dutch colonialists became so. The Dutch were in control by restricting the autonomy of the guests; they were the hosts-by-force. Holland appropriated for itself a place to welcome an other, be they slaves or labourers, and dared to become hosts, "dared to insinuate that one is at home [in Suriname].. .welcoming the other in order to appropriate for oneself a place"
(Derrida 2002:356). Through the law, language, and its accompanying violence, a hospitality of "...substitution, trauma, persecution, and obsession" was taking place
(364).
All of this tension highlights what underlies hospitality: The volatility of hospitality itself and the possibility that the 'guest' may usurp the 'host'. Soon we will see a demonstrated transition, a 'step' of hospitality formally expressed through the independence movement, although this step would still have aporic qualities in the aftermath. Akin to Derrida's writing on hospitality, and also Camus' underlying tension with the prisoner-guest, there is a threat of violence inherent in the practice of hospitality, and this is a risk that the host opens his/her self up to upon the welcome. The Asian indentureds were labourers, but fit the category of 'guest' in hospitality since the host
(those Dutch colonialists) claimed themselves as such through territoriality. Those hosts afforded 'welcome' via the invitation to come to Suriname, and with the provision of lodging, food, 'safety' and their temporally limited contract (of five to ten years to stay in 95 Suriname). Even during the formal period of indenture (just as in slavery before it), there was the possibility for 'the step'. Agitation and organization among the guest workers
(and that of the slave workers before them) marks the beginning of the 'step' that would be realized with independence.
Furthermore, when the labour contract expired and an indentured was given or sold a plot of land to call his or her own, would that former indentured not become a host? As time went on, expiration of the labour contract resulted in the various labour groups tending to settle in the areas, districts, and vocations they had come to know during indentureship. Hindustanis became important entrepreneurs in the agricultural and commercial sectors and were concentrated in the districts of Nickerie, Saramacca, and
Suriname (central). The Javanese, after their labour contracts expired, continued working as small peasant farmers in Commewijne. The Chinese became merchants in the city.
Creoles worked as farmers in districts of Coronie and Para, in the industrial sector in districts of Para and Marowijne, and in government jobs on Paramaribo (Meel 1990:263).
This carving out of space - stratification loosely along ethno-occupational lines as workers began to "settle in" to 'their' geographically marked pockets - cultivates ground for a making of the nation. As they "settled in" (i.e., found in themselves in a situation where it was no longer felt apt or appropriate to remain marked as a guest), residents would co-opt the politico-juridical terms of hospitality used to legitimate host-hood during the preceding three hundred years of colonial rule. It was nearing time for some
"guests" to become "hosts".
96 Suriname's Independence Movement
In more recent manifestations of hospitality in Suriname, particularly during the latter half of the twentieth century, ethnically divided groups jostled for power in the political realm as political parties were formed along ethnic lines. Who would 'win' the power of territoriality and thus become host? The struggle to become the 'new host', to replace the Dutch, would follow ethnic lines: Political proponents of the cause were part of the Creole majority of the Surinamese parliament, the NPS. Fearing "Creole Rule", the leading Hindustani party did not initially support the proposal for an independent
Suriname (Chin & Buddingh' 1987:27). A causal factor of independence was the emergence (in previous decades) of a nationalist ideology among afro-Surinamers living in the metropolis (Oostindie 1990:231).
A formative proponent of Surinamese nationalism was Anton De Kom (1898-
1945). He was born in Paramaribo, a son of farmer Adolf de Kom and Judith Jacoba
Dulder. His father was born a slave. As happened often, his family name is a reversal of
the slave owner's name, Mok72 and this is symbolically another interesting oscillation of hospitality. In 1934 De Kom wrote Wij Sloven van Suriname (We Slaves of Suriname), a
book that was ahead of its time as the first to call for the end of colonial relations and
imperialism in Suriname. As were so many literary and nationalist works by Surinamers,
the book was written in the Netherlands. Unlike many of the nationalistic leaders to
follow him though, de Kom was a working class leader and acted as a 'common'
Surinamer, not just as a defender of the special interests of one ethnic group as would
72 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_de_Kom, retreived July 18, 2006 happen later when the nationalist sentiment finally took hold in Suriname proper in the
1960s and 70s. This first radical nationalist in the Netherlands was of lower-class black origins - Anton de Kom had migrated from Suriname to the metropolis in 1920. There he did voluntary military service for four years and then became a bookkeeper in The
Hague. A radical left-leaning anti-colonial, he hung out with Indonesian students and supported their nationalist movements. The Dutch government worried about his revolutionary ideas for Suriname. We Slaves of Suriname was the first anti-colonial toned book by a Surinamese writer and was fiercely anti-colonialist and anti-racist. De Kom was backed by the Dutch Communist Party and labeled as a communist agitator or,
'Soviet Creole', by the Dutch authorities (Oostindie 1990:239-240).
In 1932 de Kom and his Dutch wife and children took a boat to Suriname where he had attracted the support of British-Indian and Javanese workers. Surinamers began organizing for their collective rights as workers, and this resulted in social unrest. De
Kom, labeled as an instigator by colonial authorities, was arrested in Suriname and he and his family were shipped back to Holland (240). From Holland de Kom continued to advocate for the immediate independence of all Dutch colonies until his death in 1945 in a German concentration camp.
In the 1940s Suriname had a booming bauxite industry supplying the United
States with aluminum during wartime. The robust economy inspired confidence among
Surinamese nationalists with the idea of a self-sufficient, economically independent
Suriname. Anti-colonial concepts that developed amongst post-colonial subjects in
America and Europe were reaching the ears and minds of Surinamers in the diaspora. 98 Interestingly, nationalist sentiment for Suriname developed in the Netherlands - not in
Suriname - by Surinamese students studying abroad in the Dutch universities . After
World War Two, Surinamese nationalism among student groups in Holland was making increasingly strong impressions on those who associated with working-class immigrants in the Netherlands. At this time, there began a growing consciousness among Surinamers abroad that they belonged to culturally separate group from the ethnic Dutch. Yet after being exposed to anti-colonial ideas, philosophies, and decolonization theories, these students had yet to find solidarity amongst Surinamese in Suriname. Meel notes: "these students were irritated by the lack of commitment to Surinamese nationhood back in
Suriname" (Meel 1990:266).
Hospitality issues further influenced motivation for a self-conscious Surinamese movement: It seems the Dutch did not regard those Surinamese students in the
Netherlands as fellow countrymen. This sort of 'rejection' (indicating an us/them, host/guest distinction) surprised the Surinamese students who "had a high command of the Dutch language and could debate Dutch culture excellently74" (Meel 1990:266).
Instead, Oostindie notes, "they were regarded as foreigners and expected to have a culture of their own" (266). With the consciousness of being regarded as other, the
73 Oostindie (1990) notes the long history of Surinamese students in the Netherlands. 1947 a few dozen Surinamese were studying in Dutch universities; in 1952 just above 100 and some 430 in the mid-1950s. Up to Emancipation in 1863, the students had come almost exclusively from the white population. In the second half of the nineteenth century, more Jewish and lighter-skinned Afro- Surinamese elite were studying in the Netherlands (Oostindie 1990:236). 74 The historian van Lier, himself a pre-world war two representative of this group says: "Cultured mulattoes.. .tried by reading books and magazines to acquaint themselves as much as possible with current events in the mother country. The educated Surinamer's highest ambition was to travel to the Netherlands and to give his children a European education" (Oostindie 1990:236) 99 Surinamers then began "to translate their apparent separation into political and cultural concepts" (266).
'Our' Own Thing
The formation of three prominent Surinamese Marxist-Leninist inspired de colonization organizations took root during the post-war years: Ons Suriname (One
Suriname), Wie Eegie Sanie (Our Own Thing) and the Amsterdam wing of the
Surinaamse Studenten Vereniging (Surinamese Student's Union) were driving forces behind the birth of a Surinamese nationalist spirit. These were all Netherlands-based organizations and membership was comprised mostly by Creoles, or Afro-Surinamese. In other words, those who considered themselves hosts in the Netherlands but were then rebuked as 'other' and hence formed groups focused on Surinamese nationalism.
A trickling-down of the 'nationalist spirit' was transposed over to Suriname itself by those (few) elites who had studied in Holland and returned to Suriname, but the
National Party of Suriname (NPS) - comprised of lighter-skinned, middle and upper class
Creole members - was reticent to take up any platform that might upset the status quo75.
This held true through the decade of the 1950s, even after Queen Wilhelmina of the
Netherlands made a famous radio speech during WWII, promising political reforms and a new level of autonomy for the internal affairs of the colonies. Through the Dutch Statuut of 1954 Suriname became an autonomous part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. With
75 These were 'dutchified' Creole elites with high opinion of Dutch culture and privileged status within the colony-were supporters of Dutchification rather than propagators of any sort of anti- Dutch nationalism 100 this agreement Holland remained in control of the defense and foreign affairs of
Suriname, while the light-skinned Creoles continued to dominate representation in
Suriname's internally self-governing parliament.
We have seen that the white settlers numbered less than two per cent of the entire population (Meel 1990:263) during the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
These white elites were the members of Suriname's parliament that had been in effect since 1866 and for a time the white MPs withstood Creole aspirations for power (263).
However in the twentieth century during the interbellum period, light-skinned Creoles replaced the Dutch as the socio-economic elite - a transition Meel refers to as a
"cosmetic change of the guard". These Creoles held the white-collar jobs as civil servants, teachers, and journalists in Paramaribo. Because of their achievement of these influential positions and because of the higher formal education they had achieved in the
Netherlands, Creoles were able to win seats in parliament while the other ethnic groups remained in the agricultural sectors and under-represented in parliament, professional leagues, and schools of higher education (which did not exist in Suriname). Those Creole elites had been in effect 'Dutchified' through a pedagogical replica of curriculum taught in Netherlands schools. As such, they were schooled in Dutch history, geography, language and culture76. In terms of political strategy, a "divide and rule" approach was in effect to set the middle and upper class light-skinned Creoles apart from the other classes and ethnicities in Suriname and thus keep the 'dutchified' group in power (Meel
76 It should be clarified that not all Creoles in Suriname were 'elites', but that the small elite class that did exist in Suriname were indeed identified as (lighter-skinned Afro-Surinamese) Creole. 1990:264). This kind of strategic take-over for host-hood can be seen as the cultivation, implication, and application of 'manners'; those who became 'dutchified', enacted or expressed characteristics of 'dutchification' were presumably less likely to offend the status quo, more likely to defend it, and more likely to 'fit in'. For with the practice of manners and decorum establishes a precedent of power. It establishes power relations by
'convincing' people to act according to the best and most established and acceptable mode of 'manners' to maintain or achieve status . One who demonstrates decorum in interactions may maintain the power [ie., more of the power] inherent within relations.
For example, one who 'looses control' and behaves out of order with established manners looses power. Ironically, the one who attempts to display the most power by acting out of order with manners, is the one that is interpreted as loosing it.
This ethno-political power hierarchy held until 1948, the year that universal suffrage was introduced in Suriname. To the disappointment of the influential Creoles who enjoyed the status quo and the political power it gave them, the 1949 election saw many Hindustani, dark skinned Creole and Javanese elected to parliament. If the Creole politicians wanted Suriname to achieve the internal state of autonomy promised to them by Queen Wilhelmina, they had to agree to extend the vote to all economic and social stratums. From then, the power of the Creole elite gradually declined and the balance of power shifted to include a wider range of ethnicities. This marks the formation of
'pluralism' in Surinamese politics; the formation of political parties clearly followed
77 Also see Ivy (1995:6-7) in reference to Homi Bhabha's "complex mimicry" on the part of the colonized (which can 'never succeed in effacing difference') and for which Dutchification is surely part of. 102 ethnic-racial lines, which themselves followed geographic lines and labour divisions reflective of the country's colonial past (i.e., Creole parties were largely urban-based,
Javanese had a rural/peasant following, the Hindustani parties were largely based in the agricultural districts, though they were becoming more urbanized and quite rapidly climbing the socio-economic ladder). Political parties based on ideology, faith, or a social program did not have a chance - these in fact did not make it far off the ground.
