Category: Suriname

Willem Van de Poll's Maroon Dancing in Suriname

8/17/2022

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On the way up the Suriname River, a bar in a Maroon village that served Parbo Bier. When we traveled to Suriname in 2018, guides and guidebooks alike made it clear that taking photographs of Maroons in their villages was unacceptable.

There was a point—well, I’ll be honest, there were many points—where I was getting out every book from the academic and local libraries in Baltimore about Suriname, Haiti, Jamaica, Caribbean dance, Vodou, Obeah, and so many other subjects vital and tangential to Well of Souls. At the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, I found a copy of Willem Van de Poll’s Surinam: The Country and Its People. I didn’t know anything about Van de Poll, but the 1951 publishing date intrigued me. In a 1941 paper by Harold Courlander, I found a reference to a gourd banjo in Haiti, and thought it entirely possible that a gourd banjo or a wooden-rim banjo might turn up in Van de Poll’s photos.
The book is a mix of Van de Poll’s photographs and reportage on Suriname’s history and what Van de Poll saw as he traveled in the country. I later learned that he traveled with the Dutch Royal family as their photographer, including on trips to Suriname. His photographs, while useful and at times gorgeous, are also literally taken through the lens of a Dutch colonialist who was working for the monarchy. Suriname was still Dutch Guiana, and from some of the photos, I was definitely getting mid-century National Geographic exoticism vibes.

But as I flipped through the book, I was keeping an eye out for photos and descriptions of music, dance, instruments, and religion.

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Het Koto Museum: Preserving Suriname's History

8/10/2022

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We walked down a quiet street in central Paramaribo and I checked the map on my phone to make sure we were in the right place. We arrived at a well-kept but unassuming green and white house, a house that has become home to the tradition of Koto Misis. Here, Christine Van Russel-Henar is preserving and documenting the clothing of Afro-Surinamese women, and preserving a tradition and a culture.

The front room of Het Koto Museum, with the photo of Van Russel-Henar's mother, grandmother, and great-aunt.

One of the first things I saw when I entered was a photo of Van Russel-Henar’s mother, grandmother, and great-aunt in koto outfits from around the 1920s. Although the photo is black and white, you can still see the patterns, and the mannequins that fill the room let you see the rich and bold colors of the kotos. They wear large skirts, structured jackets, and elaborately-tied headscarves. The women who bear this tradition are called Koto Misis, and the koto outfits originate in the ritual dramas like the banya prei.
The banya is a ritual play that combines song, dance, and role-playing in a religious ceremony to establish contact with ancestors, spirits, and gods. This developed into the du, which included secular or non-religious plays.

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The Images of John Stedman's Suriname

8/3/2022

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No. 15, The Creole Bania as illustrated in Stedman's book. Although it has three long and one short strings, a rounded body, and a skin soundboard, it looks pretty different from the actual instrument Stedman collected.

The first land he saw was a few rugged islands off the coast, followed by mangroves that lined the ocean. John Gabriel Stedman had journeyed from Holland to Suriname as a soldier contracted to fight Maroons--people who had escaped slavery and lived in the tropical jungle. During his time in Suriname, Stedman kept diaries, notes, and daybooks, which he turned into a massive manuscript, which at the hands of a publisher and ghost writer transformed into Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam.
In Minneapolis, during the snowiest February on record and some of the coldest weather I've ever experienced, I sat for days with the writings of Stedman. It brought me back in time to some seven months earlier when I traveled to Suriname, to the tropical climate of the Caribbean I had experienced in Paramaribo and the hot and rainy jungles in the small South American country. They took me back in time to the 18th century, too. His writings offer us an intimate and a detailed look at enslavement and the culture and lives of the enslaved in the Americas during eighteenth century. Most importantly for me, he documented the banjo in Suriname during his trip and brought what is now the oldest existing banjo, the Creole-bania, back to Europe.

The University of Minnesota's James Ford Bell Library bought the remnants of his writings, which are now tucked away in the rare books vaults deep under the cold Minnesota ground. A fellowship at the library allowed me to do the first big research dive for Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo's Hidden History, and I read every word of his writing that remains in order to build out the world around him, the world the early banjo exists in. And I write much more about Stedman and his trip to Suriname in Well of Souls (although an equal amount probably got cut; his time there was so interesting and he wrote so much about it). While I allude to drawings he made in Suriname and the illustrations that went into his book, I couldn’t include them.

The stack of books and papers I researched at the library.

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Views of the Creole Bania

2/28/2019

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I spent February at the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis on a William Reese Company Fellowship, looking at the papers of Captain John Gabriel Stedman and investigating the banjo's early history in Suriname and the Caribbean.

This is a banjo, one of the earliest images of a banjo. This engraving is only one of four pre-1800s images of the banjo, taken from Stedman's memoir Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Suriname. The special collections at the Bell Library have Stedman's diaries from Suriname, notes and journals from after his time in Europe, the original 1790 manuscript, and many different versions of the published memoir. To the left is a hand-colored plate from the English first edition, while below are versions from the German, French, and Dutch editions.

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Headscarves, Fabric, and Secrets

7/25/2018

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Read my article on Het Koto Museum on OZY.

Located in a quiet neighborhood near the center of historic Paramaribo, Suriname, Het Koto Museum celebrates the lives and legacy of Afro-Surinamese women. The museum is founded and run by Christine Van Russel-Henar, who is reviving the tradition of the Koto outfit. She shared her knowledge and passion with me during a visit the the museum.

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Come in, the stacks are open.

Willem Van de Poll's Maroon Dancing in Suriname

Het Koto Museum: Preserving Suriname's History

The Images of John Stedman's Suriname

Views of the Creole Bania

Headscarves, Fabric, and Secrets

Read my article on Het Koto Museum on OZY.

Come in, the stacks are open.

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