Maroon Fashion History An Update

Fashion has long been a dynamic aspect of Maroon culture in Suriname and French Guiana (Guyane). The textile arts that carry it through from one generation to the next were totally ignored by early writers, who lavished praise on the men’s art of wood-carving but said virtually nothing about the artistic gifts of women—most importantly in calabash carving (referred to by one of them as “doodling”) and clothing. This article, based on more than fifty years of ethnographic work with Maroons, focuses on textile arts and clothing fashions, running briefly through styles of the past before focusing on current directions. Today, with Maroons participating increasingly in life beyond the traditional villages of the rain forest, the women—like their mothers and grandmothers—have continued to enjoy adopting newly available materials and inventing novel techniques. In the process, they have been producing clothing that reflects both their cultural heritage of innovative artistry and their new place in the multicultural,commoditizedsocietyof thecoast.Theillustrationsgiveanopeninghint of the remarkable vibrancy of this aspect of Maroon life in the twenty-first century.

A sartorial history of the Suriname Maroons might appear to be something of an oxymoron.1 For the first two centuries after their ancestors established societies in the Amazonian rainforest, women were bare-breasted and men were loincloth-clad ( fig. 2).2 The people who visited their villages (virtually all men) occasionally commented on their clothing (or lack of it)-most often the range of amulets, which especially impressed missionaries, and the uniforms provided by colonial governments for political leaders to wear for official occasions.3 But they had little to say about cloth or about the decorative sewing that was done by women.4 Although some of them were effusive in their praise for Maroon artistic accomplishments, that praise was reserved exclusively for the men's art of woodcarving.
1 The story of Maroon clothing cannot be told properly in black-and-white, yet much of the fullcolor documentation of recent fashion trends comes in the form of low-resolution Facebook postings, which explains the small size of many of the illustrations in this article. For very helpful comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript I am grateful to D.S. Battistoli, Olívia Gomes da Cunha, Richard Price, and Diane Vernon. 2 For more photographs of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century clothing, see Chapter 4 of S. and R. Price 2005. 3 In the 1780s, a Moravian observer described one Saamaka captain's uniform, provided by the colonial government, as "a jacket, a vest, trousers of the finest striped linen, a hat with golden tassels, a lace shirt with cuffs, and a captain's staff made from cane and topped with a large silver and heavily-gilt knob" (Riemer 1801:370-71). "With all this finery," the missionary added, "he nonetheless went barefoot." For historical photos of Maroon officials in their uniforms, see (for example) S. & R. Price 1999:77 andPolimé &Van Stipriaan 2013:12, 18-19. 4 Decorative sewing received a three-sentence mention by L.C. van Panhuys (1899:81), who col-But women have always been as involved as the men in artistic expression. For example, since the mid-nineteenth century they have used small shards of glass from broken bottles to carve elegant designs on the fruit of calabash trees, producing bowls and ladles for meals and sometimes exhibiting them as wall decoration. And while Maroons have no weaving tradition, the women have, lected one embroidered cloth and wrote that the men used charcoal to mark designs for the women to embroider. For a summary of early references, see S. and R. Price 1980:56, 60. For the letters, sketches, and field diary of a Harvard anatomy professor who visited the Maroons in 1857, see R. Price & Willoughby 2019. And for a recent (well-intended but ethnographically flawed) attempt to explain Maroon beliefs and rituals through an examination of pangi (skirt cloths), see Ekomie-Obame 2017. since the nineteenth century, turned store-bought cloth into colorfully decorated capes, loincloths, scarves, waist-kerchiefs, neckerchiefs, wrap-skirts, baby bonnets, men's caps, adolescent girls' pubic aprons, and men's dance aprons, as well as hammock sheets, hunting sack covers, and draw-string bags for small items such as shotgun cartridges. Cloth is raised in shrines to the ancestors, flown as banners on funeral canoes, offered as gifts, and used as decoration on coffins (figs. 3-5); it is a standard item of payment for ritual services rendered and the most common form of material compensation in disputes involving arson, theft, adultery, and more.5 Today, decorated cloths are hung from the rafters as decoration at community gatherings. Until the late twentieth century virtually all of the cloth in Maroon villages was cotton imported and sold by stores in Paramaribo and bought by men during their wage labor trips to the coast.6 The bulk of it was then given to women, who turned it into clothing, using it as a canvas for their artistic creativity and inventing new styles and techniques each generation.7 This essay, a follow-up to my previous publications on Maroon textile history,8 recounts the evolving relationship between textile arts and male/female relations, beginning with the Saamaka Maroons of central Suriname whom I have known for more than fifty years, and moving into the role played by Maroons of the more eastern groups (Ndyukas, Pamakas, and Alukus) whose contribution to Maroon clothing styles has been nothing short of stunning over the past several decades. It follows the women's transition from a social/cultural environment formed by seventeenth-and eighteenth-century men and women who liberated themselves from plantation slavery to their participation in a twentieth-century commoditized society-both in postindependence Suriname and, just to the east, in the rapidly assimilating context of French price New West Indian Guide 94 (2020) 1-38 Guiana (Guyane). And it explores the new forms that have emerged from the interaction between, on the one hand, the love of creativity that has always characterized Maroon culture and, on the other, the influence of the westernized consumerist society into which many of them have moved in recent years.