Ethno-racial pluralism was the main basis of Suriname's political parties and remains so to this day. For the past thirty years, the main political parties have been: Nationale
Partij Suriname (NPS) - Creoles; Vooruitstreven.de Hervormings Partij (VHP) -
Hindustani; Kaum Tani Persantuan Indonesia (KTPI) - Javanese. Nepotism, patronage, and corruption have been widespread since welfare of one's own racial group has been the priority. "In Suriname most politicians believe national interests to be subservient to ethnic interests" (Meel 1990: 265).
However there was one political party to endorse a platform for Suriname's national independence and this was the Nationale Beweging Suriname (NBS - Suriname
National Movement) formed in 1961, which later became the Partij van de
Nationalistische Republiek (PNR - National Republic Party). Its leader was Eddy Bruma,
a Netherlands educated Creole and architect of the nationalist-oriented writer's collective called Wie Eegie Sanie (Our Own Thing), which also began in the Netherlands. The PNR was the "first party to reject ethnicity as a major basis of political organization" (Meel
1990:268). It appealed to young, nationalist-minded, 'educated' voters. Though the PNR
would eventually be influential in inspiring a sense of cultural independence among 103 Surinamers, it failed to gain widespread political support. Many Surinamers found the speeches of PNR members too 'high-brow', too abstract, and lacking in practicality.
Furthermore, though it tried to be an ethnically diverse party, its leaders were still identifiable Creoles whose discussions of topics such as Black history alienated members of other ethnic groups, in particular the Hindustani and Javanese in Suriname (269). So we see the expanding membership of the Suriname 'host', yet still differentiation amongst its 'hosts'.
Nonetheless, from the 1960s the idea of 'Surinamese unity' begins to develop within Suriname itself, as a sort of idealistic archetype of what Suriname should or could become. This is something that seems to have been expressed more effectively through literary realms than through formal political platforms (such as the PNR). Thus a
"cultural nationalism" rather than a political one is most recognizable in this period .
Authors and poets of Surinamese origin who lived and wrote in the Netherlands were
astute in forming and announcing the idea of a 'Surinamese oneness' as something that
should prevail over ethnic power struggles. The concept was that Surinamers should
consider themselves as a unified whole, and become hosts of their own domain. The final
stanza of Dobru (Robin Ravele's) 1965 Wan Bon (One Tree) poem offers an example:
Meaning that a sense was developing amongst the people, of a kind of unity which aligned those individuals who lived within the territory so that there was a 'togetherness' and bond based on historical trajectory , which formed something, but which did not express itself 'at the polls' (in the political sphere), or as a consciousness of a Nation, and remained more of a 'structure of feeling'. Contrast with Marilyn Ivy's analysis of Japan with its "inextricable linkage of culture with the idea of nation" (Ivy 1995:3); such a linkage had not yet formed in Suriname in the 1960s. 79 see Rutgers 1998:548 104 Wan Sranan One Suriname someni wiwiri so many hair types someni skin so many skin colors someni tongo so many tongues Wan pipel one people
Another poetic illustration of the plea for Surinamese unity and a vision for all to become one host comes from the Surinamese poet, Shrinivasi. The poem "Lokroep" [The
Call] from his 1968 collection Pratiksha (1968) ends with:
Zie, ik heb uw lokroep Behold In de droom both in the dream En ook daarbuiten and beyond I have seen Helder en begrijpelijk vernomen your call, clear and En in een heldergroen visioen comprehensive De Negers en de Hindostanen and in a lucid green vision De Indianen en de Javaan the Africans and the Hindustanis De Blanke en de Libanees the Indians and the Javanese De Syriaan en de Chinees the Whites and the Lebanese En al de andere continenten the Syrians and the Chinese Geboekt zien staan and all the other continents Op de monsterrol van het leven inscribed Onder een naam. (25-26) in the gigantic scroll of life under a single name.
The poem suggests the single name "Suriname" as a single, unified 'host'.
Finally, from prose is the story Atman (1968) by the Surinamese novelist Leo
Henri Ferrier. The main character in the story envisions "how the unity of the
Surinamese people must be achieved. The unity stems from the individual who views
social unity as almost originating in his own body" (Rutgers 1998:547): Everything, in no particular order, East Indians, African, Javanese, had to attract my attention. That I, no matter how, wanted to think in terms of a totality, one totality that is after all formed by everyone in Suriname, a totality that exists as one and not as not-one.
...Act in accordance with your conscience. Know your Atman. Only then will you truly be able to participate in the lovely harmony of life in Suriname where everyone is one, truly one Become one with all that is within yourself and you will be able to see an even higher peace.... Search for love in all human beings. You will certainly find this because all human beings are and belong to that great Oneness that is. Be conscious of the mortality of your body that is sometimes black and then again white, of your hair that can be kinky and also smooth. (Rutgers 1998:165-66; 171-72)
Rutgers explains: "In Atman, Ferrier narrates his protagonist's discovery that he is descendant of the indigenous Indian, but also of the African, the Asian, the European. In the diversity of the modern Suriname individual, he discovers his strength. He does not long for an "elsewhere" that he nostalgically glorifies but is home in the region where he now lives. There lies his destiny, his future" (Rutgers 1998:547).
The Surinamese independence movement that germinated in the Netherlands, and
later grew in Suriname, envisioned an idealistic perceived oneness. 'Suriname' was
conceived as something transformed into a cultural, and later a geo-political, host that
would in effect make the former host - the Dutch - guests. This is how poet Robin
Ravales recalls the desire for transition in his 1969 autobiography:
We had the intention to build a new society. One in which no exploitation of labourer and farmer by a small group of money-owners would occur. A nation that would be independent. Not only politically, but also culturally and economically. We would not allow our country to continue to be an appendage of Europe. We wanted to identify with our own people. We would no longer let the ideals of the young be focused on the mother country.. .we knew it would not be simple to conquer a system of dogmas already possessing the minds of people for three centuries (Meel 1990: 260).
His statement, in particular: 'we would not allow our country to continue to be an appendage of Europe' is akin to the metaphoric severing of host and guest, definitions of which we saw from biology and medicine, where one lives off of the other. Ravales' statement suggests the legacy of hospitality between Europe and Suriname as something pervasive ('we knew it would not be simple to conquer a system of dogmas already possessing the minds of people for three centuries'). When expressed through poetry, prose, and autobiography, the idea of "cultural independence" for Suriname is expressive of hospitality's 'step' in process. We see expressed a desire to be autonomous as a whole and culturally unified within, for a country to stand in the face of itself as it's own
'imagined community' (Anderson 1991).
At the same time, across oceans, there is an attempt to limit or downplay the boundary between Surinamers across the diaspora. See Orlando Emanuels' untitled poem80 (below) which cautions against the possibility of betrayal on the part of those emigrating to Holland, and so advises against 'defiling' one's self by 'turning one's back on this country', towards what Surinamese writer Bea Vianen describes sarcastically as
"the paradise of Orange" (van Kempen 1998: 640). Orlando's plea is for those leaving
For original version written in Sranan, see Getuige a decharge (1987; Paramaribo: De Volksboekwinkel, 1991). Translated by Monique S. Pool for Callaloo 21.3 (1998) 626 107 to remain hospitable, in a sense, to not slam the door on the way out, to remember one's
'roots', and to not sever them completely:
When before long you bid us farewell is it fare well of pocket you're running after neglecting fare well of soul*
you bid us farewell dumping worn out shoes a dirty towel ragged shirts, beware of the dustbin collecting also memories and love.
Don't defile yourself turn not your back upon this country walk softly when before long you bid us farewell.
CHAPTER FOUR
MIGRATION AND THE TIES THAT BIND
108 1. From the Open Door to Reluctant Hosts
The goal of this chapter is to demonstrate that regardless of the rate of change, that movement of hospitality as people cross over from Suriname to Holland and vice versa, is part of a "continuous process of composition and decomposition...becoming compelling signs of a past, like the present, where things fall apart and where everything, including power itself is constructed and transient" (Stewart 1996:96). In many ways hospitality has been imperfect and strained between Surinamers and Netherlanders in the
Netherlands. In some instances, Surinamers who immigrated to Holland felt less than welcome as the hosts that their citizenship legally made them. They were often perceived to be foreigner-guests in the 'new' environment of Holland. Many Surinamers chose for
Holland because it was an extension of the historical relationship that they knew as part and defining of their selves. They chose for the prospect of a perceived better life in
Holland than in the fledgling nation of Suriname. However on the part of the Dutch citizenry in the Netherlands, and even among some Surinamers who were firmly established in the Netherlands, this was a strained welcome. "They think it's an easy life in Holland", one Surinamese man living ten years in the Netherlander said to me "They think I've 'made it'. Well, I have made it, but it wasn't easy. It is very difficult, at first, to live in Holland. I struggled and it's not like here, the culture, the environment, everything is different! It takes time...years, to become established there". Thereafter, in the tourist shops in Paramaribo, I would see t-shirts being sold with the inscription: "I may live in Holland but I'm still SurinameseT
109 We have seen how since colonial times Surinamers traveled to the Netherlands for education and for work - sometimes involuntarily as house servants, and later by choice
(mainly for education). In the twentieth century,
Surinamese reception by their Dutch 'hosts' was "uneven and informed by white racism, cultural snobbery, job discrimination and European misunderstanding of tropical peoples from the imperial preserve. Yet, Surinamers flourished with their own dance halls and clubs, distinctive language, culture and dress, and, by mid-twentieth century, nationalist sentiments found expression in poetry, prose and political discussion groups (Brana-Shute 1990:4).
Brana-Shute contends that "the connections between the two lands and people, to the discontent of some Surinamers and Netherlanders, are deep and indelible" (Brana-Shute
1990:4-5). Even in 1975 when independence was finally granted to Suriname,
"Independence was the culmination of apolitical and cultural awakening, yet...this did not lead to a massive rejection of Dutch culture or language" (Hoefte and Meel 2001: xv).
Hoefte and Meel note the special relationship between Suriname and the Netherlands as a major continuity from the seventeenth century until today. However, a major discontinuity arises in the twentieth century as Suriname changed from an immigration to an emigration society (Gowricharn & Shuster 2001:155). Before the early twentieth century, life in Holland was almost exclusively reserved for the Surinamese upper class.
As we have seen, those who could afford to send their children to the Netherlands to receive a university education would often do so. The historian R.A.J, van Lier, himself a pre-world war two representative of this group says: "Cultured mulattoes.. .tried by reading books and magazines to acquaint themselves as much as possible with current
110 events in the mother country. The educated Surinamer's highest ambition was to travel to the Netherlands and to give his children a European education" (Oostindie 1990:236).
However, after the Second World War this demographic began to change. Some
Surinamese were recruited to work as labourers in Holland during post-war reconstruction. More often than that, Surinamers went of their own accord with the money they earned in the bauxite industry, which had led to an expansion of the middle class. From this point on, emigration to Holland was not reserved for the wealthy Creoles only, but included many ethnicities and socio-economic stratums. Furthermore,
Surinamese relatives already living in the Netherlands would often help finance the passage (as continues today).
Because Surinamers held Dutch citizenship before 1975, they had no problem entering the country. Owing in part to this secure legal status (and uncertainty about the future of Suriname) a major exodus of Surinamers occurred in the years leading up to
Suriname's independence and shortly thereafter. As one author puts it: "From the late
'60s on, there was no stopping it: Emigration burst forth in its full magnitude...for many people it was not a question of deciding to emigrate, but of deciding to stay!" (Bovenkerk
1982:36). Close to 40,000 Surinamers immigrated to the Netherlands in 1975 alone81.
