Reviews

• Among the many egregious injuries colonialism inflicted on us is the replacement of our ancestral languages with the languages of our colonisers. “On a Woman’s Madness” is the first novel by a Surinamese writer that I, a middle aged Caribbean woman, have ever read. Lucy Scott’s 2023 translation from Dutch to English has helped me bridge an artificial divide which has separated me from a world inhabited by people who look like me, whose history and world view are similar to mine, and among whom I probably have countless DNA relatives. In the process of discovering my Surinamese cousins, I learned that “backra” and "obea" are as much their words as they are mine. Considering that Astrid Roemer was only 25 when she finished writing it, this is a startlingly complex novel. The narrative form is a confessional witness statement dictated by the protagonist to the author. When we first meet Noenka she and her lover Gabrielle have been separated by state force. Gabrielle is incarcerated in a prison, and Noenka has only recently been released from judicially imposed incarceration in a psychiatric hospital. Noenka’s confession is a chronological exploration of her life in reference to her three great loves: Beatrix her mother, Ramses her childhood and young adult sweetheart, and Gabrielle, her final and purest love. This is not an idyllic love story. It is messy in every way imaginable. The reader witnesses toxic marriages, spousal abuse, familial estrangement, internalised racism, abusive health care providers and characters who are so persuaded that the culture of their colonisers is superior to their own, that they deny their own gods in preference to the churches of their colonisers, only to seek the intervention of the traditional gods in times of crisis. None of Astrid Roemer’s characters is squeaky clean. We root for Noenka, but we are never unmindful of her hubris. We do not doubt her mother’s love for her, but we are fully aware that it is expressed in ways that are unhealthy. We love the love between Noenka and Ramses, but when Noenka states the obvious that her parents are polar opposites, we are reminded that she and Ramses wilfully blinded themselves to the fact that what they each wanted for their lives, were effectively, on opposing poles of possibility. Then there was the love triangle between Rames, Noenka and the eugenics spouting Alek who persuaded himself that he was not, in fact, a Jew. And there was also Ramses and his stepmother. In “On A Woman’s Madness” Astrid Roemer supplies us with a fascinating cast of characters. The beautiful are beautiful in their flawed complexity. The ugly inspire morbid curiosity. They are the cousins who frustrate, enrage and embarrass me. And I love them.

• The narrative doesn’t come straight to the point too soon, which is understandable sometimes but not desirable when used uniformly. Hard hitting statements in between keep the book going, but overall it failed to create a lasting impact on me.

• On a Woman's Madness by Astrid Roemer is such an amazing, seminal work that I regret not being able to speak Dutch so that I could have read this book much earlier in my life, and because I would be able to read the original, untranslated poetic mastery and craft of Roemer. The novel is nonlinear, as it takes the reader on a journey through the troubled life of Noenka, who faces tremendous adversity from her family, her community, and to a great extent, country. She is forced to deal with a problematic and unhealthy marriage to an abusive womaniser, while she traverses Suriname in search of true love. In this quest, she discovers the multicultural society that is Suriname and the tensions, suspicions and battles that go on among them as a result of being pitted against each other by the colonisers of Suriname. Noenka deals with having her heart in many places and with several individuals, as she is shattered by the death of one of her lovers. Roemer then takes the reader on a journey into the taboo (at least for the time this novel was written), as we discover that Noenka was bisexual and fell in love with Gabrielle who, in essence, helps her along the roads of mental illness, family drama, marital abuse, lust, and loss that she has to travel, as a woman who is seen as 'mad' by society. Gabrielle is not without her troubles, and Roemer does a beautiful job of ending the novel by creating doubt in the reader's (at least for me) mind of whose madness she referred to in the title of the novel. I absolutely loved this novel. It is traumatic, but necessary. It is graphic, but absolutely believable. It is historical, but contemporary. Roemer shattered many ceilings and bars when she wrote this novel in 1982. It was bold to publish a novel on abortion. It was bold to publish a novel on queer women. It was bold to challenge society's perception of mental illness. It was bold to challenge misogyny. It was bold to challenge authority.

Purchase links