Suriname, De Kom was taken prisoner and confined to Fort Zeelandia. Here too, there is a parallel to many African-American writers such as Douglass, Jacobs, and Malcolm X, who all spent time in American prisons in the course of their lives and wrote about their experiences.
I hope it is clear by now that De Kom’s experiences, his journey toward self-knowledge and self-confidence, and his writing stand in a literary context and tradition. One significant contrast with the African-American context, however, is that many North American college students are assigned Frederick Douglass or W.E.B. Du Bois as required reading in a survey of American literature. My son, who is studying at an American university, recently asked me if I would read his essay about Douglass. African-American works have entered the canon of American literature, and there are now essays comparing “Call me Ishmael” (the famous opening sentence of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick) to “I was born a slave.” Like Melville, Douglass is now seen as an American cultural icon.
The same cannot yet be said of De Kom in the Netherlands. I read Simon Vestdijk’s Back to Ina Damman (1934) in secondary school in the Netherlands many years ago, as a text exemplifying Dutch literature and culture of the 1930s. Perhaps now, students will read We Slaves alongside the canonical Vestdijk, analyze these texts together, and establish a different, inclusive Dutch literary canon of the early twentieth century. Maybe then a new Dutch literary “We” of interconnection will emerge, a “We” of listening and sharing.
Note
1 1 In her book White Innocence (2016), Gloria Wekker uses the term “cultural archive” to reinvestigate perspectives on Dutch culture. [DvO]
Bibliography
1 Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself. London: W.W. Norton, 2016 (1845).
2 Douglass, Frederick. ‘From The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892)’. In The Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader. Ed. William L. Andrews. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 226–311.
3 Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. London: W.W. Norton, 1999 (1903). The 1903 edition was published under his full, partly Dutch, name: W.E. Burghardt Du Bois.
4 Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings. Ed. Vincent Carretta. London: Penguin, 1995 (1789).
5 Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
6 Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993.
7 Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” The Nation, June 23, 1926. Online: https://www.thenation.com/issue/june-23-1926/
8 Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself. Ed. L. Maria Child. London: Harvard University Press, 1987 (1861).
9 Kom, Anton de. Wij slaven van Suriname. Amsterdam: Atlas Contact, 2017 (1934).
10 Locke, Alain. The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999 (1925).
11 Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. London: Harvard University Press, 1992.
12 Stedman, John Gabriel. Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam. Eds. Richard Price and Sally Price. London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988 (1790/1796).
13 Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. London: W.W. Norton, 1994 (1852).
14 Vestdijk, Simon. Terug tot Ina Damman. Amsterdam: Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 1999 (1934).
15 Wekker, Gloria. White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race. London: Duke University Press, 2016.
16 Wolbers, Julien. Geschiedenis van Suriname. London: British Library, Historical Print Editions, 2011 (1861).
17 Woortman, Rob and Alice Boots. Anton de Kom. Biografie, 1898–1945 | 1945–2009. Amsterdam: Atlas Contact, 2009.
18 Wright, Richard. “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch.” In Uncle Tom’s Children. New York: Harper & Row, 1993 (1938), pp. 3–15. Library book episode at p. 14.
19 X, Malcolm with Alex Haley. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. London: Penguin, 2001 (1965).
Why Anton de Kom Still Inspires Generation after Generation Mitchell Esajas
It is an honor to write an essay about one of my heroes, Anton de Kom. I can’t remember when I first read his book, but I do know that my mother, who was born into a large farm family in Coronie, Suriname, had a beautiful edition of We Slaves of Suriname on the shelf. On the cover was a portrait of De Kom and above that the title in bold pink and orange letters.
As I write, in 2020, the latest Dutch edition is soon to be published. On the one hand, this is a praiseworthy decision on the publisher’s part, eighty-six years after the first edition. On the other hand, it is sad to think that one reason the book has been reissued is its contemporary significance. In We Slaves of Suriname, De Kom showed in a compelling, probing, and illuminating way that, even after the abolition of slavery, colonialism perpetuated inequality. Many things have changed, but unfortunately we are still, even now in 2020, grappling with the legacy of colonialism. Many generations have drawn strength and inspiration from De Kom’s work. This essay – which is based on documents from The Black Archives, a center for the documentation of Surinamese, Caribbean, and African history – aims to show how Anton de Kom has inspired different generations.
“Race” and Class in Colonial Surinamese Society
One of the reasons De Kom’s work inspires so many people is that he was the first Surinamese writer to make a razor-sharp analysis of how racism and class functioned in Surinamese colonial society. Even after July 1, 1863, formerly enslaved people, along with indentured workers who had recently arrived in the country, were still doing the demanding physical labor for the benefit of the white colonial elite and large companies. De Kom saw discrimination against indentured workers from what were then the Dutch East Indies and British India and in favor of European immigrants. He also made it clear that employers were exploiting indentured workers by persuading them, “under false pretenses, to sign contracts that keep wages low and working conditions poor in Suriname and perpetuate the old slave mentality” (p. 163).
He also provided his readers with a visceral understanding of the wretched and inhumane circumstances under which the indentured workers and formerly enslaved people were practically forced to work for meager wages on coffee and sugar plantations and as “balata bleeders” deep in the Surinamese rainforest. De Kom describes how the treatment of Black and brown laborers contrasted with that of a group of white German laborers who settled in the colony in 1897. The difference is shocking: many of the Black and brown indentured workers did not survive the voyage to Suriname, because of “malnourishment, a lack of fresh air, and filthy berths” (p. 163).
Solidarity
De Kom did not, however, hold all white people responsible for the
