Tip Marugg

Silvio Alberto (Tip) Marugg 1923 - 2006) was a Dutch-Curaçaoan writer and poet. His novel De morgen loeit weer aan (1988) was nominated for a major Dutch literature prize. His style is best characterized as a variation on magic realism. Marugg also wrote several poems (published in literary magazines as well as his book of poems Afschuw van Licht) and a Dikshonario Erotiko, a dictionary of all words with an erotic meaning used in Papiamentu.

Biography

Ancestry

Marugg's ancestors on his father's side hail from the Swiss town of Klosters, and moved to the Netherlands. His great-great-great-grandfather was born in Amsterdam in 1784; he was a surgeon who left for Curaçao in 1804 where he married Elisabeth Schul(d)er. Silvio Alberto Marugg was the son of Johann Isaac Abraham Marugg (1893-1968) and Johanna Helena Curiel (1887-1961); he was one of seven siblings who survived infancy. His mother was from Curaçao but had been raised in Venezuela.

Youth and schooling; military service and first literary exploits

Marugg, whose nickname at home was "Tip", was born in Willemstad, Curaçao, on 16 December 1923, in the Roman-Catholic district Otrabanda, where his father owned a grocery store. He went to the local Catholic school because the Protestant school, across the bay in Punda, was too far away. He attended the MULO at the Saint Thomas college, and then the Algemene middelbare school. By the time he turned 18, World War 2 was in full swing, and he was called up for military service, despite being enrolled in school. He was in the army for five years, until 1947. Official reports from that period describe him as calm, honest, polite, intelligent, and a conscientious worker. Most of the time he was guarding oil installations and the harbor, where German U-boat attacks could be expected. He tried to do his guard duties with friends with whom he could discuss literature, and published his first poems in the magazine De Stoep in 1945. Starting in 1948, he published book reviews in La Prensa.

Marugg's first literary publications were surrealist poems, published in the magazine De Stoep between 1946 and 1951. A foundational theme in his work is the inability to live an authentic life, and fate, dead, and night are recurrent elements in his poetry, which is influenced by Hendrik Marsman. He published his first novel in 1957; Weekend pelgrimage has the economic and political situation of Curaçao as a subject, and expresses a distaste for industrialization. Existential loneliness is the subject of his second novel, In de straten van Tepalka (1967). An ingenious doubling of characters allows the first-person narrator to make fun of himself without turning the novel into melodrama. His collected poetry was published in 1976 as Afschuw van licht.

Bibliography

• 1957 - Weekendpelgrimage
• 1967 - In de straten van Tepalka
• 1976 - Afschuw van licht; gedichten 1946-1951 (poems)
• 1988 - De morgen loeit weer aan (English: "The roar of morning")
• 1992 - Un prinsipio pa un dikshonario erótiko papiamentu
• 2009 - De hemel is van korte duur