The language of a pangi

Dr Gabrielle Jamela Hosein

ON A MORNING in Moungo, mist rises higher than the rooftops and trees. It is like a vast opaque river flowing over the land. Its beauty makes me pause as I wake up in a Maroon community in Suriname to complete research on community needs, and how they are gendered.

For this project, I am working with experienced community researchers; Maroon women who speak six Maroon languages in addition to Dutch and Saran, the Creole lingua franca.

Trinidadians/Tobagonians think of ourselves as exemplars of a diverse society, but Dutch colonisation of Suriname left descendants of Javanese (Indonesians), Hindustanis (indentured Indians), First Peoples, Maroons, Creoles (mixed-race Africans) and Chinese as well as Europeans living together, and speaking their own languages.

The Dutch had a different approach than the British who sought to make everyone English in language, tastes and manners. It’s intriguing to see such different outcomes for these groups. Suriname also boasts that 93 per cent of its land is forest cover so nature’s biodiversity flourishes here too.

Spending time with Maroon women researchers has been educational. This is why it is important to not just get information sent to you from "the field" and write it up at your desk. Spending time means having conversations, building relationships, sharing stories, and learning about histories, traditions and families.

It’s the value of ethnography or research that involves staying in a setting where you get to see the mist standing magnificently above the trees at 6 am, how erosion impacts houses at higher altitudes, how women make cassava bread, and where young women wash wares in the river while boys play football. These may have little to do with research, but they are essential to seeing people and communities as complex and whole; as human.

Maroons are descendants of enslaved Africans who escaped plantations and fought to establish free communities in the forested interior. Sometimes, but not always, Maroon people have Indigenous Amerindian ancestors. Their cultural traditions are different from non-Maroon, African-descended communities so Maroons consider themselves a distinct ethnic group.

As I had to wear one over days of collecting data, I learned about the pangi. The pangi is a rectangle cloth, mostly though not necessarily checkered, which Maroon women wrap around their waists like a skirt or across their bodies and over their Western clothes. It’s an emblem of Maroon identity also tied by men diagonally across the body or over the shoulders. When worn by men, it is called a djemba. While traversing the capital, Paramaribo, I saw many of these pangis in different colours and worn in different styles. I was gifted one as I arrived.

Over time spent together, driving to the interior, eating meals and relaxing at nights, I learned that a pangi communicates like a language. It is important to rituals, and particularly beautiful ones are handmade with thread patterns. If one is worn in black and white or in white, it signals a time of mourning, and the choice of colour and period of time worn reflects the closeness of family connection with the person who has died. A pangi has to always have a sewn hem, and often has a lace border, because those which are not hemmed are kept to wrap the dead at burial.

Adult women may wear their pangis below the knees whereas young girls are more likely to wrap them above their knees. There are many other meanings and uses, some of which would not be disclosed to non-Maroons and should not be written about publicly, but without this time spent together just getting to know each other, I would have seen pangis selling in stores and being worn by women and men without understanding what I was seeing.

My increased appreciation of this cloth is also part of ethical research practice or, alternately, helps to make sure that my method of research is ethical. By ethical, I mean more than a non-exploitative and consensual approach, I mean that research that enables those with whom you are doing research to feel as if you are interested in more than your pre-determined questions; you are also interested in what matters to them in their lives.

In our diverse Caribbean, being careful about each other’s customs and material culture is important. You need to know what gifts to bring, what questions are sensitive, when and where to stand or sit, how to show respect, and how to listen with openness and humility. All this is symbolised by what I learned about the pangi.

Diary of a mothering worker

Entry 531

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