At the head of a large wooden table on the Fazenda Bananal, a seventeenth-century sugar plantation, converted into tourist resort in the middle of the Atlantic Forest, Astrid Roemer takes a bite of rice with pork and fried cassava. Her Brazilian table guests ask about her native Suriname. Does it look like Brazil? Which language is spoken? Estrela Leminski, just like Roemer writer and poet, listens carefully to the answers, while her son looks up information about the unknown neighboring country on his phone. Leminski’s mother, the famous Haiku poet Alice Ruiz, says exuberantly: “We are neighbors, but we know nothing about each other!”
Astrid Roemer (78) was the first Surinamese writer ever invited to the renowned International Literary Festival (Flip) in the Brazilian coastal town of Paraty, which attracts tens of thousands of visitors every year. In addition to Brazilian authors, writers acted here in previous years as the African Colson Whitehead and the Nigerian Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and this year apart from Roemer, among others, the Israeli Ilan Pappe and the Swedish writer and draftsman Liv Strömquist. The presence of Roemer has everything to do with the Portuguese translation of her book About the madness of a woman from 1982, which appeared in Brazil in May this year.
Roemer wrote that book when she was 22. It is about 18-year-old Noenka who fled a violent marriage and ultimately opts for a relationship with a woman in the small, colonial Surinamese society. Last year an English translation was nominated for the prestigious International Booker Prize for English -translated literature. In an article in The New York Times Roemer was compared to Toni Morisson and Alice Walker, written who influenced her work. Earlier, Roemer was the only Dutch -speaking author, both the PC Hooftprijs (2016) and the Prize of the Dutch Arts (2021).
“I didn’t know Brazil at all,” says Astrid Roemer at the start of the Brazilian Tour, who will also take her to Rio de Janeiro and to São Paulo. “I didn’t really have a performance of it either. I have been a lot in Europe and in America, but this big country that is our neighbor and with which we share the Amazon is a totally new experience.”
No daily flights
A day and a half it cost Roemer to get into Paraty. First a flight from Paramaribo to Panama, then a flight to São Paulo and finally five hours by bus. The long journey is indicative of the isolated position of Suriname within South America: there are no daily flights to neighboring countries, although the nearest Brazilian city of Belém is less than two hours of flying. There is a flight to the Netherlands every day.
Suriname is the only country in the region where Dutch is spoken. When the country became independent of the Netherlands in 1975, there was a debate about the language: was it not better for integration in South America if Spanish or Portuguese would get a greater role? Or if necessary English, to strengthen the connection with the Caribbean? But now that Suriname is celebrating for fifty years of independence this year, Dutch is still there the official language and the country is still focusing mainly on the Netherlands. Just like when Roemer grew up before independence. “The Netherlands, I went there at the age of nineteen. And that is still the case for most Surinamese. You go to Dutch universities, family lives in the Netherlands. The surrounding countries in South America did not arise, they were not in my consciousness. Because of the translation of the book I am now, and doors open,” says Roemer.
Yasmin Santos (27), acquisition editor at the Companhia Das Letras (the Letterenfonds of Brazil) found after reading the English translation of About the madness of a woman Immediately that the book had to be translated into Portuguese. “The themes in the book are very topical in Brazilian society with his strong Machismo,” she says. “The desire of women to make their own decisions, to make their own choices and to be a boss of their own body. In addition, the book is recognizable for black Brazilian women, because it is about a black woman in the diaspora, in this case in Suriname.”
Santos saw interfaces between Suriname and Brazil: both countries with a colonial legacy and a native population, struggling with racial issues. “For me, Suriname was completely new, the book taught me a lot about our neighboring country. We know little about Suriname, partly due to the blockade that Dutch raises.”
Superpower next door
During a dinner that evening, Roemer will talk to Brazilian authors from the Amazon with the help of translating table guests. At the table there are Pereira, an Afro-Intheem Brazilian writer, and Milton Hatoum, from the Manaus Amazonestad. Roemer: “Only recently, when I returned from the Netherlands to Suriname, I penetrated me that our country, and therefore I too, are part of the Amazon. That is something so big for me. All those years that I lived and worked in Europe, I have never realized that.”
Veirilde Pereira, whose work gives look in the small indigenous society in which she grew up, recognized in Roemer’s book The stuffiness that post -colonial societies can have. “My family was not happy with my book. They thought I was the dirty wash outside,” she says. Roemer listens and nods with a look of recognition.
