The Middle Passage

by V. S. Naipaul

  Corly met me off the plane and welcomed me formally on behalf of the Surinam Information Office.

  ‘You are a writer and a poet,’ he said.

  ‘Not a poet.’

  ‘I knew at once it was you. I felt a sort of trembling.’

  Corly himself was a poet. He had just that day published – at his own expense and in a limited edition of four hundred copies – his second book of poems. He had a parcel of them in his office and promised to give me one as soon as we got to Paramaribo. With Corly at the airport was Theresia, a tall pretty girl of mixed race with beautiful hands and ankles. She, somewhat to my surprise, spoke little English; and as we drove in the moonlight along the straight, smooth American road (built during the war) Corly explained the language problem in Surinam and the general cultural struggle, about which the rest of the world knew nothing. Corly loved Holland, Dutch literature and the Dutch people and was in trouble with the Nationalists for writing in Dutch, and not in the local dialect, on themes that were not specifically of Surinam. Matters had not been made easier for him by the Dutch newspaper Elseviers, which had described his work as ‘an enriching of Dutch poetry’.

  It wasn’t late when we got to Paramaribo but the town seemed asleep. We found a pension – the Negro proprietress looked a little startled – and then went on to Corly’s office. On one desk I saw a miniature Surinam flag: five stars, black, brown, yellow, white and red, to represent the various races, linked by an elliptical black line, on a white field. I asked Theresia which star was hers. She pointed uncertainly to the brown star; and, indeed, in one of the handouts which Corly gave me I read: ‘In a way perhaps the brown star is the star too with a hidden meaning because its colour could represent also a successful experiment, the harmonious blending of many races into a people; the mainstay of the population of Surinam.’ At last Corly undid a brown paper parcel and pulled out his book. An uncomprehending glance showed that the criticisms of the Nationalists must have had some effect. Surinam was frequently mentioned in the poems. Corly also told me that he had invented a name for the ideal Surinam woman. It was ‘Surinette’, and was the title of one of the poems.

  Meeting the Press. Perhaps because of his work, Corly believed in the value of publicity and wanted me to have my fair share of it in Surinam. He thought my arrival was news, important enough to make the morning papers; and after we had taken Theresia home he took me to a newspaper office in a quiet palm-lined street. The office stood, I believe, next to a bakery. We went through a side gate and along a passage to a small brightly-lit room, where a tall pipe-smoking Dutchman in shirtsleeves, holding proofs and a red pencil, shook my hand with an air of surprise. Corly spoke; the Dutchman replied. We were too late. The paper had gone to press. And true enough, at the end of the cluttered room, beyond some bits of machinery, the paper was printing, a gate-like grill flapping back and forth, printing one side of a sheet at a time. So I didn’t make the morning papers.

  It was unfortunate for the British West Indies that British imperialism coincided with a period of poor British architecture. Trollope was appalled by Kingston, but commented: ‘We have no right perhaps to expect good taste so far away from any school in which good taste is taught; and it may, perhaps, be said by some that we have sins enough of our own at home to induce us to be silent on this head.’ The Dutch colonies have been luckier in the Dutch; and though Paramaribo is not as handsome as Georgetown, it has a run-down provincial elegance, with its palm-lined streets and dusty side-walks, its close-set wooden houses and their verandaed top floors, its calm main square overlooked by official buildings, the hotel and the club.

  In architecture as in so many things these West Indian territories have a mother country fixation, and – compare Rotterdam with any new British town – the results continue to be as disastrous for the British territories as they are happy for the Dutch. Federation Park in Port of Spain is an example of tastlessness which is almost like cynicism; so too are the buildings of the University College of the West Indies in Jamaica. Paramaribo, on the other hand, has half a dozen modern public buildings of which any European city might be proud. But these buildings suggesting the metropolis are incongruous in the heat and dust and afternoon stillness. For Paramaribo is provincial. Paramaribo is dull.