My own introduction to Maroon life began (together with Richard Price) in the 1960s with a two-year residence in Dangogo, a village of several hundred Saamakas on the upper Suriname River.9 The women I spent the bulk of my time with left no doubt about the importance of the sartorial dimension of their lives or their enjoyment of artistic creativity. Sitting around with women on someone's doorstep, on small wooden stools, or on a cloth spread out on the ground, I saw the pleasure they took in exploring the potential of different fabrics, discussing alternative arrangements of strips for a man's patchwork cape, mapping out the lines of a design to be embroidered, and sometimes proposing names for a cloth with a new pattern of colors and stripes that a man had just brought back from his wage labor trip to the coast. Talk would weave in and out of other topics-was it time to burn the garden sites before the rainy season arrived … what did they think of so-and-so's new wife who'd just arrived in the village … which ritual specialist or possession god should be called on for help with the fevers that were attacking children in the neighborhood … or what to do with a seven-year-old who still wet his hammock. Sometimes discussion would turn to a man who was asking the lineage elders of one of his wives for permission to bring her with him to the coast where he was conducting wage labor. (At that time women left Saamaka territory only as the wife of a laborer, and most of them had little more than token experience with life on the coast, always as a spousal dependent.) By the time I arrived in Saamaka, the sinuous embroidery sewing of the late nineteenth century and the beautiful patchwork compositions of small squares, triangles, and rectangles that women sewed in the early twentieth century were no longer being made or worn (figs. 6-8).10 Instead, the 1960s were the height of narrow-strip patchwork, and the discussions that I sat in on constituted a detailed entrée for me into the aesthetic and compositional principles that lay behind that form ( fig. 9).11 9 See R. & S. Price 2017. 10 I was nevertheless able to see them in the form of black-and-white photos taken by explorers and other visitors to the Maroons and, more importantly, through the kindness of village men who let me go through the trunks where they kept dozens and dozens of old capes, loincloths. and other items that they no longer wore. There were also some faded examples of this style in the museum in Paramaribo, hanging in the tropical sun, and a few others at the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam. 11 They were also doing a bit of linear embroidery, mainly for small items such as kerchiefs. Women used the terms "head" and "side" for the strips that were cut from the end (the weft) and ripped along the selvage (the warp) of each of the two-ell lengths of the cotton cloth that were bought by men in the stores of Paramaribo. And their comments made clear that the bottom strip was more aesthetically important than the one on the top; together with the tri-colored, tasseled calfbands that they fashioned with an umbrella spoke, the cape's bottom strip was meant to highlight the man's calves, considered an aesthetically important part of the body.
As the strips were laid out on the ground in proposed arrangements for a man's shoulder cape (the most common patchwork garment, called bandyakoosu or aseisente12), the discussions made it clear that "heads" and "sides" should be alternated. These sessions were important for identifying aesthetic and technical aspects of the art-considerations that guided their aesthetic decisions but would not have been discoverable from photos or examination of the finished product.13 By 1968, talk sometimes turned to the new art of cross-stitch embroidery that village men with wives from the Christian villages downriver had begun wearing with pride. Women in Dangogo were leery of this new fashion. Never having been to school, how could they ever learn to execute the kinds of grid-based designs that the lower-river women copied from the missionaries' needlepoint magazines? And besides, the new, thicker cloth that set up the grid for the crossstitch was more expensive than the thin cotton that was providing women's skirts and the material for patchwork capes. Nevertheless, it seemed clear that the new cross-stitch technique would eventually displace narrow-strip compositions, and indeed, when we returned in the mid-1970s, some of the younger women had mastered the new style ( fig. 10).

