The Roar of Morning

AFTERWORD BY PAUL VINCENT

Tip Marugg famously considered Dutch “the most beautiful language in the world.”¹ Though Papiamento, not Dutch, was his native tongue, Marugg published comparatively little in it apart from a number of poems,² book reviews and a dictionary of erotic terms (1991). (Another, a drink-related glossary, never appeared due to his failing eyesight.) Also fluent in Spanish and English, he reviewed, for example, Philip Roth and Kurt Vonnegut. His literary reputation, however, rests largely on his three Dutch novels: Weekendpelgrimage (1957; tr. Weekend Pilgrimage, 1960), In de straten van Tepalka (In the Streets of Tepalka, 1967) and De morgen loeit weer aan (1988; tr. The Roar of Morning, 2015). Marugg was an avid reader of contemporary Dutch literature and admired such figures as Harry Mulisch, Gerard Reve and W. F. Hermans, though he never sought direct contact with them.³ He was, however, on friendly terms with other Curaçaoan authors writing in Dutch, such as Frank Martinus Arion and Boeli van Leeuwen.

Silvio Alberto (Tip) Marugg was born in Willemstad, Curaçao, in 1923, into a family of Swiss Protestant origin resident in the Antilles since 1804. In 1949, after completing military service (1942–1947), Marugg joined the PR department of Shell Oil, where he worked until taking early retirement in 1970, eventually becoming editor of the company’s in-house magazine De Passaat.⁴ At the end of his life he was made an Officer in the Order of Orange-Nassau for services to Dutch and Papiamento literature. He died in 2006.

In 1988, having been shortlisted for the Dutch AKO Prize, De morgen loeit weer aan won the Cola Debrot Prize, named after the doyen of Antillean writers, whose novella Mijn zuster de negerin (1935; tr. “My Black Sister,” 2007) remains iconic. The publicity-shy author did not attend the award ceremony.

There are clear parallels of content, perspective and style in his three novels. In all of them an unnamed, isolated male I-figure in an extreme situation reflects on his past and present life as a white man on a largely black island. In Weekend Pilgrimage (originally called “Lost Island”) a disillusioned office worker, after his usual weekend drinking binge (the “pilgrimage” of the title), skids off the road in a tropical storm at night and while stranded surveys his life to date in a series of flashbacks. He feels that he has no identity. “What would happen if I disappeared?” he asks rhetorically. The narrative starts literally with a bang: “My head lies on the steering wheel. I hit it with a hell of a smack, but I feel no pain.”⁵ In the final chapter the words return verbatim to frame the intervening reflections.

His memories are uncomfortable and sometimes painful, but ultimately the protagonist decides against emigrating as he had been planning. The balanced, happy life he yearns for eludes him, and he has lost his religious faith and contemplates suicide. But the coming of day brings new resilience:

A glow — old, forgotten, almost lost, but in some miraculous fashion full of vital force and giving vital force. .

This is my town. This is my island.

⁶

This conclusion borders on sentimentality, and perhaps its residual optimism is what the author had in mind when he described the novel as a “boy’s book.”⁷

Such an upbeat ending is denied the narrator of In de straten van Tepalka, who is lying in helpless discomfort in a hospital bed close to death, adrift between dream and reality. A succession of visions is presented, including those of a hunchback; the child Andra, to whom he seems to be related; Heskia, a girl he met in Canada; a masturbating boy (who could be himself); the prostitute Conchita, with whom he makes love after confessing he is a virgin; and the peripatetic performer El Indio. Like the soldier in Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” or the shipwrecked sailor in William Golding’s Pincher Martin, he longs to escape and apparently succeeds in doing so until he finds himself back in the hospital and we realise that the Last Sacrament he hears is in fact being read for him. His reaction is understated: “What is left is a feeling that is hard to pin down of having missed something essential all along.” Throughout the book the connection between the hallucinatory and the lucid passages is so seamless and the continuum so complete that the reader is disoriented. Unlike the two above-mentioned survivalist narratives, Marugg does not finally tell the reader explicitly whether the narrator is dead, dying or insane; instead he leaves us with the voice of the narrator, who has just experienced a hitherto unknown “inner silence,” recalling (dreaming? remembering? inventing?) an evening spent outside the town with El Indio:

El Indio slowly stood up, stared straight ahead for a while and then started speaking fast. . I could scarcely understand a word of what he said and yet I knew he was talking about his life, which consisted of little but fretting and in the future would contain much grief. . When he had finished, I said something about the mercy of God and he sat down again. We stayed there until we could no longer stand the cold.

