Sour Name Swamps as Fermentors of Afro-Surinamese Voice in Eighteenth-Century Colonial Poetry

In descriptions of eighteenth-century Suriname, the perspective of Afro-Surinamese people, both free and enslaved, is virtually absent because they hardly left any written sources behind. This article attempts to bring the Afro-Surinamese experience to the fore in Dutch colonial poetry of Jan Jacob Mauricius (1692–1768) and Paul François Roos (1751–1805). It does so, by reading the poetry through the lens of the swamp, an environment that was feared and preferably avoided by the Dutch, and precisely therefore a place of refuge for freedom seeking Afro-Surinamese. Using theoretical concepts such as ‘hybridity,’ ‘opacity,’ ‘ecological personhood,’ and ‘relational sacred,’ next to anthropological studies of Afro-Surinamese oral traditions and objects, the article examines how Maroons engaged with the ecology of the swamp to enhance their chances of survival and challenge the plantation system. It hypothesizes that Mauricius and Roos’s colonial representation of Suriname is destabilized by imaginations of the swamp, creating space in the poetry for an unfolding of Afro-Surinamese agency that involves alliances with the swamp and its inhabitants. Specifically, it examines Dutch and Maroon usage of metamorphosis, featuring representation and ‘Relation’, respectively, to express their different experiences of the swamp as an environment that is either decaying or fermenting. On the whole, this article aims to be a probing of the disciplinary boundaries of Dutch literary studies, and a contribution to the project of decolonizing them.