12
The term aseisente, which in the 1960s meant "man's cape," soon became generalized to mean any garment sewn in narrow-strip patchwork, so one could sew, for example, an aseisente hammock-sheet. 13 Being a woman gave me a privileged position for hearing commentary on textile arts, and growing up with sewing skills (in the gendered setting of the 1950s) also helped. Observers without that upbringing are often handicapped by confusion about such things as the difference between hems and seams, sewing and darning, or patchwork and quilting. The conversations in Dangogo also touched on other aspects of Maroon understandings about textile arts, most notably the idea that decorative sewing was always intended for a man, a kind of thank-you for the things that husbands did for their wives, including presents of all sorts of carved wooden objects, from combs and kitchen implements to houses and canoes.14 I occasionally saw modest embellishments on the small capes that women wore when they were in their husband's village15-a simple embroidery pattern or a few strips added on in the form of an "H" (fig. 11). But the wrap-skirts that they wore, always in two layers, were never decorated; nor were the squares 14 See S. Price 1993 for discussion of the exchanges between men and women involving their artistic productions. 15 Unlike men's capes, which pass under one arm and are tied on the opposite shoulder, the smaller capes that women wear fall fully on the back, with a tie across the throat. See fig. 11. price New West Indian Guide 94 (2020) 1-38 and the traditional power of lineage elders has been seriously eroded, leaving women free to travel to the coast, even unaccompanied by a husband. Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, many of them left their villages for new lives of variable duration in coastal Suriname or Guyane. Around the same time that Maroon women gained significant freedom to travel, Richard Price and I were seriously truncated in our own. In 1986, we suffered a midnight expulsion from Suriname by government MP s in the initial days of that country's civil war between the government and Maroons, and subsequent advocacy in human rights struggles only served to reinforce the government's decision to keep us out.16 As a consequence, we, too, began spending time in Guyane, both to stay in touch with the new life of Maroons there and to hear news of what was happening back in the villages of the Suriname interior. Our trips over the next three-plus decades allowed us to visit frequently with Saamakas we'd known in Suriname, but they also opened up other anthropological projects, including with Maroons of the three eastern groups. For example, recruited to make a collection of Maroon material for the Musée des Cultures Guyanaises, then in the planning stages, we spent time over two summers visiting Ndyuka, Aluku, and Pamaka villages along the Maroni/Marowijne River.17 Later research visits kept us in close touch with Saamakas, notably through our friendship with a remarkable Saamaka curer living in Cayenne.18 Although our relationships still tended to be Saamaka-centric, we made it our business to spend time with members of the other three Maroon populations, eventually traveling to every site where they lived in order to write a book about their evolving presence and participation in Guyane society.19 On these trips, during which we met with students and teachers, housewives, laborers, municipal workers, census takers, cultural organizers, and others, one of the many aspects of Maroon life that struck us was the ongoing stylistic change in clothing and textile arts, now with a whole repertoire of new influences.
Our conversations with teachers (mostly from France) who were ushering Maroon children into basic literacy gave us insights into everything from social problems such as growing numbers of drug-trafficking "mules" in their middleschool classes to the latest innovations in textile arts. In 2013, for example, Cécile Duro, a dedicated teacher in St.-Laurent-du-Maroni, told us about the wrap-skirts that girls in her classes were embellishing with painted designs. 16 See (See the third and sixth skirts from the left in fig. 1. See also the image in Polimé & Van Stipriaan 2013:43.) As with other aspects of Maroon culture, it wasn't possible to predict where novelties like this would be taken: six years later an article in the Suriname press described how a Maroon man in that same town named Donovan Landveld had set up benches on a balcony, bought a blackboard, and was making a living by offering 4-week-long skirt-painting classes for girls.20 The Maroon women who migrated from villages in the rain forest to various locations in coastal Suriname and Guyane came to experience greater independence (whether voluntary or not) from men. In many cases this meant taking on responsibility for their family's economic survival. Living among other members of the multi-ethnic population, they adapted-picking up the practical know-how they needed to interact with neighbors, shopkeepers, government workers, schoolteachers, and more. We often met women who were providing for their whole household via family welfare checks issued by the French state. They could also make modest amounts of money selling produce in the market or offering carved calabashes and decorative textiles to touristsfor example, opening a stall in the Cayenne market or becoming involved in the rapidly expanding network of cooperatives. Mareska, an enterprising Saamaka woman originally from the village of Kayapaati, established a concession in a busy shopping mall in suburban Cayenne, where she sells her textiles along with carved calabashes and small bottles of rainforest medicines ( fig. 12). Olívia Gomes da Cunha has told me about a Ndyuka woman, Tresna Pinas, who opened her own craft shop in the town of Moengo, and is constantly visiting stores and villages to discover new textiles and sewing techniques. And a Facebook page called "Mi Anga Mi Pangi" ["Me and My Wrap-skirt"] offers a sales outlet for many others. With money of their own, women are able to enjoy the material offerings of the consumer society, from washing machines, refrigerators, and freezers to televisions, rice cookers, and cell phones. Some of them have saved up for state-of-the-art sewing machines and multicolor thread sergers (for edge-stitching) in order to take much of the tedium out of their continuing involvement with textile arts. And store-bought pocket books have become a much appreciated accessory ( fig. 13) In these new