Suriname: An Imagined Community

Recent testimonies

In Van Galens book, one elderly Creole woman says, in 1995: ‘Let that woman take back that country!’ With ‘that women’ she means the Dutch queen Beatrix and with ‘that country’ Suriname

(Van Galen; back-cover). A similar thought is expressed by an elderly fishermen van Galen encounters. ‘‘I love the Hollanders…the bakra’s (whites) should help us build up the country. They should stay with us forever’. He looked at me, almost begging. In Holland I grew up with the enthusiasm of decolonization’  (Van Galen was kind of a socialist-RL). A Javanese man tells him: ‘You  visit our country, sir. We’re thankful’..Make The Netherlands know about our country..Because The Netherlands already are, Suriname has to become. You should help us become, Sir’ (Van Galen; p.12).  There is an obvious dichotomy within the Surinamese national consciousness: on the one hand they want to be independent and still resent the Dutch for the hardships during the colonial times. Om the other hand the Surinamese realize that they are poor, and ill-educated, and look to the Dutch for help. The youth seems to have a more pragmatic view than the elderly: They are glad if The Netherlands can help, but if not, they will try it on their own, whereas some of the elderly people, like president Venetiaan, still carry a grudge towards Holland. As for those old people that complain, but ‘did nothing the last 30 years to make Surinam better’, the youths are fed up with them. As one young Surinamese woman puts it in Radstake’s documentary ‘It’s so nice to be a Surinamese’: ‘If you can’t feel at home here, go back to Africa or Asia or wherever you came from. But if you stay, then stay, and make something of this country’.

To answer the main question I put forward in this article: ‘how do the Surinamese imagine their community?’, I will go back to Anderson’s ‘Imagined Communities’ (1983; p.123-125). Anderson quotes Tom Nairn who has one said that: ‘Nationalism is pathology of the modern developmental world, inescapable like a neurosis.’ (p.124). This applies to Suriname, because in a decolonizing world, it was a matter of time before the Surinamese people would foster a nationalism to claim their rights,  and it was just as inescapable that the decolonizing world of the time would acknowledge these claims.