Opinion
Margaretta Pos – Galibi
Suriname stories – there are six in the series – has posted on Caribbean Views.
The website is run out of the University of Amsterdam by Michiel van Kempen, who has a chair in Caribbean Literature. Obviously, the focus is on the former Dutch territories, but it posts articles from around the region, mostly in Dutch, but also in English and other languages.
Here is Margaretta Pos:
I was thinking about my father.
It was June, when the sea turtles make their annual pilgrimage to the equatorial region to lay their eggs and we went ashore silently for fear of disturbing them. We had crossed the Marowijne River from Galibi, in Suriname, at its vast mouth into the Atlantic Ocean. It took an hour in one of the big, motorised canoes that ply the river, with the boatman cutting the engine for a quiet landing. There were no life jackets. Not that it really mattered, I told myself, because of the possibility of piranhas lurking beneath the surface of the water. Even scarier was the thought of one of my father’s stories, of being in a canoe when a huge, plate-sized tarantula materialised from under an empty seat.
My father, Hugo Pos, had …