On Astrid Roemer’s Off White
(Two Lines Press, 2024)
By Tikkun Bambara
The women were mostly quiet. They polished off the food they were served and lingered in the hall, staring at Laura and her mother. It was as if they, like her, wanted to see the impossible happen—Laura taking her mother’s arm and walking off through the gate and out of sight forever. As if they were thinking, If one of us can escape, maybe any of us could be freed one day.
We are greeted once more by Astrid Roemer. She welcomes us. Her greetings are beams of light between those we call kin. A niece visits her mother’s sister in Kolera, and asylum for the mentally. Heli, the exiled daughter, visits Laura, the exiled unruly would-be wife of Suriname. “I heard her friends shouting that I was on my way. Arms spread like a happy bird, she came up to me and gave me a hug. She took the food container, insisting, “‘Come with me!’”
And yes, we follow, as if exiled ourselves, beckoned into the labyrinth of a yellow house. Roemer’s new novel Off White, her latest portal into Suriname after almost twenty years of silence, arrives—this time in Paramaribo, its capital city where it “isn’t just about what you see; most of all it’s what stays hidden.” Rhetorical casting reminiscent of Suzanne Césaire’s seminal surrealist provocation The Great Camouflage, a descriptor that privileges the tropical beauty of the Caribbean at the expense of the colonial and intra-communal phantoms haunting the tropics.
Through depictions of blood, faint murmurings, intense erotic encounters, and silence, we are tasked to commune with the living world of Grandma Bee. And through Grandma Bernadette Vanta’s world, we witness that which is both marvelous and kept in a whisper within the Vanta family. Though from the outset, the stage is set. Grandma Bee is dying. Blood is the threshold through which all these relations must pass. And through blood, through various silences: care. And yet also harm from that which lingers. That which remains unspoken, unnamed. Harm by the negation of an utterance. Of knowing one’s proper timing to call one’s family on their proverbial BS:
“Grandma Bee, do you believe your brother Léon abused your daughter Laura?” No answer. “Imker, I can’t help Laura.” Then Imker leaned her head against her grandmother’s forehead. “Grandma, are you in pain?” Her grandmother rasped, “Yes. My Laura was such a cheerful little thing.”
The narrative brings us through a litany of inquiries. What is one to do with the prodigal granddaughter Heli, in the muck of a scandalous affair with a married man and an unsettling age difference? Heli, who knows during her first Sunday morning in the Netherlands that “Crying is what you do when blood pours from your body because you may be in mortal danger. But sometimes a woman bleeds and no one can see it.” Heli, whose connection to Surinamese identity is dislocated and unromantic. “I don’t want to live with other people from our country on some kind of Surinamibo reservation; I want to sample the Dutch way of life, understand it and absorb it.” Roemer’s labyrinth also asks us what to do with the daughter Laura, who reminds the reader of a kind of biblical Hagar in the Wilderness, Laura, a Surinamese woman, who:
[. . .] lost the will to do the things considered normal for women in Paramaribo. A woman who had once biked briskly to her school each morning with a bundle of notebooks tied to the cargo rack had turned into a loaded gun: menacing, unapproachable.
Laura, who now resides in Kolera. Grandma Bee, upon visiting her daughter in the asylum, asked “why she had to cry after every visit. ‘Because you love me’ was the answer. And her daughter kept repeating it, as if she wanted to make clear what mattered to her. ‘Because you love me mama.’” This scene, one of many encounters of Surinamese kinship between women, works as a microcosm of a larger parable in the novel: in the wake of intimate family and communal abuse, what human behaviors take shape if we are to indeed reinvent love? In the spirit of a Caribbean feminist echo of Kaiama L. Glover’s A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being, the women of the Vanta family could themselves easily be seen as both disorderly and gratuitous:
These self-regarding female characters (come to) believe that they matter and, as such, that to love and be loved is their right. However, like the Haitian goddess Ezili so exquisitely theorized by Colin Dayan, they “demand that the word [love] be reinvented.” (Dayan 1995, 63) (Glover 2020, 29)
Indeed, within Roemer’s new work the cartography of love and the intricate attention the characters map out display the interiority of family dynamics where elderhood and childhood require the same amount of bodily care and laughter:
It was Imker herself who offered to be more involved in dressing and bathing her. “And in the toilet, too, if you need help with that.” She said, “I feel so ashamed.” And her granddaughter said “Me, too, Grandma.” And then they couldn’t help but laugh. But she felt so relieved after the first shower, because Imker was as naked as she was, splashing water in every direction. [. . .] Afterward, there was no shame and no hopeless longing for death [. . .] and the thought that God was palpable in everything others did for her.