When Marugg was asked about his own favourite among his novels, his answer was unambivalent: “In de straten van Tepalka. I recognise most of myself in it. It’s a true surrealist book, combining prose, poetry and essay in one. I quite simply live a surreal life.”⁸

In the twenty-one years that separated In the Streets of Tepalka and The Roar of Morning, Marugg had not been idle: he produced another long, third-person novel, which he finally discarded in 1981.⁹ He also continued to write and plan fiction after the appearance of his third novel: two fragments appeared in literary magazines,¹⁰ and according to the author’s housekeeper/companion a novel was nearing completion at his death, though no manuscript has yet been found.¹¹

The first of The Roar of Morning’s nine chapters opens with a “zoom-in” effect reminiscent of Robert Musil: from an aerial view of the geology of the Caribbean to a solitary man sitting drinking on his front terrace waiting for the dawn and contemplating his past. Only slowly do we realise that he is planning his own suicide. The effect is repeated in Chapter 8, where we move from a panoramic God’s-eye view on the summit of Aconcagua to two horrific atrocities in an unspecified South American country. Finally, at the book’s climax, there is a “zoom out” as the whole continent is swallowed up by the sea.

As in the previous novels, the narrative present seems static and the flashbacks more vivid, creating a cyclical pattern in which the unities of place and time are blurred. Here these flashbacks include an episode of precarious lovemaking with a black girlfriend in a hammock, after which the protagonist witnesses a series of riots (a clear reference to the 1969 troubles, a rare case where the historical reality of the Antilles obtrudes). In Chapter 7 the present appears to reassert itself but again is interspersed with childhood memories. A countdown to Armageddon begins, and we realise that the novel’s “present” consists of only the ninety minutes between 1:30 am and 3 am

The book’s title relates to the opposition of dark and light that is a key component of Marugg’s work. He entitled his collected poems “Horror of Light” and was clear about his own preference: “You can look inwards better in the dark.”¹² His own existence tended to be nocturnal, working at night and sleeping during the day. In Chapter 7 the night is compared to a huge, comforting black woman, while the advent of the tropical morning is as violent and destructive as a roaring tornado.

Marugg has been called “the most Latin American of Dutch writers.”¹³ In terms of content his books, particularly The Roar of Morning, powerfully evoke Caribbean and Venezuelan nature and culture (see Chapter 2, where the hostile landscape of the mountain is tangibly present, and in Chapter 4 the scene where the curandera places two doves that have been slit open against the soles of the narrator’s feet to draw out the fever).

It is stylistically, however, that the latter book is most reminiscent of Latin American magic realism and surrealism. Its ending is unashamedly apocalyptic. Unsurprisingly the original title was “The Destruction of South America.”¹⁴ The tone is equally reminiscent of the biblical world of Marugg’s Protestant heritage. In Chapter 8 the narrator’s repeated phrase “And I see. .” is a clear paraphrase of St. John’s “And I saw. .” in Revelation 5:21, while at the end of Chapter 7 the narrative moves from a realistic account of a pet dog bitten in a fight to Old Testament rhetoric:

I rubbed lots of red ointment from the magic tube onto the wound and the bleeding stopped. Of course, I should have hosed the pool of blood off the path at once, but I didn’t bother. When the cruel tormenting spirit passes through the land on its tenth circuit and sees this bloodstain, it may pass over my house in silence and proceed to my neighbour’s, where it will slay the eldest son.

The protagonist’s mystical yearning to “create myself anew” (Chapter 1) and “free(ing) myself. . from time and space” (Chapter 3), usually with the aid of drink and sex, is a recurring theme. It has been suggested that the climactic hour of 3 am may be an inversion of the time of Christ’s death on the cross at 3 pm, while the image of the protagonist stretched Gulliver-like across the whole South American continent also evokes a crucifixion.

The combination of drink (“anyone who reflects on life needs alcohol” was the author’s watchword),¹⁵ brooding nature and violence has led some to suggest parallels with Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947), set in Mexico.

