My Name Is Sita

Bea Vianen rose to prominence as a writer in both her native Suriname and its European colonizer, the Netherlands, with the publication of My Name is Sita in 1969.

Set in the 1950s in the Caribbean Dutch colony during an era of social and ethnic turmoil, this coming-of-age novel shadows Sita, a young East Indian girl, as she copes with the loss of her mother and defends herself against her father’s many mistakes, while also trying to care for her younger brother and carve out a life for herself in a staunchly rigid culture. Beneath the festering, lush, and humid tropical setting, Sita’s struggles only become more difficult with her best friend’s departure and an unwanted pregnancy.

Now considered a contemporary Dutch classic, My Name is Sita makes it all too clear what women have had to, and continue to, sacrifice in the name of claiming their identity.

Bea Vianen (1935-2019) is one of the most important and groundbreaking Dutch Caribbean authors of the 1970s, writing about entrapment and escape, freedom and the lack of it. Her prose and poetry revolve around her Hindu heritage and the effects of colonialism in Suriname. My Name Is Sita (1969), in which she describes the sense of suffocation in her native country with extraordinary sharpness, became a classic both in the Netherlands and Suriname.

Kristen Gehrman is a literary translator from Dutch to English. Recent translations include The History of My Sexuality by Tobi Lakmaker (Granta), The Tree and the Vine by Dola de Jong (Transit Books) and The Melting by Lize Spit (Picador). Originally from Charleston, South Carolina, she now lives in The Hague, The Netherlands, with her husband and young daughter.