July 1 is approaching, and that means Keti Koti, and it means summer. The city my window overlooks sparkles in the sunlight. It feels like a memory that I get to relive. The recognition lies in the tops of the trees that burst into a thousand shades of green, in the laughing people in the street, the heated horns in the traffic.
A boy walks past on the other side of the canal. He wears a black miniskirt and gold ankle boots with a heel.
My phone rings, I allow myself not to answer. I get a lot of calls during this period. Or I want to come and talk, think, write about the slavery commemoration year. They ask me why it’s important, the commemoration. To ask the question is to answer it, we all know that. Yes, it is important that we keep talking to each other, and that we remember together. Because in that conversation and in that togetherness something like a society arises.
A recorded message on my voicemail; if I can come to the studio to talk about Anton de Kom and his rehabilitation. I can’t, the agenda is too full. Besides, but I won’t say that, I don’t want to. I wrote a novel about De Kom ten years ago. I crawled into his skin, tried to see the world as he might have. Tried to bring him to life for all those people who didn’t know him (there were many at the time).
When the book came out, there was praise in the Netherlands. Criticism came from Suriname, because I had had the book take place in the psychiatric institution in which De Kom had been admitted for a short period. Inappropriate, they said. Unkind and hurtful. Mental problems were a form of weakness. And weakness apparently did not mix with heroism. The comment that touched me the most: “That’s what you get when they start writing about us.” ‘They’ were Dutch. That was me. ‘Us’, those were Surinamese. It was not me.
I realised; if commemoration is a conversation, then I wasn’t invited here.
I call the studio to say I don’t have time to talk about De Kom. And that I hope they find someone else (someone who remembers in a more appropriate way than I do, I think, but I’m not saying that either).
After I hang up, I look outside for a while.
The boy is almost out of my sight. I can just make out his long, straight hair, the short, pleated skirt that ends well above his knees. His legs are long and slender.
I admire him, and I am concerned. Silently wish him a safe walk, hope that no hostile looks will be thrown at him, no violence, no revenge for what he imagines.
Keti Koti, I now think, coincides with the end of Pride Month. The month in which the rights and beauty of the queer human being are celebrated gives way to the commemoration of all people who have been denied in the aftermath of slavery. People like Anton de Kom: heroes who were sold to us as a threat to national security. Like this boy is a hero in his own way, and his wayward resistance is still characterized by too many people as dangerous, superfluous, abnormal. With all its consequences.
Commemorating and celebrating is still so necessary on so many levels. It is actually an ongoing conversation about who we were and who we want to be. A conversation in which we will usually not agree with each other. About whether a man in a skirt gives offense or not. Or about how to write about heroes, for example.
Karin Amatmukrim is a writer and man of letters. She writes a column here every other week.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of June 27, 2023.