  I had a little provincial excitement on my first morning, when I was awakened by a military band. The small procession of white and black soldiers in white, and black policemen in chocolate, passed three times in the street below. The streets never offered anything like that again. In fact, very little happens in the streets of Paramaribo after midday. Because of the heat offices and shops open at seven in the morning and close for the day at half past one. As a result, everyone goes to bed early, and throughout the morning people are to be seen eating in offices.

  A roof garden had been opened on the new Radio Apintie building. It was a club, Corly said; but as a foreigner I would be admitted without any trouble. There was no trouble. We were welcomed by the barman, who had no other customers and was glad of our company. We looked over the silent city. At the back of most private houses, grand and not so grand, there were whole ranges of ancillary buildings: the big house and tenants, in one yard: a relic of slavery, which was abolished here only in 1863.

  ‘What,’ Corly asked, ‘do the Surinamers do when they are doing nothing?’

  In Georgetown I had longed for the liveliness of Port of Spain. Now I longed for Georgetown, and the people of Paramaribo told me I didn’t know what dullness was: I should go across the border to French Guiana.

  The C.I.D. Man. I had met the Inspector of the C.I.D. Special Branch in one of the fine new banks where I was disadvantageously changing my British West Indian dollars for guilders. He invited me to visit him at headquarters, and when I did so I found him in a small white office which was full of newspapers from various West Indian territories. The Inspector read these newspapers diligently. His concern was the security of Surinam and it was his duty to study political trends in neighbouring territories. He was going to British Guiana to ‘observe’ the elections.

  Below the shuttered afternoon calm, however, passions were engaged. A fortnight before, an ‘advisory council for cultural cooperation between the countries of the Netherlands Kingdom’, had been set up with the aim, in Surinam, of promoting ‘interest in and a knowledge of Western culture, especially in its Dutch manifestations’. The Nationalists had responded vigorously; and their four-page manifesto, issued while I was there, contained their denunciations and resolutions, together with the text of a radio talk by Dr Jan Voorhoeve. It is typical of the fairness and urbanity of the Dutch-inspired administration (which has produced the only incorruptible police force in the Western Hemisphere) that the Nationalists should have access to a radio station; and not surprising that Dr Voorhoeve is himself a Dutchman, a member, moreover, of the Netherlands Bible Society. Voorhoeve’s intelligent, temperate talk was especially interesting for its analysis of the colonial society.

  A colony is a strange sort of society, a society without an élite … The leaders come from the motherland, are people with another culture … The colonial cultural ideal has pronounced bad consequences for the individual. It is in fact an unattainable ideal … A few exceptional people … come to great achievements, but thereby lose their nationality … And what goes for them does not go for ten thousand others who must remain stuck in a soulless imitation, never achieving anything of their own. They learn to despise their own, but get nothing in its place. So, after the war there were many in Surinam who thought themselves far above the ordinary people because they had been able to assimilate the Dutch language and the Dutch culture. Sometimes they wrote a pretty little poem à la Kloos, or painted a pretty little picture, or played a Mozart sonata not without skill; but they were not capable of any true cultural achievement. When this new generation was able after the war to go to Holland in greater numbers … they discovered their cultural emptiness with a shock. They came into contact with the great wor
ld, the community of nations, and stood there with empty hands. They did not have their own songs; they hardly had Mozart. They did not have their own literature; they only had Kloos. They had nothing and were worthless elements in the life of nations. What once was reason for pride – ‘Surinam is the twelfth province of Holland’ – was now reason for shame and disgrace.