Yet another wave of immigration - consisting of 30,000 individuals (Niekerk
2004:161) - to the Netherlands occurred between 1975 and 1980. This wave was largely incited because the special agreement between Suriname and the Netherlands that gave
81 The Hindustani and Javanese-based political parties were opposed to Suriname's independence when the plans were first announced by the Creole dominated government in 1973. Thus most of the emigrants between 1973 and 1975 were of East-Indian or Indonesian descent (Bovenkerk 1982:36). Ill Surinamers free movement between the two localities was set to expire. From 1980
Surinamers would require a visa to enter Holland and this made things much more difficult for those Surinamers who wanted to move to, or even visit, the former metropole82.
For a small society of roughly 400,000 people, the 'exodus' to Holland was a major event in Suriname's social and political (and economic) history. Ramsoedh describes it like this: "Tens of thousands of Surinamese responded to the proposed independence with quiet panic and by fleeing to the Netherlands. By November 1975, some one hundred thousand Surinamese, roughly one quarter of the total population of
Suriname, were living in the Netherlands." (Ramsoedh 2001:101). This is critical for understanding why since independence Suriname's ties with the Netherlands have remained so tangible. Due to the relatively large number of Surinamese who would move to Holland, in van Pitou's words: "Suriname has remained strongly focused on the country that moulded it in the colonial period, probably even more than other independent countries in the Caribbean" (Van Pitou 2001: 46).
With the move towards independence, Surinamese of every social stratum moved to Holland. This changed the dynamic between "hosts" and "guests" and the way that
Surinamers were perceived and received. In fact, van Niekerk says that by the time
Surinamers began to arrive en masse in the Netherlands in the 1970s, their reception had
Migration to the Netherlands has been continuous but modest in scale since 1980 (Niekerk 2004:161) 112 drastically soured "Attitudes towards the new arrivals became more negative, not to say hostile" (162).
An article by Amersfoort and Surie (1987) suggests that, during the 1970s, the
Dutch were reluctant hosts "taken by surprise" by the waves of Surinamese immigrants to the Netherlands prior to 1980. Not only were Dutch authorities unprepared for the number of Surinamese newcomers arriving; once there, the Dutch government did not expect those foreigner-guests to stay. It seems the Dutch hosts anticipated a significant rate of return among the Surinamers in Holland and also, supposed that it would be possible to stimulate such a return83. They were not expecting to come face to face with hospitality's 'step'; potentiality that guests might stick around and transcend from guest- hood into host-hood. Many Surinamers made the move to the Netherlands out of anticipation of the 1980 visa requirement, which they knew would make mobility more difficult. However the forecasts of the Dutch authorities grossly underestimated the number of expected immigrants. The Central Office of Statistics (CBS) "supposed that during the period 1975-80...migration from Suriname would mainly consist of between
2000 to 3000 persons coming temporarily to the Netherlands for educational purposes... and a dwindling number of persons who came to settle with relatives in the
Netherlands...The immigration of 18,000 Surinamese in 1979 and 1980 came, for them at least, as a complete surprise" (Amersfoort and Surie 1987:174).
On balance, in opinion polls a high percentage of the Surinamese said they eventually intended to return (56% in May 1974, 52% in Dec 1975, 53% in Oct 1976) although the actual return was slight around 1975 and ceased after a few years (Amersfoort and Surie 1987:174-75) 113 Even though the Surinamese would constitute only two per cent of the total population of the Netherlands84 (Niekerk 2004:161-162) the reception of these
Surinamese migrants was 'soured' when they arrived en masse in 1970s. Authors attribute this cool hospitality to the changing socio-economic backgrounds of many of the migrants, coupled with an economic recession that was hitting the Netherlands right at the time of this sudden influx of Surinamers. The 'new' Surinamese were not the educated middle class, "Dutchified" Creoles of earlier years. In addition to including migrants of 'lower-class' backgrounds, the 'step of Independence' waves included
Surinamers who were 'less dutchified' (less familiar with Dutch language and culture) than the earlier migrants tended to be. In other words, the new migrants were perceived to be more distant, less like the host, and more other. In an interesting study of alterity however, the "ethnic Dutch were found to perceive less distance to the Surinamese than to the Turks and Morroccans [living in the Netherlands]" (Niekerk 2004:167)85.
According to Niekerk (2004), because of Holland's economic crisis, new immigrants and visible minorities were perceived to be a strain on the welfare state.
Unemployment rates were high and economic restructuring was taking place, and somewhat negative attitudes towards Surinamers developed. In this sense, the timing of
Surinamese migration was unfavourable: "Unemployment was rising overall in the population but hit the Surinamese immigrants particularly hard. By 1979 one quarter of
According to the Dutch Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, people of Surinamese descent are either born in Suriname or in the Netherlands, with the mother born in Suriname. 85 In an interesting correlation, the Surinamese now occupy a socio-economic position in between the Turks and Morroccans and the native Dutch (Niekerk 2004:163). 114 the Surinamese labour force was unemployed; and this was five times that of native
Dutch population"86 (van Niekerk 2004:162).
On an everyday level, the degree of integration or acceptance of Surinamese migrants to Holland was explored by the anthropologist Philomena Essed (1990). Essed interviewed fourteen Netherlands-based Surinamese women about their experiences with racism and living in the Netherlands. The interviews were conducted during 1981 and
1982 and are representative of young Surinamese women in Amsterdam: "The majority are working-class women, about half of whom work as nurses, either for the elderly or in hospitals... Others are enrolled in college or have just graduated" (Essed 1990:5). In terms of the racial and ethnic origins of the Surinamese women, they described themselves as "Creole," "mix" or "mixed," "Hindustani," "Negro," or "just Surinamese"
(5). This is what one Netherlands-Surinamer had to say about her experiences with ethnic Dutch in the Netherlands:
They act as though they don't discriminate. But all the while they're discriminating like mad. It may be with a smile and real nice words, but if you listen well and see where it's leading, you see the discrimination. I'd rather a Dutchman say it straight out: 'You can't go here and you can't go there.' Then I know it and I'll fight back.
But instead they say: 'Sure, come right in.' Then, once you're there, they treat you like shit! (Essed 1990:1)
From: Reubsaet, T.J. Kropman and L. van Mulier (1982) Surinaamse Migranten in Nederland. De Positie van Surinamers in de Nederlandse Samenleving. Nijmegen: Institute for Applied Sociology (pi28) 115 These are complex hostilities between 'host' and 'guest'. On the one hand, we see the 'limits of hospitality' coming up again (as examined in previous chapters): when the host can not afford to accommodate the guest, to the point where the host him/her self would suffer, the refusal to provide hospitality could be forgiven. However, who exactly is the host? Who has the right to be host? The Surinamese newcomers to Holland have
Dutch citizenship in-hand. Nonetheless it seems that there is more to the host identity than the passport, because even with official documentation, it seems the Surinamese may be deemed guests in light of the last Surinamer's expression. The words of Essed's informant imply a situation of belayed and ambiguous hospitality, something where the lines between guests and hosts are uncertain. Perhaps Hans Buddingh' summarizes an uncertain hospitality when he says that "relations between ex-colonies and their former colonizer are never easy, but the ties between the Netherlands and Suriname are particularly burdened with sensitivities, dilemmas and paradoxes" (Buddingh 2001:71).
2. Unity, Belonging, and the Decision to Become a Host in the Words of Surinamers
Surinamese nationhood was imagined out of Surinamese intellectuals, artists, writers, and workers collectives in Holland. In that environment, ideas were percolated with regards to anti-colonialism and questions as to the future of the people in that place called Suriname: How long could they continue under Dutch-rule? Wasn't it time to decide for them selves how their country would be? Wasn't it time for an independent, sovereign leadership? Couldn't the Surinamese become masters of their own house?
Hosts, where before they were made as guests? The way the transition took place, it 116 seems there was a consciousness among some that the Surinamese had already broken that mold of guesthood and were in transition to hosthood. Political independence was just the formal transition point - the threshold - where the Surinamese could no longer continue as a dependent appendage of Holland. While the goal was autonomy, a truly separate status would be difficult and ambiguous as so many Surinamers would move to
Holland. The shared past meant that another transition took place; as Surinamers could proclaim themselves hosts in their 'own land' (territoriality) with decisions to make about how to welcome and perform hospitality (literally, independence would grant Suriname the control over its own national defense and foreign affairs; the two main aspects that formally changed with the transition and were reasoned platforms for independence), they became guests in the other (Holland). Perhaps Surinamers were always guests in
Holland; despite the politico-legal aspect of having Dutch citizenship before 1975, there is also the question of cultural difference (combinations and variations of difference: language, ethnicity, religion, the idea of 'race', and so on). We will see how difference actually did play out over time, affecting Surinamer's acceptance as guests or hosts in
Holland by ethnic Dutch. In addition to this, 1975 was a pivotal step, which some
Surinamers imagined as part of a personal, as well as national, identity. In this we see a common refrain of "choosing for" Suriname or "choosing for" Holland expressed by
Surinamers in either local. Why should an individual feel such allegiances? I suggest that simple binary distinctions (host or guest; Suriname or Holland), simplify the confusion and ambiguity that comes from four hundred years of cross-migrations and also hide the aporia of hospitality. This chapter examines 'the step' of Suriname's political independence, which is merely a fraction of the recondite history of hospitality issues in
Dutch-Suriname relations.
3. November 24,1975
I have chosen November 24,1975 - the official date of Suriname's independence
- as the symbolic and material 'step of hospitality' (Derrida 2000) that takes place between Suriname and Holland. It is material because it becomes enacted through the
Law (legalities of citizenship), and symbolic for the way it plays out in the hearts and minds - and words - of Surinamers. We have seen the pervasive hospitality that characterized relations between people in Suriname and Dutch colonial representatives; rebellious slaves, the legal fight for manumission, the cultivation of a new 'Surinamese' identity, and the cultural variation maintained after people from other places and cultures arrived to populate the space. Hospitalities unfolded into a 'step' as Suriname gained greater forms of autonomy and eventually independence from Holland. The movement towards an independent Suriname was a transition out of a relationship that suggested the
Dutch colonials as 'hosts' and the Surinamese as 'guests', at least on Suriname soil. For doesn't the host maintain - as a duty - the rights and responsibilities over its own territorial affairs?
The host determines relationships with outsiders, defends if necessary, and may invite when called on or moved to do so. These are precisely the issues that Surinamers perceived to be at stake during the independence debate of the late 1960s and early 70s.
Those in favour of the movement wanted the foreign affairs and national defense of 118 Suriname to be in their own hands, not in the hands of the perceived foreigner (the Dutch state which oversaw the political affairs of Suriname from afar). The Surinamese thus invoked territoriality, which changed the dynamic between hosts and guests and caused many people to question, challenge, and 'choose for' identities within the transition.
Using the existing space that surrounded them - the geo-political borders and those longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates - the territory remained the same, yet the space was 'claimed' by another - a new 'host'.
The political 'step' of independence for Suriname meant a symbolic switch - a reversal of roles - wherein the Dutch became foreigners and guests in a foreign land. No
longer in control, no longer entitled to the title of 'host', the Surinamese people - the
former 'guests' - were now 'hosts'; autonomous, sovereign, and rightful owners of the
land, directing and determining the flow of goods and people who desire to cross its
borders. However there is still some confusion, a lingering trace, as "the reciprocity
between host and guest is thus transposed to a temporal sequence and a spatial alternation
in which the roles are reversed" (Pitt-Rivers 1977:109), it is not a neat and tidy switch
because of course, there is the matter of three hundred years of hospitality within and
amongst Surinamers and Netherlanders. We have the dialectical image of hosts and
guests, and the collection of Surinamers whose self and group consciousness created
nationalist spirit and ideology, usurping the host (the Dutch colonizers) in the dialectic
where roles are reversed.
