Books from Suriname

Suriname sits on the northern coast of South America, bordered by Guyana, French Guiana, and Brazil. Its food reflects centuries of contact between Indigenous, West African, Indian, Javanese, Chinese, and Dutch communities, producing a kitchen that draws from several continents at once. Allan van Brussel's cookbook collects 22 recipes from this tradition, covering both well-known and everyday dishes.

The book is designed for accessibility. Recipes use ingredients that are widely available outside Suriname, and the instructions aim to be quick enough for weeknight cooking. Each recipe includes a short note on the dish's origins and cultural background, connecting the food to the people and history behind it.

Beyond the recipes themselves, the book offers context about Suriname as a country. For a place with fewer than 600,000 people, Suriname has an unusually varied food culture, shaped by the different groups who settled there over several hundred years. Van Brussel's collection serves as a compact introduction to that range, organized around dishes that can be prepared at home with relatively little effort.

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Aphra Behn, often described as one of the first professional English women writers, published Oroonoko in 1688. It follows an African prince, grandson of a king, who loves the daughter of the king's general. The king claims the young woman for his harem, and she is sold into slavery. When Oroonoko tries to follow, an English slave trader captures him and carries him to the same West Indian island.

Much of the story unfolds in the colony of Surinam, where Behn claimed to have spent time. She blends travel writing, romance, and memoir to show a man of high standing reduced to property. The story sets his sense of honor against the cruelty and broken promises of a colonial society that thought itself civilized. His resistance to enslavement forms the central tension.

Behn wrote as English involvement in the Atlantic slave trade was expanding. Oroonoko was reprinted often, imitated by other writers, and later used by campaigners against the slave trade. Thomas Southerne adapted it for the London stage in 1695. The text sits at a crossing point between prose romance and the early English novel.

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Mark J. Plotkin is an ethnobotanist, a scientist who studies how indigenous peoples use plants. Over more than a decade, he traveled through the tropical forests of Suriname, Brazil, and Venezuela, working alongside the Trio, Wayana, and Yanomamo peoples to document their knowledge of medicinal and psychoactive plants. This book recounts nine of those expeditions, describing encounters with shamans who served as healers and keepers of botanical expertise passed across generations.

Plotkin's fieldwork unfolded against two converging pressures. Deforestation and development were destroying the ecosystems where these plants grew, while younger generations in indigenous communities were increasingly drawn toward Western material culture, leaving shamanic traditions without successors. The book describes specific plant discoveries, including research into curare, a potent arrow poison, and epena, a hallucinogenic snuff used in spiritual rituals. It also records the healing ceremonies Plotkin observed and the trust he gradually built with the shamans who shared their knowledge.

A recurring concern throughout is the question of how plant-based medical knowledge held by indigenous communities might be preserved and, where possible, patented in ways that direct revenue back to those communities rather than away from them.

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The Cost of Sugar is set in eighteenth-century Suriname, then a Dutch plantation colony on the northern coast of South America. Cynthia McLeod, one of Suriname's best-known novelists, follows the lives of two stepsisters, Elza and Mini-mini, whose different positions in colonial society expose the workings of a world organized around sugar production. Elza is white and European-born; Mini-mini is of mixed heritage. Their fates diverge sharply as each encounters the rigid racial hierarchy that governs everyday life on and around the plantations.

The novel presents plantation society without softening its conditions. Enslaved people, free people of color, plantation owners, and colonial administrators all appear within a system where sugar dictates social order, labor, punishment, and opportunity. McLeod draws on the specific geography and history of Suriname, a colony that remained under Dutch control long after most of South America shifted to other European powers or independence.

Originally published in Dutch as Hoe duur was de suiker? in 1987, the book became widely read in Suriname and the Netherlands. McLeod, born in Paramaribo, is a historian by training, and her fiction draws on archival sources from the colonial period.

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