Shattered Heads; On the earliest Dutch West Indian migrant’s text

Michiel van Kempen (Universiteit van Amsterdam)

Albert Helman (1903-1996) was the first modern migrant’s writer from the Dutch West-Indies. His extensive oeuvre consists of 130 books in all thinkable genres. His first novel Zuid-Zuid-West (South-South-West) (1926) is however not his first prose text. His novelette Mijn aap schreit (My Monkey Weeps), published in 1928, was already written when Helman started writing Zuid-Zuid-West. The story of Mijn aap schreit is rather simple, but the text is extremely complex, interwoven as it is in Western literature, theology and philosophy. Frank Martinus Arion and Stine Jensen have already delivered interesting interpretations of the text, but there is still a lot more to say about it. Mijn aap schreit is a text on primitiveness and civilization, and Sigmund Freud is never far away. But in two ways there is clearer light to shed on the text: from a gender perspective, and from a perspective that takes into account that Amerindian cosmological concepts have been crucial to the thinking of a writer with two Amerindian grandmothers.

Michiel van Kempen - Universiteit van Amsterdam

Michiel van Kempen (1957) is professor of Dutch West-Indian literature at the University of Amsterdam. He wrote an extensive history of the literature of Suriname and published a series of monographs and anthologies of the literature of Suriname, the Dutch Antilles and Aruba. He received several prizes and was knighted both in Suriname and the Netherlands.