very act of writing undermines colonialist prejudices about the supposed unintelligence of enslaved people. Such prejudices formed the pretext for denying them formal education. In 1845, Frederick Douglass published his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. This slave narrative immediately became a huge success, and part of its radicalism lay in its subtitle, Written by Himself.
By writing literature, an enslaved person defies one important tenet of the slavery system: enslaved people can never hold a position of any significance in white society and will always need support. Writings by enslaved people were dismissed as hoaxes, and critics argued that they had actually been written by white authors. Even De Kom, who published We Slaves almost ninety years after Douglass’s book, met with this reaction. We Slaves was disregarded and belittled as “really written by Jeff Last.” The implicit claim was that De Kom, a Black man, could not possibly possess the ability to write such a book. That argument was used to exclude him from Dutch culture.
Furthermore, De Kom’s union activities and contributions to left-wing papers led to accusations of communism, and he thus came to be seen as a potential enemy of the Dutch state. In the United States, many African-American writers faced similar allegations in response to their political activities. The well-known gospel singer, actor, and activist Paul Robeson, for instance, was not permitted to renew his passport after the McCarthy hearings. Strikingly, De Kom’s biography notes that he used to hum Robeson tunes (Woortman and Boots, p. 261). Du Bois emigrated to Ghana for idealistic reasons, and Richard Wright to France.
The Surinamese-Dutch American Otto Huiswoud, who moved from Suriname to Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance and became involved in political activism there, also left the United States. After World War II, he moved to the Netherlands, where his positions included the presidency of Vereniging Ons Suriname (the “Our Suriname Association”; V.O.S.).
The Breath of Freedom
That sense of inferiority can be counterbalanced by writing literature. De Kom states this in no uncertain terms: “No people can reach full maturity as long as it remains burdened with an inherited sense of inferiority. That is why this book endeavors to rouse the self-respect of the Surinamese people and also to demonstrate the falsehood …” (pp. 85). This is also one reason for the autobiographical basis of many works in this Black literary tradition; as witness statements rooted in fact, the stories are necessarily true. The writers of the Harlem Renaissance built on the literary “I” developed in slave narratives like those of Frederick Douglass. The near-classic opening “I was born a slave” serves to show how the writer escaped that category and became an “I,” a person with a human identity.
Langston Hughes wrote in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926), “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. … We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.” The authorship of “selves” is a central concern. That is why De Kom emphasizes the “We” in We Slaves of Suriname. Taking control of the literary presentation of “our own individual black-colored identity” is more or less the motto of We Slaves.
This understanding of “We” forms a fundamental departure from the “I” of much early African-American literature. De Kom thus emphasizes his conception of solidarity and the distortion of history. This is illustrated by two important passages from We Slaves.
When De Kom returned to Suriname in late December 1932 to visit his gravely ill mother, he stood on the deck of the ship longing for “Sranan, my fatherland,” as he put it, amid the flying fish and “the breath of freedom.” It is no stretch to see this as an allusion to the slave ships and the captivity associated with them. For example, in the best known of the rare literary accounts of the “Middle Passage” (from Africa to the Americas), The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavas Vassa, the African (1789), the enslaved Olaudah Equiano described the flying fish on the deck and the contrast between the fresh air there and the stench in the hold. De Kom goes on to describe his encounter with a white stoker:
High in the stays and shrouds of the Rensselaer blows the wind of freedom. On the deck below me, a stoker emerges – white, but blacker than I am with soot from his fire – and hurries toward his stuffy quarters. Halfway along the forecastle, he waves at me and the children. In the blackness of his face, the whites of his eyes and his pearly teeth are smiling. That too is the same everywhere, and beautiful everywhere: the fellowship among proletarians and their love of liberty. (p. 200)
The stoker and De Kom embody a new “we,” “the same everywhere, and beautiful everywhere,” which champions the love of liberty. In this passage, we witness an unexpected encounter between white and Black: not a sense of alienation from one another, but a look of recognition, a laugh, and a wave. De Kom recognizes the stoker and himself as equals, in spite of all their differences.
These passages in We Slaves deserve literary analysis to uncover new textual meanings. In reading his final chapter purely as autobiography, the reader overlooks De Kom’s added nuances and creative choices.
A Vision of Motherly Listening
Here, in closing, is another key passage from the final chapter of We Slaves. In it, De Kom lays out his literary vision, in much the same way as Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk. While Du Bois sees the sorrow songs and African-American music as the instruments of positive change in American culture, De Kom describes his vision through the story of his arrival in Suriname, where he is hailed as a savior. At that stage, he doesn’t quite know what to do; he is under surveillance by investigators and forbidden to give speeches.
It’s as though someone has suddenly knocked at my heart: What will you do to ease your people’s suffering? In the velvet darkness of the night I hear soft steps.
Mother, what can I do to help? My comrades are waiting. I have only just returned. So much has changed.
It seems as if my mother leans in to kiss me, the way she did when I was little, the way she listened to my complaints and my sorrow ebbed away because someone was willing to listen.
And all at once I know: I will open an advisory agency and listen to the complaints of my fellows, the same way my mother once listened to her son’s sorrows. (p. 202)
De Kom had traveled to Suriname with his wife and children to see and speak to his mother, but she died not long before his arrival. It is as if that personal trauma of arriving too late is transformed into this image, this vision of motherly listening as the driving force of change. Not the archetypal male response of fighting back, as Frederick Douglass fought the “Negro-breaker” Covey, but listening and working with others: that is the vision that comes to De Kom in We Slaves.
It is striking that this key passage has gone almost unnoticed in discussions and interpretations of We Slaves, with the emphasis placed instead on the autobiographical person and on communist allegations about a kind of revolution. In We Slaves, this revolutionary vision is explicitly rejected. Ndyukas, members of a maroon people, want to conceal weapons on the grounds of De Kom’s house. But De Kom writes:
Almost every day, representatives of the Ndyukas of Boven-Commewijne came to me, and I received a number of offers to bring weapons to my property in secret, offers I rejected in the most forceful terms. What I was after was organization, not a bloodbath. (p. 208)
Instead of promoting violent resistance, De Kom tries to achieve change through a strategy of listening. His mother listened to his complaints, and that helped “because someone was willing to listen.” De Kom listens to the complaints
