Afro-Surinamese Women's Sexual Culture and the Long Shadows of the Past

• Author: Gloria Wekker
• Pages: 192-214

192

SEXUALITY, SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND HUMAN RIGHTS

INTRODUCTION

Since the AIDS epidemic struck at the heart of many global

communities, commentators have reflected on the irony of this

particular, late twentieth-century meeting of Eros and Thanatos. The

metaphorical death that individuals, engaged in the pursuit of Eros,

encounter may very well metamorphose into a very real, material death.

Yet, it has also become clear that this scourge does not attack communities

and individuals at random; systematic sets of socio-economic

circumstances appear to be operative that make some groups more

vulnerable to this particular disease than others: poverty, gender inequality,

low educational and high unemployment levels of women, high risk

sexual patterns, repressed alternative sexualities, labour mobility and

migration have been named as some of those factors. Yet, what that

systematicity consists of exactly in particular settings, still needs to be

determined. The most general claim of this article is that while a

biomedical approach may be of service in detecting on the ground,

epidemiological patterns of sexual risk, a more informed, sociohistorical

understanding of sexual configurations is necessary in order to successfully

respond to HIV and AIDS.

In this chapter, I will zoom in on Afro-Surinamese or Creole sexual

cultures, the cultures of the descendants of the enslaved, especially as they

manifest in Paramaribo, Suriname. I understand sexuality as a cultural

construction. Sexuality is not God-given, nor biologically programmed

into our genes, nor, moreover, is it frozen or transhistorically and

Afro-Surinamese Women’s Sexual

Culture and the Long Shadows

of the Past

Gloria Wekker

Chapter 10

193

AFRO-SURINAMESE WOMEN’S SEXUAL CULTURE

transculturally given. We construct it together, with some of us having

more power to steer its manifestations and its outcomes. According to

Foucault (1978), sexuality is a thick terrain, where different power nodes

come together, pertaining to other institutions in society, e.g. kinship,

marriage, mating, relationships, property, economics and gender; it is

expressive of such power relations.

Even with such a small multi-ethnic, transnational population as

Suriname’s, with 440,000 people living in Suriname and about 330,000

in its Trans-Atlantic counterpart and former colonial metropole, the

Netherlands, there is lot of variation in sexual cultures and, one supposes,

in vulnerabilities. I will demonstrate that there is a firm historical

embeddedness of some sexual behaviours, which are nowadays regarded

as ‘high risk’. I am referring specifically to an old and widespread

phenomenon, called the mati work by those who engage in it, which is

found in working-class Afro-Suriname. The mati work entails both men

and women having sexual and erotic relations with partners of the same

and of the opposite sex, either simultaneously or consecutively. Mati,

both male and female, typically, have children. These behaviours carry

long shadows from the past, having first been documented in colonial

literature in 1912. While most accounts of the female variant of the

phenomenon place it in the context of turn-of-the-nineteenth century,

when many men were absent from Paramaribo, due to migrant labour in

the forest and the interior, this does not account for the male variant,

which has not been studied yet.1 I have argued that these behaviours may

very well have much longer and thicker roots than has generally been

assumed (van Lier 1986, Janssens en van Wetering 1985). The mati work,

in my understanding, forms part of a complex conglomerate of West

African derived configurations of sexual subjecthood (Wekker 2006).

These behaviours, I furthermore argue, are more widespread than just

Afro-Suriname and elements of the configuration may be observed in

Africa, in parts of the Afro-Caribbean and the African American Diaspora.

Because of a particular combination of colonial-political and

demographical factors, Afro-Suriname forms a site where this

configuration was enabled to develop relatively unhampered.