“I love words so much,” Astrid Roemer said ten years ago NRC. “When I die, I will miss the language the most.” The writer had just been awarded the PC Hooft Prize, which turned out to be the prelude to a renewed appreciation of her work. According to the jury, “political commitment and literary experiment” went hand in hand. After the prize was awarded, her work was discovered by a new generation, followed by a series of translations and new prizes. Roemer died on Thursday at the age of 78 in Paramaribo.
Roemer is now considered a literary pioneer, who wrote about decolonization, racism and the disadvantaged position of black women in the 1970s. The translation of her novel About the madness of a woman (1982) was longlisted for the International Man Booker Prize in 2025 and was hailed in the United Kingdom as “a classic in queer literature”.
Roemer was not afraid of complex literary constructions, which earned her the praise of critics and the admiration of fellow authors. However, she also became involved in controversies several times due to political statements. When she was awarded the Prize of Dutch Literature in 2021 for her work that was “unconventional, poetic and lived through”, Roemer’s unconventionality turned out to cause problems. The award ceremony by the Belgian king was canceled because she had praised Desi Bouterse, and even after his conviction for the December murders she refused to call him a murderer. She herself regarded the affair as “an action by diaspora Surinamese, intended to deny me what makes me happy.”
Roemer was born on April 27, 1947 in Paramaribo. In 2016 she told how as a child in Suriname she heard songs by Annie MG Schmidt on the radio and became fascinated by language. “I liked listening to adults and thought it was special what language use did. That those sounds and signs had meaning, that they touched people.” She became a frequent reader, a child who ordered books about which she had read reviews from the bookstore in Paramaribo.
At the age of twenty she left for the Netherlands, where she broke through as a writer, although she refused to be pigeonholed: “I am married to Suriname, the Netherlands is my lover, I have a homosexual relationship with Africa and I am inclined to make mistakes with every other country.”
Role model
About the madness of a woman made her a role model for many women and established her reputation as one of the most important Surinamese-Dutch authors. Roemer’s most ambitious project was the trilogy Bold living (1996), Look like love (1997) and Was signed (1999) in which she examined the problematic Surinamese-Dutch relations in more than a thousand pages. She wanted, she said, to show the patterns that keep recurring in Surinamese history. “I do not mean that Suriname is stuck in a vicious circle, that would be far too fatalistic for me. The point is that you cannot escape your own history, but that you can find a new relationship with it,” she said in NRC.
After that, it became quiet for quite some time around Roemer, who was also a short-lived municipal councilor for GroenLinks in The Hague. She felt hunted for years, she said, by burglars and stalkers, by people who pretended to be her and also by the police. After being awarded the PC Hooft Prize, Roemer started publishing more; in 2024 DealersDaughter nominated for the major Belgian literary prize De Boon.
Roemer was now living in Suriname again, in the house of her mother, who died in 2019. She didn’t want to leave anymore, she said NRC in 2021. “I am in transit in the metaphorical sense, towards the last twenty years of my existence.” She said she still had at least eight books to write. A few weeks before her death, she completed her last novel. In 2016 she had already said that she only wanted to write autobiographically. “Before you suddenly die and others start writing about you based on gossip and lies. I have nothing against biographers, but it is better to put your own words into words first.”
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