Wild Coast

by John Gimlette

  After bouncing through the numbers I eventually arrived in a town called Springlands. It was a sleepless place, with two new minarets and yet more flags in the sea. Everyone here seemed either to fish for snapper or to sell stationery or teeth. In the market there was one man to pull the old teeth out and another to replace them. Most people got around in ‘Tapirs’, which were tiny home-made buses, with more paintwork than engine. All the beggars, I noticed, had parrots, and you could buy any god you wanted, made out of plaster. It all felt like some sort of unspecific festival, a celebration of nothing in particular. Was this the same Berbice that had almost imploded under the weight of discontent? Since the arrival of the Indians, it – or at least, the coast – had become a hotbed of something else; cricket, perhaps, or ‘Grand Sari Pageants’. (‘That’s all we ever do in Guyana,’ an Indian once told me, ‘hold pageants’.) It was sobering to think that even the best-paid participants – the cane-cutters and pan-boilers – might earn as much in a month as an English plumber earns in an hour.

  I stayed in a tall, thin hotel, almost on the sea wall. From my room I had a view of Suriname, way across the estuary. I also had a television, with two channels. One was in Dutch and had wafted over the river. The other was a Hindi channel, offering dances to the dead (‘To Grandma, with all our love from Romel, Romeo and Robin’). There was no food in the hotel, and the only decoration was a portrait of Ganesh. The owner didn’t even have his own room, and so he sat outside on the street. But at night he was replaced by a watchman, who had one wall eye and another for the ladies. He was disappointed that I hadn’t brought him eye candy, so I gave him some beer instead. As we sat on the sea wall, dangling our legs, I asked him if India was anything like this.

  ‘You joking, man? India some bad place, all that suffering and flies!’

  I wondered about this, as I went off in search of food. Springlands had only two illuminated eateries. The first was a Halal ‘snackette’, which also happened to sell scent and anti-perspirant. The other was a curry shop, popular with farmers. I’d never seen Hindus in Stetsons before, and huge canvas boots. There were only three things on the menu: ‘bush hog, chicken or iguana’.

  This, I decided, was India all right but with a South American swagger.

  On my last night in Guyana I watched the programmes from Suriname. It was a pleasing vision of life across the river. Smart, preppy-looking black people, chatting away in Dutch, sipped champagne and driving around in Humvees. It was like watching the American Dream, scrambled and encrypted.

  Even the Guyanese were occasionally bewitched and would risk their lives for a piece of the dream. As darkness fell, I watched their lights, like sparks on the water. Each boat carried a payload of whisky and laptops, or human beings. Some moored next to the hotel, wedged in the silt. There the watchman studied them sadly. Hardly a month went by, he said, without some sort of unsung disaster. ‘Usually, they hits the fish-sticks, the boat flips and everyone drowns.’

  Guyana, I realised, always seemed to end like this, leaking smugglers around the edges. The watchman called them ‘backtrackers’, as though they were pioneers or scouts showing everyone the way. Was this the future for Guyana, a ‘backtrack economy’? The watchman didn’t think so. He told me something I’d often heard before: that here beneath this great, pink swathe of ocean lay the world’s largest untapped oilfield.

  ‘This place,’ said the watchman, ‘going to one day be like Kuwait.’

  All that was holding the future back was the threat of a threadbare war. For years the Guyanese had been asking Canadians to set up a rig. But the last time anyone did so was in June 2002, when Suriname’s response was to send an ancient gunboat. Guyana had no real answer to this, and so there matters lay.

  I asked the watchman if he ever saw the Surinamese boat, out on the river.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘they can’t afford the fuel.’

  6

  GOOD MORNING, SURINAME

  In the distance I see a town which I think must be Surinam. It belongs to the Dutch, you know. Our troubles are over and happiness lies before us.

  Voltaire, Candide

  Surinam resembled, indeed, a large and beautiful garden, stocked with everything that nature and art could produce to make the life of man both comfortable to himself, and useful to society.

  John Stedman, Expedition to Surinam

  ‘But this Surinam is a lost corner of the world,’ he motioned through the open cabin porthole toward the low-lying swampy coast in the distance. ‘Ten miles in there is nothing but sickness and death, murder and Black Magic.’