settings, the principle that decoratively sewn clothing was for men, which had already begun to give way in the Suriname interior, went completely out the window, and women began devoting serious aesthetic attention to their own outfits, especially their wrap-skirts ( fig. 14). These quickly became the major focus of women's sewing, both for themselves and as a source of income. Although the social and economic place of women has changed dramatically,22 their interest in the aesthetics of clothing, as well as the pleasure of 22 This is not to say that Maroon gender relations in the past were frozen. For example, a gradual increase in the time men spent engaged in wage labor on the coast in the early creating new designs and the techniques to produce them, remains as much a part of their lives as they were for the women of earlier generations ( fig. 15). It would be no exaggeration to say (as Olívia Gomes da Cunha did in commenting on an early draft of this article) that women are now the main producers of aesthetic innovation in Maroon art. twentieth century produced a demographic imbalance in the villages that led to greater subservience by women in the domestic sphere. As a result, women became increasingly reluctant to initiate divorce; other diacritics of their relationships with men were also affected. Among the changes: while it was once acceptable for a woman to address her husband by his name, that was no longer true in the 1960s, when she had to be more polite. One aspect of personal adornment that has all-but disappeared is the art of cicatrization. Before they began frequenting the coast, all non-Christian women, beginning in adolescence, had patterns of decorative keloids cut on face, chest, back and, most importantly, the inner thighs … not only for beauty, but also for tactile stimulation during love-making ( fig. 16).23 The erotic principle behind these keloids did not die easily. In the late 1990s, Saamakas assured us that teenage girls, who had abandoned cicatrizations in visible areas of the body, were nevertheless still having them cut in the "under-the-skirt" area, and this apparently continues today. As the art of cicatrization was being phased out, commercial forms of dermatological modification such as tattoos and piercings entered the fashion repertoire, as have false nails and eyelashes, extensions, and wigs. Around the same time, frontal aprons (koyo), once the daily dress of adolescent girls in the villages of the rainforest, were abandoned except for playing a role in the rite-de-passage marking a girl's entry into social adulthood. (Koyo made to be worn by male dancers are still used in that role.) 23 See R. & S. Price 1972. New West Indian Guide 94 (2020) 1-38 figure 16 Cicatrization, 1960s S. Price 1968 Some of the changes that we witnessed took root in traditional villages in Suriname and then spread to Guyane. In 1991, for example, R.P. and I stopped on our way from Cayenne to the eastern-border town of St.-Laurent to visit with several women sitting in a palm-leaf shelter by the side of the road.24 Needle in hand, Norma Amania, a recent immigrant from the Saamaka village of Botopasi, showed me how she was putting together a double-layer cloth with decoratively shaped openings in a curvilinear design, held in place by lines of embroidery-producing what I would call "reverse appliqué" (fig. 17) Many years later D.S. Battistoli, a former Peace Corps worker who had stayed on in Saamaka and was living in Abenasitoonu, generously offered me more specifics: Abenakamisa sewing was invented by Ma Nena (school name Emelina Cornelia Selina Huur) of Abena while she was living with her husband who was doing construction work in Brownsweg [the largest of the new towns built for Saamakas who were displaced by the hydroelectric project of the 1960s] in 1964. On their return, she taught it to two classificatory sisters and a sister's daughter, Gaan Bea, Maama, and Maata. Maata's younger sister Nolda later moved to Botopasi, her husband's village, and introduced it to women there. It rose rapidly in prominence over a period of twenty years, but then declined even more rapidly. Nolda died last year, but Maama and Gaan Bea are still sewing (now usually with the handcranked sewing machines they got in the late '90s).27 Later email exchanges made clear that the story is a bit more complicated. What Ma Nena "invented" was a revival of a kind of appliqué that had been common in the 1920s-then sewn by hand, now often on hand-cranked sewing machines.28 Mid-twentieth-century Saamakas referred to it as kago-buka-a style consisting of small squares and triangles (often in red, white, and black) appliquéd onto a background cloth (figs. 18ab).29 But by the 1990s, the term abena-kamisa had come to refer not only to that revival style but also to the new curvilinear designs executed in reverse appliqué like the one Norma Amania showed me.30 that of the English term "blue jeans"-originally referring to a kind of pants and later to the fabric, as in "blue-jean jacket. In subsequent visits to Guyane, I began hearing additional names for this new style of sewing: koti-fula ("cut and pierced") and koti-pelaki ("cut and stuck on"). Women from eastern Maroon villages (Ndyukas, Alukus, and Pamakas) sometimes sewed it, unaware of its specific history, but associating it with a Saamaka origin ( fig. 19). While it was Saamaka women who initiated the reverse-appliqué style of sewing, it was the eastern Maroon women who later took on the central innovating role in embroidery, setting an explosive new direction for Maroon textile arts. The aesthetic inspiration came from the colorful acrylic painting that Ndyuka, Aluku, and Pamaka men were producing, sometimes to decorate canoes, paddles, and household objects and sometimes as wall hangings to sell in the burgeoning tourist market ( fig. 20).31 Picking up on both the brightly colored palette and the pattern of interlaced ribbons of the men's paintings, the women invented a new art, based on their earlier cross-stitch embroidery, but aesthetically and even tangibly different. Part of what distinguished the new style, which they often referred to as asabem, was that it was realized with heavy yarn (instead of the thinner embroidery thread of earlier styles) and covered the entire (significantly enlarged) surface of the garment (figs. 21ab). The design 31 Saamaka men have never participated in this development. They sometimes embellish their bas-relief or openwork carvings with decorative tacks or inlays of different woods, but they do not use paint.
