Suma na mi?

Or, in other words, who am I? My name is Rachel Gefferie. I have been married to Tjark Doorson for 20 years, and we have been living together in the UK for five years now. Before moving here, we also lived in Sint Maarten for five years. We both have Afro-Surinamese roots, being born and raised in Suriname. I grew up in Wageningen, a little picturesque town in the rice district, Nickerie. Wageningen was once at the centre of the flourishing rice industry in Suriname. I grew up in the vast rice fields where vibrant parties took place to celebrate the harvest of fruit and, of course, the rice. Each year the harvest feasts included a horse parade, and enjoyable carnivals too.

On New Year’s day, more specifically New Year’s morning, there was Long Lady: a parade of musicians that would pass by people’s houses with homemade instruments, joyfully singing and dancing. The highlight of the parade was a tall wooden female doll on stilts, the famous Long Lady, and a cow made from burlap sacks and wood, which was supposed to be her cow. It appears to be a tradition originally from Guyana. As Nickerie borders the country of Guyana, there are prominent Guyanese-Bechan influences visible in Wageningen. Our speech, the use of particular words, typical habits - they all distinguished us from the other districts in Suriname. At the age of fifteen I graduated from the mulo (secondary school) and moved to the city, Paramaribo. There my life started to quickly take shape. At 24 I married Tjark, and at 32 we moved to Sint Maarten together.

In Sint Maarten, I worked as a senior social worker for the Ministry of Social Affairs for 5 years. Sint Maarten quickly became my second home, even though it was a different environment than I was used to. In Suriname, you are surrounded by the mighty Amazon jungle, the open beaches with mangrove forests and the cool creaks with deep black water. In Sint Maarten, you are surrounded by the vast blue sea, mountainous lands and extended beaches covered with fine white sand. A special phenomenon in Sint Maarten is the Great Salt Pond. This body of water is located in the middle of the capital Philipsburg and is a silent witness to one of the largest former sources of income in Sint Maarten, salt. This salt was processed by enslaved people day and night. In Suriname, the cotton, coffee and sugar cane plantations are the silent witnesses to a period of cruelty and dehumanization for my ancestors, the enslaved Africans.

When moving to Kent, one of England’s counties, I stepped into an entirely different world. The UK is extremely different from Suriname and Sint Maarten. And yet, there are still little, typical, almost unnoticeable things that remind me of home. And when I say home, I mean both Sint Maarten and Suriname. In the UK, I did my studies in social anthropology. I am currently in the last phase of my doctoral research and am an associate researcher and teacher at the University of Kent in Canterbury.

With all of our moves, we took our special belongings with us: objects that are of great emotional and spiritual value. Both in Sint Maarten and now in the UK, these objects helped us give our house a feeling of home, a Suriname feeling.