  Nicol Smith, The Jungles of Dutch Guiana

  ACROSS THE RIVER LAY A PECULIAR LAND. The key to its peculiarity lies with its earliest visitors. They’re misfits and dreamers, running away after years of destruction. They’re also English, and wear sashes and lace, and beautiful wigs. Behind them are the charred remains of Edgehill and Newark, to which, they hope, they’ll never return. But they haven’t always had a common purpose. Some have fought for the King and others for The People. Their leader, however, Francis Willoughby, 5th Baron Willoughby of Parham, has fought for both sides, and in his portrait – which still hangs in the National Portrait Gallery – he is the very picture of well-groomed indecision. But about Surreyham (as this coast is quaintly known) he has no doubt. In 1650 he sinks the colossal sum of £26,000 into the creation of this, his own private heaven. It will be known, of course, as ‘Willoughbyland’.

  For the next seventeen years the coast flourishes and is a variant of paradise. ‘It is commended by all that went for the sweetest place,’ writes Willoughby, ‘delicate land, brave trees and fine timber.’ The new arrivals build a fort, and the Jews – recently expelled from Brazil – teach them the subtle arts of sugar. Soon over fifty vast estates appear. You can still detect the old rivalries, scrawled across the map. The Royalists name their plantations after themselves, or their fancy friends at court. The Roundheads, on the other hand, prefer something more apocalyptic, such as Succoth, Gilgen or Beersheeba. Only the slaves suffer, but at least their role will be remembered for ever: Aphra Behn calls by, and produces Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave. It will be the first English novel to emerge from the continent.

  But then the Dutch appear. After several inconclusive wars, the English agree to swap Willoughbyland for a cold, wet slab of North America called New Amsterdam. It’s a terrible transaction. Even with a catchy new name (New York), nothing grows up north. It will be another fifty years before the American colonies can produce even half as much as the island of Barbados. What’s more, England will lose its new colony in just over a century, whereas Holland will keep hers until 1975.

  Despite the protests from people such as Bolingbroke and Aphra Behn, the deal is done. In 1674 the Roundheads and Cavaliers burn down their mansions and leave the colony, soon to be forgotten. They are not the key to the story from here.

  Instead, it’s their slaves, now scattering into the forest. They will vanish for a while, like a secret world within, the nucleus of modern Suriname.

  As my ferry shuddered through the currents, I realised how little I knew of the country ahead. For months I’d been gathering books and statistics, and touring the Web. Of course, I had the components but I could never make sense of the whole. It was like viewing a gallery by looking through the keyhole. One minute I’d have a perfect view of the eighteenth century, and the next it would all be swept away in a torrent of languages, or I’d find that there were fifteen separate Marxist parties, each saying something different.

  Sometimes Suriname seemed almost to shrink out of sight. This wasn’t hard for a country the size of Florida, the smallest on the continent. I read that, at night, it all but disappeared, producing too little light for the satellite maps. Its population, at half a million, would barely fill a London borough. But I realised it wasn’t just size. Suriname seemed somehow to court oblivion. It had few diplomatic links and was often tangled up in sanctions. Visitors were deterred with
a labyrinth of visas and a dearth of information. I never found a guidebook, and the only map I had was gleefully approximate.

  The world, it seemed, had repaid Suriname by forgetting all about it. This must be one of the few countries that’s produced at least five famous people without anyone knowing where it is (they are, incidentally, all footballers: Clarence Seedorf, Patrick Kluivert, Frank Rijkaard, Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink and Ruud Gullit). Meanwhile, Suriname often ends up on the wrong continent. The Discovery Channel once placed it in Africa, and in the film, The Silence of the Lambs, it pops up in Asia. Things were no better under its temporary name, Dutch Guiana. Evelyn Waugh said it conveyed nothing to him (but then nor did anything Dutch). Even the Dutch thought it sounded too Deutsch, and in 1938 changed it back to Suriname.