New West Indian Guide 94 (2020) 1-38 was first marked out in pencil, either by a man or, increasingly, the seamstress or another woman.32 Then, when the embroidery was completed, a strip of cloth was added at the waist and smaller strips-realized in crochet [S. haki], ruffled cloth, or store-bought eyelet-were added along the other three edges. The dense yarn embroidery and the significantly larger dimensions of these skirts made a much heavier garment; while previous styles produced light cotton skirts that weighed less than a woman's T-shirt, the new cross-stitch extravaganzas were clocking in at weights to rival a winter jacket.33 figure 20 Painting by Antoine Dinguiou, Aluku, 1990 Musée des Cultures Guyanaises 32 Cloth stores also sold lengths of cloth with the outline of a design already in place. 33 Unlike the yarn cross-stitch skirts, those decorated with reverse-appliqué did not become heavier, but they were expanded in their overall dimensions. In the 1960s a typical wrapskirt measured about 48 × 27 inches; compare that with a (typical) abena-kamisa skirt I was given in 2019 that measured 59 × 32. It should be noted that many women, freed from such exercise-rich tasks as gardening, carrying water in buckets from the river, processing rice with a mortar and pestle, and paddling a dugout canoe, and instead spending time watching television (not to mention adopting a diet that included readymade food from the supermarket), were also taking on more ample proportions. Among the Saamaka, while cross-stitch was once associated with downriver (Christian) villages, Battistoli reports that today the finest cross-stitch textiles are produced in villages far upriver, or by descendants of upriver Saamakas living in Paramaribo or Guyane. Although the new-style embroidered textiles could be sold to tourists (or other Maroons), some of the most elaborate ones are very personal possessions, explicitly not for sale. An Aluku woman who offered to sell me one of the skirts she'd made refused to part with the one that I (and she) found most beautiful, explaining that she was saving it to wear in the coffin at her funeral.
As with my exploration of narrow-strip sewing in the 1960s, it was helpful, in learning about the yarn embroidery, to watch it being produced and to talk with the women as they sewed ( fig. 22). They explained that since the designs followed a grid of horizontal and vertical lines, the initial examples were made on a special kind of cloth sold in stores that incorporated the grid in its thread structure. But it was expensive, so women began producing the grid structure on their own, using cloth that had no built-in grid and laboriously extracting threads at intervals to produce the guidelines for their designs. Not only was this cheaper, but it also allowed them to space the guidelines closer together or farther apart, in anticipation of their intended design. The downside was that the process was extremely tedious and took a tremendous amount of time. As they put it, you had to take a pin and coax each thread to slide slowly toward the edge of the cloth, saaaa, until finally it popped out, bem! Hence the name, asabem, for embroidery made in this way.34 And when the embroidery was finished, it was also possible to pay someone to make a crocheted edging; that cost up to 30 euros for a wrap-skirt. 34 Note that an earlier version of this technique had sometimes been used by Saamaka women in the mid-twentieth century for cross-stitch embroidery on light cotton garments. There, it was referred to by the more straightforward term puu-maau koosu ("pullout-the-thread cloth"). As more and more Maroons moved away from the forested interior of Suriname and Guyane and into more westernized settings on the coast, the men stopped wearing their loincloths and shoulder capes on an everyday basisexcept (sometimes) at home, and in ritual settings such as political gatherings or wakes ( fig. 23). And although the main item of women's daily clothing continued to be wrap-skirts made from the same kind of trade cotton as in the past (or sometimes the much-appreciated "African style" cloth imported from Europe), the cloth was now cut larger and the skirt was topped off with a storebought bra or tank-top. For festive occasions, women could wear an outfit of matching skirt and top embroidered in the colorful heavy-yarn embroidery ( fig. 24). As women from different Maroon groups came into increased contact on the coast, the once-clear distinction between Saamaka and Eastern Maroon dress softened-for example by a Ndyuka woman attending a special event in a handsome wrap-skirt made by a Saamaka friend. Like fashion in Milan, Paris, New York, or Tokyo, borrowings, novelties, and new touches in Maroon clothing, such as hems cut in decorative curves, have always been highly appreciated At the same time that wrap-skirts became much bigger and more densely decorated, so too did the unembellished squares that Saamaka women had always