by Noa de Kievit
Introduction
Colonial archives are never neutral repositories of the past (Stroler, 2002, p. 87). Rather, they are shaped by regimes of visibility and erasure that determine which subjects can appear as knowable historical actors and which lives remain partially absent from the historical record (Trouillot, 1995, pp. 2-3). Within colonial contexts, literary texts therefore function not merely as reflections of social reality, but as active participants in constructing the epistemological frameworks through which that reality is interpreted and understood. This dynamic is particularly evident in J.G. Spalburg’s Bruine Mina, de Koto-Missi (1913), cited here under its original title for archival accuracy, while recognizing that its racialised nomenclature reflects colonial discourses that are critically examined rather than endorsed in this article.
Although Spalburg presents the book as a simple “schets uit het volksleven” (“sketch of everyday life,” trans. my own), it simultaneously stages a complex negotiation of race, gender, class, and sexuality in colonial Suriname, revealing the ideological tensions embedded within colonial representation itself. As such, this essay approaches the novel through a decolonial methodology informed by Monique Allewaert and Saidiya Hartman, attending to the ways Afro-Surinamese forms of knowledge and sociality exceed the interpretive limits imposed by colonial discourse. Rather than reading the text solely as an ideological artefact to be decoded for its colonial assumptions, I examine it as a layered and unstable archive in which alternative regimes of intelligibility persist within embodied practices, material culture, and vernacular forms of communication. Central to this analysis are the koto and angisa: the koto is a distinctive Afro-Surinamese dress traditionally worn by Creole women, while the angisa is a carefully folded headscarf whose shapes and styles can communicate social messages, emotions, and forms of interpersonal knowledge. As such, rather than functioning merely as markers of cultural identity, these garments operate as complex technologies of signification through which Afro-Surinamese women negotiate visibility, agency, and self-definition beyond the terms of colonial legibility.
Building on this foundation, the essay further extends its analysis to questions of gender performativity and intimate relationality. Drawing on Judith Butler’s formulation of gender as a performative practice rather than a stable essence (1999, p. 23), alongside Gloria Wekker’s conceptualisation of sexuality as lived practice rather than fixed identity (2006, p. 118), the essay examines how Spalburg’s Bruine Mina gestures toward forms of embodiment and desire that exceed colonial classificatory frameworks. Particular attention is given to mati wroko as a relational and social practice through which intimacy, gender, and sexuality are negotiated outside the rigid epistemologies imposed by colonial modernity. In doing so, the essay argues that the novel not only exposes the operations of colonial power, but also preserves traces of Afro-Surinamese social worlds in which identity emerges through performance, relation, and embodied practice rather than through fixed categorical definitions.
Reading Beyond the Colonial Gaze: Bruine Mina as an Archive
The Allard Pierson Museum houses one of the most extensive collections on the colonial history of Suriname worldwide. The origins of this collection can be traced back to the Amsterdam City Library (1578), and it includes a wide range of archival materials from the era of the Dutch West India Company, such as travel accounts, administrative documents, and cartographic records (Allard Pierson Museum, n.d., n.p.). These materials document the infrastructures of colonial power, but they also constitute a fragmented archive through which alternative voices and histories can be traced. It is precisely this tension between colonial representation and the traces of other forms of knowledge that informs my engagement with the Surinamica Collection more broadly, and in particular with Bruine Mina, de Koto-Missi, which forms part of the Surinamica holdings within the Allard Pierson’s Suriname collection.
Bruins Mina was written by Johannes George Spalburg and published by J. N. Wekker in Paramaribo in 1913. Spalburg remains one of the few early Surinamese authors whose work later circulated in the Netherlands, marking a significant moment in the transatlantic movement of colonial literature (Van Kempen, 2022, pp. 345–346). In the foreword to Bruine Mina, however, Spalburg explicitly downplays the literary and intellectual ambitions of the text, insisting that “dat wij hier niet te doen hebben met een werk van literarische waarde of met een brochure waarin eenig belangrijk vraagstuk van den dag wordt behandeld” (“that here we are not dealing with a work of literary value, nor with a pamphlet in which any important issue of the day is being addressed,” trans. my own) (1913, Foreword). Instead, he frames the work as “een schets uit het volksleven” (“a sketch of everyday life,” trans. my own), presenting it as observational, informal, and politically unassuming.
