I know: I will open an advisory agency and listen to the complaints of my fellows, the same way my mother once listened to her son’s sorrows. (p. 202)
De Kom had traveled to Suriname with his wife and children to see and speak to his mother, but she died not long before his arrival. It is as if that personal trauma of arriving too late is transformed into this image, this vision of motherly listening as the driving force of change. Not the archetypal male response of fighting back, as Frederick Douglass fought the “Negro-breaker” Covey, but listening and working with others: that is the vision that comes to De Kom in We Slaves.
It is striking that this key passage has gone almost unnoticed in discussions and interpretations of We Slaves, with the emphasis placed instead on the autobiographical person and on communist allegations about a kind of revolution. In We Slaves, this revolutionary vision is explicitly rejected. Ndyukas, members of a maroon people, want to conceal weapons on the grounds of De Kom’s house. But De Kom writes:
Almost every day, representatives of the Ndyukas of Boven-Commewijne came to me, and I received a number of offers to bring weapons to my property in secret, offers I rejected in the most forceful terms. What I was after was organization, not a bloodbath. (p. 208)
Instead of promoting violent resistance, De Kom tries to achieve change through a strategy of listening. His mother listened to his complaints, and that helped “because someone was willing to listen.” De Kom listens to the complaints of “his fellows,” and today’s reader listens to De Kom.
In Suriname, De Kom was taken prisoner and confined to Fort Zeelandia. Here too, there is a parallel to many African-American writers such as Douglass, Jacobs, and Malcolm X, who all spent time in American prisons in the course of their lives and wrote about their experiences.
I hope it is clear by now that De Kom’s experiences, his journey toward self-knowledge and self-confidence, and his writing stand in a literary context and tradition. One significant contrast with the African-American context, however, is that many North American college students are assigned Frederick Douglass or W.E.B. Du Bois as required reading in a survey of American literature. My son, who is studying at an American university, recently asked me if I would read his essay about Douglass. African-American works have entered the canon of American literature, and there are now essays comparing “Call me Ishmael” (the famous opening sentence of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick) to “I was born a slave.” Like Melville, Douglass is now seen as an American cultural icon.
The same cannot yet be said of De Kom in the Netherlands. I read Simon Vestdijk’s Back to Ina Damman (1934) in secondary school in the Netherlands many years ago, as a text exemplifying Dutch literature and culture of the 1930s. Perhaps now, students will read We Slaves alongside the canonical Vestdijk, analyze these texts together, and establish a different, inclusive Dutch literary canon of the early twentieth century. Maybe then a new Dutch literary “We” of interconnection will emerge, a “We” of listening and sharing.
Note
1 1 In her book White Innocence (2016), Gloria Wekker uses the term “cultural archive” to reinvestigate perspectives on Dutch culture. [DvO]
Bibliography
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3 Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. London: W.W. Norton, 1999 (1903). The 1903 edition was published under his full, partly Dutch, name: W.E. Burghardt Du Bois.
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18 Wright, Richard. “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch.” In Uncle Tom’s Children. New York: Harper & Row, 1993 (1938), pp. 3–15. Library book episode at p. 14.
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Why Anton de Kom Still Inspires Generation after Generation Mitchell Esajas
It is an honor to write an essay about one of my heroes, Anton de Kom. I can’t remember when I first read his book, but I do know that my mother, who was born into a large farm family in Coronie, Suriname, had a beautiful edition of We Slaves of Suriname on the shelf. On the cover was a portrait of De Kom and above that the title in bold pink and orange letters.
As I write, in 2020, the latest Dutch edition is soon to be published. On the one hand, this is a praiseworthy decision on the publisher’s part, eighty-six years after the first edition. On the other hand, it is sad to think that one reason the book has been reissued is its contemporary significance. In We Slaves of Suriname, De Kom showed in a compelling, probing, and illuminating way that, even after the abolition of slavery, colonialism perpetuated inequality. Many things have changed, but unfortunately we are still, even now in 2020, grappling with the legacy of colonialism. Many generations have drawn strength and inspiration from De Kom’s work. This essay – which is based on documents from The Black Archives, a center for the documentation of Surinamese, Caribbean, and African history – aims to show how Anton de Kom has inspired different generations.
“Race” and Class in Colonial Surinamese Society
One of the reasons De Kom’s work inspires so many people is that he was the first Surinamese writer to make a razor-sharp analysis of how racism and class functioned in Surinamese colonial society. Even after July 1, 1863, formerly enslaved people, along with indentured workers who had recently arrived in the country, were still doing the demanding physical labor for the benefit of the white colonial elite and large companies. De Kom saw discrimination against indentured workers from what were then the Dutch East Indies and