used, folded and tied with a point in the back, to secure them at the waist. In addition to heavily geometric embroidery (reminiscent of the linear mid-twentieth-century embroidery Saamakas called naai-a goon ["along-the ground sewing"]), these garments sometimes included lettered aphorisms in Sranan/Ndyuka proclaiming, for example, "God is the boss" or "Your love is mine" (fig. 26). Similar messages began appearing on the wrap-skirts themselves, as the new level of literacy allowed women to express themselves in writing-most frequently about sexual love or God.35 35 The new embellishment on wrap-skirts, both decorative and in writing, complements Maroons' long-standing enjoyment of naming the patterns of cloth sold in coastal stores-often after local scandals such as a fight between co-wives, global events such as the moon landing, or aesthetic properties such as color combinations; for examples see S. & R. Price 1999:92. And it wasn't just the embroidery that differed from that of earlier generations; the entire range of garments and accessories exploded in new directions. Women's outfits began including an over-one-shoulder cloth that had once been a uniquely male option for both Saamakas and Ndyukas ( fig. 27). And items of clothing that had been worn in the villages were reworked in new ways as part of a more-and-more lavishly colorful, kaleidoscopic sartorial revolution. Calfbands (sepu) provide one example. Throughout Maroon history, sepu have been a much-admired accessory.36 Using an umbrella spoke to make connected loops of cotton yarn, and working around a cylindrical form (a bottle, a decoratively carved wooden cylinder, or a section of PVC piping), women created bands that were worn just below the knee by men, women, and children, especially for festive occasions.37 White except for narrow stripes of color in the middle, they sometimes sported small tassels made with colorful yarn or thread. In the early years of the twentieth century some calfbands had a zig-zag pattern in red and black.38 At the end of the twentieth century, as people moved into new homes on the coast and adopted western clothing, they did not abandon sepu, but instead turned them from a relatively simple item of traditional dress into a stunning new artform, producing them in a variety of more complex designs and flashier color schemes. The new sepu became a much appreciated item of dress 36 Van Panhuys mentioned that women and girls made "ankle-and calfbands," using wooden forms carved by men or boys (1899:81). For a discussion of Amerindian, African, and Maroon calfbands, see S. and R. Price 1980: 210-11 or, in French, 2005 As one Saamaka put it, "Limba uwii [the village-wide event a year after a death that ushers the deceased into the land of the ancestors] simply aren't held without sepu." 38 For the story of this early style (known as logoso-baka ["turtle back"]) and its re-emergence many decades later in Dangogo, see R. & S. Price 2017: 213-14 … a story that in some sense parallels Ma Nena's revival of a 1920s style of patchwork sewing.
for both men and women at certain cultural events (what Battistoli astutely dubs "Saamaka black tie"), complementing the vibrant colors of the increasingly expansive sewing on women's skirts and waistkerchiefs. They also became an object suitable for display on a shelf over the TV in an urban apartment (figs. 28ab). The sartorial history of the Maroons unfolded largely in a setting that was, in spite of being based on commercial (imported) cotton cloth, relatively free of external interference. Aside from the colonial exhibition of 1883 in Ams-price New West Indian Guide 94 (2020) 1-38 terdam,39 nineteenth-century Maroons were generally spared the indignities of degrading roles as the objects of gawking outsiders-there were no Saartji Baartmans stripped bare for European titillation, no Ota Bengas caged with orangutans in American zoos, no Clickos dancing for circus freak shows, and no photo shoots with The Great Farini.40 Even the commercial performances that grew out of expanded travel opportunities in the twentieth century, in which people were carefully choreographed to reinforce Western stereotypes of primitive life, largely passed them by. There were some Maroon performances for outside audiences, such as those in the 1992 Festival of American Folklife on the Washington Mall (see R. & S. Price 1994), but they were much less micromanaged by outsiders than, for example, the Maasai warrior dances analyzed in Bruner & Kirshenblatt 1994 or the offerings to members of the Center for African Art in New York who enjoyed (as the "high point" of a $ 3900, 8-day trip to Africa) front-row seats at "the dance of the marriageable young women and of the men who hurl themselves into a blazing fire" among the Senufo (Vogel 1991: n.p.). In a comparative context, Maroons have been more successful than many non-Western peoples in holding the reins to their representation for tourists and other outsiders.