Examining what is within this dialectic, particularly at the moment of the step of
hospitality, becomes interesting here; "a dialectics at a standstill, it presents the historical 119 object within a charged forcefield of past and present.. .It asserts the discontinuity of those rough and jagged places where the myth of history-as-progress breaks down and impacted objects reveal the cracks in its construction (Buck Morss 1989 as quoted in
Stewart 1996:96). This refers to Walter Benjamin's work on allegory, and operates here in regards to the tension of host/guest and Suriname/Netherlands when it is 'fashioned into a dialectical image'. The threshold of the dialectic becomes apparent in the step of hospitality, a phenomenon which is never actually 'seen' in the material sense, but felt through its absence: "Where thought comes to a standstill in a constellation saturated with tensions, there appears the dialectical image. It is the caesura in the movement of thought...it is to be sought at the point where the tension between the dialectical oppositions is the greatest" (Benjamin 1972:595 as quoted in Buck-Morss 1989:219 as quoted in Stewart 1996:96). Surely 1975 becomes this threshold, the point where independence - 'autonomy' - is gained, and the trace is felt in the absence or gap.
4. Anthem
Fellowmen arise! The Suriname ground is calling you. Where ever our ancestors came from, we must build up this country. Struggles have to be made, but we won't be afraid. God is our leader. During our whole lives until death We will fight for Suriname87
http://www.troon.org/suriname/anthem.html (accessed March 15, 2004) 120 Suriname's national anthem is an invitation to Surinamers to recognize and enact the call - almost the duty - to become hosts of their own domain. This is the English translation of Suriname's national anthem. According to one Suriname-focused website88, the anthem derives from a late nineteenth-century Dutch composition which was altered and converted to Sranan in the 1950s. Of relevance here to hospitality and dialectic is that Derrida writes on the subject of the host imposing a language on the foreigner, which: "imposes on him a translation into their own language, and that's the first act of violence. This is where the question of hospitality begins" (Derrida 2000:15).
By translating the national anthem into the Surinamese language, reforming the message, and reclaiming it as their own, the step of hospitality is transfigured (yet deferred, since the process of hospitality is perpetual). Here is an interesting intertwining of host-guest:
From Dutch language the anthem became indigenized, re-claimed, and taken-up as one's
'own'. The mutation of an anthem demonstrates how, once again, boundaries of hospitality can be transfigured, even cyclical; like Edgar Cairo's invented language89, where does one influence begin and another end? Here, hosts and guests are not really
separated but remain part of one another. Note also that the anthem invokes territoriality
('the Suriname ground is calling you'). Only a host has power to decide over territory,
and this is what the Surinamese independence movement was about - becoming hosts,
'master of the house' ('we will fight for Suriname'). The national anthem also invokes the idea of a Surinamese unity ('Where ever our ancestors came from, we must build up this
88 http://www.everyculture.com/Sa-Th/Suriname.html (accessed September 9, 2006) 89 see Chapter Five 121 country') reminiscent of that expressed by the early nationalist Surinamese poets; a transition which necessarily implies the 'other' in the formation of the self.
5. Becoming/Choosing 'for' Suriname
But perhaps most striking is the idea of becoming, expressed through the words of
Surinamers themselves as they experienced, or recall the experience of, the nation's independence from Holland. Surinamer Jennifer Simons expresses the idea, the process, of 'becoming hosts' this way:
I never left Suriname. On the day of Independence I was 23, and was studying at the medical faculty in Suriname. The day of Independence itself was a fantastic day in my life. Years earlier I had already realized that we could not continue under the flag of Holland. The differences were too great for that. We should determine our own destiny. The problem with South Africa90 made me open my eyes at that time.. .Independence was the beginning of the road to the formation of a nation (Jennifer Simons in Tijn 2000:47).
Notice that the speaker declares her position to 'choose for' Suriname: "/ never left Suriname" does not mean that she has never left the geo-political boundaries, but that her allegiance remained in and with 'Suriname'. And we can assume also that her statement ("I never left Suriname") refers intuitively against the alternate option, to move to, to 'choose for', Holland. Her memories express a sentiment of desire for national
Simons is referring to the international trade boycott that many countries chose to enforce against South Africa during apartheid. Holland did not choose to support the embargo, and so pre- independent Suriname could not legally support it either since it did not control its own foreign affairs under the 1954 Statuut. This became a flashpoint for many Surinamers (Simons clearly included) and thus a turning point in the decision by some individuals to support independence. Considering that Suriname's trading relationship with South Africa was virtually non-existent, this was truly a symbolic gesture on the part of Suriname to express anti-colonial solidarity and also the importance of its own expressed sovereignty. 122 self-determination and sovereignty for Suriname. It seems the theme of a transition from guests to hosts underlying the statement is personalized; it expresses a feeling of both personal (individual) and national 'becoming', and furthermore is understood in terms of historical trajectory.
"As a result of slavery, and because of our upbringing, we denigrated ourselves, because we wanted to be white.. .That day, 25 November 1975, was only the beginning.
To really give meaning to Independence has been the most important and most difficult task ever since" (Elfriede Baarn-Dijksteel in Tjin 2000: 44-45). Baarn-Dijksteel incites the historical trajectory that makes the decision to become 'hosts' so significant. Here again, the trace (Derrida 2000) is evident as an absence that defines a presence ('To really give meaning to Independence has been the most important and most difficult task ever since'). The year 1975 is noted by the speaker as a significant turning point representative of Derrida's 'step' of hospitality, where the trace of the colonial past in Suriname remains felt, where the colonizing 'hosts' of the past are absent and yet have a lingering presence
("As a result of slavery...we..."). Underlying this sentiment is the idea of presence and absence, and becoming a host in a context where the past continues to haunt. Becoming host entails a structure of feeling, ".. .the very tangled way people sense, intuit, and experience the complexities of modern power and personhood...[it] has everything to do with the character of power itself (Gordon 1997:194) (i.e., the power of hosting).
Surinamers faced with step of hospitality intuit the past history between Suriname and
Holland, the colonial past and the past of migration - into and out of Suriname - in the task of becoming host in light of this past. This becomes recognized as a structure of 123 feeling for the way that it "gives notice to the proceeding looming present" in a living and interrelating continuity (195).
6. Choosing for Holland
Still, during the 1970s there was the paramount question in the minds of so many
Surinamers in Suriname of whether or not to stay. The door was open, and the welcome seemed unconditional, for Suriname nationals to choose for life in Holland. And the decision was made by tens of thousands of Surinamers to immigrate to Holland. The impact of this mass migration was dramatic for Suriname's demography and would test the boundaries of hospitality between Suriname and the former 'mother country'. While the transition ('the step') of Surinamese nationalism and the year 1975 conceptualized
Suriname as a seemingly unified 'one' and a host to the former Dutch colonizer/host, the geo-politically sovereign Suriname was still economically dependent on the Netherlands.
Suriname has nearly always been on the receiving end of Dutch aid in order to meet its budgetary requirements, even during the days of the old plantocracy91.
This financial tie is one of the ties maintaining a relationship of hospitality between Suriname and the Netherlands; perhaps indicative of the power relations inherent in these 'ties that bind'. But a second and more pervasive tie stems from the result of the actual movement of people who decided to immigrate to the Netherlands around the time of independence, and the ongoing relations this maintains albeit
91 Of note though is the suspension of Dutch aid between 1982 and 1987, during the years of a military government, then again in 1990 - 1991 when army chief Desi Bouterse again took over and led a second military coup (Buddingh' 2001:85). 124 awkwardly. Moving across that border, they already had the same citizenship. But would they be 'foreigners', guests, or hosts in the Netherlands? For the receiving country, questions about foreigners are inevitably asked: Are they one of us? How are they different? What makes them the same? Are they safe? Are we safe? Do they have a 'right' to be here? There entails an oscillation between those imperfect duties of hospitality: Between an obligation to receive and a right to say 'no'. Or is this an aporia?
Since those Surinamese already 'belong', are citizens, and are already part of Holland.
What of the second and third generations born in the Netherlands? Are they to be deemed hosts or guests? And when those generations travel to Suriname, to which category do they belong? To illustrate the point, an Afro-Surinamese father, age 39, living in
Holland, told this of his thirteen-year-old son: "He doesn't know the first thing about
Suriname. If he went there, people would see him as a Dutch boy. But here in the
Netherlands, where he was born and raised, he's black. That's the problem for the second generation, the colour of their skin makes them different, people expect them to be different" (van Niekerk 2004:174).
Perhaps people expect them to be different because of an assumption about a
'different' past, about coming from a different place, a foreign place. Such an assumption elides the shared past between the two nations, Suriname and Holland. The irony is that it is because o/this shared past that identity becomes formulated, a structure of feeling is created, that is "a historical materialism characterized constitutively by the tangle of the subjective and the objective, experience and belief, feeling and thought, the immediate and the general, the personal and the social" (Gordon 1997:200). The boy's father reveals through his statement that the past looms larger and affects how people relate to one another - as hosts or guests - though the past remains visible, yet invisible.
At least misunderstood, it recovers the evidence of things not seen" (Gordon 1997:195).
We can understand hospitality as a series of transitions, which in effect attempt to give form to something that is ambiguous (hospitality and host-guest relations). When the
Surinamer immigrates to the Netherlands that Surinamer may be at first a foreigner there, then a stranger, towards a guest, and finally, perhaps, a host; then they are also in a position to invite and receive. This series of transitions, again, could take place within a brief matter of moments, or (more likely) over the course of many years. More questions arise: If, through the transition, those Surinamers in Holland were accepted as hosts, would they remain hosts in Suriname as well? Could they remain hosts in Suriname as well? In essence, could they be hosts in two places simultaneously? Or would they have to decide on where they 'belong'? Whatever the rate of change, all of this movement of hospitality, as people cross over from Suriname to Holland and vice versa, is part of a
"continuous process of composition and decomposition... becoming compelling signs of a past, like the present, where things fall apart and where everything, including power itself is constructed and transient" (Stewart 1996:96) and this is what this chapter is meant to demonstrate.
7. Back to Suriname: Coming 'home' for Independence
Testimonials by some more Surinamers demonstrate the complexity of these issues, of how and why one must decide where they belong, of the rhetorical inability to 126 belong to more than one place at once coupled with the actual impossibility of separation.
Herein is the confusion and ambiguity that hospitality entails. There were also those
Surinamers who had been living Holland, and returned to Suriname around the time of independence, specifically because of that reason. In a compelling version of her story,
Surinamer Chandra van Binnendijk demonstrates 'the step' that requires one to decide:
It was very intense at the passport control: there was a counter for residents, in other words: Surinamers, and a counter for foreigners. I did not know, by God, which counter I had to go to, so I just stood in the line for residents. I guess I did the right thing, because I eventually stayed in Suriname..." (Chandra van Binnendijk in Tjin 2000:58)
Elfriede Baarn-Dijksteel offers a more somber view of independence, its justification, significance, and magnitude for Surinamese self-awareness and the importance of the perception of creating Suriname-ness:
I was in Holland when the Independence movement got underway. I purposely chose to return to Suriname to have my first child there. At that time I was 7 months pregnant. I was young and did not realize the heavy task that had been put on our shoulders. It was not so much about running a country, but about finding each other..." (Tjin 2000: 44-45).
Baarn-Dijksteel would actually emigrate at seven months pregnant in order for her child to be born on the 'new' Suriname soil - impressive! It speaks of the importance that this 'changing of hands', that this 'step of hospitality' has both symbolically and materially in the hearts, minds, words, and actions of Surinamers. The speaker reveals that she wanted to belong, and wanted her offspring to belong to that perceived 'oneness'.
Certainly the move across an ocean back to one's native land to birth a child and, by correlation, celebrate and monument the 'birth' of a nation is a symbolic and material demonstration of 'the step'. She chose for a life in Suriname and chose to be part of that mysterious 'becoming' that is ephemeral but indicative of the pervasive hospitality. The desire to re-imagine one's self as a host, to shed the identity of a guest. Her action embodies what Avery Gordon describes as "that special instance of 'merging the visible and the invisible', the dead and the living, the past and the present - into the making of worldly relations and into the making of our accounts of the world" (Gordon 1994:24).
What's more, she enacted a return migration from the 'mother country', the former colonizer, while an unprecedented number of Surinamers were choosing the opposite. Herein lies an aporia pertaining to hospitality and host-guest identity formation: While some chose for life in Suriname, to change from guests in Holland to hosts in their own land, a vastly larger number of Surinamese decided to emigrate to
Holland. Surinamer Willy Alberga says "...and the great exodus to Holland began.
