In October 1873, my great-grandfather and great-great-grandmother departed what was then Calcutta, India for Paramaribo, Suriname. They arrived in mid-January 1874, 96 days after their departure.

On arrival, they were sent to de Resolutie, one of the largest sugar plantations in the Dutch colony, where my great-great-grandmother worked as an indentured labourer on a five-year contract. After that point, they were granted permission to stay in Suriname. Neither of them ever returned to India.

My great-grandfather and great-great-grandmother left no written materials in their own words. There are no diaries, no letters. In fact, family lore suggests my great-grandfather even avoided the camera, in the process even further obscuring attempts to understand him and his life.

The only documents that remain from their journey are the Crew Agreement and Ship’s Log for the Kate Kellock (the ship on which they travelled) and colonial Dutch immigration records. These documents indicate that my great-grandfather was 2 on arrival, while my great-great-grandmother was 25. Both are listed as “dark brown” and both as Hindu. They came from a small village called Aburpore that no longer exists on any map.

In this project, I want to imagine possible conversations between my great-grandfather and my great-great-grandmother as they sought to make sense of their journey aboard the Kate Kellock as it took them from the only world they knew towards a life that neither could comprehend before their arrival.

To do this, I am creating a daily stitched log book that reflects my research process, and a series of found poems: fragments of imagined conversations. Both are inspired by the extant archival materials, and both consider a child’s eye perspective.

The stitched log book draws on insights from the archival materials. It will include both quantitative elements (for example, the Dutch colonial classification of labourers according to skin colour) and more qualitative elements (for example, responses to commentaries in the ship’s log). The stitched log book will be 96 “pages” long, corresponding to the length of the journey.

The imagined conversations, in the form of found poems or lullabies, will be created entirely from the extant materials. Transcribing the archival texts, I have created a lexicon of words (that could be understood by a child) that will form the basis of my writing.

On this blog, I’ll include excerpts of my research, writing, and stitching process: samples of the stitched ‘pages,’ excerpts from research materials, and questions that are shaping my writing.

I am grateful to the Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture, University of Manitoba, for three months as writer-in-residence, which will allow me to really dig deep into this project. Interestingly, my 95-day sojourn in Winnipeg almost exactly maps onto the 96-day journey that brought my ancestors from Calcutta to Paramaribo.

(c) sonja boon, 2025.