Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde - Volume 136, Issue 2, 2020

This paper compares the different possibilities of verbal complementation of the Dutch verb proberen ‘try’ and its Afrikaans cognate probeer ‘try’. In Dutch, proberencan take three complement types: an om te infinitive, a te infinitive and a bare infinitive. In Afrikaans, probeer can only take two complements: an om te infinitive and a bare infinitive. There are no semantic differences among the complemen-tation patterns. We conducted a corpus study for both languages to investigate which factors influence the choice of the complement. In Dutch there is a clear influence of region (Netherlandic Dutch versus Belgian Dutch). Furthermore, the length of the object and the type of clause (main or embedded) have a significant influence on the choice of the complement. In the Afrikaans data the presence of the object as well as its length significantly influence the choice between an om te and a bare infinitive.

In 1620 Jacob Cats published his didactic poem Self-stryt, about the biblical story of Joseph in Potiphar’s house (Genesis 39) the title of which he might have borrowed from the English translation by his friend Josuah Sylvester, of George Goodwin’s Automachia (1607). Self-stryt can be read as an Arminian text, as the protagonist Joseph fights off the advances of Potiphar’s wife, with God’s help surely but in the first place by his own good will. In 1620 this would be a dangerous view. The persecution of the Remonstrants was still in full flow. Maybe at instigation of the clergy of Middelburg, good friends of the poet, he therefore added an emblematic poem Sinne-beelt, plus commentary in which he defended the Counter-remonstrant theology, with a heavy accent on God’s grace through Jesus Christ. The real Self-stryt is now only to be found in born-again Christians and not in all well-meaning people. The combination of Self-stryt and Sinne-beelt makes the book acceptable for orthodox readers. My argument is that Cats himself did not want to be involved in the dogmatic quarrels of the period. When commenting on the Synod of Dordt (1618-1619), at the time but also later on, he always avoids taking sides. His own position might be characterized as semipela-gianist or synergist: man must be willing to accept God’s grace.

The memory of colonialism and slavery is finally becoming more widespread in the Netherlands. However, the field of literary studies still falls behind compared to the central place of the Dutch-Caribbean slavery past in recent societal debates. One of the reasons could be that the representation of trans-Atlantic slavery in literature is often oblique and allegorical. This article proposes a reading of such allegories in The Sign of Jonah (Van Leeuwen 1995) by the Dutch-Antillean writer Boeli van Leeuwen. The novel’s intertextual references to both the Biblical story of Jonah and numerous other intertextual references, connect European, South-American and religious texts with the violent colonial history of the Caribbean. Using European (Walter Benjamin) and Caribbean (Eduard Glissant, Antonio Benítez-Rojo) theory, we argue that it is precisely this hybrid and postmodern practice of meaning-making that shapes the depiction of slavery and colonial memory in Van Leeuwen’s novels. Binary oppositions between Europe and South-America, masters and slaves, humans and nature, are deconstructed and readers are encouraged to understand man as fundamentally entangled with his other, be it animal, botanical and mineral. The postmodern use of the allegory turns out to produce cultural memory, and also to announce a future of ‘ecobe-comings’.