A Cultural Map of Aruba – Dewi Kopp

My cultural map of Aruba takes the shape of a long poem that I have recorded and that takes the reader around the island as I know it. The poem is based on my personal memories. My parents used to live on Aruba from 1989 to 1993. I was not born at the time but I have visited the island a few times, the last time in 2017. The poem is inspired by Notebook of a Return to my Native Land by Aimé Césaire and A Map to the Door of No Return. Like both those works, my poem is quite associative and descriptive. The way I based this work on my personal memories is more similar to A Map to a Door of No Return. Having said that, the poem is still only loosely inspired by these two works. 

            I decided to make the final product an audio recording, because I felt that it was more in line with how I retrieved my memories and those of others, like my parents. Oral transmission felt like the best way to relay this poem to an audience as well. The audio format also made it possible for me to add different sounds that I could not include through script. In this audio format, the poem also complements the centrality of orality in “creolité” as described by Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamouiseau and Raphaël Confiant in “In Praise of Creoleness”. As almost any island in the Caribbean, Aruba is a place where creolization took place since the first time the Spaniards set foot on the land. Arawak Amerindians, Spaniards, Portuguese, Dutchmen, West Africans, Sephardic Jews, Americans and many more have contributed to Aruban culture and what it has become today. Because of the creolized nature of Aruban culture, creolization is a big theme in my poem. Also, interdependence and entanglement are themes of importance, because up to this day, Aruba depends on overseas countries and peoples. For example, on the United States, because of the many tourists from there that come to visit, but also on the Netherlands, because Aruba is still part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. I also tried to show the embeddedness of Aruba through the musical clips that are all connected to the island but in very different ways. Additionally, my personal memories are also transnationally entangled, because I live in the Netherlands and I of Dutch-Indonesian descent. I hope that these themes of entanglement and creolization come through in the poem as I intended.

            Lastly, I wanted to say that it was quite hard for me to write this poem in English, because all my memories are in Dutch. Writing in Dutch might have been more true to my experience but because this master’s programme is in English, I chose to make it in English. In a way, English is also the one language to portray the Americanization that is taking place on Aruba because of the immense influx of American tourists.

            Additionally, I decided to annotate my poem, because the references in the poem are probably not familiar to someone who has never visited Aruba. I also added some personal details and translations of Papiamento and Dutch words. You can find the annotated version below. If you are interested in the geographical locations of the places that I mentions, I recommend looking up a literal map of Aruba to put the poem in context.