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 escaping, freedom and the lack of it. Her prose and poetry deals with her Hindu heritage, beauty and oppression in Suriname, and the aftermath of colonialism. 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 as well as Suriname.
