Poetry
Matrozenrozen
Not translated into English
G. G. T. Rustwijk · 1915
Synopsis
This collection brings together twenty-five rhymed poems, most of them long, written to be recited in public, in a Dutch sprinkled with local words and a few sentences in Sranan. The poet parades popular figures of Paramaribo: a Hindustani milkman whose milk changes colour with his clothing, the old cook Ma Abeni who opens crabs with her teeth, a Chinese man and his duck soup. The shortest pieces draw a moral; the last, a sequence on the disease ravaging the cacao trees, gives voice to a planter and to the blight itself.
Context
Published in 1915 by H. van Ommeren, the volume answered, according to the publisher's short introduction, a last wish of the poet; its title designates a large red flower of the country, without great beauty but which charms by its simplicity. Michiel van Kempen regards it as the first Surinamese poetry collection, if one sets aside an author born outside the country. The sequence on the cacao trees denounces the abandonment of cultivation and the preference for office jobs, motifs that many writers would take up in the twentieth century. The book was reprinted in the Netherlands in 2004.
Who it is for
For those who like occasional poetry and street portraits of a colonial city at the turn of the twentieth century.
Prizes and reception
Warmly received by the Paramaribo press, later judged dated in its humour, it remains the country's first collection.