Short stories
Rond het sterfbed van mijn dorp
Not translated into English
Dorus Vrede · 1987
Synopsis
The collection opens with a commentary on the people of the interior who would like to leave the city and go home. The title story and “I'm not leaving before the water reaches my feet” tell of the rising of the reservoir lake in 1964 through a few destinies: quarrels between the lo, branches of the clans, families scattered upstream and downstream, the powerlessness of the obia before the rising water. Other texts portray a son and his mother, a priest who builds a school in a little girl's village, or a heroic woman of legend.
Context
More than five thousand Maroons from twenty-eight Saramaka villages and six Aukaner villages were displaced without consultation when the Afobaka dam made the river rise. For the critic Michiel van Kempen, this collection, the author's first, is the first major narrative treatment of this tragedy, of documentary value and partly autobiographical; he sees in it the birth of an oral tradition immediately written down, with the framed tale characteristic of Creole oral storytelling, while regretting endings that are too moralising. The book went through three printings.
Who it is for
For those who want to hear, from the inside, the history of the Maroon villages swallowed up by Lake Brokopondo.
Prizes and reception
Reprinted three times, hailed by critics as the first great narrative of the flooding, it made its author known.