  These days, few places are so energetically misspelt. Voltaire called it ‘Surinam’, and ever since the French have followed suit. On Google there are now almost as many Surinams as Surinames. Even my map gets it wrong, and so does the national airline. But I like ‘Surinam’. It has a mysterious quality which describes a land that’s everything this isn’t: ancient, rich, exploding with life and tucked into the margins of Indochina.

  On the far bank I found a prophet to drive me to Nieuw Nickerie. He said that the taxi was only a temporary measure, and that for years he’d been waiting for someone like me. ‘I want you to tell me what language this is’, he said, slotting a tape into his deck.

  From the speakers came the sound of muttering and birdsong.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Surinamese?’

  The man grinned and shook his head.

  As he was Indian, I tried Bengali.

  ‘No, not Indian, not Dutch, not any words I know.’

  ‘But it’s your voice, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes!’ he said triumphantly, ‘but I don’t know what I’m saying!’

  ‘So the words just came to you?’

  ‘Exactly! I think they come from God.’

  I’d been in Suriname an hour and already I could feel veils of incomprehension beginning to descend. At first everything had seemed normal: houses on stilts, oxen pulling carts of manure, canals cutting away to the horizon and wetlands bulging with rice. But then words appeared, and people. LET OP! said the road signs, and every little shack had Kippen te koop, or ‘Chickens for sale’. Even more intriguing were the things that were forbidden. What pleasure, I wondered, was prohibited by ‘Verboden voor Fietsers en Bromfietsers’? Bicycles and motor bikes, according to the Prophet. But there was another sign that said, ‘Verboden te plassen’. It seemed to mark the start of Nieuw Nickerie.

  ‘Ah yes,’ said the Prophet, ‘that means “No wild pissing.” ’

  Now we were among people and long rafts of vowels: Gouverneurstraat, Landingstraat and Oostkanalstraat. Everything dangled over water, and the canal banks were shored up with panels torn from cars. It was pretty, with its pink lilies and long waterways lined with palms and hatbox houses, and enormous creaking churches. I remember the sound of hymns coming from a bar, and an old crashed plane now serving as a nightclub. This is how Amsterdam would look if it were made from spare parts. It even had its own zeedijk, or sea wall, and a fleet of skiffs that sailed through the market. Water got everywhere. One area was called ‘Bangladesh’, because it was perpetually soggy. People didn’t seem to mind this. In 1879 their entire town had slithered into the sea, and they’d simply retrieved what they could and anchored further up.

  But most surprising of all were the people themselves. Where were all the Africans, with their flutes of bubbly and button-down collars? Almost everyone was Asian. I could see Chinamen in the shops, and Indonesians out in the mud. But the majority were Indian. The Prophet told me that, although Hinduestanen made up only a third of Suriname’s population, here they ran the town. They also ran the rice fields, the gold claims, two television channels and dozens of political parties. This was like a corner of Bihar, translated into Dutch.

  ‘You want me to give you a tour?’ asked the Prophet.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘but I’ve got a friend here.’

  He frowned and switched off the birdsong.

  That was the end of my encounter with the Prophet. Part of me still regrets not going on his tour. Suriname might have looked so much clearer through the lens of a seer. I often wonder at the experience I’d missed: two days, perhaps, of wild piss and wishful thinking, and a hotline to God.

  It was true I had a friend in town, or at least a friend of a friend. Archie Kaw was a bootlegger, journalist and trader in old computer parts. Like Suriname itself, he was a composite of races. His great grandfather, he once told me, was from Uttar Pradesh, and had been so rich he’d ridden around on a white horse throwing coins to the poor. This was obviously a popular ploy, because soon there were Africans in the family tree, together with Scotsmen, boeren, Lebanese, Pathans and the occasional Sephardi. ‘Shake a Surinamese tree,’ as Archie would say, ‘and a Jew always falls out.’

  All this had left Archie looking oddly nondescript. This was useful, as he ducked around between his lives and wives. He always wore black sandals and black jeans, and shirts of forgettable orange. He also carried two mobile phones, which rang alternately every few minutes. One was for calls from the television station and required a voice that was solicitous and urgent. The other was for wives and clients, and required ridicule and charm. Archie always had to pause at the sound of the chimes. It was like being with a man with two heads, never quite sure which one he was. Then, once he’d found the person he needed to be, he either slumped in his chair or ran for the door. Often he’d be away for hours and would then slip back in as though nothing had happened.

