Poetry
Sarka / Bittere strijd
Not translated into English
Michaël Slory · 1961
Synopsis
Sarka / Bittere strijd (Bitter Struggle): the poet's first collection, in a bilingual edition, the poems written in Sranan being followed by the author's own Dutch translation. It is a political and anticolonial poetry: it hails the decolonisation of Africa, denounces apartheid and attacks the foreign companies that exploit the riches of Suriname, as well as the hold of the great American companies over Latin America. Africa appears in it as the homeland of the Surinamese descended from slaves.
Context
The collection appeared in 1961 in Amsterdam from Pegasus, a communist publishing house, under the pseudonym Asjantenoe Sangodare, with a preface by the writer Theun de Vries. A student at the time, Slory frequented Creole nationalist circles, and he had just moved from Dutch to Sranan. Michiel van Kempen ranks him among the three greatest poets of Suriname, and Susan Legêne devoted a study to this first book in 2025.
Who it is for
For discovering committed poetry in Sranan, the Creole language of Suriname; no French translation exists.
Prizes and reception
Hugo Pos saw in its author the poet of resistance and guerrilla war, whose weapon is the poem and the song.
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