And indeed, Bruine Mina, de Koto-Missi presents a series of at first seemingly ordinary scenes from Afro-Surinamese everyday life, centred on the figure of Mina, a young Afro-Surinamese woman known as a koto-missi (a woman identified through her dress and social presence within Creole culture). The narrative follows her interactions within domestic and social settings, including her relations with family members, neighbours, and romantic partners, as well as her participation in everyday practices such as work in and around the household and public encounters on the streets of Suriname.
Yet this gesture of modesty should not be mistaken for neutrality. By presenting itself as a mere ‘‘simple sketch,’’ the text obscures the ideological work it performs, naturalizing the colonial gaze through which Afro-Surinamese life becomes legible. Meanwhile, the narrative unfolds through a series of everyday encounters in which questions of reputation, gender norms, and social mobility repeatedly emerge. In this way, the text does more than document Mina’s world: it organizes and interprets that world through a colonial framework of representation that both reveals and constrains what can be seen. Moments such as conversations between women, domestic labour, and public interactions shaped by dress, comportment, and reputation are presented as ordinary details of daily life. Yet these scenes also encode broader social hierarchies and systems of regulation that remain only partially visible within the narrative itself. Rather than offering transparent access to Afro-Surinamese experience, the text filters such experiences through colonial assumptions, rendering certain forms of knowledge recognizable while relegating others to the margins.
Therefore, in this analysis, the significance of the book lies not in Spalburg’s authority as an observer, but in the tensions and contradictions that emerge within his representation of Afro-Surinamese life, revealing the limits and instabilities of his colonial perspective. Namely, beneath the narrative’s surface, traces of Afro-Surinamese social worlds persist in ways that exceed the interpretive control of the text itself. These traces are often embedded within seemingly incidental details—dress, gesture, silence, ritual, or coded forms of communication—requiring a mode of reading attentive not only to what the novel says, but also to what it does not fully contain or articulate.
This suggests that a simple postcolonial reading of the text—at least one primarily concerned with identifying and critiquing its colonial discourse—is insufficient. While such a reading is valuable in exposing the colonial logic through which Afro-Surinamese subjects are represented, it does not fully account for the alternative forms of meaning, knowledge, and sociality that exist within and beyond the limits of that discourse.
In response to these limitations, in this essay, I approach Spalburg’s Bruine Mina through a decolonial reading strategy informed by the work of Monique Allewaert as well as Saidiya Hartman. Allewaert argues that colonial texts are often approached through abolitionist or postcolonial frameworks that seek to “rehabilitate” Afro-descendant subjects into categories of full humanity in order to redress historical erasure. While politically important, such approaches risk reinscribing the very humanist frameworks that emerged alongside colonial domination. Therefore Allewaert offers an important corrective by shifting attention away from the recovery of normative categories and toward the forms of knowledge, sociality, and resistance produced under conditions of marginalization (2013, p. 6). As Hartman suggests in her discussion of archival absence, the task then is not simply to recover lost voices but to attend to the fragmentary traces through which marginalized lives become partially visible within records that were never intended to preserve them (2008, p. 2). Through this methodology, the novel can be read not simply as a colonial representation of Afro-Surinamese life, but also as a text that contains traces of meanings and forms of resistance that exceed the limits of the colonial gaze.
The Koto and Angisa: Coded Communication and Cultural Agency
This alternative layer of meaning becomes particularly visible in the novella’s treatment of the koto. Significantly, although Mina is explicitly identified as a “koto-missi” in the title, the text itself refers to her in these terms only fleetingly—primarily in an early episode and one later scene. The relative scarcity of direct references is striking given the prominence of the koto in the title, suggesting that its role exceeds simple description and instead operates as a subtler cultural and symbolic framework within the narrative. And indeed, rather than functioning merely as a descriptive label, the koto appears as a contested site through which broader tensions surrounding race, class, femininity, and cultural belonging are negotiated.
