Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Introduction

1998; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 21; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cal.1998.0164

1080-6512

Hilda van Neck Yoder,

Introduction —Hilda van Neck-Yoder, Guest Editor (bio) Je gaat vaak aan dit land denken. You going to think of this country a lot. . . . een tekst die ik hier moet verzwijgen. . . . a text which I must leave unspoken here. —Hans Faverey The narratological questions “Who speaks?” and “Who listens?” are approached with ambivalence and anxiety by writers from historically colonized communities, such as Suriname, the Netherlands Antilles, and Aruba—countries that share a history of Dutch colonization. Born in small communities with few resources to sustain them, these writers have often looked for audiences beyond their communities, thereby confronting the difficult dilemma of how to translate their Caribbean voices, their experiences and their values, into another language, one spoken by readers on the other side of the globe, who at best may be ignorant and at worst deeply prejudiced against linguistic and somatic differences. For whom do these authors write and how do they translate their own often complex and contradictory connections to both the victim and the victor in an asymmetrical power relationship—these are questions that may guide us to the heart of these writers’ literary aesthetics, the heart of a Caribbean poetics. Cola Debrot writes a story of a silent black woman who eavesdrops on words explicitly spoken to exclude her at the climax of Mijn zuster de negerin [My Black Sister] (1935), the first Caribbean novel in Dutch. 1 This scene exemplifies how, from its inception, “Dutch” Caribbean literature radically subverts the European colonial literary tradition, questions its truthfulness, and silences its authoritative narrative voice. The abrupt ending of My Black Sister creates a space that elicits Caribbean voices, voices that, as this special issue of Callaloo amply shows, speak in many languages, often from contradictory positions, always in a rich variety of tones. In the penultimate moments of My Black Sister, the young black servant Maria eagerly welcomes her white childhood playmate Frits to her bed in her dark bedroom, warmly embracing the young plantation owner who has returned after a long sojourn in Europe to take charge of his inheritance, his deceased father’s plantation. Their lovemaking, however, is interrupted by a loud knock on the front door. Answering to see who could have the nerve to interfere, Frits finds himself face to face with Maria’s maternal grandfather who tells him that “Maria is your father’s daughter”. Though the grandfather courageously utters a truth that everyone in this novella—from doctor to lawyer to policeman—had tried to keep from Frits, he does not tell Frits anything that Frits did not know. Shocking though it may be, Frits knew that Maria’s warm embrace was incestuous, knew that she was his sister. Debrot shows us a young man willing to violate the horrific taboo to claim his father’s inheritance and solidify his role as colonial master. [End Page 441] Maria, on the other hand, had welcomed Frits warmly, not because she is equally arrogant or equally perverse, but because she is the only one who does not know what Frits and everyone knows: she and he are sister and brother, children of different mothers but the same father. Her mother a servant who died in childbirth, Maria has had no one—not even her mother’s father—who would tell her the story of her mother’s violation. Maria’s loving embrace proves the successful censuring of her mother’s narrative, the erasure of the forbidden story about Maria’s origin, about who fathered her, a story forbidden in part because it would seriously challenge the legitimacy of Frits’s claim to the plantation, the political legitimacy of the colonial hegemony on the island. When Maria’s grandfather courageously addresses Frits, he begs the young man not to tell Maria, for “Maria should not know any of this”. As the grandfather speaks to protect his granddaughter, he ironically and tragically affirms his loyalty to the white male power structure that sanctioned the violation of his daughter in the past and that has been unwilling to prevent—indeed, as the plot shows, has conspired to make possible—the horrible violation of his granddaughter in the present. By speaking to Frits rather than...