People left in droves because they were being incited to do so. Only at the last moment did we come together as a people..." (Tjin 2000:16).
In some ways all of the above statements indicate an urgency in the sense of a moment where one must decide on which line they will fall, which identity they will
choose for themselves. Choosing for Suriname meant becoming a guest in Holland, giving up Dutch citizenship, and becoming like a foreigner in Holland despite whatever
'roots' had been established there. John Pawiro:
Right after Independence, I chose for the Surinam Nationality. At that time I was living in Holland and had to finish my studies. That meant that until my return in 1977 I had to go to the Dutch Alien Registration Service every now and then to get a residence permit. But I did this with conviction! (Tjin 2000:23)
Not everyone who chose for a return migration were as convinced, or felt as strongly in their conviction to return, as Baarn-Dijksteel, Pawiro, and others. Chandra van Binnendijk also recalls her experience of traveling to Suriname from Holland just before independence, and how she met others on the plane for whom had not yet decided whether to 'choose for Suriname' or 'choose for Holland':
I came to Suriname to do fieldwork for my journalism study. There were only a few people on the plane. They told each other where they were going, and whom they would be visiting. I spoke with a man who had already been living in Holland for sixteen years, and asked him if he was going to stay. "Well, I'm first going to see how everything is going, because you can't go fishing without knowing if there are any fish there. First I'll toss in my line; if I get a bite, and catch something, I can stay" he said (Chandra van Binnendijk in Tjin 2000:58).
It is interesting how the man's narrative, his allegory about fishing, tossing in a line and seeing if he gets a bite buffers his decision. In this sense it is an instance of narrative fashioning "a gap in the order of things - a gap in which there is room to maneuver" (Stewart 1996:3). Here we see the gap between host and guest, and narrative is a way of configuring that space so that the gap is bridged. The allegory is useful, it affects actual life processes and decisions. He's going to 'test the waters' and fish for hospitality; perhaps see if he feels 'at home', welcome, and safe in his return to Suriname and if these factors of hospitality are there, if he 'gets a bite and catches something', he will stay. Then perhaps he'll have gone from host in Suriname to guest in Holland, back to guest in Suriname, and host again. 129 Choosing 'for' one place or the other appears to be a monumental decision in the lives of Surinamers. I am reminded of my time in the field in Suriname. Of a man I met in front of the old Fort Zeelandia in Paramaribo, an historic site where the Dutch defended the territory against seafaring invaders, and today's home of the Suriname
Museum, platform for cultural events, and the previous headquarters of Suriname's military government in the 1980s. The man was 73 years old. He asked me where I was from, said he had relatives in Canada, and he asked me whether I knew how old this fort was. He told me he had lived thirty years in Holland, and had returned to Suriname to retire. He wanted to lead a simple life, with a few chickens and a garden. He said he was waiting for his pension from the Netherlands. It seemed he'd been waiting a long time for this money that would afford him the ability to retire in his 'native land'. I returned to the Fort for two or three days consecutively after that, and every time, he was there; talking to tourists, tour guides, or just gazing out from under a tree. He advised me where to go to eat: "Don't go to the 'snack bar' (restaurant); they will charge you too much, it's only for tourists. Go to the Waterkant where the locals go". I asked him about his time in
Holland, what his life was like there. He said he'd raised a family there, that his children were all grown now, and he "only wanted to retire back in Suriname". He said that at the time of his immigration to Holland, there were very few Surinamers there. "At that time, if you walk down the street and see someone looking like me [referring to his skin], you give him a hug!" "Couldn't you retire in Holland, where your family is?" I asked. To which the stranger replied: "Yes, but Holland is not the same today as it was at one time...[today] there are too many foreigners there!" 130 There was something about the old man's presence that seemed sad to me. Just waiting, waiting, waiting by the old fort, a relic of the past. I can hear his voice as if it's part of that landscape with the fort and the river behind it. I oversaw him talking to nearly every visitor to that museum as they entered. Most often, those visitors were from
Holland, visiting friends and relatives in Suriname. I wondered what they, those others, thought of him, because of that something about him that was a little bit sad, the sense that he was waiting perpetually, that he would always be waiting, and that waiting would become "just what he does". The space and role he occupied was liminal - neither here nor there - he seemed caught in between, and I didn't know if I could believe his whole story, parts, or none at all. The fort was like a signpost to him, of things past and future promise. The connection between the old man and the fort is like a mimesis of hospitality; there is a gap there, "local voices are launched from within a space of
contingency, and the 'truth' of things is lodged in the concrete yet shifting life of signs"
(Stewart 1996:4).
The migrations and ambiguous welcomes in Suriname and Holland since
November 25, 1975 demonstrate how hospitality can be liminal. Mobility increases as
people scramble on either side of the divide. We see a mass exodus of nearly 200,000
people out of Suriname and into the Netherlands during the latter half of the twentieth
century. Derrida says that the "right to hospitality commits a household, a line of descent,
a family, a familial or ethnic group receiving a familial or ethnic group" (Derrida
2000:23). What this means is that there is an historical relationship, there is movement,
perhaps a circuit, inherent in hospitality; if hospitality "commits a familial or ethnic 131 group receiving a familial or ethnic group", then there can be inferred a standing expectation of a relationship in which one accepts an other whence that other 'knocks at the door' (since it was that other's door you were last at). The problem is, as we have seen, in the 'real' world, there are limits met and betrayals of hospitality exposed time and again. As the relationship unfolds, one thing remains and that is the relationship itte//(although the parts within it move). Relations of and within the dialectic move and shift, and reintegrate through expectations, proclamations, disappointments and celebrations of hospitality. Hospitality can be understood only so long as one understands "culture as a process constituted in use and therefore likely to be tense, contradictory, dialectical, dialogic, texted, textured, both practical and imaginary, and infilled with desire" (Stewart 1996:5). The 'truth' of hospitality is a truth of shifting and redefining power relations between hosts and guests, always.
Astrid Roemer encapsulates the pervasive affect that the ambiguous circuitry of hospitality between Suriname and Holland has had on her. In what follows, the "love- hate relationship with Suriname" indicates ambivalence, that most pervasive aspect in hospitality. She recalls the effect of history on the present, and the 'sensitivities, dilemmas and paradoxes' that history invokes. These are the ties that bind:
I have a love-hate relationship with Suriname. Hate because history shows how I ended up here. My ancestors were dragged here by force and emigrated under false pretences. They suffered and never bequeathed Suriname as their native country to their offspring...Yet I love Suriname because I was born there...Holland's material wealth was gained partly at the expense of my native land. After five generations of legitimate oppression I have the right to choose to which country I belong. I have
132 chosen Holland, even though Holland has not chosen me (Callaloo 1998:552)92
According to Derrida's "unconditional welcome", true hospitality says yes, welcomes whatever and whomever turns up. Roemer cites with some acrimony that
Holland has not welcomed her. Yet she suggests that Holland should, that because of the history, 'Holland' has some responsibility or moral obligation to welcome/accept 'her'.
Her statement makes the suggestion of a trajectory of hospitality over time. A trace of hospitality recalled through historical trajectory, of hospitality, which links people across boundaries of time and space. The links are "deep and indelible" (recalling here Brana-
Shute's statement: "the connections between the two lands and people, to the discontent of some Surinamers and Netherlanders, are deep and indelible" (Brana-Shute 1990:4-5).
Yet the trajectory is not a smooth one; the metanarrative of hospitality tells its story through oscillation, demonstrates the tension of the subject matter (hospitality and its unstableness).
8. 'She's Our Mother'
There was a moment when I was beginning fieldwork in Suriname that drives this point home. There I was doing 'fieldwork' - drinking Suriname's national beer with my friends Jaime, Saskia, and Loes. Catching up. Naturally the conversation turns to
Holland, who has been and who is going. Jaime is planning to bring her kids for a two-
92From the novel Nergens Ergens (Nowhere Somewhere) (Roemer 1983:176-77) and reproduced here from Callaloo 1998 21(3):552. Even the title "Nowhere Somewhere" is suggestive of aporic hospitality and the unsettled space between home, belonging, place, and movement. 133 month stay. It will be the second time the whole family has gone. But this time there is a pause, a problem. They still have to settle the matter of the entrance visa: "we are still waiting for the papers". Something regretful is in her voice, something awkward, and it's tense. Loes, who already has the required visa, whose bags are packed, who is set to leave for Holland in two days to visit her own extended family nods, "It is verry difficult to get the visa...everybody has to wait such long time!" and says something about how everyone has to go through this process and nobody really knows why or what the decisions are based on. Then Jaime looks around the table at us and says: "/ am so upset; every day I am going to the embassy and every day they tell me I 'must waif ". Then
Saskia jumps in and says this in the most natural-sounding way: "You know, she
[Holland] is our mother. If I want to go see my mum, do I have to ask? No! I just go!"
She is convincing and passionate in her conviction. We all see the dilemma, we see the historical trajectory that is hidden but explains so much of the complication and the inequities of hospitality, the power struggle: the history of Dutch colonialism which indirectly brought them all together around the table right then and there, how Holland in a sense 'made them' what they are, made "Suriname" or at least assembled its parts, how the Dutch 'were there' on their land and how now when they want to visit on Dutch
European soil, they are not permitted to go. The feeling is of betrayal, frustration, disillusionment, and how large bureaucratic systems - political systems and cultural histories - become personified. Terminology like 'mother country' and 'mother land' are
often invoked of Holland in relation to Suriname. Saskia's statement was so emphatic, so emotional it was as though she felt betrayed, denied by her own flesh and blood, 134 implying the renege or lapse of duty. And it is simply because of the historical relations between the two countries that this becomes perceived as embodied experience, a personal experience. And even though we can not see hospitality, we can not see seventeenth-to-twentieth century colonial slavery and indentured labour, or Suriname's independence in front of us in the material world, we sense "that special instance of
"merging the visible and the invisible, the dead and the living, the past and the present - into the making of worldly relations and into the making of our accounts of the world"
(Gordon 1997:24).
It seems so appropriate to invoke the relations between these two nations in terms of kinship and hospitality. It jumps back to the sentiment of Astrid Roemer, Astrid
Roemer: "To Suriname I am married, The Netherlands are my lover, I have a homosexual relationship with Africa and I tend to be adulterous towards all other countries" (Meel 1990:280) because hospitality, its perfection or betrayal creates and continues a relationship. The sentiments of my friends, of Roemer, and others speak of
'rights, laws, and duties' of hospitality' and degrees of difference and deference. Inferred in their sentiments is the idea that they should not have to ask whether or not they can enter [Holland] since Holland is already symbolically a part of them from this shared and significant past. As Roemer expresses: "After five generations of legitimate oppression I have the right to choose to which country I belong. I have chosen Holland, even though
Holland has not chosen me" (Callaloo 1998:552). It represents "a structure of feeling that is something akin to what it feels like to be the object of a social totality vexed by the phantoms of modernity's violence" (Gordon 1997:19). Just as the old man by the Fort 135 Zeelandia seemed caught in a state of perpetual reminiscence standing by the old fort and hoping for the hospitality of the future, a utopic hospitality; just as Saskia emotionally implies a lapse of duty from Holland and a rendering of familial relations; and just as
Roemer recalls the historical trajectory as a series of imperfect encounters of hospitality:
A space for "narrative re-membering" (Stewart 1996:11) opens up, positing "an immanent critique capable of tracking the sensibilities of mimesis in narrative and the densities of a textured and remembered landscape" (11).