At other times in the novel, cartography serves as a descriptor for these kinships, particularly when frustration rears its head at unmet expectations when the family doesn’t show up. “Daily contact with Grandma was opening her up like an unfurling map, revealing some spots whose existence she’d forgotten. Mama has left Grandma Bee to her fate, she thought. She never stops by, never seriously asks how things are going in Zorg en Hoop. An old grudge?”
In this new work, Roemer’s “philosopher’s stone” is precisely that inclination that those we call kin are worthy of revisiting, protection, and questing for. Wherever they are in the universe. Inside an asylum, missing halfway across the world, or forged within our own fading memories. Even if the thing that binds us comes, in part, by way of violence:
A surname like Vanta that was coined by a racist, even if over time its significance has changed from threatening to healing. Rogier lets her talk. Her ambitions may be inspired by our country’s history, but they’re focused entirely on creating new human life. Besides, nothing blacker than Vanta exists; that’s a necessary condition of the universe. And no one can escape it.
And still, within the wake and afterlives of Dutch colonialism, delights seep in. So do erotic encounters. As well as assault and unwanted touch. Against this backcloth of abuse and whisper, Roemer posits life. Beams of life and taking cues from what Kevin Quashie calls “black aliveness” reset the stage. The smell of almonds. The texture of dark cake on the tongue. How are we to preserve the learning of a Surinamese family recipe when its keeper’s throat is aflame with cancer and can no longer speak? A matriarch now assigned to transcribing longings, a granddaughter tasked with learning how to oblige:
She went to the kitchen, grabbed a notepad and pencil, and wrote, “Imker, I’ll teach you how to bake a Fiadu. It’s not easy, but it’s my favorite kind of cake [. . .]. My cake should be as brown as my daughter Louise.”
Through Surinamese cake and occasions when families gather to celebrate new life, Roemer paints a picture of a Surinamese family articulating their various outlooks on skin color and varying shades of blackness:
Anton went to report his child’s birth at the civil registry [. . .]. The midwife’s name and his last name, which meant “black” at the plantation where his mother came from. [. . .] Much less delighted were the members of his wife’s family who came to see the new baby. [. . .] Ethel’s older siblings, Winston and Louise, had come out a just barely respectable shade of light brown, but the skin on this one had gone a step too far toward an undesirable extreme.
Indeed, throughout the novel we see the ongoing specter of Dutch colonialism haunt perceived standards of beauty, the labor market, and the geopolitics of Suriname. Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s illuminating Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism between Women in Caribbean Literature speaks to the ways, much like our protagonist Heli Vanta’s forced exile to the Netherlands is a miniature replica of a larger pattern of Caribbean human movement on the world stage:
Many can tell of relatives who have migrated to the Netherlands because while there is so much of the world here in Suriname, there is too little of world capital, and a dyadya uma needs to make a living. This continual stream of migration following Surinamese independence means that mati move to Holland, where their presence begins to Creolize the lesbian community and lesbianize the mati community. It also means that those Surinamese working-class women who stay in Paramaribo without remittances have less community as well as economic power [. . .]. (Tinsley 2010)
In Roemer’s novel, we also see relatives remaining. Siblings stewarding siblings through adolescence; naming parts of their bodies and modes of description for new adulthoods. This new offering centers a household of daughters, granddaughters, and beloved sons who are indeed fully alive and breathing Surinamese evening air. Laura; Louise; Babs; Audi; Heli; Imker; Winston. You may first notice the distance. Indeed, cascades of silence invoke the intertextual fabric of these relations. And yet we are tasked to resolve the quagmire. What is one to do with the grandfather, Anton, who protects his children at all costs and who sternly believes that “we must redeem ourselves from the shortcomings of the place called Suriname. The Europeans abandoned their overseas plantations, but they forgot to liberate their overseas workers from the hell they lived in. Anton Vanta didn’t care for his mother country.”