  It was obviously a delicate matter, being a mixture of colours. As in Guyana, status was a matter of shading. Being too dark would have made Archie merely a half-breed, known as a Moksi. Among other Indians, he’d have been lumped together with criminals, the Guyanese and those that pick bananas. But being too light, as Archie was, could also be a problem. It made him an outsider, both superior and slightly suspect. In this respect journalism was a perfect pedestal. It gave him just the vantage point he needed to administer the necessary levels of flattery and scorn.

  Soon after we met, Archie took me to his television studio.

  ‘What’s the story today?’ I asked.

  ‘One of our leaders is making a donation, to repair the road.’

  I nodded appreciatively. ‘And what about crime?’

  ‘A bit of smuggling, that’s all …’

  He said they hadn’t had a murder for years. That was impressive, I thought, for the nation’s second city. ‘Not really,’ said Archie, ‘they’re all alcoholics. Can’t get up without a rum.’

  He was an unusual reporter. I soon realised that most of Archie’s life was a matter of repackaging. Here in the studios he’d download a few hours of BBC, dub it in Sarnami and then send it back out. It was the same in his shop. The shelves were stacked with music that had been reclaimed, transferred onto disc and wrapped up in porn. Even the computers were re-packaged. Archie would take an old hard-drive, strip off the casing and replace it with a new one. ‘There,’ he’d say proudly, ‘who’s going to know?’

  No one, it seemed. Nieuw Nickerie was full of fakes and counterfeits, fizzling cigarettes and clothes that shrivelled up and shrank as soon as you put them on. But none of this was making anybody rich, and – despite his own industrious contribution – Archie remained obstinately poor. Tourism was just his latest scheme, and that’s where I came in. For a modest fee he’d feed me for two days, drive me around and put me up in his garage.

  So that’s how I ended up with a large pink room in a yard full of dogs. Whenever I went out, Archie had to gather them up and drag them to the side. I dreaded the telephone going at moments like this, and had visions of Archie dropping everything, vaulting the gates and leaving me alone with the pack. The only building within screaming distance was a brothel. It was made of old wet wood an
d had a neon sign across the front. ALLEEN VOOR GASTEN (‘Only for Guests’), it proclaimed – rather needlessly, I thought. Archie once let slip that the girls were mostly Brazilian and charged twenty bucks an hour.

  The next two days were partly Indian, and partly something else. At dawn I’d be woken by a muezzin and the response of the frogs. For breakfast we’d eat fried chickpea and samosas, dipped in ketchup. Then we’d be out in the rice, which Archie called the achterland, or boonies. Usually the farmers were already out, half-naked on the polders. Once we visited the creek where the water monkey lives and found it planted with prayer flags. Although we never saw the ogre, we did come across a pond full of giant crabs, and a tiny prehistoric fish called the kwie-kwie, which is like a rhinoceros with fins. Another time we went down to the zeedijk to drink some beers and ended up in a temple with the goddess of water, Ganga Mai.

  Archie often talked about his ancestors. I was never quite sure whether he admired their enterprise or despised their credulity. He said they’d been coaxed here after the abolition of slavery in 1873. Many believed that they were coming to the Land of Ram. ‘Can you believe it?’ said Archie. ‘They thought they’d come to heaven!’

  Tens of thousands of Indians had followed. This great misconceived migration ended only in 1916, at the insistence of Mahatma Gandhi. But there could be no question of going home, or turning back the clocks. ‘We were told,’ said Archie, ‘to make lots of children, and take this country over.’

  Archie’s own attempts at population had been somewhat sporadic. He had families, but never quite where he wanted them. Now there were the ringtones, a constant reminder of the pitfalls of the past. His latest girlfriend was called Shafiqah, and happened to be Javanese. ‘The Indonesians,’ he once told me, ‘were the new slaves, imported to replace us.’