136 CHAPTER FIVE
TRACING HOSPITALITY IN DUTCH-SURINAMESE LITERATURE
We have seen how hospitality reflects mobility, and vice versa. Literary works on the theme of mobility, international migration and diaspora are also often reflections of the theme of hospitality. As people cross over spatial thresholds, which at some given point in time are declared the territory of one group, individual or nation, it is the time signature that becomes the critical aspect in hospitality that can proclaim one person as
'guest' and another 'host'. What I am referring to is a situation where subjects are mobile; moving across borders - linguistic, literary, political, geographical - which are actually oscillating in terms of governance. An environment of post-coloniality - an environment such as Suriname - is a poignant example of this; where land and its inhabitants and contents -including everything situated within the established borders - are changing hands and meanwhile, people are shuffling in between. Hosts and Guests are a very unstable binary. If we examine hospitality then in the temporal dimension, we see that it becomes a floating concept dependent on historical particularities and situated localities of participants. It also becomes curated by personal narratives, in the sense that these historical particularities - expressed in the form of memories, experiences, nostalgia, and operative nation-making - come together to demonstrate identities and a consciousness cached in 'hospitality'.
137 Evidence of that shifting, boundary-transgressing process of hospitality; the slipperiness and stickiness of 'hosts and guests' that is simultaneity (not duality) can be found in Surinamese literature93 (and we have seen a few examples of this, above in
Chapter Three). The poetics of the Surinamese literary repertoire is not unlike that found elsewhere in Dutch-Caribbean fiction and that of Caribbean literary works in general (see for example: Naipaul 1987,1994; Kincaid 1988; Brathwaite 1973; Walcott 1990; Philips
1991). These authors of the Caribbean convey themes of identity, rupture, belonging, and a cycle of becoming, of rootlessness that finally finds form through the very process and rupture of migration and diaspora. I am referring to poetry, novels, and other creative works that describe a post-colonial past/present through narratives that subvert the power structures inherent in colonial apparatuses, and give voice to subjects once marginalized. Surinamese poets and writers have a great deal in common with these other Caribbean writers who have produced narratives of 'the native point of view' and often, as in the stories of Kincaid, Naipaul and Walcott, weave fiction with some degree of autobiography.
Many Surinamese writers have conjured the colonial past in their writing, as seen here in the following excerpt from Henri Ferrier's novel Atman:
Peter Meel (1990) highlights the various criteria that might comprise Surinamese literature by asking the following questions: Could it be literature published on Suriname and Surinamers (a subject criterion); should it be interpreted as literature written and published in Suriname (a geographical criterion); is it identical to literature published in one of the Surinamese languages (linguistic); could it be literature addressing a Surinamese audience (public criterion); does it refer to literature written from a Surinamese point of view (a position criterion) or must one regard it as literature produced by people of Surinamese descent (a nationalist criterion). Meel then goes on to pose the ubiquitous question: How to identify a Surinamer?! (Meel 1990:272). 138 Here I came ashore as the first immigrant when we had to embark at Nieuw-Amsterdam. Because its draught was too deep, the Lalla Rookh could not sail directly to Paramaribo. This was the first place our feet touched the earth of the country that would be a blessing to us. In the renovated slave sheds where most of us ended up, we saw the sadness, the terrible torture, the agelong torture, the blood that could not be washed away of black enslaved Africans who were meant to be our holy predecessors.
As yet we understood too little of it. We had to find our answers in the tears we still had to shed. (Ramdas 1998:621)
I wonder how literary representations, re-creations, and re-memberings such as this affect a Dutch or Surinamese audiences' perception of the past, present, and future identity as well as relations. I wonder also, to what degree and affect is this conjuring and maintaining nostalgia?94
The literary medium demonstrates an important arena for conceptualizing and expressing this ambiguous hospitality consciousness, and this is commensurate in the words of Astrid Roemer, a lauded Dutch-Surinamese poet, when she says: "Suriname has become a language, transformed into stories, stories, stories. Newspaper articles.
Letters from home. Phone calls. Occasional visits..." Roemer then goes on:
"Many Surinamese living in Holland have said to me: 'You give Suriname back to us'. But I thought: I'm not giving Suriname back to them. All I'm doing [with these two books] is adding two new chapters to the story that Suriname has become to us"
(Niemoller 1998:507). In this sense, Roemer resists the temptation to fall into nostalgic re-memberings (which seem desired by audiences) and opts to consciously and
See Chapter One of Marilyn Ivy's Discourses of the Vanishing (1995) 139 intentionally create Suriname as a constant state of becoming, a constant state of flux. Yet
Suriname, the imagined synecdoche ("Suriname has become a language, transformed into stories...") should not be ignored either, as it still somehow informs the present, and migration is an integral part of this. Apart and away from Holland, or in Suriname itself,
Surinamers continue to inform and reform. This is part of the process of imagining the present, past, and future (often still in relation to each other). Although Roemer seems to resist invoking a nostalgic past, preferring to view and present Suriname as a story of unfolding and becoming {"what Suriname has become to us"), it is still interestingly, almost metonymically, invoked as a story. Marilyn Ivy (1995) lends insight to this process in the following statement:
Language reveals a movement of loss and recovery, of difference and repetition and there is something within the production of a text that allows for its coming apart, its difference from itself, and its elegiac reinscription. Texts often allegorize this 'something,' and this something is nothing other than the movement of desire in language: That which is not reducible to what language intends to say and which returns to trouble the surface of meaning (Ivy 1995:13-14).
Perhaps Roemer and her audiences all reveal that something which is the movement of desire.
Peter Meel writes that: "In the Caribbean, Suriname's extreme dependence on the
Netherlands sets the country apart from neighboring states. Sustained by the large
Surinamese community in the Netherlands, the focus of attention of many Surinamese is
140 still directed towards the former mother country " (Meel 2001:150). It is interesting to note then, that the relationship is reciprocal. Roemer, as part of that 'large Surinamese community in the Netherlands' makes it clear that 'Suriname' - both real and imagined - plays a pivotal role in diasporic Surinamers' consciousness and self-identity as well.
Suriname is imagined as a place that Roemer's stories in part create. And her statement also suggests how Roemer herself, as an author is both active and passive in the process of place-imagining, nation-making, and belonging. She writes from her own experience and creative capacity, from her personal subjectivity which combines with the subjectivities of others so that Roemer, the author, is both host - invoking nostalgic
Suriname for readers - and guest, as a part of the same process that her Surinamese readers are part of.
That Suriname exists like a kind of interminable nostalgia is, I think, hinted at in
Roemer's above statement (allegorically transforming a place into stories, letters, phone calls; relations of longing and displacement, farness which is simultaneously, somehow, near, attachment). She is not the only Surinamese writer to reveal this sort of nostalgia96, this sentiment of relation where nostalgia is expressed both in the literary works of writers and poets as well as the interpretation and even embodiment of such works by the
Meel cites the "continuous dominance of the Dutch language in the Surinamese administrative and educational system" as being of "crucial importance" in this relationality (Meel 2001:150) 96 Also see Doelwit (1989; 1998), Helman (1980), Trefosa (1957/1988) readers. Take for example, the way that Thea Doelwijt (1938-) conjures Suriname for her imagined readers in the story Honour to Whom Honour is Due97:
I am talking about a country where I no longer live but which I dream about every night. Even in those dreams I am surprised how light everything is. It is the sunlight, still so fierce that even with closed eyes it is not only visible but tangible; it lightens the whole surroundings
(Doelwijt 1998:605)
Doelwijt has been explicit about her directed literary intent to write for an audience that is crossing boundaries through migration and thereby affected by the
Surinamese diaspora: Be they Surinamese in Holland, ethnic Dutch in Holland, or for
Surinamers in Suriname. Yet here, the author also intones what migration means for host-guest identities, which are in flux. In the following interview, the author explains the narratological difficulties she faced in translating her work for audiences in Holland.
Simultaneously, Doelwijt's statement reflects a perception of embodied Suriname-ness, something that is at risk of slippage, subject to alteration through the host-guest transition where one is both foreign and domestic, perhaps an aporia:
I try to show Holland what it is for Surinamese people, who have left their country. I did two plays in Holland and one was for children, a special children's play; that was the last play I could do in Suriname. And I tried to do it again in Holland, because I thought it very important for the children of immigrants, especially the Surinamese children, to look at a
Originally "Ere wie ere toekomt," from Verhalen van Surinaamse schrijvers, ed. Michiel van Kempen Amsterdam: De Arbeiderspers, 1989, 74-83. This excerpt translated by Hilda van Neck- Yoeder and published in Callaloo 21.3 (1998) 605-610
142 story of another country without too many problems. And I liked the fairy tale thing, also very much inspired by Suriname. Then I had to do it with young people—I wanted to do it with young people—about eighteen, twenty, twenty-five, but we've been living here for a long time—some were born here, some came when they were very small—and when I tried to do the Surinamese play, they couldn't understand everything I wanted them to do. They did not have the feeling, the smell, the right movements; they didn't know how to walk in the bush, they couldn't imagine how, they didn't know how to walk; it was very difficult for them to do that in the improvisations we did. So I had to rewrite the story. I had to start in Holland; otherwise I couldn't even make it possible for the actors, who had lived too long in Holland. That was the children's play, Roy Mi Boy (Rowell 1998:611).
Doelwijt's re-writing of narrative to fit the contingencies of Surinamers' migration simultaneously reflects the malleability of hospitality; to properly fit the diasporic reality of Surinamers living in Holland who have become Dutch in action yet attempt to embody some sense of Suriname-ness. Reflecting the changing notions of hosthood and guesthood: "They didn't know how to walk" is a poetic injunction on the part of the playwright; her young actors unable to embody the Suriname-riess inscribed in her own memory or experience, Doelwijt re-writes the play to harmonize with current contingencies. Instead of performing what they 'could have been', they perform what they are: her Dutch-born or immigrated actors naturalized to a new place; the play was revised to this understanding and so the latest rendition of the play reflects the reality of this slipperiness of host-guest vicissitude. This occurs with the same kind of sentiment that Roemer indicates of her work when she says: "All I'm doing.. .is adding two new chapters to the story that Suriname has become to us" (Niemoller 1998:507). I suggest again how this prevalent thematic aspect of 'Suriname' in the writer's oeuvres reflects an auspicious, aporic 'hospitality' experienced and expressed by people affected by the
Dutch-Surinamese diaspora generally
One of the best literary expressions of the aporia, that is to say, a work that picks up ambiguous hospitality as insolubility in hospitality and Suriname-Netherlands relations is the poem Copenhagen (1957). Written by one of the most lauded poets of
Surinamese origin, Trefossa' (Henry de Ziel, 1916-1975), Copenhagen is a remarkable poem for many reasons. First of all, Copenhagen was written in Sranan, the Surinamese language, during a formative period where Suriname was escalating its formal transition to political independence is significant. Before Copenhagen, Surinamese authors were writing in the language of the colonizer (the 'host language'), a result of a formal
'dutchification' policy during late nineteenth and early twentieth century Suriname. In the 1950s however, Surinamese authors - mainly poets - living in the Netherlands became encouraged and inspired to write their work in the Surinamese language. This was a radical change, since these authors were accustomed to writing in Dutch for a
Dutch-speaking readership and Dutch language publishers. Publications in Sranan were therefore groundbreaking and formative for the field of Surinamese letters. Such was a decision to declare a Surinamese identity, to express something of the Surinamer as subject, protagonist, conductor of will, and conscious observer of his or her own experience. The change to Sranan has been described as a radical idiom, one that
"confronted Dutch readers with new narratives" (Neck-Yoder 2001:246).
Hilda van Neck-Yoder and Michiel van Kempen have both written about the significance of Copenhagen relating to the Dutch-Surinamese imaginary. The poem 144 contains themes of the foreigner, the host and the guest, questions of identity and belonging, loneliness, migration, cross-culturalism, cosmopolitanism, and the transitions in all of these. Neck-Yoder says that the poem itself 'Caribbeanises a European icon'. In the poem, Edvard Eriksen's Mermaid statue is found in the Danish harbour by the protagonist, and the voice in the poem speaks as a visitor "...the tourist tries to seduce the bronze statue to speak to him, to reveal herself as the Surinamese Watramama" (247-
248):
Kopenhagen Copenhagen 98
San dya na mofo se? What is this by the sea? eh-eh! See-see! Watramama na yu sidon Watermama, is that you sitting on Na ston? that stone?
