“Nowadays you can search for your roots,” says author Ellen Ombre. “But I prefer reading.” Her work is full of characters crossing borders, particularly between Surinam and The Netherlands.

Ellen Ombre - On My Way

Ellen Ombre was born in Paramaribo in 1948. She moved to The Netherlands with her parents when she was 13 years old. After graduating high school, she worked breaking horses and then trained as a medical social worker.

Ombre made her literary debut in 1992 with ‘Maalstroom’ – a collection of short stories. One Dutch reviewer described them as “amazing observations that paint a harrowing picture of the gap between Netherlanders and Surinamers.”

Best intentions
In 1996, she published the autobiographical travel book ‘Wie goed bedoelt’ (With Best Intentions). On a trip to Benin, she develops a cynical perspective on Dutch development projects that fail due to lack of local knowledge and understanding, or corruption and laziness.

“How is it that I am what I am?” Ombre asks, confronting her own Afro-Caribbean identity. Believing her ancestors were probably shipped from West Africa to Surinam as part of the 17th century slave trade, she is shocked when a guide says African princes were happy to sell “inferior rabble” to the Portuguese and Dutch.

False desires
Ombre’s 2000 collection of short stories ‘Valse verlangens’ (False Desires) updates the Atlantic triangle of trade between The Netherlands, West Africa and the Caribbean. Many in search of money, love and happiness now travel the same routes that once carried gold, arms and slaves.

Questions of identity and extremely complex family relationships characteristic to the Caribbean are central themes in Ellen Ombre’s first novel ‘Negerjood in moederland’ (2004). When a young woman of Surinam descent starts working in a Jewish retirement center in Amsterdam, she begins thinking about her roots – particularly her Caribbean black-Jewish mother.

Christmas trees
For Radio Books, Ombre has written another story in which the main character is dealing with a sense of displacement. Nimrod Groen was born in Paramaribo to a Dutch Jewish father and a much younger Creole mother. After the death of his mother, Nimrod leaves Surinam with his father to resettle in Amsterdam.

“A week later, on December 23rd, I turned seven. We went to live next door to my father’s mother in a house on the Prinsengracht. She owned the house. She had an imposing head of grey hair and wore folk-art jewelry and dresses from Afghanistan. I had to call her Esther; she got cross if I said Oma…

For my birthday I wanted a Christmas tree. We’d always had one at home back in Surinam. Every year I decorated it together with Ma Lina even before Sinterklaas. Christmas tree? Esther wouldn’t have anything to do with such nonsense. Christmas trees were for goyim.”

‘On My Way’ by Ellen Ombre was translated by John Nieuwenhuizen. The story is read by Chris Chambers.
 

The series Radio Books is an initiative of the Flemish-Dutch Huis de Buren in Brussels, in association with the Flemish radio broadcaster Klara and Radio Netherlands Worldwide.