How are we to respond to Babs Vanta, the granddaughter, who “poked her nose into Mama’s most intimate stories. Then she would stalk off, more resentful than ever; but that piece of history stayed with her like the moon stays with planet Earth.” How are we to come to terms with the reality that a precious daughter named Ethel was shipped off by Anton in an act to salvage a possible future for her, who we now must recover from the debris and carnage of silence?
Silence is also a threshold. An arched beam. A bright yellow house. Silence colors the impasse family brings forth. And yet apace our disquiet are budding Surinamese girls and boys discovering who they are and who they want to be. Who they want to touch and who absolutely will not be touching them:
And how Mama had stood outside the shower with a pile of dry clothes, never failing to say, “Don’t forget to wash your vajayjay, yep, a little soap on your washcloth, rub gently, yep, under the shower, don’t be scared, your jayjay is yours, yours alone, no one else’s.”
Throughout the novel blood is a conduit for modes of relation to take shape. A sister provides clarity to a younger sibling: “‘What’s this?’ He’d once heard Heli say to Umar that she’d do everything in her power to help make a good man of her little brother Audi. She picked up the package and said in a friendly tone, ‘They’re pads for older girls and women, to absorb their monthly blood flow; yes, they put it in their underwear, and the bleeding has to do with making babies.’ He nodded. ‘Can you die from it?’ Heli rewrapped the pack in the newspaper he’d brought it in. ‘Bleed to death, you mean?’”
At other points in the novel, blood is an occasion to express the limits of pleasure as seen by our exile Heli. “I want to fuck him in the dark, to the point of bleeding if that’s what it takes.” And indeed, in the first few pages of the novel our Bernadette uses blood as a descriptor that will trace her kin back to her. “‘May my blood start to flow on this very spot and not stop until I’m found.’ The figure of Christ looked down on her. Blood on his torso. Drops of blood on his feet. Bleeding wounds in his palms. To keep from dissolving into tears again, she moved on to the figure of Saint Anthony of Padua through whose intercession all lost things are found again.”
In this new work, we are also onlookers at various rituals of preparation; a mother, Louise, preparing her son, Audi, the young Surinamese boy, a blooming scientist and poet with a keen interest in “reproductive organs.” This preparation by way of a haircut in the living room, for a world in which the displays of violence men do are taken as self-evident. As seen when Heli, now in Holland, arrives at a local library: “Another fear weighs on my mind as well. At the library, the morning paper was open to a headline in capital letters: SURINAMESE MAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF DRUGS ATTACKS GIRLFRIEND WITH MEAT CLEAVER. And still we must be our brother’s keeper, a guy said to me, handing me a free pocket Bible.” Heli’s mother Louise desires a different kind of being to emerge from her son Audi:
“I’ll shape you into a good brother to your sisters, Audi, and a good father to your children.” He laughed a little and glanced at the big book next to her. She went on, “And what’s left will be pure gold for the woman you love.”
This potent image of “a human being as pure gold” invokes sentiments akin to Suzanne Césaire’s conception of “the marvelous,” published in her pathbreaking essay “Alain and Esthetics.” For Césaire, the marvelous is made flesh by way of a kind of Antiilean art and by extension a human experience that is a conduit for overwhelming beauty. “A new art which leaves humankind in its true condition, fragile and dependent [. . .], a beauty that could not be more unexpected and overwhelming.”
Themes of the marvelous bubble up in the novel at various intervals and in ways that are complicated. Particularly for our heroine Heli Vanta, who attempts to self-emancipate to the mountains in the Netherlands with her lover, only to be abandoned by him when he brings his wife and children:
Cate looks pale from the rough weather and grimly takes off her gloves. “So, tell me.” It comes out in a seamless screech: “Derik has left his family to continue his relationship with me, and I have to pick him up at Schiphol soon so we can fly off together!” Cate sighs, clearly relieved, gets up to order two bowls of peanut soup, comes back, sits, and takes the hat off her head. “What can I do to help, sweetie?”