Watramama mi sabi yu, Watermama, I know you, trutru. sure I do. Watramama, Watermama, ke ba... my-my... yu gowtu kankan, pe your golden comb, where has ade? it gone? gudugudu tayg' mi dan, my dearest dear tell me then, me
98 from Neck-Yoder 2001:244; translated by Virginie M Kortekaas
145 mi wwan. alone. Watramama y' e waki mi Watermama you look at me so pi... so calmly... enhe, mi sab' p' a e tan: aha, I know his home: Sranan! 'Sranan'!
The protagonist tries every way of coaxing the figure (the mermaid statue) to speak. Approaching it like a friend, the protagonist seems to recognize the statue at first, and yet the voice (and the reader) is unsure of whom or what is being spoken to.
Suddenly, we are aware through the peculiar ending that the faceless voice is proclaiming an identity that until that point has remained silent. The statue never does speak, but the protagonist's finale leaves the poem as a quadruple entente: Sranan! He proclaims.
Beautifully multiplex, this proclamation can be: A self-other identifier, saying 'you're like me' (Surinamese); it can also refer to a recognition of the language (Sranan); and, it can be the pronouncement of a far-of place (geographically, Suriname) as well as recognition of a shared imaginary, that is the nostalgic 'Suriname', one constructed through Surinamers in the diaspora. The gleeful recognition of Sranan also hints at a sense of longing and not-so-belonging, of being the stranger in a foreign land, where one is surrounded by a language not their own, a foreign language of a foreign host. One gets the feeling, reading this poem, that the protagonist identifies himself and the statue as Surinamese, and both are perceived as a kind of 'guest-visitor-foreigner-quasi- friendship' understanding. Yet through the recognition of the other that is like the self, perhaps there is a transition towards 'host'. It is as if the identity of both - statue and protagonist - had been so immersed in a foreign culture that their own remained hidden, 146 until, one had the power to proclaim one as its own. This is a symbolic declaration of identity, as if coming into one's own and declaring the distinction that was forever there but hidden as the guest in the host. The poem then recognizes a 'Suriname-ness' that comes out of Otherness. Once again, in relation to the Dutch surroundings, Suriname identity is formed.
In an interesting way, this interpretation happens to coalesce with an observation made by Suriname Scholar Gert Oostindie. He comments here on the birth of a
Surinamese nationalist consciousness from inside the Netherlands: "Paradoxically, a residence in the former metropolis, even if characterized by intensive and amicable relations with Dutchmen, would stimulate many a Surinamer to revaluate the colonial nexus and to engage in nationalist endeavors that would have seemed unthinkable at home" (Oostindie 1990:239).
In reference to the setting of Dutch-Caribbean literature, Hilda van Neck-Yoder claims that: "Such a poetics is rooted in journeys and migrations, in colonization, enslavement, and the Middle Passage, and in the suffering, the resistance, and the emancipation of its speakers, its poets, its visionaries." (Neck-Yoder 1998:443). Neck-
Yoder speaks of "the construction of a liminal audience, necessary for the survival of
Surinamese letters" (2001:257). What she means is that Surinamese authors, whose works have been predominantly produced in the Netherlands, operate on a kind of threshold. Surinamese writers have had to carve out a voice and an identity for and through their works while writing in this context. In addition to this is the question of readership: To and for whom are these Netherlands-based Surinamese writers writing? 147 An interesting example of this writing-from-the-threshold is the work of Edgar
Cairo (1948-2000). Cairo set the oral tradition of Sranan storytelling to paper in highly original ways in the form of poetry and novels, but also though plays, essays, literary criticisms and newspaper columns. The most interesting aspect of Cairo's work can be seen through a series of stories that he wrote about his father's life on the plantations of
Suriname, and where he actually invents his own language!99 The first version of the story, Temekoe, was published in Paramaribo in 1969 as the first literary prose written in
Sranan. In 1979, after moving to the Netherlands, Cairo translated Temekoe into his own invented creolized Sranan Dutch and renamed the story Temekoe/Kopzorg (Mindworry).
In 1988 he completely rewrote the story in a new Surinamese-Dutch language, omitting
'Temekoe' from the title and re-titling it Kepzorg: Het verhaal van vader en zoon
(Mindworry: The Story of Father and Son). Thus we have three versions of the story written in three unique languages. The series attempts to "invent a distinctive Creole textual identity" that can "reflect a Surinamese voice, yet be understandable to a complex, multilingual audience of Surinamese and Dutch speakers" (Neck-Yoeder
2001:254-257). His attempt proved too liminal for his imagined readership; "Surinamese readers thought his creative representation of their speech odd, wrong, even insulting.
The European-Dutch readers could not appreciate his creativity either...and the Dutch
"It is a language teeming with syntactic borrowings from Sranan, with old sayings and proverbs, with onomatopoeic inventions and idioms of startling ingenuity. Cairo stretched his linguistic virtuosity so far as to arrive at a new, original literary language, a new 'Black Dutch'" (van Kempen 1998:640).
148 literary world almost completely ignored him" (257). The readership to which Cairo wrote was an imagined one, as the cosmopolitan complex that the colonial and postcolonial history has in fact created; one that is both Caribbean and European simultaneously. Neck-Yoeder conceptualizes this audience as one with access to two centres (Suriname and the Netherlands). Just as hosts and guests in the context of
Suriname and the Netherlands are continually in flux as a result of their history, "this imagined [literary] liminality paradoxically connects the author to, and simultaneously separates the author from, the distinct communities of readers" (247). Hence, the realm that encompasses Surinamese writing, writers, and readers entail the oscillating hospitality that characterizes their shared past and present.
Cairo's inventive use of language expresses another of the prevalent thematic currents found within Surinamese literature and of Caribbean writing generally which is the transcendence of fixed boundaries. Be they literary, artistic, or political, this is a kind of writing, which destabilizes categories of 'place', is argued by Ashcroft, Griffiths and
Tiffin to be derived from a consciousness produced from processes of exile, colonialism, and imperialism (Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin 1989:2-12). Transcending fixed boundaries is something we see expressed in literature and is expressive of the larger theme of hospitality as it perforates the colonial and post colonial environment: Host-guest identities being questioned and questionable.
Writing from the Threshold "Shall one tell you the truth about this country and about its poor children, when he does not possess the love that makes eyes to see? Without your love, without the love which is your duty - for all colonial property is voluntarily undertaking a duty - salvation will never be possible...If you only knew, how beautiful this country is, how intimate life is there..."
Albert Helman from Zuid-Zuid-West (1926)100
Zuid-Zuid-West represents an early nationalist sentiment in Suriname's history.
Together with de Kom's Wij Slaven van Suriname (1934), these works were ahead of their time, yet influential in planting a nationalist, anti-colonialist seed for Surinamers
Not coincidentally, both books were written in Holland. In 1957 Trefossa published
Trotji, the first printed collection of poems in the Surinamese language, Sranan Tongo.
In the 1970s, authors started to publish in Sarnami ("Hindustani") and Surinamese-
Javanese. Surinamese writers living, writing, and publishing in the Netherlands found themselves in a difficult spot between nourishing their creative drive and their national and personal allegiances. This state has been called "betwixt and between" by Neck-
Yoder (2001). For these writers, particularly during post-WWII, Holland provided an inspiring intellectual platform of critical post-colonial theory, which could encourage their work, as well as provide the infrastructure (publishers, distributors), and a large readership. Yet "on the other hand a Surinamese writer working in the Netherlands is troubled by feelings of disunity and alienation, and has to make considerable concessions; for example Surinamese authors were largely confined to write in the Dutch
in Meel 1990:275 150 language since the wider audience base is familiar with that language" (Meel 1990:280).
The resulting kind of confusion and ambiguity is perhaps explanatory of this statement by
Astrid Roemer: "To Suriname I am married, The Netherlands are my lover, I have a homosexual relationship with Africa and I tend to be adulterous towards all other countries" (Meel 1990:280).
The experience of 'coming home' and of being the guest is expressed in Albert
Helman's novel, Het eind van de kaart (Where the Map Ends). His protagonist has this to say after visiting his native tribe in Suriname, feeling disillusionment with his life and education in Holland: "Stupid of me, not knowing more than five or six casually picked up Oayana words. Here I sit with all my years wasted on Ulfila's Gothic and Panini's
Sanskrit, and with my belly full of Ruusbroeck's Middle Dutch. It's enough to make me want to puke" (Helman 1980:87).
Helman's character expresses a lack of belonging101, of being like a foreigner as a result of the rupture of post-colonial migration, in a space where there is a noticeable gap between he and his hosts, an absence indicating a sense that the character feels he should be host, should be 'the same'. The character's experience is that of a 'dutchified'
Surinamese, like so many thousands of Surinamese experienced through Dutch curriculum and education policies in twentieth century Suriname, and many experienced after immigrating with education and life in Holland. One could extrapolate that the character feels as not quite guest and not quite host in either Suriname or Holland.
101 Revisit "mimetic desire" from Homi Bhabha, see Marilyn Ivy (1995:6), its realization and disillusionment in respect to this character's experience. 151 We see an aporia here, just as Astrid Roemer expresses ("To Suriname I am married, The Netherlands are my lover..."), through Edgar Cairo's invented liminal language and constructed liminal audience, and the disunity and alienation as themes in so many Dutch-Surinamese writer's works. This is how Cario's work and other
Suriname author's work operate on the threshold; because of the problem of hospitality, of being neither host nor guest. Form is found through imaginings in the diaspora, through being without a recognizable form as host or guest. In Roemer's words:
"Suriname has become a language, transformed into stories, stories, stories..." and this stands as exemplary of the hospitality landscape as far as many Surinamers are concerned: Finding meaning in the gaps in between, in a non-place, in an imaginary place that is neither Suriname nor Holland, but in the meaning that comes from being in between.
152 CONCLUSION
This thesis has explored the concept of hospitality and applied it to the political, historical, and personal relations between Suriname and Holland. Hospitality involves the crossing of a perceived territorial line; how visitors respond to a perceived host, how a host responds to a perceived visitor, and how these identities are precarious and can change over time. The concept 'hospitality' can be understood as hypothetical, even utopic; it has a peculiar quality that allows it both an auspicious universality and a delicate particularity.
For philosopher Jacques Derrida (2000), the concept of 'hospitality' is not easily appropriated into the familiar host/guest binary. Derridian hospitality is illustrated with the blurry, shifting dimensions of subjects in the midst of trans-national travel, migration, 153 and post-colonial encounters. This understanding of 'hospitality' has been demonstrated as directly applicable to a particularly complex relationship - a personal, political, and historical relationship - between the small South American/Dutch-Caribbean Republic of
Suriname and the European Kingdom of the Netherlands. Surinamese citizenship and identity formation are correlated with that nation's independence movement of 1975, a consideration of 'origins', and a relationship with the Netherlands that reaches back to the seventeenth century colonial expansion and continues today through the affects of diasporic movement, diasporic imaginations, and in/out migrations.
Certain 'laws of hospitality' can be state sanctioned (as in the law of nations theory) or culturally understood (as in the rituals particular to a culture when welcoming foreigners). Boundaries in hospitality are symbolic, movable, and operate to legitimate the affectations of the host and the othered guest. Thus hospitality operates as a way of identifying self and other among inhabitants of a place. Conceptions of hospitality in this thesis have referred primarily to the Western-European based assumptions about rights to space and how these assumptions are understood and enacted politically through land ownership. In essence, this is 'territoriality' (Sack 1986), which operates as a mode of power and identity marker for the Dutch colony Suriname and is later exemplified in the process of formalizing Surinamese statehood.
This thesis has presented examples of hospitality's practice (seen in Kerr 1989;
Pitt-Rivers 1977), its cultural limits and motivations. It then considered these examples in reference to the Surinamese-Netherlands landscape, using the Derridian (2000) or post- structuralist approach towards understanding hospitality and thus demonstrating a way of 154 seeing hospitality as always in flux. An analysis of themes of 'troubled hospitality' - whereby hospitality is belayed and betrayed thematically in Surinamese literature and ethnographic detail comes to light. Surinamese political and migratory history - particularly in relation with the Netherlands - illustrates the vacillating, ambiguous character of hosts and guests over time and space.
