When mud is indicated on maps, it’s a warning. “Here be danger,” these maps tell sea captains, adventurers, and prospective colonists, “Steer clear.”
A 1771 map in the Allard Pierson collection details thick mud and sandbanks along the entire coast of Suriname. Indeed, the mouths of the rivers look almost like narrow, secret channels into hidden worlds.
A 1796 map is more ominous, with a large, amorphous, dark blob labelled Surinam Mud Bank lying ominously in wait just off the coast, ready to ensnare unsuspecting ships. So powerful is the Surinam Mud Bank that it appears to be casting a shadow onto the “Marshy land” behind it. Around the amorphous blob are more dangers: “muddy bank,” “soft mud,” “soft ground,” “muddy ground,” “soft muddy ground,” “sand,” “dangerous sand,” “clay,” and my favourites: “ooze,” “oozy ground,” and “soft ooze.”
An 1816 map, meanwhile, doesn’t label the “ooze,” but the mud and sand-banks are still clearly visible, while an 1896 map of the mouth of the Marowijne River shows a narrow waterway surrounded on either side by a range of potential dangers including “stijve modder,” “hard zand,” “zand en modderplaten,” as well as plain old “modder” and “zand.”
All of these terms – marshy, mud, soft ground, mud flats, sand, clay, ooze, and soft ooze – exist in a nebulous space between solid land and the sea. It’s not entirely clear what the exact difference is between “ooze,” “soft ooze,” “soft mud,” “soft ground,” “soft muddy ground,” “dangerous sand,” and “oozy ground.” What matters is that they are dangerous. What matters is that those navigating these areas need to steer clear.
But what if we consider mud not as a threat, but as a site of possibility?
Along the Surinamese coast, mud is a site of encounter. It’s not just the space between water and land, but also the place where peoples meet: where Indigenous peoples encountered colonizers, where enslaved Africans encountered Indigenous people and colonial authorities, where indentured labourers encountered formerly enslaved people, Indigenous people, and colonial authorities.
Taking this further, mud is also that contact zone that exists in the afterlives of forced and chosen encounter. The intermixing of peoples in Suriname has resulted in “muddy” racial and ethnic identities. As a result of forced and voluntary oceanic migrations, Suriname is one of the most multicultural countries in the world and much of that “multiculturalism” is carried within single bodies. Mud asks us to reflect on the afterlives of contact: How are individuals positioned by others? How do they position themselves? What kinds of allegiances are possible (and what kinds of allegiances are impossible)?
From this perspective, we might consider mud as a cloudiness that obscures racial and ethnic “facts” while simultaneously revealing the fictions on which those facts were founded. Mud is about challenging boundaries once thought determined, and showing the gaps and silences within them. Maybe, then, mud is the instability of “brown” itself, a colour that gains meaning only in relation, but that remains ever chameleon-like, slipping and sliding, resisting fixity.
And what happens if we take this notion of mud as a sticky resistance further? We might consider the agency of mud – as a physical material – itself. While plantations were developed on ostensibly solid ground, over time, several plantations eroded (Strik 2015). Not only has mud claimed their economic, political, and social power, but it’s also, in the process, undone colonial and imperial ambitions. Erosion is evidence of a landscape that is continually remaking itself. As Jill M. Church writes, “The shapes of continents constantly change as waves and tides cut into old land, while rivers deposit silt and build new land. Erosion eventually wears away mountains” (n.p.)
Finally, mud as encounter asks researchers to think reflexively about who we are as researchers, what histories we bring into the archives ourselves, and how these personal histories shape the lenses that we use to approach the materials we find there.
Mud can offer ways of dealing with archival silence and archival violence. What do we do when archival silences yawn louder than the materials that remain? What might happen if we embrace muddy ways of knowing, rather than always searching for transparency, clarity, revelation? Mud can also help us wrangle with the messy space of the colonial archive itself, where colonized folks jostle both against and within the directives and dictates of colonial authorities.
Perhaps these ideas – social, cultural, political, and racial mixture, geographic dissolution, and muddy ways of knowing – were exactly what colonial authorities found threatening. And
perhaps then, the cartographers were wise to mark the manifold dangers of mud. But looking from a different perspective, perhaps danger is the point: it is precisely in these thick, sticky, cloudy – oozing! – dregs that we can begin to search for alternative stories.
References
Church, Jill M. 2009. Erosion. The Encyclopedia of time: Science, philosophy, & culture, ed. H. James Birx. Thousand Oaks: SAGE.
Strik, Wouter. 2015. Het slavenleven door merg en been. Parbode: Surinaams magazine. 9 February 2015. https://www.parbode.com/het-slavenleven-door-merg-en-been/.