Abstract
Abstract This essay explores the complex ways in which narrative may signify in the contemporary Caribbean cultural context. Specifically, it is concerned with a trilogy written by award-winning Surinamese author Astrid Roemer, set in the years of independence of the Caribbean country after 300 years of Dutch occupation. The analysis focuses not on the usual postcolonial themes but on structures of signification: allegory, materiality and media of language, affect, and the function of objects. Roemer’s texts demonstrate the relation between discourse and physical violence, her language being tied to material media, bodies, and earth. Not just postmodern, but posthuman too, the Surinamese narrative is characterized by the attempt to connect objects to language, objects to emotions, or nature to memories. Language brings us in touch with Caribbean reality and memory, all the while questioning its capacity to do so through allegory and metaphor.
Highlights
How can we explain an author from a small Caribbean community whose texts her readers have trouble making sense of? Why so much noise on the line? In order to gain more insight, this article explores the complex ways in which these three novels denote the function of signification structures in the contemporary Caribbean cultural context
The power of Grimm is not in the tales, but in the experience of Ilya’s mother reading them to him: in the relational quality of narrating and an embodied voice and embodied listener. What is it that we have demonstrated? Our analysis of a major Dutch-Caribbean work of literature started from a meta-hermeneutical question about the structures of signification, which implies a focus on allegory, on the represented media, on language, and, on the relation between the symbolic and the physical world
Self-reflexivity is found in the materiality of language, in metaphor, and in the way in which affect, material culture, and nature are foregrounded to produce meaningful relationships and to undermine patriarchy
Summary
In Gewaagd leven, Onno’s brother, Hagith, becomes a reporter and in this role he joins the military commandos that operate from the jungle. We can read this as a foreshadowing of the tribunal, later in the novel, in which Herman will have to make his intimate practices public In this way, Cora (and Roemer) involves her audience in her testimony, making it aware of the highly politically charged space in which the information circulates.. Like Cora, the reader gains insight in the course of the narrative This discovery is relational: Cora’s travels and conversations with those who knew An Andijk bring her closer to the meaning of the past and of her own complicity. The novels require a different attitude from the reader, an ethical stance in which meaning is not grasped discursively, but rather embodied and felt affectively At those moments, the story is more than “just” text, coming closer to something “real,” albeit unable to coincide with reality. Foregrounded materiality of the words of the media, there is final strategy in Roemer’s texts: tying language to experiences and to objects
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