Methodologically, this study of hospitality comes from my own participant- observation of hosts and guests in Suriname, from historical accounts of relations between Surinamers and Netherlanders, and from the experiences of hospitality expressed in Surinamese poetry, prose, and dialogue. Hospitality finds expression - and understanding for scholars - through literary works of fiction: A kind of material culture from which an anthropologist can hope to understand more of the practice, its relations and components. Discussions around the topic of hospitality, historical analysis, and literary works of Surinamese authors imply a "history of the present" in the theme of hospitality so that "third-class travel between the synchronic - the sociological - and the diachronic - the historical - can broach the effectivity of marginality and invisibility...only such a context can approach the intermingling of fact, fiction, and desire" (Gordon 1997:95). What results is a revelation that "dialectics of visibility and invisibility involve a constant negotiation between what can be seen and what is in the shadows" (26). Like Gordon, I have attempted through this thesis a way to "make the fictional, the theoretical, and the factual speak to one another" (26). What we see through the history is that the master narrative of colonization is beset with interruptions, take overs, challenges, and re-routings because of the effervescence of hospitality made up of 155 "moments of encounter, shock, recognition, retreat (Stewart 1996:7). The story is not smooth but comprised of challenges at every turn; there is never a dull moment, never a moment where one is 'safe' from the dilemmas and vicissitudes of hospitality. All of this adds up to articulate a structure of feeling where a presence is felt through the historical, literary, and dialogic material, as what Raymond Williams claims is "characterized constitutively by the tangle of the subjective and the objective, experience and belief, feeling and thought, the immediate and the general, the personal and the social" (Gordon
1997:200).
As much as this has been a thesis about hospitality's presence and absence, it has also been a thesis about movement. Hosts and guests are in league by the movement of one's crossing a threshold, of entering upon invitation or of transgressing a boundary.
That boundary - one that marks one space as 'mine' and 'not yours'; of 'yours' and 'not mine' - is itself moveable, interpretive, and ambiguous; and by that so are the host-guest identities located on either side and even in between the territorial line. We have seen how 'hospitality' permeates Dutch-Surinamese social and political history, as forces of travel and movement have compelled individual subjects to decide on which side of the host/guest line they will fall - though always with some ambiguity. Decisions to "choose for" Suriname, or "choose for" Holland, are arrived at with subjective reflection on the part of participants; their individualized understandings of self, nationhood, and belonging. The obstinate phenomenal lens for understanding the peculiar relationship cultivated between hosts and guests in Suriname and the Netherlands has been shown through this concept: Hospitality. By framing colonial processes in terms of hospitality and territoriality this thesis has exemplified the fluctuating capacity of these categories; hosts and guests change over time in a given space. The 'step' of hospitality (Derrida 2000) for Suriname coincides with its achievement of political independence from the Netherlands in 1975 - the moment when power is relinquished, then replaced by another. In fact it is by a liminal moment in between - the threshold - that this occurs.
I chose November 24,1975 - the official date of Suriname's independence - as the primary symbolic and material 'step of hospitality' (Derrida 2000) that takes place between Suriname and Holland. It is material because it becomes enacted through the
Law (legalities of citizenship), and symbolic for the way it plays out in the hearts and minds - and words - of Surinamers. We have seen the pervasive hospitality that characterized relations between people in Suriname and Dutch colonial representatives:
Rebellious slaves, the legal fight for manumission, the cultivation of a new 'Surinamese' identity, and the cultural variation maintained after people from other places and cultures arrived to populate a space. Hospitalities unfolded into a 'step' as Suriname gained greater forms of autonomy and eventually independence from Holland. The movement towards an independent Suriname was a transition out of a relationship that suggested the
Dutch colonials as 'hosts' and the Surinamese as 'guests'. We have seen how the host attempts to attain and maintain rights and responsibilities over territorial affairs claimed as one's 'own'.
The host determines relationships with outsiders, defends if necessary, and may invite when called on or moved to do so. These were precisely the issues that Surinamers 157 perceived to be at stake during the independence debate of the late 1960s and early 1970s
(Buddingh' 2001). Those in favour of the movement wanted the foreign affairs and national defense of Suriname to be in their own hands, not in the hands of the perceived foreigner (the Dutch state which oversaw the political affairs of Suriname from afar).
'Suriname' thus invoked territoriality, which changed the dynamic between hosts and guests and caused many people to question, challenge, and 'choose for' identities within the transition. Using the existing space that surrounded them - the geo-political borders and those longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates - the territory remained the same, yet the space was 'claimed' by another, a new 'host'.
A guest may become a host; a host may become a guest with the passing of time and political movements, as well as with the physical movements of people across borders. However in Suriname-Netherlands relations, there remains a residual feeling of hosthood and guesthood simultaneously and in both locals; it is what piles up, remains in excess, and troubles relations. Derrida says that 'true' hospitality is impossible because it requires one to relinquish all control before accepting the guest - at which point, the line between host and guest becomes aporic and the boundaries, the identities, become blurry.
To be truly a host means that one must give up that power over space that (in)effectually characterizes him or her as host in the first place, and at this point, the host loses the power therein. It is the moment that power is relinquished that the opportunity for 'the step' occurs. That is, it is in the moment when power is relinquished where identities may become something else; the roles may reverse/combine/blur and the guest may become the host. Temporally this step could take place in an instant or, it could take 158 place over a matter of years or even centuries and so on. 1975 indicates a political 'step', however incompleteness of the decolonization process (Hoefte 2001) causes confusing hospitality issues between the two nations (Suriname and Holland) and the people within them, whose allegiances reside physically or symbolically in both places. How do these people get along with each other or define their relations after 'the step' which may or may not be 'complete'?
Hosts and Guests are a very unstable binary. By examining hospitality in the temporal dimension, from 1667-2007, we have seen how it becomes a floating concept dependent on historical particularities and situated localities of participants. It also becomes curated by personal narratives, in the sense that these historical particularities - expressed in the form of memories, experiences, nostalgia, and operative nation-making - come together to demonstrate identities and a consciousness cached in 'hospitality'.
The literary medium demonstrates an important arena for conceptualizing and expressing this identity-hospitality-eonsciousness, and this is commensurate in the words of Astrid Roemer, the lauded Dutch-Surinamese poet, when she says: "Suriname has become a language, transformed into stories, stories, stories. Newspaper articles. Letters from home. Phone calls. Occasional visits..."102 (Niemoller 1998:507). That Suriname exists like a kind of interminable nostalgia has been revealed in the poetic works of
Roemer (1983; 1988), Doelwit (1989;1998), Helman (1980), and Trefosa (1957/1988).
We see within these works a sentiment of relation where nostalgia is expressed both in
102 Roemer then goes on: "Many Surinamese living in Holland have said to me: 'You give Suriname back to us'. But I thought: I'm not giving Suriname back to them. All I'm doing [with these two books] is adding two new chapters to the story that Suriname has become to us" (Niemoller 1998:507). 159 the literary works of writers and poets as well as the interpretation and even embodiment of such works by the readers.
In the 1950s Surinamese authors who lived in the Netherlands began to write and publish in the Surinamese language. Since these authors were accustomed to writing in
Dutch for a Dutch-speaking readership and Dutch language publishers, the switch to
Sranan was a radical change. Such publications were groundbreaking for the demonstration of a decision to declare a Surinamese identity, to express something of the
Surinamer as subject, protagonist, conductor of will, and conscious observer of his or her own experience. Sranan poetry and prose then operated on the threshold towards host- hood: the transition to this 'radical idiom' "confronted Dutch readers with new narratives" (Neck-Yoder 2001:246) and implied in this is a re-working of understandings of host-guest identities. Surinamese writers who lived and wrote in the Netherlands were thus formative in expressing a Surinamese consciousness that was distinctive, autonomous, and would inspire the Surinamese independence movement first in the
Netherlands, and later in Suriname.
Demonstrating the inefficacy of the so-called host/guest binary, Suriname scholar
Hilda van Neck-Yoder speaks of "the construction of a liminal audience, necessary for the survival of Surinamese letters" (2001:257). Thus Surinamese authors operate on a kind of threshold since the distinctive literary Surinamese 'voice' has been produced largely in situ of the Netherlands. This implies the question of hospitality being actualized in readership: To and for whom do these Netherlands-based Surinamese writers write? Neck-Yoder conceptualizes this imagined audience as one with access to 160 two centers (Suriname and the Netherlands); one that is both Caribbean and European simultaneously as a result of the shared colonial past. Just as "hosts" and "guests" in the context of Suriname and the Netherlands are continually in flux as a result of their history, "this imagined liminality paradoxically connects the author to, and simultaneously separates the author from, the distinct communities of readers" (Neck-
Yoder 2001:247). Hence, the realm that encompasses Surinamese writing, writers, and readers entails the oscillating hospitality that characterizes their shared past and present.
Transcending fixed boundaries is something we see expressed in literature, and is expressive of the larger theme of hospitality as it perforates the colonial and post colonial environment: Host-guest identities being questioned and questionable.
In Suriname the 1975 political independence "was the culmination of a political
and cultural awakening, yet...this did not lead to a massive rejection of Dutch culture or
language" (Hoefte and Meel 2001: xv). The "special relationship" between Suriname
and the Netherlands is a major continuity from the seventeenth century until today
(Hoefte and Meel 2001). However, a major discontinuity arises in the twentieth century
as Suriname changed from an immigration to an emigration society (Gowricharn &
Shuster 2001:155). As Suriname Scholar Gary Brana-Shute contends: "the connections
between the two lands and people, to the discontent of some Surinamers and
Netherlanders, are deep and indelible" (Brana-Shute 1990:4-5).
Amersfoort and Surie (1987) suggest that the Dutch were "reluctant hosts taken by
surprise" during the 1970s by the waves of Surinamese immigrants arriving in Holland.
Dutch authorities were unprepared for the number of Surinamese newcomers and did not expect those foreigner-guests to stay in Holland long after their arrival (Amersfoort and
Surie 1987:174-75). The Dutch 'hosts' did not expect to come face to face with hospitality's 'step'; potentiality that guests might reside and transcend from guest-hood into host-hood. Many Surinamers made the move to the Netherlands out of anticipation of the 1980 visa requirement, which they knew would make mobility more difficult.
However forecasts made by Dutch authorities underestimated the number of expected immigrants, "...the immigration of 18,000 Surinamese in 1979 and 1980 came, for them at least, as a complete surprise" (Amersfoort and Surie 1987:174).
If hospitality is defined formally as the "offering or affording welcome and entertainment to strangers, visitors, or guests" (Cavallar 2002:2) then this thesis offers an exploration and explanation of what this offering entails and how it may work. As a cultural practice, hospitality invokes a complex interplay of power, territoriality, sentimentality, and nostalgia. Whenever people meet on common ground there will inevitably (and instantaneously) be 'hospitality' at play. Furthermore, there will always the potential for the 'step', whether this commences over a matter of minutes, years, decades, and so on is still a matter of hospitality. The aporia in hospitality remains impossible in Derrida's rendition: "For to be what it 'must' be, hospitality must not pay a debt, or be governed by a duty: it is gracious, and, 'must' not open itself to the guest
[invited or visitor], either 'conforming to duty' or even, to use the Kantian distinction again, 'out of duty...' (Derrida 2000:83).
Perhaps Hans Buddingh' summarizes an uncertain hospitality when he says that
"relations between ex-colonies and their former colonizer are never easy, but the ties 162 between the Netherlands and Suriname are particularly burdened with sensitivities, dilemmas and paradoxes" (Buddingh 2001:71). It is because of the irreconcilability of hospitality that these paradoxes exist. With seething absences and muted presences
(Gordon 1997:21), one can surely foresee the question of hospitality, of 'hosts and guests' continuing on the threshold of Dutch-Suriname relations.
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