Writers Unlimited Special - One of the important guests at Writers Unlimited is Roland Colastica. This Curaçao author made his debut in 2012 with the children's book 'Fireworks in my head'. The book was enthusiastically received, and has since grown into a modest bestseller. Major strength of the story is its colourful and rhythmic style, but just as important is describing the lives of children in Curaçao, which we see for the first time from an Antillean perspective.
Colastica has been writing in Papiamento for 20 years and also performs as a storyteller. Indeed, as a performing storyteller he is more famous than as a writer. Isn't that also an idea for Dutch writers? Here, book sales are also declining, while people's interest in writers is only increasing. My question to Colastica was therefore: Should writers start performing more to get their income?
"I think then the time when the writer sat in his hermetically sealed turret and only communicated with the reader through his written material is over. I am talking about shifted tendencies in society, other forms of reading have emerged more and more. The reader of books has to be approached in a different way. You used to buy a record or a CD of a singer, and that was actually enough. Now you make more demands: you want to see the person yourself. For Dutch writers, it is true that they have to go out more and more. In children's literature, it is already happening in abundance."
Do you write differently because you are also a performing storyteller? What is the characteristic of that?
"A lot of descriptions, a lot of repetition, an awful lot of rhythm and colour in word choice and sentence structure. If I had to describe a 30-kilometre walk, I wouldn't tell those facts, I would repeat the action. So then I would say: I walked I walked I walked I walked. Now I am developing a much more technical writing style, which also fits mer with a certain literary Dutch-language tradition."
This book was a tough read?
"I had several barriers to overcome. Dutch is a Germanic language and I come from a Latin/Creole tradition. If you want to publish in the Netherlands as an Antillean, the road is so terribly long, because even though the same regulations and subsidies apply to us as in the rest of the Netherlands, if you want to apply for something you suddenly become a foreigner. It is incredibly difficult to claim coaching and the like. My predecessors in the Antilles, still had all kinds of schemes through which they could get coaching and guidance, but I and my contemporaries have to solve it all by themselves. So our manuscripts that we sent to Dutch publishers were also not at the level that Dutch publishers expect. There is also a very different image in the Netherlands about what the Antilles should be. If you didn't meet that, you didn't get in. I managed it after twenty years; I have been a foreign writer in the children's book week for twenty years. The Literature Fund eventually made sure I could be coached by Sjoerd Kuiper. This also gave me an entrance with a publisher."
Slavery is a theme in your work. A Dutch reviewer remarked that he found the passages on this a bit scholarly, and corny: that we were over that by now, he seemed to mean.
"Slavery was abolished 150 years ago. We commemorate that on July 1 next. That seems like a long time ago, but if you were freed as a slave only 150 years gelen, and you have no land, gee clothes, nothing, you remain a slave. You have to keep living and working on your former master's estate. You were allotted a square metre of land, on which you could grow crops. From the proceeds, you had to remit 50% to the landowner. My grandmother, who was still a slave. It was with the advent of the Shell in 1917 that industrialisation came about, and rural people were able to earn their own income, however minimal. My father's generation was the first generation to know freedom. Dutch people don't understand that. It was not 150 years ago, so it is behind us. It is not behind us. Not that far, anyway."
The entire interview can be listened to here:
The Cultural Press Agency reports on Winternachten at Writers Unlimited. Follow this site on Friday 18, Saturday 19 and Sunday 29 January 2013 for updates, perhaps still deep into the night, when we go undercover into the hotel suites, to report on what's really on the writers' minds.
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