Changing fashions in clothing, long driven by the Maroons' longstanding love of novelty, are now continuing in the context of their move away from the relatively isolated villages of the rainforest into a world where the products of local cultures have become commodities to be bought and sold, promoted selectively, and influenced by outside forces. In the cities and towns of late twentieth-century Suriname and Guyane, where Maroons rubbed shoulders on an everyday basis with people identifying as (for example) Creole, Hindustani, Javanese, European, Hmong, Haitian, Amerindian, and Brazilian, symbols of identity such as the way one dressed in different settings took on special importance as a way to celebrate cultural identities that were beginning to be rivaled by new options.
In Guyane, this process unfolded in the context of an aggressive assimilationist program created in Paris, known as francisation ("frenchification"). Through radio and TV, newspapers and magazines, administrative practices, cultural offerings, and educational programs, non-Europeans living there were being encouraged to think and act according to norms established in metropolitan France. In addition, evangelical churches were attracting Maroon con- 39 See Prince Roland Bonaparte 1884. 40 For a sampling of the vast literature on this genre, see Blanchard et al. 2002, Bradford & Blume 1992, Breitbart 1997, and Lindfors 1999 New West Indian Guide 94 (2020) 1-38 verts at an astonishing rate;41 for example, in 2018 the 2500-person Ndyuka enclave of Charvein in western Guyane included no less than 15 different churches. Some Maroon artists were learning to take advantage of marketing venues that ranged from tourist shops, cultural festivals, and museum exhibits to Facebook pages, YouTube films, and events hosted by trendy urban cafés. Promoters, both Maroon and non-Maroon, organized exhibitions of Maroon art in the building that once held inmates of the infamous "Devil's Island" penal colony. Troupes of Maroons danced on the stages of festivals such as the "Biennale du marronage" in the town of Matoury42 and at the annual fêtes of many towns. Maroon cooperatives began participating in school programs, introducing children to the elements of their art.43 In the 2007 "Miss Saint-Laurent" contest, presided over by the town's mayor, contestants all wore clothing in the style of eastern Maroon men's painted designs; the fact that their outfits were made by a British textile designer who had apprenticed herself to an Aluku artist and then had the cloth manufactured in Indonesia fit comfortably with the new multifaceted reality of Maroon culture in Guyane ( fig. 29). The fastdeveloping integration of Maroons into the fabric of Guyane life has, not surprisingly, been dependent on some command of the French language, which means that Aluku Maroons-born on the French side of the border river with Suriname and therefore citizens by birth-started out with a distinct advantage. But with the great majority of Maroon children in Guyane now going to school, whole new generations of young people have been acquiring the tools to participate at some level in the cultural life of this overseas offshoot of France.44 41 The list of churches also included Jehovahs Witnesses and smaller denominations such as Les Combattants de la foi, Source de Vie, and La mission biblique de l'Église Baptiste Genezareth du Mexique. 42 For an idea of the cultural offerings of this event, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v =YaVmYS5wMVA. 43 See, for example, Doat, Schneegans & Schneegans 1999:123. 44 In 2003  At the same time, Maroons across the border in Suriname have been experiencing related changes. As an independent republic rather than a European ex-colony, Suriname is affected by a stronger grass-roots component for such developments, but many of the same kinds of changes are taking place among Maroons-evangelization, commodification, increased literacy, ubiquitous cell phones, and the adoption of new, more westernized lifestyles, both material and conceptual. In Paramaribo, Maroon beauty contests are organized by professional enterprises such as "Twister Entertainment QS" in which contestant videos feature versions of traditional Maroon clothing and ample use of cultural diacritics (such as head-carried baskets, small woodcarvings, paddles, and gourds), votes are taken via cell phone, and it's all now available (and well worth watching) on YouTube.45 Or again, a Paramaribo-based enterprise called Eured MediaCaptures posts images that show how totally baroque the flashy embrace of Maroon clothing can become ( fig. 30). 45 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqwgaG-gJ1k. These kinds of events tend to reflect specific cultural/political initiative and advocacy. While "Maroon Day," a public holiday in Suriname since 2011, has always been heavily focused on Ndyuka culture, Saamakas launched the first "Saamaka Daka" (Saamaka Day) in 2019 in an effort to right the imbalance.