  Controversy at this level could scarcely become public in the British West Indies. True, there is talk about West Indian culture, but this is ingenuous where it is not political, and is rooted in the colonial attitude which rejects as barbarous all that does not issue from the white mother country. That a colonial society might be one without an élite is too frightening even to be perceived. One reason for this British West Indian passivity is that the British have never attempted to turn their colonials into Englishmen. They have in fact been irritated by the assumption, made so easily by the Dutch or French West Indian, that equal opportunities existed in the mother country. In their empire the British were ‘Europeans’, and the West Indian conception of the mother country has caused amusement, dismay and alarm in England. The Dutch have latterly encouraged Surinamers to think that they could become Dutchmen; and I was told of a club in Amsterdam where, over their genever, these Surinamer Dutch speak with regret of the loss of Indonesia. The paradox is that Dutch idealism is leading to rejection, while out of British cynicism has grown a reasonably easy relationship between colonials and metropolitans.

  The Dutch have offered assimilation but not made it obligatory. Their tolerance and understanding of alien cultures is greater than the British, and the very reverse of the French arrogance which makes the French West Indian islands insupportable for all but the francophile. And one cannot help feeling it unfair that the Dutch should have their own cultural offerings spurned by their former colony. Surinam has come out of Dutch rule as the only truly cosmopolitan territory in the West Indian region. The cosmopolitanism of Trinidad is now fundamentally no more than a matter of race; in Surinam diverse cultures, modified but still distinct, exist side by side. The Indians speak Hindi still; the Javanese live, a little bemused, in their own world, longing in this flat unlovely land for the mountains of Java; the Dutch exist in their self-sufficient Dutchness, the Creoles in their urban Surinam Dutchness; in the forest, along the rivers, the bush-Negroes have re-created Africa.

  Despite all the talk of culture, however, Surinamers have little idea of the diversity and richness of their own country. My recurring exclamations at the Javanese costume made my Creole friends laugh. The Creoles know only Europe; they have made no attempt to get to know the Javanese or the Indians and it is only recently, under the Nationalist stimulus, that they have tried to understand the bush-Negroes. One Nationalist even suggested that the existence of Javanese and Indian culture in Surinam was a barrier to the development of a national culture! This pointed to the confusion and the unexpected racial emotions that lie at the back of the Nationalist agitation. The cultural problem in Surinam is mainly a problem for the Negro; it is only he who has rejected his past, all that attaches him to Africa.

  For the Negro of the islands Africa is no more than a word, an emotion. For the Surinamer Africa is almost in his backyard. Beside the rivers the bush-Negroes have maintained their racial purity, their African arts of carving, singing and dancing, and, above all, their pride. Rediscovery was not hard.

  At Home. The minister, big and black and bluff, played bush-Negro songs on the record-player in the greenheart-floored drawing room of his fine new minister’s house. ‘You wouldn’t have heard these songs in a drawing room a few years ago,’ he said. Afterwards, as if emphasizing the new era, he told jokes in the local language, which is talkie-talkie for the irreverent, negerengels – Negro English – for the correct, and Surinam for the nationalist. Later he took the two other ministers, of different races, to the bar in the corner of the room for a political confabulation. While this was going on the three wives made little jokes about politics and the ways of politicians.

  The Nationalists hope to replace the Dutch language by Negro English; and Mr Eersel, who has done much work on the language, explained the possibilities to me in his Volkslecturing office. I put Mr Eersel in his forties; he was grave and very gentle, with one of those sculptured Negro faces in which every feature appears to have been separately cast, so that one studies the face feature by feature. He said that Dutch was not properly understood or spoken by the majority of Surinamers, while everyone understood Negro English. They had already compiled a dictionary of Negro English; and the language was growing: they made up new words in conversation every day. I said that the adoption of this language would mean that every important book in the world would have to be translated: did they have the resources? They would manage. But what about the writers? Was it fair to ask them to write in a language spoken by only a quarter million people? That was no problem, Mr Eersel said; if they were good they would be translated. Was this language capable of subtlety? Was it capable of poetry? Mr Eersel asked me to test him. From a faulty memory I wrote:

  They flee from me that some time did me seek

  With naked foot stalking in my chamber

  I have seen them gentle, mild and meek

  That now do scorn to remember

  That they have taken bread from my hand.

  He at once translated:

  Den fre gwe f’mi, d’e mek’ mi soekoe so,

  Nanga soso foetoe waka n’in’ mi kamra.

