A conversation with Off-White author Astrid H. Roemer
Karen Gu, Two Lines Press Publicist, interviews all of our authors ahead of their releases. The other day, she sat down with acclaimed author Astrid H. Roemer about her recent release, Off-White.
Off-White is a novel centered around the Vanta family and Grandma Bee, the family’s dying matriarch. Can you introduce us to the Vantas and the Suriname that they live in?
The Vanta family’s Suriname is a territory on the Guiana Shield, the shoulder of South America, wedged in between the Francophone, Anglophone, and Lusophone parts of the continent. The family starts out in the district of Nickerie, right next to British Guiana (present-day Guyana), but divided from it by the wide Courantyne river. Paramaribo, the Surinamese capital, is where the grown children and grandchildren of Anton Vanta and Bernadette (Bee) Julienne attempt to build lives for themselves. The small population is diverse in ethnicity and religion. As well as poor. But not destitute—it’s a working-class society. The novel covers a period from approximately 1920 to 1970, when Suriname is a Dutch colony shaken by political unrest. The family is relatively well off, because Anton Vanta works for the colonial authorities as a soldier. His children are enrolled in educational programs. Grandmother Bee Vanta, the central character of the novel, is an active housewife.
In an interview with The Low Countries you say about Suriname, “Dutch will slowly but surely disappear.” Can you talk about your relationship with the Dutch language as a writer? And can you expand on your thoughts about the role of the Dutch language within Suriname?
Dutch is my mother tongue, one hundred percent. I delved into this language because of my colonial history, and since I use Dutch in my profession, I’ve come to love it more and more. In my Vanta novel, Dutch is the more or less “foreign” language of a society not emancipated from slavery until 1873! Migrants from Asian countries to Suriname speak their mother tongues there. At school and in government offices, the Dutch language is absolutely dominant. That has always caused friction. And now Surinamese society has entered a difficult stage of distancing itself from Dutch and trying to settle on one or two common languages that will connect the Surinamese to other peoples of their own South American continent. English and Spanish are popular, but you can also take lessons in Mandarin and Portuguese. Dutch is no longer a high-status language, but it’s still used all over the place, mostly in a sloppy, conversational way, as the number one everyday language, alongside the country’s still flourishing lingua franca, known as “Sranantongo.” And then of course, there are the mother tongues of the country’s many different ethnic groups, including the Maroons, the direct descendants of the African Surinamese who fled the slavery plantations and stayed in the Amazon forest for centuries, living alongside the native peoples of the Amazon basin. Now, after all this time, the Maroons are coming to live in Paramaribo.
The color “off-white” reappears in the novel—as the color of orgeade syrup, café au lait, cookies—and it also refers to the Vanta family’s mixed racial background. Can you expand on what “off-white” means in this novel?
The Dutch term for “off-white,” gebroken wit, can also mean “broken white” or “refracted white.” Essentially, it refers to refracted sunlight—a rainbow, for instance—showing a wide range of colors. And as the metaphorical title of this novel, Gebroken Wit also means that sunlight always finds a way through time and always keeps gathering together. The novel also uses the conventional meaning of gebroken wit in the Dutch language: off-white. The languages that had to articulate the times of slavery—Dutch, English, Spanish, and Portuguese—have the largest vocabularies for nuances of skin tone. It’s striking that the word/concept of BLACK has strong negative connotations in these languages and also that certain people and ethnic groups are referred to as BLACK. Off-White is partly my linguistic attempt to call into question the supremacy of WHITE (WIT or BLANK in Dutch).
The novel is full of vivid descriptions of food and cooking. Can you talk about the significance of food in Off-White?
Off-White is a novel that gets under your skin. It’s a physical book. Eating and preparing meals, drinking, and thinking about and engaging in sexuality are physical activities. That is the paradigm for these novels, which will form a trilogy.
On a Woman’s Madness, your first novel translated into English, was first published in Dutch in 1982. The original Dutch edition of Off-White hit the shelves in 2019. Can you talk about how your approach to writing, or your perspective as an author, has changed over time?
Yes, between Madness and Off-White is a whole human life. My perspective on life has broadened, and my vision of human life has become more compassionate. Increasingly, I see myself in other people, even when I’d rather not. In short, I’ve really deepened my humanity, and over time I’ve arrived at a comprehensive experience and understanding of my ethnicity, my female gender, my heterosexuality, my historicity as a Surinamese woman, and my membership in the human species. And above all, I’ve learned how to let go of those categories and become more open to our remarkable existence on this strange planet. I LOVE IT.
For a time in the early years of this century, you published considerably less. Since 2016, you’ve been back in the center of attention with a memoir, a libretto, new poems, a novella, the major novel Off-White, and your new sequel Dealer’s Daughter. What led to this new, prolific period? Does Off-White play a special role in it?
Fundamentally, I was never gone. Around the turn of the century, after my 1,000-page trilogy Impossible Motherland, the then-authoritative feminist magazine Opzij even named me as one of the three most important women of recent years. I wanted to give my work a chance to connect with Dutch society and reach a younger generation. And while my career was flying high in public, I was grappling with constant break-ins at my home address, and with threatening phone calls from strangers. I had liberated myself from certain intimate ties. I was ready to write novels like Off-White and Dealer’s Daughter, along with new poems that would express my cosmological worldview. I felt an intense longing for an English-language habitat. I settled on Scotland and Skye, from where some of my ancestors had set off for Suriname. I was so happy there, just me and my cat Steffi. Now I’m rediscovering the American side of my early years in old love songs. And in Lucy Scott’s wonderful translations. VERY INSPIRING.
ASTRID H. ROEMER, OCTOBER 13, 2023, PARAMARIBO, SURINAME
Before joining Two Lines Press, Karen Gu worked in publicity at Graywolf Press. While in graduate school, she worked for The Believer and the National Book Foundation. She is a fiction writer and Kundiman fellow.
