Founding Fictions of the Dutch Caribbean

Author, educator and artist Diana Lebacs was born in Curaçao, and, like most natives of the Caribbean, is of mixed heritage, Curaçaoan, Indonesian and Surinamese. She is best known for her children’s literature and young adult novels written in Papiamentu and Dutch, but she has also written poetry, drama, and for television. She has received regional and international recognition for her books. In 1976 she received the coveted Zilveren Griffel award in the Netherlands, the highest honor awarded for children’s literature. In Curaçao in 2003 she received the inaugural Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds Caribisch Gebied cultural award. In 2007 she was knighted in the Order of Orange-Nassau, one of the most distinguished civil decorations of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

Lebacs’ young adult novels and children’s writing are often a species of coming-of-age stories, what literary critic Wim Rutgers calls novels of childhood, where a young Black person grows into confident adulthood in a postcolonial society. In Sherry, het begin van een begin (Sherry, the beginning of a beginning) (1971), for example, a young Black Curaçaoan girl who looks in the mirror daily wondering sadly why she is Black, becomes a teacher and, inspired by the May 30, 1969 postcolonial revolt on the island, takes up activism. She grows into a confident young woman who observes her social and cultural environment more critically and takes as her task to raise awareness among the Black population of the changes needed on the island. And she becomes a champion of her own culture as Harry Theirlynck argues in his important 1986 study Van Maria tot Rosy. Over Antilliaanse Literatuur. Lebacs received the Zilveren Griffel for the first of the four books of the Nacho in Bonaire series about a Black boy growing up on the island of Bonaire. The Longest Month is her first novel that clearly aims to make adults its primary audience.

The four texts in our series, My Black Sister, A Stranger on Earth, Slave and Master, and The Longest Month, trace the arc of emancipation from post-slavery to postcolonial in two ways. First, they offer a view of the historic circumstances in their fictional backgrounds, and second, they imply the changing view of their audience toward the prospect of racial equality and the final extirpation of the legacy of slavery and other forms of oppression. My Black Sister appeared in the 1930s and speaks to the basic situation of a collapsing colonial empire. A Stranger on Earth appeared in 1962 and reflects the postwar period in the world at large and the continuing racial stalemate on the island of Curaçao. Slave and Master, while it is about the slave revolt of 1795, reflects the politics of the year 1988, when it was published. The Longest Month appeared in 1994, twenty-five years after the 1969 revolt on the island, and sixteen years before the 2010 dissolution of the Netherlands Antilles and Curaçao becoming an autonomous country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands.