banana republic
vahni kurra
When my amma told me that she had grown up in a banana republic, I thought she meant the clothing store. I was probably seven or eight years old. At that point, I had only encountered the Banana Republic as an establishment of the Indianapolis mall. I pictured my mom sleeping under racks of cashmere sweaters and dining on Annie’s pretzels for every meal. She loved junk food and ate it with the guilty relish of a child, sucking crumbs from her fingers. She also adored Banana Republic. She thought their clothes were classy, though not as nice as J. Crew’s. It made sense too, because my mother had told me that she had come to America with only three dresses as a child. From this, I reasoned that my mom, aunt, and grandparents had been storybook poor. The Banana Republic was probably the only place they could afford to live—as the benefactors of a generous store owner or maybe as squatters. Eventually, she clarified that she was talking about Suriname, the former Dutch colony where she had lived for the first eight years of her life. This did little to correct my view of her childhood, as Suriname might as well have been a made-up place. Once, I asked my mom to point it out to me on the plastic globe we had at home. She pointed to a place on the upper crest of South America, covering the entire country with the tip of her finger. Somehow, this felt more ridiculous than the idea of my mom squatting in a high-end store.
People often have a hard time deciding where my amma is from. She has large, almond eyes, slightly frizzy, black hair, and skin the color of Warm Honey, according to her foundation shade. Her name is Suneetha, but she’ll often say it’s Sunny. She doesn’t speak with an accent. Latina women sometimes approach her in the grocery store in breathless Spanish, only to walk away disappointed. Indian people can usually identify her as one of their own, but no one easily guesses that she grew up in what was once a Dutch sugar colony. Suriname is a small country smothered by plantations and thoroughly mixed up by the many nationalities that have landed on its beaches: Indian, Dutch, English, West African, Javanese. In its fledgling colonial years, African slaves were brought by Europeans to grow sugar, cacao, and coffee, supporting the wars and sweet tooths of Holland. After the abolition of slavery, Asian indentured servants were brought to harvest rice, mine gold, and, eventually, yes, to pluck bananas. The story is not unique. The same dynamics were franchised out to Honduras, Haiti, the Caribbean, and all along the South American coast. I wonder if this mass-marketed violence gets too soft in our re-tellings of it.
The stories my mother told me about her childhood were always casually tossed into our daily lives. We’d be at the laundromat or going home from a day at the mall when she’d say something like, “You know, I used to be really good at hide-and-seek. One time, I was playing with our family maid and I hid so well that she couldn’t find me for an hour or so. When my mom and dad got home, they were completely freaked out because this was during the coup and there was a curfew and they thought I had run outside. My dad said he would go look for me, but your ammama begged him to stay inside because there were men patrolling the streets with machetes and he could get killed for breaking curfew. I knew then I was in trouble, so I came out of my hiding place. Oh, your thata was so angry with me. He was so scared that I’d been killed.”
The tone of her voice would remain even, as if she had just reminded me that we needed to pick up bread. I couldn’t see how this story fit in with the mundane activities of her life now. There was no place for it in my world of convenience stores and planned neighborhoods. I already had a hard time understanding where my mother was from, let alone envisioning its streets and smells and maids and military men.
“They were targeting Indians,” my grandmother said, when I asked her about it in my aunt’s house in Michigan. “We knew that the radio station had been bombed and that the Indian-owned businesses were attacked.”
Her voice was graver than my mother’s, but not enough for me to fully believe it. I was twenty-two when she told me that. I had learned about the Holocaust, the Trujillo regime, American slavery, the British Raj, and other atrocities that were decidedly tragic and true. But I had never heard about what happened to Indians once they entered the Western hemisphere. In looking for proof of what my family told me, I have only been partially satisfied. Wikipedia’s page on “1980 Surinamese Coup D’état” tells me that it was led by Dési Bouterse who overthrew Prime Minister Henck Arron with the help of sixteen generals, known unimaginatively as “the group of sixteen.” Hoefte’s Suriname in the Long Twentieth Century devotes one chapter to the subject. It mainly talks about the economic downturn and corrupt parliament that lead to the coup. It then throws in a gory detail about a sergeant being made to march in his underwear before being shot on a gurney. There is hardly any mention of Indians except to say that the “Hindustanis” opposed independence and began leaving en masse in the 70s. And still, my grandfather once jumped to calling the police because I had hidden too well in their Indiana home, 3,000 miles from Paramaribo.
People Magazine, November 14, 1983
It's Bye-Bye, Jeans, and Hello, Khaki, as the Banana Republic Stages a Coup in Safari Rags
Worried that the Banana Republic is somewhere near Belize or Suriname? Take a deep breath. There are already five Banana Republics scattered up and down California.
When I ask my grandmother about why they left Suriname, she doesn’t talk about the coup. Her goal was always to get to America, and they left because my grandfather’s boss found him a new position at Alcoa’s Warrick Operations in the States. Their time in Suriname was the “golden years,” she says. Work always ended by two and they could dance to Donna Summer all night long. But America was Heaven, she said. They had already made it from India to the West, and they couldn’t stop just at the Pearly Gates. It is in these moments that I see her dark eyes sparkle and hear the longing in her words.
This is how I know I will never understand where my amma grew up. Having been born in small-town, Midwestern Heaven, I often forget how high above the rest of the world we Americans are. This height is not because we are happier, smarter, or more enterprising, but because we are simply good at hiding. In Suriname, my mother saw the dark cloth of a military uniform and knew it meant danger. She saw the sea curling its waves into the sand and knew it meant adventure. My grandmother saw that she was the head of the Department of Agriculture, that her husband was an important man about town, that she was happier and freer than she had been in her Indian village, and knew the value of what she was leaving behind as well as what lay ahead. In America, I can see a store called Banana Republic and only know that khakis are the new denim.
I had learned about the lives of Anne Frank and Gandhi, the ones whose suffering was most direct and visible, but I had never written the names of my family down on index cards to memorize for World History. In this country, we understand atrocities by the victims and the perpetrators. Only some choose to recognize the adjacent people. These are the ones who stick in the margins of our pages; the ones who witnessed terror, but managed to evade it, the ones who felt the ground shaking, but did not fall through its cracks. Their stories are fragmented, not quite fitting into any narrative. My mother and grandmother do not get emotional when they talk about Suriname because they know that they are passers-by in history. When I ask them to tell me about their past, they invent new ways of explaining the world, finding touchstones they hope their American girl will understand. This is how I come to think my mother grew up in a high-end clothing store. This is how it takes me twenty-two years to Google, “Suriname coup 1980s.”
My amma and I don’t go shopping much together anymore. She lives in South Dakota while I’m in Ohio, and she knows I hate the mall. We still take long drives whenever I visit her, and I still ask her questions about growing up in Suriname and then America. We wind through the twists of the Black Hills, stop for fries at McDonald’s, lick the salt from our fingers. Sometimes, we daydream about taking a cross-country road trip once I graduate from college. I think about us traveling down the highway indefinitely until we run into the sea, but my imagination stops there, at the edge of known Heaven.
