Recovering <i>Watapana</i>

This essay focuses on the Aruban literary-cultural magazine Watapana, which published poetry, criticism, fiction, and translations from the Dutch Caribbean between 1968 and 1972. The magazine hosted spirited debates about the politics of language in the Papiamento- and Dutch-speaking islands of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao. The author shows how the Watapana editor Henry Habibe’s internationalist ideals conflicted with Dutch Caribbean left-wing nationalism, which promoted Papiamento as a literary language. Papiamento’s obscurity outside of the Dutch Caribbean islands presented intellectuals like Henry Habibe with a literary and political problem. Their nationalist literature would be neglected in the wider Caribbean unless it could be translated into a widely understood regional language. This essay closely reads the two special issues of Watapana that Habibe published entirely in Spanish, instead of Dutch or Papiamento. Further, the author recovers archival evidence of the reception of Watapana in Cuba and Guyana to counter the widespread perception of the Dutch Caribbean’s neglect in the region.