Читать книгу We Slaves of Suriname - Anton de Kom - Страница 11

And that cultural archive was bulging with material.¹ De Kom devotes one whole gruesome chapter to the “punishments” inflicted by the plantation owners, with details drawn from historical documents. In We Slaves, De Kom uses these documents to give literary form to facts forgotten and facts suppressed, so that the reader can no longer dismiss them as trivial.

Until the publication of We Slaves, much of the Dutch population felt that slavery in Suriname had been far away and irrelevant. They told themselves it couldn’t have been as bad as all that. Yes, perhaps there had been a few unfortunate incidents – so the argument went – but that was a question of a few rotten apples spoiling the reputation of all plantation owners. Meanwhile, the investors in Surinamese plantations had often been banks or individuals in the Netherlands. African-American literature contests this “bad masters defense,” often with horrifying facts and stories, and De Kom proceeds in exactly the same way, showing that the Dutch justice system had horrifying consequences. Because enslaved people were not seen as human beings but as possessions, public massacres came to be considered normal. The torture method known as the “Spanish billy goat” played a central role in all this; almost everyone has seen the prints by John Gabriel Stedman and William Blake. Surinamese slavery is known, despite continuing debate in some quarters in the Netherlands, as the cruelest form practiced by any Western power.

Another form of cruelty discussed by De Kom at length is the systematic sexual exploitation of “our mothers.” They “worked” for their owners and produced still more Dutch chattels: the children they bore. His trenchant analysis shows that this practice was inspired not by any Christian ideology, but by the deep-seated Dutch love of the koopje, the cheap buy. To De Kom, the combination of putative Christianity and the desire for a cheap buy is unique to Surinamese slavery.

De Kom also rewrites the rainforest expeditions against the maroon leaders Joli Coeur, Baron, and Boni, describing them from those leaders’ perspective and telling the stories of their individual backgrounds. He sets them in direct contrast to the governors heading the Dutch colonial administration and shows the reader that their conduct is more civilized than that of the “whites.” He writes, “We defy one and all to show us that whites have ever, at any time in Surinamese history, treated colored people this way” (p. 115)! Role models like these, “our fathers and mothers,” as De Kom consistently calls them, are the book’s literary heroes.

They were counted among the brutes, as the whites called the maroons in those days, but to us they are and will remain heroes of Suriname, who won their proud status as leaders through bravery and virtue, fighters for the rights and liberty of Surinamese slaves. Baron! Boni! Joli Coeur! Your memory will be forever cherished in our hearts. You are part of us. (p. 120)

Here De Kom places a literary image in the heart of the reader, so to speak – one which drives out any colonialist image of the maroon leaders. This revisioning from the perspective of the oppressed is central to the narration of the story of slavery. As Frederick Douglass reflected at the end of his life, “My part has been to tell the story of the slave. The story of the master has never wanted for narrators” (Douglass, pp. 310–311).