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I enjoy looking up to the hills without any desire to climb them. Maybe I have enough experience to know that the landscape consists of never-ending highs and lows. For three months, I am living in the valley close to the river. This stream is not a waterway, for I never see any ships or even pleasure boats. Once in a while girls slide by with flushed faces, canoeing resolutely. Otherwise nothing goes over this water-no person, no vessel. The paved roads that lie along the water process an unbearable stream of automobiles. I am thinking: that's how it is now. In the morning, even before this stream gets going, I go for a walk on the tiled path that runs between river and street, the kind of hike that gives me about an hour of restlessness. There is so much to see and to ponder. In addition to the heavy automobiles that tear over the road, I hear ducks, geese, and birds. I am ashamed when I catch myself so preoccupied with thoughts that carry fragrances of memories. As I look at the landscape over the water, my view collides against its hills. They are bright green and contrast sharply against the azure of the sky. The air smells like sunlight. I suppose that the temperature, especially, gives me the feeling that it is good to decorate the day like this: the river, the freeway, the trees, the hills, the birds, and the sky. I learn to accept that I cannot manage to keep my mind only on the rhythm of my arms and legs.

It's on a day when it's pretty hard for me to get out of the city; my friend and I were on extremely good terms with each other, my work as a city council member and author was moving along incredibly, and my mother was within heart's reach. However, persistent and charming as my publisher Jos Knipscheer can be, he managed by way of my answering machine of all things to make me feel sensitive about his reception in honor of Alice Walker. Obviously, I'd received the invitation weeks before, but I couldn't find any reason to place myself in the throng around the writer. While we are busy dividing the tasks-my friend, her son and I-my mother calls to say that she'd finally made some moksi-alesi again and that she's coming over with a helping for me. She sounded a little disappointed when I made it clear to her that I was just about to leave for Amsterdam-and that I'd very much appreciate her delivering three helpings to my address, because my beloved plus a family member were staying there, to make my yard presentable again, as it happened. After some contention of a practical nature, I hung up-and while I'm already anticipating my enjoyment of the Creole stew with which, late in the evening, I will finish Friday, I take cordial leave of my friend in the hallway. On the train I let my thoughts as well as my feelings loose on Alice Walker-and the receptions arranged on her behalf. It makes me think of my own reluctance when I receive invitations from abroad, and of my longing sometime to be able and willing to indulge them. Compelling is the sorrow the instant Orsyla Meinzak flashes into my mind-this Surinamese woman of the theater who had pretty much imposed on me to write her a monologue for the personage that Alice Walker had rendered so engagingly, Sister Shug. Night after night Orsyla M. was on the move to bring this character to life on various stages throughout The Netherlands. She had even flown down to Paramaribo (Suriname) to perform Purple Blues. One evening, while Shug was caught in the stage lights, absorbed in a retrospective, Orsyla Meinzak collapsed onstage in Amsterdam, deathly ill. A day later she died in a hospital in her town, alone.

ASTRID ROEMER: I started writing in Suriname, where the only language the people speak is Dutch; and my family are all teachers, physicians, and civil servants, so the only way for me to express myself is in Dutch. In Suriname they speak fourteen languages, and Dutch is the official one. I started writing and was published in the newspapers there when I was twelve, so writing was just something very natural for me and being published also was normal, but I could not imagine being an author, because there were no authors in Suriname. The only professional writers were journalists. Before I came to Holland, I won different local awards, but still there was no reason for me to think that I would become a professional author. Then I came to Holland, when I was about twenty, and I discovered other professional authors; I would read about them in the newspapers here in Holland and then slowly in my mind thoughts grew about being a professional author. I liked the way the authors were reviewed and the way they were promoted and the way their novels were bought. Then to inspire me there was Bea Vianen, the first black woman to have an official publisher in Holland, because there were no publishers in Suriname.