Complicated further because our Heli doesn’t actually situate her experience of the marvelous in the Caribbean at all, but in her new dwelling, the Netherlands. Arriving in the mountainous town originally reserved for Heli and her Derik, she is
[. . .] overwhelmed by the feeling that my experiences in the tropics were mere dreams and now, finally, reality is shining before me. It’s clear why Derik wanted to bring me to this virgin landscape high above sea level. When I enter our room and discover the view of the mountain range, I know my mother’s God has intervened. Cate comes up beside me and stares, too. “We’re up high,” I say. She doesn’t see my tears. Everything is frozen in place.
The marvelous in Caribbean belles lettres has been manifold, proliferating in many directions. While some scholars tend to collapse the terms of what we call the marvelous, within the hispanophone tradition we have magic realism and by extension Alejo Carpentier’s infamous naming of the “marvelous real” or “marvelous realism.” It is beyond the scope of this essay to delve into the various contours of the distinctions between them; my intention here is to particularly situate Césaire’s conception of the marvelous in relation to the experience Roemer’s protagonists live through. To be sure, Césaire’s articulation of the marvelous does not map perfectly onto Heli’s experience in the Netherlands. First and foremost, Césaire situated her conception of the marvelous firmly in her hometown of Martinque. As a seminal scholar of Césaire, Annette Joseph-Gabriel reminds us when thinking about what the marvelous meant to Césaire:
The marvelous for her is in part Surrealist and in part Caribbean. The Caribbean was for Césaire a site for all that eludes rational thought. You can see how that is political in two ways: 1) resistance to the status quo, of course, and that status quo being colonialism and fascism during World War 11; and 2) it’s also political and subversive to think about the marvelous in the Caribbean as a site for philosophy and cultural and intellectual production, which goes very much against what colonial discourse has said, that there is nothing here that France brings its gift of civilization to.
Attempting to read Roemer’s depiction of Heli’s overwhelming experience atop the mountains in the Netherlands alongside Césaire’s conception of the marvelous rooted solidly in the Caribbean occasions an opportunity to ask questions concerning what we mean by “the domain of the marvelous” and how do we recognize narratives of liberation across islands for the women who inhabit them. Roemer writes in a world where an ousted Surinamese exile is not in turn ousted from the domain of the marvelous, even if that experience comes through a Surinamese woman who has a complicated relationship with the Caribbean. In a similar literary labyrinth as René Ménil, Roemer also depicts the marvelous, among other avenues, by way of the erotic and the orgasmic, as terra communis and landscape. In Introduction to the Marvelous, René Ménil underscores:
Through a sort of magical incantation, stories and poems transport us into an extraordinary world: The land of the marvelous. It is the land which (unlike the world of real life) finally responds to our fundamental desires that ordinarily do not dare to be confessed. [. . .] Here is a world governed only by the pleasure principle. Man sees the intolerable limits of everyday life [. . .]. He can transgress his spatial boundaries [. . .]. He transforms himself into a tree. (Ménil, ca. 1930)
The marvelous also creeps in through other doorways, by way of African ritual. Grandma Bernadette Vanta’s hallucinogenic memory invites us there, when she recalls time spent during a Surinamese spiritual gathering called a Winti séance. As the morphine does its work, the cancer announces itself more profusely. Her granddaughter Imker assures her that she will stay, as Bernadette wishes, “Until I’m completely covered with sand”:
She could fearlessly tumble back to the Winti séance, which had not disappeared from her thoughts since the morphine [. . .]. Adults in colorful shawls, men with bare torsos next to wooden drums, women with headscarves carrying sloshing buckets of water with fragrant herbs. The master of ceremonies, wearing a European-style suit. He assured them that Anton’s ancestors had something to say and [. . .] everyone else was in a flurry of movement [. . .]. For them, it was a way of mourning. For the others, a party. Everything got louder—the singing, the hand clapping, the foot-stomping, the drumming [. . .]. A woman brought a gourd filled with a reddish drink, which the dancer sucked in then spit out. And returned to dancing, but more and more wildly, until she screamed, the dancer did, and everything held still [. . .]. Strangers were also looking on, the light in their eyes like jewels in their faces [. . .]. The Winti séance seemed to have been forgotten until, years and years later, the dancer’s gibberish began to look like a premonition. Laura, a grown woman, living at Kolera.
