Astrid Roemer was “one of the most influential authors in Dutch-language Caribbean literature,” wrote the Surinamese site Star News last week, upon the death of the writer, at the age of 78.
Mind you, says Michiel van Kempen, emeritus professor of Dutch-Caribbean literature: that influence did not mean that everyone embraced or followed Roemer. “She has always been someone who wanted to wake up others and did this by dropping conventions. Early on, she put topics on the agenda that are now commonplace: everything that has to do with color and gender roles. But she did not want to be pinned down to anything, which also led to conflicts.”
She showed that personal life is steeped in politics: the living room just as much as the House of Representatives
Roemer was “relentless,” says writer Karin Amatmoekrim, and she says that with great appreciation. “For me personally, as a writer with a Surinamese background, she meant a lot as an example, because she claimed her own place in literature. In choice of subject and theme, but also in form and style. That she was a black woman, also queer, who dared to be so idiosyncratic was exceptional.”
Amatmoekrim met her as a Dutch student, during a course on ‘West Indian’ literature. “I had not learned Roemer from home, although my mother was very committed and up to date. That may say a lot about how poorly she was read among Surinamese: everyone knew Clark Accord and Cynthia McLeod, but Roemer was too complex, too contradictory for many. That is understandable – I worked on it myself, but I admired her approach to anyone who demanded an easy reading experience.”
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Ambition
Roemer’s prose was unruly, deliberately disruptive, sometimes confusing. Her work was not praised from the start. Reviewers wrote that it made them “itchy,” recalls Michiel van Kempen. The fact that she received the PC Hooft Prize for her oeuvre in 2016 caused “a shock” in the literary world, says Sander Bax, professor of contemporary Dutch literature at Leiden University. He was chairman of the jury at the time. “There was a tenor: that woman cannot write. That was telling for the prevailing norms, in which literature was most highly valued if it was an autonomous work and revolved mainly around form and style.”
The jury praised Roemer’s novels “which are at the same time sharp and relevant interventions in the public debate and complex literary representations of the history of Suriname.” Not autonomous but social, and the fact that her narrative style was complicated is simply related to her story.
I thought: how is it possible that this was hardly part of my training as a Dutch scholar?
Amatmoekrim, also a member of that jury: “What Roemer added to Dutch literature was an enormous ambition to give great history a place in her work, which was at the same time about everyday life and intimate relationships.”
The complex style was inextricably linked to this, says writer and researcher Emma van Meyeren, who is working on a dissertation on Roemer’s prose. “Roemer put a lot of weight in her language. She consistently reflected on how she used language, and thus showed how it partly determines how we interact with each other. In this way, she showed that our personal lives are steeped in politics, the living room just as much as the House of Representatives. Her novel Look like love (1997), for example, is very specifically about a retired cleaning lady, and Roemer manages to make it simultaneously about the big questions of life and the specific history of post-colonial Suriname.”
Bouterse
Roemer was a pioneer in this. Prior to his membership of the PC Hooft jury, Sander Bax admits, he was “not yet very familiar with her oeuvre”. “It was a discovery for me. So much so that I thought: how is it possible that this was hardly part of my training as a Dutch scholar? This was also due to the unspoken ideal image of a novel that prevailed in literary circles, an image that Roemer did not fit into, even though she did something that had great value. Her work also caused me to question my own literary standards – something that has recently become more common in Dutch studies as a whole.”
Unconventional became controversial when Roemer spoke positively about Desi Bouterse, whom she refused to call a ‘murderer’, even after his conviction for involvement in the December murders. The festive presentation of the Prize for Dutch Literature, awarded to Roemer in 2021, was therefore cancelled. Van Meyeren: “I was also shocked by those statements, precisely because she wrote very differently about those events in her novels.”
She remains a loner who does not want to be pushed around
Amatmoekrim: “She went far in her statements, but did express a position that is widely supported among ’boutists’, who see Bouterse’s movement as justified anti-colonialism.”
Bax: “I didn’t like the statements, but they were not entirely unexpected: she remains a loner who does not want to be pushed around.”
Champagne
Her position as an outsider has also brought Roemer loneliness. Amatmoekrim: “She once said about writers like Edgar Cairo, Bea Vianen and Anil Ramdas, loners just like herself: the fact that they went crazy was not only due to them, but also to their habitat, to the misrecognition and exclusion they experienced in the Netherlands. Be careful, she said to my generation. Fortunately, we are less alone.”
Ultimately, something changed: with the major oeuvre prizes in the past decade, Roemer did gain recognition. Amatmoekrim: “She had become a great lady. I once saw her on a plane to Suriname, she flew business class, with a glass of champagne. She also claimed her position in public: beautiful.”
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