Bea Vianen (Suriname, Paramaribo, 1935-2019) is one of the most important Dutch Caribbean authors of the 1970s. She wrote, far ahead of the time, about entrapment and escape, freedom and the lack of it. Her prose and poetry revolve around her Hindu heritage, beauty and oppression, and the effects of colonialism in Suriname. My Name Is Sita (1969), in which she describes the sense of suffocation in her native country with extraordinary sharpness, became a classic both in the Netherlands and Suriname.
