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Life-writing of Albert Helman: not for the monastery

by Michiel van Kempen

Last September my biography of Albert Helman, Rusteloos en overal, was published by In de Knipscheer, the publishing house of many Caribbean authors and also the last publisher of Albert Helman. Helman, born in 1903 in Suriname, went to the Netherlands when he was 18 years old and became the first important modern Dutch migrant’s writer from the Caribbean.

 

tobago-rosenwalt-1979

Albert Helman op Tobago, met zijn vriend, de Amerikaanse industrieel Jimmy Rosenwalt, 1979

When he passed away in 1996 at the age of 92, he had published some 130 books, hundreds of contributions to literary magazines and thousands of journalistic articles in practically all main Dutch newspapers. Besides that he had been active as a music composer, a music critic, a reviewer of literature, he had spent quite some time in linguistic studies (bringing him a honorary doctorate in Amsterdam), a connaisseur of movies, a combattant in the Spanish civil war and in World War II, a minister of Education and Public Health and diplomat, he had written anthropological and historical studies and so on. If any man of culture from the Dutch Caribbean deserved a biography, it was Albert Helman. The late Anil Ramdas called him the most important Surinamer of the 20th century.
So I dedicated some ten years of my life in getting the complete picture of this extraordinary man, ten years of imprisonment, no watching of football, “sorry, nice asking me out but I have to write tonight – and tomorrow as well”. Helman lived in 8 countries, his literary legacy is packed in 19 boxes in the Dutch Literary Museum and some five more kept by his family, I visited some 50 archives, I read thousands of letters send to friends around the world and was very happy to find out that some good friends destroyed their complete correspondance, and I had intense conversations with about fifty people who had known him very well, including some who had fought fierce battles with the grumpy old man…
The biography of Albert Helman is the story of his struggle to question class, race, sexual behavior, colonial and postcolonial conditions, concepts of nationalism, the imaginary of slavery. What pushes this biographical narrative to its extremes is that it unfolds in different eras, in different political junctures and in the ever moving transitional world that was the 20th century.
Now, of course my main problem was how to get all this into a readable book. So for what public do I present this trans-atlantic person? I knew on beforehand that I would not harass the reader with endless talks on all kinds of theoretical issues. When your car is broken and you are going to a garage, you expect to have your car repaired properly and not to find fifty pieces of tools on your chair. My public would be well-educated, but not part of the monastery of academics who seem to understand each other very well, but unfortunately nobody outside their circle understands them.
When one writes on a person of importance rooted in a former colony, to my opinion you have an obligation to bring back to the people their own history. But how do we do that? How to cope with more ideological questions, questions of interpretation and analysis and the difficult issue of sometimes completely opposite appreciation for someone’s works and activities? Knowing all too well that there is no such thing as universality or objectivity in the study of any culture, and wanting to write a true biography and not a collection of chronological ordered facts, I choose not to write this biography as were it a collection of essays, or a book of literary criticism for that matter. Let the composition of the book do what it should do, but let the material speak for itself as far as possible, and let me as a biographer be reluctant in my opinions. Does this approach result into a biography of Albert Helman that will be accepted by every reader? No, of course not. But I’d say: if you really think a person is important enough to write a voluminous book upon, it is better not to start throwing up walls preventing interested people from getting to the man.

[Statement on the symposium Unhinging the National Framework: New Developments in Transnational Life-Writing, VU, Amsterdam 9 december 2016]

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