Michiel van Kempen: “I was the last of the white faces”

Every five years for the past eighteen years, Michiel van Kempen had to fight again to keep his special chair of Dutch Caribbean literature. Each time, the chair was threatened with closure because there was no money to maintain the research, which has to be funded externally. But it worked: time and again, external funds and private individuals were willing to put money into the chair so that it could continue to exist after all. All these years, the UvA had no interest in turning it into an ‘ordinary’ chair, paid for by the UvA, so Van Kempen had to go out and find financiers himself. But that is now over: Michiel van Kempen (67) is retiring and will give his farewell lecture this Friday.

How important was it to establish this chair in 2006?

“Very important, of course. Until then, there was actually nowhere in the Netherlands where explicit attention was paid to Dutch Caribbean and Surinamese literature. There was Bert Paasman’s postcolonial literature chair, but when he retired, the chair was split up into an Indies chair and a South African literature chair. The postcolonial literature of the Caribbean and Suriname was not addressed. That’s where my special chair came in.”

So then things worked out after all.

“Of course, it was a special chair and therefore not paid for by the UvA. That was and is very odd when you consider that at least thirty literary prizes have gone to Dutch Caribbean writers in the last twenty-five years. The Surinamese writer Albert Helman even received an honorary doctorate from the UvA in 1962. But think also of Astrid Roemer or the young poet Radna Fabias. She gets all the poetry prizes you can think of. Then it is very strange that the UvA does not have a full-fledged chair in this field.”

Is that just a money issue?

“I don’t think so. The UvA has a huge image problem, because it is still a very white university. Black students prefer to go to the VU. The UvA should work on that.”

You say that Dutch-Caribbean writers are rapidly shifting their cultural orientation. What do you mean by that?

“Many of these writers were born here in the Netherlands and they have a much more international orientation, are more educated and much more Anglo-Saxon-oriented than their colleagues who were born in the Caribbean. For the new generation, the whole world is its playing field. I am reminded of the 2019 Venice Biennale, in which three Surinamese-Dutch artists participated who gave colour to the entire Dutch entry. And also look at the music: last year, the Concertgebouw Orchestra performed the Surinamese opera Het pand der Goden by Johannes Helstone. That was truly spectacular and would have been unthinkable a few years ago.”

In this way, it seems like equality has already been achieved. Is that true?

“No way, there is still a lot to do. What you do see is that the ‘black world’ is becoming more and more embedded in policy, but in practice a multicultural dance is mainly performed. Many policymakers assume that you have to accommodate the multicultural world by paying attention to their roots, but many people from that world are already a lot further along, they are really not just concerned with ethnicity. The real equivalence lies in the fact that with a multicultural background, you don’t necessarily have to write a book about that, but can just as easily make something that has nothing to do with it.”

Did you ever think colonialism would ever become such an important issue again?

“I certainly didn’t see that coming. The Black Lives Matter movement has accelerated the fight against and attention to colonialism. I think the murder in 2020 of black American George Floyd by a white police officer was a turning point. That same year, the Surinamese writer and activist Anton de Kom was included in the canon of Dutch history.”

How to proceed with the field of Dutch Caribbean literature now that you are leaving?

“The UvA should immediately open a vacancy for a full professorship and put someone with an Antillean-Surinamese background there, because it should be clear that I was the last of the white faces on that chair. That would also immediately attract more black students.”

This Friday, 31 January, Michiel van Kempen will give his farewell speech (in Dutch), entitled Black splendour: Caribbean culture in times of transition. Location: UvA auditorium. Start time: 5.30 p.m. See here for more info.