This tension becomes evident early in the text, when Mina recalls how, as a child, she was repeatedly reminded of her inferior social status within the neighborhood where she grew up. When she quarreled with the daughter of her family’s landlord, she was frequently blamed and told: “weet je wel, dat je niet met mijn dochter gelijk staat? zij is een kleedmijsje en jij een onnoodige kleine kottomeid” (“do you realize you are not equal to my daughter? She is a well-dressed girl, and you are an unnecessary little kottomeid,” trans. my own) (Spalburg, 1913, p. 3). The passage demonstrates how colonial and class hierarchies permeated everyday life, attaching moral and social value to appearance, respectability, and bodily presentation. Dress here functions as a disciplinary marker through which racialized difference and social inferiority are both articulated and naturalized.
However, the text does not tell the whole story, as it omits the fact that a dress can also be a space to reclaim cultural meaning and agency. The text may position the koto within a discourse of inferiority, yet it does not fully contain or explain the cultural significance embedded within the garment itself. Read against the grain, the episode opens a space in which dress can be understood not merely as an imposed marker of status, but also as a site of cultural memory, expression, and embodied agency. The very partiality of the narrative’s explanation becomes significant here: what remains underexplained within the colonial text points toward systems of meaning that exist beyond its interpretive reach.
This alternative narrative becomes clearer when situated within the broader historical and cultural context of the koto. The traditional Afro-Surinamese dress emerged during the colonial and slavery period and, according to Michiel van Kempen, was initially imposed to conceal the bodies of enslaved women from the sexualized gaze of plantation owners (2002, p. 41). Yet what began as an instrument of colonial regulation gradually appropriated and transformed by Afro-Surinamese women into a means of cultural expression, social identification, and community formation.
Central to this practice was the angisa, the elaborately folded headscarf worn together with the koto. Like clothing practices elsewhere, the koto and angisa communicated social meanings, emotions, affiliations, and interpersonal relationships. What made these forms of expressions particularly significant in colonial Suriname was not that they constituted an unusual system of communication, but that they enabled Afro-Surinamese women to create and maintain networks of meaning within a society structured by racial domination and cultural suppression. Through particular styles, fabrics, and folds, women could signal social positions, emotional states, and shared cultural knowledge in ways that were intelligible within their communities but not always fully legible to colonial authorities. This relative opacity was significant because colonial power sought to control not only labour and bodily conduct, but also cultural expression and social organization. The koto and angisa therefore functioned as more than articles of clothing. Reworking an object rooted in colonial oppression, Afro-Surinamese women transformed dress into a means of negotiating identity, sustaining cultural knowledge, and maintaining forms of communication that exceeded the interpretive frameworks of colonial authority (Wereldmuseum Amsterdam, n.d., n.p.).
Reading Spalburg’s Bruine Mina through this lens shifts attention away from the colonial gaze that seeks to classify and discipline women like Mina, and toward the interpretive frameworks produced within Afro-Surinamese communities themselves. As such, the novella no longer appears solely as a document of oppression, but also as a fragmented archive through which traces of Afro-Surinamese agency, creativity, and social knowledge remain present despite the limitations of colonial narration. In this sense, the koto transforms from a symbol of colonial control into a medium through which women negotiated authority over their bodies, identities, and social relations. Such a reading is decolonial precisely because it recognizes Afro-Surinamese embodied knowledge as a legitimate epistemology rather than reducing it to a folkloric and mythic supplement within colonial discourse.
Embodied Femininity and Gender Performativity
The novella further suggests that the koto functions as more than a communicative artifact; it also operates as a performative framework through which femininity and social identity are enacted and made legible. Mina describes herself as carefully shaping her bodily presentation while dressed:
‘‘Als ik gekleed was, verstond ik de kunst mij zoo behaaglijk mogelijk voor te doen. Telkens wierp ik het welgevormd hoofd met dikke haarvlechten in den nek, of zooals het aan mijn sekse eigen is, maakte ik met hoofd en handen wel vier bewegingen, eer ik één volzin had uitgesproken.” (Spalburg, 1913, p. 17).
“When I was dressed, I knew how to present myself as attractively as possible. Each time I threw my well-shaped head with thick braids back into my neck, or, as is characteristic of my sex, I made about four movements with my head and hands before I had spoken a single sentence” (trans. my own).
