Founding Fictions of the Dutch Caribbean

Introduction

Olga E. Rojer and Joseph O. Aimone

Translators often re-cultivate old fields, providing fresh translations for works that have already produced sustained interest in the target languages. It is a rare privilege to be among pioneers, to bring a literature to an audience that quite literally has not seen anything much like it before. And when the gift the translator brings is full of tragedy and history, and vividly works through issues of terrific importance, such as emancipation, decolonization, and a fractured sense of community in a globalized geopolitical world, the privilege is even more humbling.

Once a neglected corner of the map of postcolonial studies, the literature of the Dutch Caribbean is becoming of increasing interest to readers worldwide. Original and of high caliber, it inhabits a wide range of voices, themes and styles, exploring typical Caribbean topoi of history, race, identity and culture, tensions between colonizer and colonized, the legacy of slavery, spiritual alienation and the vexed drama of polyglot religion. Although written by authors born on small Dutch islands in the southern Caribbean, this literature is not parochial but sets universal themes in the specificity of a tropic light. It is a relatively young literature, not having found its voice until well into the twentieth century. Inextricably rooted in the daily life of the Dutch Caribbean, the stories reflect the mixed culture, a veritable multicultural, multiracial and multilingual mosaic. On the Leeward Islands of Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao, Dutch was (until 2007) the official language, the language of the former colonizer, and Papiamentu, the popular Creole language, the language of the native population. Dutch is the official language on the Windward Islands, Saba, Saint Martin and Saint Eustatius, along with English and French. In 2007 Papiamentu became the official language of Curaçao, along with Dutch and English. The founding classics of Dutch Caribbean literature are written mostly in Dutch, rather than in Papiamentu, and mainly on the largest island, Curaçao. But it would be a mistake to characterize Papiamentu as a minor literary language. Papiamentu is a mature and exemplary Creole, with a literature of growing significance.

This book lays the fourth stone in the edifice that is the emerging presence for English-language readers of the literature of the six former Dutch colonies in the Caribbean, specifically the Leeward Islands, Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao. We laid our first stone with our 2007 publication Founding Fictions of the Dutch Caribbean: Cola Debrot’s My Black Sister (Mijn zuster de negerin) and Boeli van Leeuwen’s A Stranger on Earth (Een Vreemdeling op Aarde), in which we showcase two crucial works of postcolonial Dutch language fiction from the Dutch Caribbean from the 1930s and the 1960s. We laid our second stone in 2012 with Founding Fictions of the Dutch Caribbean: Carel de Haseth’s Slave and Master (Katibu di Shon), a 1988 novella widely acknowledged as an important work of serious fiction in the Creole language Papiamentu, produced by an author native to the Dutch Caribbean islands. The third stone was laid with our 2022 publication Founding Fictions of the Dutch Caribbean: Diana Lebacs’ The Longest Month (De Langste Maand), a multi-layered story in Dutch from 1994, written as a regional novel and authored by that rare find, a woman novelist from the Dutch Caribbean. We focus now on another key work in the history of that literature, this time from 2009, Eric de Brabander’s novel in Dutch The Life Everlasting of Doña Lisa (Het hiernamaals van Doña Lisa), a hard-boiled, minimalist, postmodern story about perennial problems of postcolonialism.

Curaçaoan author, essayist, literary critic and dentist, Eric de Brabander, has written seven novels and two short story collections in Dutch. Still active today in the field of dentistry, de Brabander completed his dental studies in the Netherlands, and, after a multi-year internship at a university in Rochester, NY, set up his dental practice in Otrobanda, the older, historic section of Curaçao’s capital Willemstad. He published scientific articles before he began writing fiction. His fiction has similar themes that the author grapples with in his writings, the influence of historical events on human life and action and the inability to stop it, the search for a dignified life in the throes of history, health, human frailty, and the inescapable power of destiny, the feebleness of love in relationships, and, finally, science versus quackery. The Life Everlasting of Doña Lisa is his debut novel. It was longlisted for the prestigious Libris Literature Award in the Netherlands. The novel was translated into Papiamentu by noted Curaçaoan translator Lucille Berry-Haseth. His 2013 novel De supermarkt van Vieira (Vieira’s Supermarket) was translated into English by Scott Rollins.