The Dutch scholar J. Oversteegen, attempting to account for Marugg’s appeal in the Netherlands, which is at least as great as in his native Antilles, wondered whether this suggested some “deep rapport in the Dutch reader, still in thrall to Calvin, with this attitude to life, which is imbued with guilt and predestination.”¹⁶

Marugg’s style, with its substratum of Papiamento,¹⁷ vivid imagery and striking compounds, was widely praised in the Low Countries; in the Antilles the emphasis was more on his sociological analysis of race relations on the island. Cola Debrot went so far as to see the main character of The Roar of Morning as “a black man in a white man’s skin.”¹⁸ This seems very sweeping: in certain respects the character may have “gone native,” but his pessimism and self-knowledge transcend race. Alienation, as is seen in Chapter 1, extends across the racial divide:

The white man isn’t white and the black man isn’t black; both are aliens in this land where their umbilical cords are buried.

The outsider figures he has created in his fiction have clear autobiographical traits, but this has sometimes led to overfacile identification of author and characters: Tip Marugg was not a total recluse, despite his admiration for the hermit-like behaviour of J. D. Salinger.¹⁹ One acquaintance described him as “secretive but not reclusive.”²⁰ Nor was he a professional failure or a suicide, but first and foremost a highly original, visionary writer and an accomplished stylist.

Notes

1. A. G. Broek and W. Rutgers (eds.), Tip Marugg. De hemel is van korte duur. Verzameld werk 1945–1995 (Amsterdam, 2009), 669.

2. Collected with his Dutch poems in Afschuw van licht (Horror of Light) (Amsterdam, 1976).

3. R. Wester, “Een vreemdeling op aarde,” Vrij Nederland, 3 March 2001, 45. W. F. Hermans visited the Caribbean and Surinam in 1969 and described his experiences in De laatste resten tropisch Nederland (The Last Remnants of the Tropical Netherlands) (Amsterdam, 1975). Although Hermans in his article (142) is generous in his praise of Frank Martinus Arion’s novel Dubbelspel (1973; tr. Double Play, 1998), he does not appear to have read or met Marugg.

4. H. E. Coomans, “Biografie van Silvio Alberto (Tip) Marugg,” in Drie Curaçaose schrijvers in veelvoud, ed. H. E. Coomans et al. (Zutphen, 1991), 277–284.

5. Weekend Pilgrimage, tr. R. Edwards (London, 1960), 5 and 180.

6. Ibid., 190.

7. Wester, “Een vreemdeling op aarde.”

8. Ibid.

9. C. Zoon, “De heremiet van Pannekoek,” in Tip Marugg. De hemel is van korte duur, Verzameld werk 1945–1995, ed. A. G. Broek and W. Rutgers (Amsterdam, 2009), 652. See also Wester, “Een vreemdeling op aarde,” 47.

10. “De leguaan en de overlevende” (The Iguana and the Survivor) and “Groeizame aftasting” (Fertile Exploration), both in Tip Marugg. De hemel is van korte duur, Verzameld werk 1945–1995, ed. A. G. Broek and W. Rutgers (Amsterdam, 2009), 427–430 and 431–434.

11. P. Possel (ed.), Niemand is een eiland. Het leven van Tip Marugg in gesprekken (Amsterdam, 2009), 119.

12. C. Zoon, “De heremiet van Pannekoek,” 642.

13. Netherlands Foundation for Literature, http://www.letterenfonds.nl/en/book/872/the-roar-of-morning.

14. H. M. van den Brink, “De dunste schaduw van het eiland,” Cultureel Supplement NRC Handelsblad, 2 August 1985. In fact, this was the title given to a section of Chapter 9 published in a magazine.

15. H. J. Vaders, interview, in Tip Marugg, De hemel is van korte duur, Verzameld werk 1945–1995, ed. A. G. Broek and W. Rutgers (Amsterdam, 2009), 627–633.

16. J. Oversteegen, “In de val,” in Drie Curaçaose schrijvers in veelvoud, ed. H. E. Coomans et al. (Zutphen, 1991), 335.

17. See P. Heuvel, “Van aanloeien tot zielstuimel. Over taalgebruik in de romans van Tip Marugg,” in Drie Curaçaose schrijvers in veelvoud, ed. H. E. Coomans et al. (Zutphen, 1991), 358–364.

18. The Dutch phrase is “van binnen vernegerd.” Quoted in J. de Roo, Antilliaans literair logbook (Zutphen, 1980), 39.

19. Possel, Niemand is een eiland, 25.

20. H. J. Vaders, Tip Marugg, 71.