Importantly, this passage should not be read as a transparent account of Afro-Surinamese femininity. As a colonial text, it remains shaped by representational conventions that may reproduce racialized and gendered stereotypes, including the exoticization or hypervisibility of Afro-Surinamese women’s bodies within colonial discourse (Collins, 2000, p. 120). Yet, following Allewaert and Hartman, the analytical task is not simply to dismiss such passages as ideological distortions, but to attend to the traces of embodied social practices that remain visible within them. Even if mediated through Spalburg’s colonial perspective, the scene foregrounds femininity as something enacted through gesture, bodily comportment, and sartorial practice rather than as a fixed or self-evident essence. The koto does not merely frame these movements; rather, dress and gesture emerge as practices through which social identity is performed and negotiated.
Read through Judith Butler’s framework of gender performativity, these acts can be understood not as expressions of an essential feminine identity, but as stylized repetitions through which gender is continuously constituted and socially recognized (Butler, 1999, p. 23). Mina’s self-presentation thus destabilizes colonial assumptions that treat gender as natural, fixed, and universally legible. Instead, femininity emerges as something produced through cultural repetition, embodied practice, and shared interpretive codes.
This performative dimension opens the text to a broader rethinking of how identity is produced within colonial contexts. Read through a decolonial framework, the embodied practices that appear in the narrative–dress, gesture, and coded communication–suggest that social meaning is not merely imposed through colonial structures, but is also actively generated and negotiated through the body itself. Although these practices are filtered through Spalburg’s colonial perspective and thus remain only partially legible within the text, they nonetheless reveal traces of forms of agency, belonging, and self-fashioning that exceed the categories through which colonial discourse seeks to define them. The novella therefore does more than reproduce colonial modes of representation. It inadvertently preserves fragments of alternative ways of knowing and being, allowing otherwise marginalized forms of subjectivity to remain visible at the edges of colonial archives.
Mati Wroko and the Decolonial Reconfiguration of Intimacy
The book’s emphasis on embodied communication and performative identity opens up a broader analytical horizon in which bodily practices emerge as sites where meaning is produced. If the koto and angisa demonstrate how dress and gesture can encode social knowledge, then this logic of embodied signification can also be extended to questions of intimacy and sexuality. Rather than treating these as fixed identities or stable categories, they may be approached as situated, relational, and culturally encoded practices.
In this sense, the novella’s attention to corporeal expression prepares the ground for a reading in which affective and erotic relations are likewise understood as forms of embodied knowledge that operate outside the classificatory frameworks of colonial discourse. What appears within the narrative as gesture, dress, or bodily comportment thus points toward a wider logic of knowledge production in which meaning is not simply represented, but actively produced through lived, material, and socially embedded practice.
Spalburg’s description of the so-called mati-game as a “vloek voor onze maatschappij” (“a curse for our society,” 1913, p. 49) must be situated within the same colonial logic of legibility and moral regulation that structures the text more broadly. The term mati refers to intimate relationships between Afro-Surinamese women and has historically encompassed a range of emotional, social, and sexual bonds that often existed alongside heterosexual relationships. By characterizing these relationships as a social evil, Spalburg casts non-normative female intimacy as a form of moral and social contamination. His framing reveals how colonial discourse extended beyond the regulation of dress and bodily comportment to the policing of affective and sexual relations among Afro-Surinamese women.
The language of “curse” is therefore not a neutral descriptor but a moralising judgement embedded in heteronormative and colonial anxieties about female autonomy, embodied pleasure, and forms of relationality that exceed reproductive and patriarchal norms. In this sense, the passage does not simply document social practice; it actively participates in producing a framework in which certain forms of intimacy are rendered unintelligible, deviant, or socially threatening.
A decolonial reading informed by Gloria Wekker’s analysis of mati wroko–literally meaning ‘‘mati work’’ or ‘‘mati practice’’–significantly destabilizes this framing. As Wekker demonstrates, mati relations cannot be adequately captured through Euro-American sexual taxonomies such as heterosexuality or homosexuality, which presuppose sexuality as a stable identity category. Instead, mati wroko conceptualises intimacy as a set of practices—situational, relational, and embedded within broader social, economic, and affective networks (Wekker, 2006, p. 118). Within this conception of relationality, desire is not grounded in an inner truth of the subject, but emerges through ongoing forms of interaction, obligation, secrecy, pleasure, and care.
