ABSTRACT
This chapter asks how the metaphorically rich style of the Dutch-Surinamese writer Astrid Roemer intervenes in Dutch conceptions of the colonial, gender, history and the natural by reading the changing connections between water metaphors and its meanings in her 1998 novel Was getekend (Was Marked). Firstly, the metaphors are read as a poststructuralist intervention in notions of truth in (hi)story telling. Secondly, the metaphors are considered in the context of questions around guilt and blame, directing attention to the paradoxes of a story that is not determined by the history of a nation yet exists in intimate relation to it.