  Mi si den gendri, safri,

  Di kosi now, f’no sabi

  Fa den ben nian na mi anoe.

  My memory had mutilated and simplified Wyatt’s simple lines and Mr Eersel had simplified them further, but there was no denying the sweetness and rhythm of the language. I would have liked to see how it would handle something more abstract, but my memory failed me altogether.

  I know no Dutch and relish it for its improbability, its air of recent and arbitrary manufacture. Oost woost thoos boost, you utter, or sounds like that, and you’ve said, ‘East west, home’s best’. While English breeds dialects that are recognizably English and scarcely modify the standard language, Dutch, because of its difficulty or improbability, breeds new and separate languages which very soon destroy Dutch. There is the kitchen Dutch of South Africa, the Papiamento of the Netherlands Antilles, the negerengels of Surinam. A passion for bad grammar is one of the singular features of regional pride in Dutch territories. The Surinam district of Nickerie, which is noted for its independent spirit, has a cyclostyled newspaper called Wie for Wie. The paper is written, no doubt impeccably, in Dutch; but its name, which is simply ungrammatical dialect English – ‘we for we’ – proclaims the dialect as an exclusive possession.

  The importance of English in Surinam dialect is puzzling until one remembers that British Guiana is next door – in Nickerie they even play cricket – and that Surinam was British until 1667. It is in fact the English left behind three hundred years ago, in the minds of the slaves, which is the basis of Surinam Negro English. And this is the true wonder. Though Trinidad was Spanish until 1797 and thereafter, with immigration from the French islands, French-speaking for three-quarters of a century, Spanish in Trinidad is dead and French survives only in a few phrases and constructions. In Surinam, however, after three hundred years, a form of English survives. At first the English element in Mr Eersel’s translation seems negligible; but this is largely the effect of corrupt pronunciation.

  Ah dee day day we. This, improbably, is nearly all English, and from English-speaking, sophisticated Trinidad. Unscrambled: I did there there, oui: I did find myself there (to there, to find oneself, to be), yes: I was there. Considering the English the Surinam slaves must have spoken in 1667, and considering the pronunciation of the time in England, it is remarkable that so many words are still recognizable. We can tell how the language had developed a hundred years later, in the 1770s, from Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam.

  In on
e of the minor actions of the war a military detachment was cut to pieces in the forest by the rebellious slaves, who, following the custom of the time, began cutting off the heads of the dead soldiers. One soldier was only pretending to be dead, however; and before his turn came, the head-cutter put away his cutlass, saying, ‘Sonde go sleeby, caba mekewe liby den tara dogo lay tamara. – The sun is going to sleep. We must leave these other dogs till tomorrow.’ During the night the soldier escaped. Though the sentence has been twice reported, first by the Dutch soldier and then by Stedman, it needs only to be spoken quickly to be recognized as English, English in the mouth of a West African.

  You no sabi waar she iss? Dutch sounds so made up that at times it brings on a light-headedness in which you feel that anything said in a Dutch accent would be understood. In a restaurant in Arnhem I once found myself, with perfect seriousness, speaking pure gibberish to a waitress who continued misleadingly to smile. And something like this happened when I went to call on Theresia one afternoon. A woman from one of the tenements in the backyard (relic of slavery, I remembered) told me Theresia was out. Improvising an accent, the words coming from I know not where, I asked, ‘You no sabi waar she iss?’ ‘Ik weet niet waar ze is,’ the woman replied in careful Dutch, and tossed her head. ‘Ik spreek geen talkie-talkie, mijnheer. I do not speak talkie-talkie, sir.’ So I hadn’t spoken gibberish; I had spoken negerengels.

  It may be smart for ministers and others to speak negerengels, but for the proletariat, to whom it comes naturally, it remains a degradation. Until recently, according to Dr Voorhoeve, children whose mothers caught them speaking negerengels were made to wash out their mouths.