We follow Roemer’s labyrinth through Grandma Bernadette’s memory; it takes us to a kind of land of the marvelous; a land of the uncanny. For Bernadette and Anton, this spiritual scene is unsettling. So unsettling, in fact, that this becomes the decisive moment that bullwhips Bernadette into converting to Catholicism. Impatient, Anton said, “What is this woman saying?” And she whispered, “I want to go home.” Laura and Winston, like all the guests, were offered pieces of cake, which they refused. Where a reader might interpret this moment as an anti-African sentiment within the novel, Roemer shows that it is precisely this site of African ritual where Bernadette is able to use her almost disintegrating mind to formulate inquiries around her loved ones—her kin. “The dancer’s gibberish began to look like a premonition.” Indeed, the indigenous language of the dancer conjures up clarity about what needs to be asked.
Roemer writes characters who in the midst of anguish still have subjectivity, who can consider the shaping of their worlds, undeterred by their foreshowed decay. “Speaking so many words in one breath had become an effort. She gulped down a clot of blood. She was in pain. But she really wasn’t interested in bleeding to death.”
~
Particularly concerning the erotic, Roemer takes Ménil’s conception of the pleasure principle further and shows Surinamese women and girls governing their lives under the auspices of pleasure principles with gust and agency—in a way that is, to be frank, quite explicit. Heli, in spite of knowing her status as an exile living in Holland, has a scandalous affair. She envisages indulging in pleasure with a local tennis instructor who for the most part remains unnamed throughout the novel:
The lust in my womb has not been sated. I want to feel more everywhere he can touch me, melt with desire [. . .]. He lets the mailman out, locks the door, draws close to me, takes my left hand, presses it to his crotch. I grip it [. . .] and he pushes his tongue into my mouth. With both hands, I hold him by the balls, saying, “I need you to fuck me!” He lifts me off my feet [. . .]. Lya and Winston are watching the news when I let them know I’m home. “Were you with him?” Winston calls out. “Yes,” I call back, adding, “It took a long time, my Dutch dinner, delicious, though!”
These erotic encounters are less about providing a sense of the pornographic for the reader or the kind of metamorphic fantastical organismic imagery we get in a work like René Depestre’s Hadriana in All My Dreams, wherein a mischievous “sex-crazed butterfly man Balthaze Grachinre [. . .] has been turned into a sexually insatiable giant wood moth by the sorcerer Okil Okilon.”
Roemer’s depictions are more about sensual acts of refusal, precisely because Surinamese women are not allowed to talk about desire so explicitly in public, either in the context of the erotic or their desires for a life fulfilled. “Everyone in the family knew Grandmother Bee had been married off. Because she never had the chance to choose a life partner for herself.” And indeed, Cate, a friend of Heli, says: “My mother claims that a woman must learn to adapt if she wants a good marriage, but who can have a good life with a man who keeps walking out, Heli?” “I don’t know. I have no understanding of Men.” Conversations revolving around the erotic usually take place quietly:
She whispers in a staccato voice, “I broke up with that bastard I was dating because he couldn’t understand that a woman like me wants marriage, kids, a nice house, and a long life together, and not him screwing around like the cock of the walk.” I don’t crack a smile, even though she’s trying to make me laugh. I know how much that bastard really meant to her. After spending the night with him, she’d tell me the next morning at school, “He has a short penis, but so thick, it’s addictive, Heli, I’m staying with him until I drop dead!” [. . .] As we get off the bus, she says, “Heli, you know what rhymes with ‘thick penis?’” Just like at school in Paramaribo, I respond, “Hot Venus!” She offers me her arm, and we venture into the unknown.
These delights proliferate. Friends trying to make their friends laugh in spite of recognizing their heartache and then, for a moment, recovered by humorous foolishness. Roemer posits friendship as the qualifier for company into the “unknown,” which functions both as a way to describe the Surinamese immigrant’s experience traversing the Netherlands, and as a metaphor for Grandma Bee’s edging toward the abyss of death and what that unknown moment of surrender occasions for her children. Writing the erotic in such a way provides space for female protagonists to frankly articulate their desires in a world where their pleasures are deemed non-existent. This is shown in part when Heli takes her little sister Imker, along with Heli’s co-worker, to a conference held by The First Association for the Rights of the Surinamese Woman. Wherein a workshop instructor sets out to teach the young women attendants:
The woman who comes in with a Dutch lady looks familiar to me. She doesn’t say her own name, but immediately introduces the white woman, who begins her talk. Right away we’re all on the edge of our seats. [. . .] I don’t miss a single word. We’re shown a big color illustration of the vulva and vagina. Eleven pairs of women’s eyes stare at the thing. [. . .] The moderator has a question for each of us: “Are you in a relationship and how old is your partner?” She doesn’t ask who’s still a virgin and who is having sex. She obviously isn’t interested in lies. I say I have a boyfriend and give his age. She blinks. She even smiles. She says, “Best not to get stuck in that type of relationship, no matter how romantic it is, because by the time you get a handle on what your body needs, he’ll be too old to satisfy you and get you pregnant.”