The realization that a superpower with more than two hundred million inhabitants, a larger South American world, was giving Roemer and energy next door, but also sorrow somewhere. “If only I had known before. It feels like a parent who was always there, but who I have only got to know now. I realize that I am South American, I want to shoot here root,” she says at the end of her journey when she looks back on the terrace of the Copacabana Palace hotel.
This country feels like a parent I am only now getting to know
There is also recognition with the Brazilian audience, which has come en masse to the book presentation of Roemer at the festival in Paraty. Folha de São Paulothe largest newspaper in the country, publishes an interview with and a large article about Roemer. In it, a paragraph is also devoted to the issue of Roemer’s issue about the now deceased former President Bouterse prior to the presentation of the prize of Dutch letters in 2021. Roemer then wrote on social media that the Surinamese community Bouterse had needed to become self-awareness; After the emergence, the party at the prize -giving ceremony with the Belgian king was canceled.
On the main stage in Paraty, where journalist Adriana Ferreira Silva Roemer interviews for a sold -out room, it is mainly about her writership and Dutch in which she writes. “I think it’s a wonderful language,” she tells the audience that the translation hears through headphones. “But it is also the language that has been insulated from the rest of the continent in Suriname. Moreover, it is the language of the colonizer, who is often pronounced against their children by Surinamese in an imperative. Give this. A Surinamese man also does not use Dutch to express his feelings of love.
Violence against women
Daverend applause sounds like Roemer in response to the struggle of her protagonist Noenka talks about the position of women. “Women must serve a man. That is already in the Catholic faith.” Father, son and Holy Spirit, “we say when we hit a cross. But where is the mother? Actually they should say Father, Son and Mother. Everyone here was born from a mother. You can come so high in society as a man, become a king or emperor or admiral, but you are born from a woman!” She ends with a plea against violence against women. “For centuries, men do nothing but kill each other. And while they do that, they also destroy women and their children who try to build a happy life. There is still violence against women. Women still have no room to live in peace.”
In the long line at the signing session, the thirty -year cris says that the argument seized her. “Nowhere in the world are the femicid figures as high as in Latin America. But in Brazil there is a taboo on it. This writer mentions it, that gives us strength.” A reading club of friends Las Roemers book (Sobre a Loucura da Uma Mulher) And wants to take a picture with her. “Next year we will go on holiday to Suriname.”
The Brazilian Letterenfonds hopes to translate more books by Roemer and other Surinamese writers. “I would love to be Roemers Broken white want to translate, which contains many themes that are recognizable to Brazil, “says Yasmin Santos.” We’ll go soon We slaves from Suriname Translate from Anton de Kom to the Portuguese and release here. It shows that a Broederland has similar problems and, like us, a slavery history. Due to the translations, barriers are canceled and we can start the conversation. “
Porch
In the week that Roemer is touring Brazil, the Surinamese writer Cynthia McLeod is also in the country. She visits the capital Brasilia because of the translation of her debut novel How expensive was the sugarabout daily life during slavery. “My book has gotten wings,” she says in the Surinamese newspaper The true time.
Roemer visits the remains of the Slavenhaven Cais do Valongo found in 2011 in the Pequena Africa (Klein Africa) district. It realizes that during the transatlantic slave trade the most slaved Africans were transported to Brazil, an estimated five million people. And that slavery in Brazil was only abolished in 1888. “I don’t feel an outsider here, I feel like a black woman. The pain here, I feel too,” she says. She walks quietly and emotionally along the excavations.
This is also the neighborhood where the Afro-Brazilian writer Conceição Evaristo lives, a peer of Roemer. She opened a literary house where the audience can sniff in her library. “Evaristo is the most important black writer in Brazil of the moment,” says Yasmin Santos, showing Astrid Roemer some books. “She holds us from a different perspective, that of the black woman, a mirror of our class and color company.”
At the end of the journey, Roemer concludes that Dutch has not only isolated her from South America, but in a certain sense it also took her to it. “The Netherlands has given me plenty of room to become a writer, and the Dutch Fund for Letteren has committed itself to being translated now. The circle is round. I will quickly advise my nephews in Suriname to broaden their gaze to the region. Who knows they will study here in Brazil.”
