I have no near neighbours and no one is out walking at this hour. Only my dogs will hear the shot — and all the Caribbean islands, which geologists had long suspected are mushroom-shaped, will snap off from the earth’s crust and be washed away by the boiling maelstrom, sucked down one by one into the depths by the crazily swirling sea.
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 noveclass="underline" 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 Musiclass="underline" 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