“Did you know that your great-grandfather was also a journalist?” My father and I are in the Maduro library on my native island of Curaçao. He comes there often, because genealogy is his passion. Where I normally listen with half an ear when he talks about the umpteenth ancestor, I now prick up my ears.
“His name was Moses Michael Pinedo,” says my father, “better known as ‘Momon’. He was owner and editor of daily newspaper Boletin Commercial.”
With the help of the librarian, we find three boxes of yellowed newspapers from the 1930s. My heart skips a beat when I read the subtitle: Handelsblad.
Momon (1878-1945) practices several genres and writes in three languages: Dutch, English and Spanish. His style is too exuberant for me, but I can appreciate his idealism. “As soon as we are back to our regular work and the party intoxication is over, let us continue to live as beautifully as we did this week,” he writes in 1934 after the celebration of the 300-year relationship between the Netherlands and Curaçao. “Searching in one another something united.”
Momon also had his own section, ‘Sociales y Personales’, in which he describes the life of Curaçaoans. “In that section, gems of Spanish writing were found,” writes J. van de Walle in below the wind from 1974. “Small portraits of people at meals, at receptions and parties, worth rereading in every way.”
Van de Walle was sometimes surprised about his “friend” Momon. “When I was only on the island for a very short time, he invited me for a meal on the cool terrace of the then Americano hotel. While eating he told all kinds of details about the city of Amsterdam as it, at least I thought, lived on in his memory. The description of that city, however, deviated so fundamentally from reality in some respects that I finally asked Shon Momon when he had last been to the capital. He answered without batting an eyelid that he had never been to the Netherlands, and therefore never to Amsterdam, but that he knew the capital like the palm of his hand thanks to the books (…) he had read about the city.”
Van de Walle also visited Momon at home. He showed him a clump of Dutch soil donated by a friend – his most precious possession. Momon, Van de Walle surmised, was grateful to the Netherlands that the Curaçaoans had never been reduced to ‘nationals’, ‘however colonial the conditions might be in contemporary eyes’.
The Maduro Library gave me – and I am eternally grateful to them for that – a copy of Boletin Commercial. And my father gave me a silver box, once owned by Momon, with the clod of earth. “Take good care of it,” he said. “And someday give it to someone who can take good care of it too.”
Danielle Pinedo replaces Ellen Deckwitz for three weeks.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of August 9, 2022