New West Indian Guide 94 (2020)  Of course, the flip-side of cultural adaptation is cultural revival. Throughout the world, people who've been pulled, willingly or not, into participation in "westernized" settings have developed their own ways of keeping alive (a creative version of) their former cultural beliefs and practices. In Suriname, for example, Ndyuka artist Marcel Pinas has been spearheading an active move in this direction, both by devising projects that encourage the participation of his whole community and by integrating in his art many once-everyday objects such as the handheld tin lanterns used by women before the arrival of electricity and the cotton cloth of many colorful patterns that was traditionally used for loincloths, skirts, and shoulder capes.46 In both Suriname and Guyane, the mushrooming presence of tourists, schoolteachers, administrators, and other outsiders has contributed to the incentive for Maroons to build a whole new set of competences, taking on authorship of their image-recording and marketing CD s and DVD s, building, advertising, and managing tourist lodges, writing and publishing children's books, soliciting funding and logistical support for a local museum, mounting contests of traditional forms of dance, posting YouTube videos, and so on.47 Some of these developments seem to be on the way toward becoming the In our multicultural society, Sisa Events specializes in organizing various events … with the aim of promoting Afro-Surinamese culture in the Netherlands. We especially want to introduce you to Maroon culture, history, traditions and music … From staff parties to workshops, from fairs to a festive opening of a company (or building), we organize varied events for different target groups with a multicultural touch or an explosion of cultures in a unique way.48 Some aspects of life lend themselves more easily than others to both the assertion and the commodification of culture, so it's hardly surprising that such revival projects center on visual arts, music, dance, and food more frequently than, say, childbirth, legal systems, or political succession. Within the range of cultural materials, clothing represents one of the most effective mediums, capable of celebrating cultural identity in chosen contexts, simultaneously for western audiences and for people who are doing their best to hold on to the richness of an eroding way of life.49 As we have seen, when Maroons moved from rainforest villages to western settings, the cicatrizations that once constituted an essential element of their bodily esthetic dropped out. But garments that can be donned for selective occasions and then removed (such as shoulder capes and calfbands) allow Maroons to celebrate their identity on chosen occasions-for themselves and for outsiders-without impinging on their efforts to adapt to western mores in their everyday lives. Today, men often don bell's analysis of the "Banamba contests" that have been held in Paramaribo since 1997. These carefully choreographed (in both senses) events transform a dance that was enjoyed by Maroons during their earliest years in the rain forest into the centerpiece of a competition that "functions as a potential vehicle to transition a young dancer from social and largely informal performance opportunities into a professional realm" (Campbell 2019:327 The new, ultra-modern Louvre-Abu Dhabi Museum recognizes this by its dress code for elegant invitation-only exhibition openings, suggesting "national dress" as an alternative to tuxedo/black tie. a traditional-style shoulder cape over their western clothing during their participation in community events, and officials and other visitors frequently do the same at public appearances in a show of solidarity ( fig. 31).

figure 31
Expression of solidarity WhatsApp 2018 In 2013, when the Carifesta festival (organized annually by the Caribbean Community, CARICOM) took place in Suriname, Maroons in the town of Moengo organized an innovative community event called Poolo Boto Show ("celebration boat show"), very loosely based on a Ndyuka funeral ritual, but aimed at (and realized with the help of) participants from all the ethnic groups who lived along the river, from Javanese and Chinese to Creoles and Amerindians. As described by Brazilian anthropologist Olívia Gomes da Cunha, it constituted "a composition of practices decontextualized from their frame of reference, … making kulturu [Maroon culture] into a visual experience."50 The joyously raucous event centered on long dugout canoes filled with celebrants, with as many as 20 in a canoe-some drumming, some dancing, and others just grinding to the beat. Many waved fans or kerchiefs or held up balloons. Cloth banners of all sorts were everywhere. Ndyuka wrap-skirts, waist ties, loincloths, and shoulder capes (plain, appliquéd, painted, embroidered), shared the scene with T-shirts, tank-tops, bras, blue jeans, and baseball caps. Some women balanced baskets or wooden trays on their head. There were palm fronds, parasols, pod dance anklets, costume jewelry, headscarves, braids, cowry-shell hairdos, and bright-colored commercial hair extensions. One woman's waist tie was 50 Cunha 2019: 286. price New West Indian Guide 94 (2020) 1-38 hung all around with aluminum spoons that jiggled noisily as she danced. Each village designed (and "performed") its own canoe, sometimes with coordinated costumes for the women. Participants in the Asians' (smaller) canoes were more restrained in both costuming and celebratory behavior, with women gracefully manipulating silky scarves. The river parade was the main event, but it was followed by a western-style "podium" boasting a massive state-of-the-art sound system. All in all, it was a spectacular celebration of multicultural coexistence. Rich footage by Ndyuka filmmaker Djoe Basta not only makes clear the central role played by cloth and clothing, but also shows how the event created a second layer of self-imaging, as participants turned it into videos, DVD s, and cell-phone and social-media photos. His 40-minute video captures the joyful creativity of people moving the spirit of their aesthetic cultural heritage into the twenty-first century.51 This article, which reflects sartorial trends that I learned about during my last visit to Guyane in 2018, augmented by email exchanges and Facebook pages in 2019-2020, barely scratches the surface of current Maroon fashion.52 By the time it's published, it will already be out of date, with numerous new examples of creativity bubbling up in the cauldron of cultural mixtures that comes from continuing Maroon enjoyment of aesthetic innovation. If you follow Facebook pages you'll see what I mean.