320 pages. Published April 9, 2024 by Two Lines Press. Fiction.
Grandma Bee has a cough that’s settled deep in her lungs. A long-time cigar smoker, she knows what it means; and after a lifetime of pain, loss and misunderstandings, she wants to settle some things before she goes.
Gradually, Astrid Roemer unfolds the story of Bee’s family—her own complicated past, the only daughter of a French settler who couldn’t raise her, and who married her off to a Black man, Anton Vanta. Vanta’s the descendant of enslaved people who took over the plantation they had worked on, but when he marries Bee, he becomes more or less estranged from his family and heritage. Bee focuses on raising her children, who are ‘off-white,’ the theme running through the book.
Like any family saga, this is full of lives, motivations, and secrets. It’s an epic about a multiracial family that’s complicated by the Dutch colonisation of Suriname, by racial barriers, and the legacy of slavery. Off-White is also about the struggles of the Vanta women—educated, but labouring under heavy emotional burdens passing down through generations. There is hope, though: the youngest generation, that of Grandma Bee’s grandchildren, is far less burdened, and the story ends on a sense of newness, and the righting of wrongs.
Thank you to Two Lines Press and NetGalley for access to a DRC.
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Harare Review of Books 
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