In a social sphere where the female body is on full scientific display, where partners are assumed to be men and women are assumed to eventually get pregnant, Roemer posits encounters of Surinamese sisterhood. This is particularly shown a few moments after the conference workshop: we catch the awkwardness of what a close-knit community chalks up as embarrassing and scandalous, particularly regarding Heli’s affair with her previous teacher, an older married man named Derik. Heli’s sister Imker informs us who the woman who chose not to introduce herself, but looks familiar, actually is:
Imker and my co-worker Cate and I walk arm in arm behind the other women in silence. Then Imker says softly, “The woman who introduced us to the doctor is Derik’s wife: she’s straightened and dyed her hair, but I know her from the training program; she teaches arts and crafts.” I don’t respond. “Are you taking one of her classes?” my co-worker Cate asks sweetly. “Yes,” my sister whispers. “You poor thing,” Cate says, giving my arm a hard, painful pinch. I should say something to Imker, but I don’t know what. And suddenly my sister declares in a loud voice, “I’ll love you just the same, Heli, whatever you do!” I pull free and hug her in the middle of the street. I promise to share everything I have with her for as long as I live.
Again, the marvelous creeps in. A dimension of the marvelous in Caribbean surrealist literature has always been precisely those encounters that abolish time. Heli invoking such a language while flirting with her local tennis instructor: “Then I hear him saying in whispered tones as Cate watched us, ‘I’m not getting married before forty, how about you?’ I responded, ‘Go ahead and transform into oceans of time, and don’t teach me tennis, teach me to swim.’ We smiled at each other.” At another point the mother, Louise, wrestles with how to carve out a lasting adventure for herself in a world that has divulged chaos instead of consent:
After the abortion, she’d promised herself she’d never fall into the hands of any man. She knew what pleasure she was sacrificing, even if it had been forced on her. Her children had just happened to her, and she didn’t have time to get to know every one of them [. . .]. She understood that her four children held her future inside them, that the time had come to get to know her firstborn and the others, to learn to appreciate them as chunks of time opening worlds of being, where no clock, no calendar, no time limit existed.
Roemer is also an architect of the taboo, and, to be frank—of the disturbing and perverse within the realm of the erotic. Pushing us to our limits of what is actually readable and how far we can empathize with Surinamese women. Writing about what are undoubtedly the topic’s most taboo aspects: incest among Surinamese children. We continue into the labyrinth Roemer presents us with and encounter Louise and Winston Jr. (Louise, who many years later knocks her daughter Heli unconscious one night for the unfortunate accident of having stumbled on her mother and Winston Jr., who later has to face up to assaulting another member of the Vanta family: her daughter Heli):
Leaving behind the house where she was born proved more difficult than she’d expected, and when she asked her brother Winston how he made himself feel better, he pulled down his blue-black trousers and his underwear and let her see how he bounced his penis around and asked her to hold onto it until it settled down. And she did. And it got so hard, and a wad of something white shot out. She loved using both hands on his thing. She started to do it more often, and she started to crave it so badly she couldn’t do without it—it was the best feeling ever. It would have gone on longer than just a couple of days if Winston hadn’t tried to stick his hand down her underwear. That really shocked her. That wasn’t allowed. Suppose she started bleeding?