This distinction is crucial for rethinking the assumptions embedded in Spalburg’s moralising discourse. Whereas Western sexual regimes tend to produce sexuality as an identity that must be named, stabilised, and rendered visible—often through narratives of confession or “coming out”—mati relations operate according to a logic of relationality rather than identity. They are not organised around the question of what someone is, but around what people do, how they relate, and how bonds are sustained within specific social contexts. As such, they resist incorporation into classificatory systems that depend on fixed and legible categories of sexual being.
This shift in emphasis also has methodological implications. It moves analysis away from ontology toward practice, from classification toward enactment, and from visibility toward situated forms of knowledge that may remain partially opaque to external observation. Importantly, this opacity should not be read as absence or lack of meaning; rather, it signals the presence of alternative epistemologies that do not depend on the demands of colonial transparency or legibility. In this way, mati wroko not only challenges the moral framework through which Spalburg characterises non-normative intimacy, but also exposes the limits of the knowledge systems that render such intimacies “deviant” in the first place.
Crucially, this reframing also reorients how we read Spalburg’s own narrative position. What he designates as moral deviation or social “curse” can instead be understood as a misrecognition produced by the epistemological limits of the colonial framework to which he himself remains committed. The text’s inability to adequately account for mati relations is therefore not simply a descriptive failure, but an effect of a broader colonial logic that translates complex forms of relationality into moral categories of deviance, danger, and disorder. From this perspective, Spalburg’s novel becomes legible not only as a text that polices intimacy, but also as one that inadvertently exposes the fragility of the classificatory systems it relies upon.
In this sense, the novella stages a tension between representation and excess: between what can be made visible within colonial discourse and what persists beyond its interpretive reach. It is precisely within this gap that a decolonial reading, as developed in this analysis, becomes possible, allowing us to see how Afro-Surinamese social life exceeds the categories through which it is narrated. Importantly, this approach does not seek to fully ‘‘master’’ or exhaustively theorize these alternative forms of knowledge, nor does it seek to reify or exoticise them as a stable ‘‘elsewhere’’ outside of interpretation. Instead, it remains attentive to the limits of representation itself and to what must remain partially unknowable within any interpretive framework. This tension ultimately opens toward the concluding question of how such textual “excess” should be theorised—not as residue to be resolved, but as a constitutive feature of colonial representation itself, which is always structured through both visibility, as well as its necessary limits.
Conclusion
Reading Spalburg’s Bruine Mina, de Koto-Missi through a decolonial methodology as informed by Alleweart and Hartman, reveals the limitations of approaches that treat colonial texts solely as sites of ideological representation or misrepresentation. While Spalburg’s narrative is undeniably shaped by colonial and heteronormative frameworks—particularly in its moralizing treatment of Afro-Surinamese women—it also inadvertently gestures toward cultural systems of meaning that exceed those frameworks. Practices such as the koto, the angisa, and mati wroko emerge as marginal details, but can in fact be revealed as significant modes through which social life was organized, communicated, and sustained under colonial rule.
Ultimately, the novel can be read as a text that both reflects and unsettles colonial epistemologies. Through its gaps, tensions, and moments of excess, it allows for a decolonial rereading in which Afro-Surinamese women appear not only within the constraints of colonial representation but also within the alternative logics of meaning they continue to generate. In this sense, the novella becomes a site where colonial discourse is neither simply affirmed nor rejected, but partially destabilized by the persistence of other ways of knowing, relating, and being.
Noa de Kievit is currently pursuing a research master’s in Literary Studies at the University of Amsterdam, where her work explores how literature engages affect, embodiment, and relationality to imagine social transformation. Her research examines the ways texts create possibilities for solidarity, agency, and resistance across diverse social and geographical contexts. She has a particular interest in feminist methodologies, gender- and class-based inequalities, and the practice of knowledge production and dissemination.
References
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