GREAT BAY--Marvin Hokstam Baapoure, a former St. Maarten journalist now visiting the island for the Reading Festival, will meet with the Surinamese community at Makan Bersama restaurant on Friday, where he will present and sign copies of his debut novel, the historical thrillerHet Punt.
Hokstam Baapoure, who worked forThe Daily Heraldbefore relocating to the Netherlands, is on island this week to give writing workshops to schoolchildren as part of the Reading Festival: St. Maarten Edition. This festival takes place on September 25 and 26, organized by Stichting Biblionef Netherlands in collaboration with the Ministry of Education, Culture, Youth and Sport, the Library of St. Maarten, the Help Our Children Foundation, and the University of St. Martin (USM).
The two-day festival is aimed at inspiring a love of reading among children, parents and educators, with author visits, workshops and interactive activities for schools on Friday, and for the general public on Saturday at USM. For the initiative, writers from the Netherlands, Curaçao and Aruba are joining local St. Maarten authors to visit schools across the island, leading writing workshops and engaging students directly in the craft of storytelling.
“It is a privilege to be invited to return ‘home’ for a cause like this that aims at getting children excited about reading. As adults, we have an obligation to prepare our children for the future and I take every chance I get to do exactly that,” said Hokstam Baapoure, adding that the initiative also affords him the opportunity to present his novel to Surinamers.
“The book deals with everybody who has perceptions of superiority or inferiority and teaches how much all of us on this earth are related through history. And in particular it deals with the history that I share with people from Suriname.”
Het Puntwas ten years in coming when it was released last July; in this thriller fiction and lived reality constantly bleed into each other. The book opens with the body of a racist politician found hanging from a tree at the Lindengracht in Amsterdam; investigations by private detective Reinier Groote lead to a Black man who has traced his lineage back through Ghana and Suriname to a plantation in the early 1800s.
It leads to the unraveling of a family secret that brings four centuries of history into a collision course. Readers are left with the question: “how far would you go for a truth that upends everything you thought you knew about yourself?”
The book has received rave reviews from readers in the past months.
Suriname-born Hokstam Baapoure worked for St. Maarten’sThe Daily Heraldnewspaper in the late nineties, as well as for regional and international publications, and news agencies throughout the Caribbean, winning five regional journalism awards along the way. After relocating to the Netherlands in 2012, he started AfroMagazine.nl, the only media organization there devoted to the Afro diaspora.
In his book he deals with the racism Black people encounter in the Netherlands and writes about the Netherlands from the perspective of a Black man who embraces his African identity. For his research for the book he travelled extensively in Ghana.
The gathering at Makan Bersama restaurant on Friday is organized by the Foundation Friends In Action; it starts at 6:00pm. Copies ofHet Puntwill be available for purchase for US$24. Makan Bersama restaurant is located in the Philipsburg Food Court on Front Street.