Again, we get an invocation of blood as both an indication of the body’s physical boundaries and the parameters of what is socially acceptable. And, most importantly, we also get a scene of a young Surinamese girl questioning the context in which the erotic happens. Roemer’s novel traces the limits of the taboo to the nth degree in the lives of Surinamese women who are on the receiving end of everyone else’s subjectivity but their own. Roemer’s covenant is to not throw them away. Tiphanie Yanique in conversation with Jamaica Kincaid and Kaiama L. Glover at Barnard College foregrounds the treatment of women and girls in the tradition of Caribbean letters within a negotiated dialectic between agency and subjectivity that provides a path where we might come to a clearing and notice who is allowed such experiences in the traditional Caribbean literary woodland, and who isn’t. Whereas women and girls in Caribbean literature
[. . .] get to act [. . .]. They get to move. They get to make decisions and act on their own decisions. Then maybe after that they get to have adventure, which boys always get [. . .]. Caribbean feminism has always been allowing women to have agency, even the old dead guys [. . .]. Even in those texts the women and girls had agency, but in a reverse way because they always didn’t have subjectivity. I feel like that always has been the condition that girls and women are up against in Caribbean literature [. . .] we were always doing stuff, we were always active but it wasn’t always clear in the literature why and what personhood was behind that action. (Yanique, 2015)
Roemer speaks to this desire; she distills fully fleshed subjectivity and gives us a world that responds to Surinamese women attempting to enchant their lives. “‘I’ve waited for flowers for so long,’ Laura said softly, adding, ‘You can go back to your house.’ But how could she do that, under the circumstances? ‘What are you going to do with the flowers?’ Laura’s response was very simple [. . .]. ‘I’ll go see my friends now and give each of them a flower.’” The Vantas and the Surinamese women that comprise their household buck up against the archetype of the romantic revolutionary of the Antilles. In some ways, Laura reminds us of Toni Cade Bambara’s Velma Henry from her 1980 novel The Salt Eaters—Velma, who lived in Claybourne, a town which was “getting to resemble the backwards of the asylum more every day.” Velma, the unassuming organizer, clustered among the disenchanted, a flickering light in the wake of 1960s revolutionary fervor, who attempts to take her own life in a final attempt to wash away despair and ventures into a journey of psychic renewal. Similarly, we see Laura, laborer of a grassroots movement, search her own psyche to make sense of how her world has come to be in its current shape:
She searched her mind for a landmark to organize her memories around. Elections. A Green People’s Party. The whole city littered with pamphlets [. . .]. Laura joined a young politician who was campaigning for a presidential candidate known to his adoring followers as Jopie. She formed a club with other young women that provided entertainment throughout the campaign, performing songs about the country, its party politics, and, of course, love. The politician lost the support of his party. He turned to alcohol. Threw tantrums. Put pressure on her to binge drink with him after his failure. Then something must have happened that made her snap. A rape? Did he beat her? She returned home from her job as a teacher in Saramacca a broken woman. Never wanted to see him again. Insisted on pressing charges against him. Gave us a hard time because her brother and sister were so enthusiastic about the new party.
Roemer’s novel occasions us to consider the options of lived adventures available to Surinamese women under conditions of duress, not only from the state and the aftershocks of colonialism, but from the Surinamese women we call kin. Moreover, to sit with the intensity of our urge to hold judgment over their lives. “She asked forgiveness for not letting her sister Laura into the house that night. For striking an innocent child. For enjoying a forced, forbidden lust. And each time she muttered, ‘Make each of my children better than I am, God the Father.’ And she understood it was her duty to help make that happen.” The novel also occasions us to consider the ways Surinamese women take care of other Surinamese women and the paths that lead from those sites of caress and friendship. Cate, upon hearing that her friend Heli, after the mayhem of having a scandalous affair with a prominent man in the community, responds in the only way she knew how: “Cate takes a white napkin from the napkin holder, grabs a marker from her purse, and writes in red letters: Fine, I’ll help you escape into happiness.”
Roemer is a relentless pursuer. She welcomes us. And in being welcomed, we are engulfed by modes of relation that are frankly impossible. And that impossibility is nonetheless pursued with vigor, desire, and gusto. Some of the consequences reenforce trauma, others provide a path through the heart of the forest. Laura greets Louise: “Maybe that was enough. Her mind was on other matters. She’d been reunited with her sister Laura, in a place where no woman wanted to go: inside the barbed-wire fence at the world’s end. Now it was her duty to lighten her sister’s undeserved suffering by spending time with her, as much as possible, or even if it became impossible.”
xxx
More on Astrid Roemer here and here
