Diana Lebacs is a Curaçaoan educator, actress and author, most known for her children's literature. She writes in both Papiamento and Dutch. In 1976 she received award, one of the Netherlands' highest honors for youth literature for her book Nancho van Bonaire. In 2003 she earned the inaugural Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds Caribisch Gebied for her book Caimin's geheim and in 2007 she was honored as a Knight in the Order of Orange-Nassau.
Early life
Diana Melinda Lebacs was born in 1947 in the Chere Asile neighborhood of Willemstad in the Dutch colony known as the Territory of Curaçao. The year after her birth the country would become the Netherlands Antilles, a constituent state of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Her mother, Esther Amalia Doelwijt, was from Suriname and spoke Sranan Tongo, having moved to Curaçao at the age of eighteen. Her father, Willem Mertjo Lebacs, was a chief customs officer, who also worked artistically as a carpenter and woodcarver. Willem's father was from Bandabou on Curaçao and had completed his military service in Indonesia and married a Malay woman there before returning to Curaçao. Her grandmother never learned Dutch and only spoke the Malay language and Papiamento. As her parents could only communicate in Dutch, Lebacs grew up speaking Dutch and Papiamento at home. After Lebacs completed her primary education at the Philomena School she attended the María Immaculata Lyceum for her secondary studies. During this time, she began writing novels for teenage girls and sang in a band, Teenage Shadows, from 1963 to 1966. In 1966, she graduated from the Willemstad Pedagogical Academy and the play performed at the commencement ceremony, Regels voor ezels was written by Lebacs. The following year, married Pacheco Domacassé, who had directed Teenage Shadows and would later head the cultural section of the Education and Cultural Department of Bonaire. They would subsequently have two children.
Career
In May 1968, Lebacs' mother died and in August she and her husband embarked on a tour of western Europe over the next six months. During their travels, she began to write a novel, Sherry—het begin van een begin, a coming of age story of an Antillean girl which delved into the socio-economic development of the islands and the labor strikes which occurred in conjunction with anticolonial uprisings in Curaçao in 1969. That summer, she sent the book to Leopold Publishing in The Hague and waited six months for their response. After agreeing to publish the novel and completing the edits they wanted, in 1970, Lebacs enrolled in a two-year literary course in Papiamento to gain a better insight into the lingua franca of her homeland. She wanted to publish children's stories in the language spoken by children in the Dutch Antilles. In 1971, Sherry premiered and two years later was translated into Finnish by the publisher Tammi. Also in 1973, Lebacs wrote a youth theater play, which was the first dramatization written in Papiamento in over twenty-five years. Buchi Wan pia fini, premiered with her husband as director, as a critique of European education systems and featured live exchanges between the actors and the audience. After the debut, the play was presented several times in Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao and it was published in 1974. At the beginning of the next six years, Lebacs published a new work. Her 1975 book, Nancho van Bonaire earned the award in 1976, the first time the honor had been given to a non-European author. Lebacs continued working on several fronts simultaneously throughout the 1980s and 1990s. She published children's fiction in Dutch and Papiamento, educational textbooks for elementary students, developed television programs about the Spanish and Dutch colonization history of Curacao, and acted in two films, Famia kibrá and Boka Sarantonio. She also participated in community projects including book fairs, workshops to end violence against women, and programs to protect the environment. In 1994, Lebacs published her first novel for adults, De langste maand, which evaluates disparities in traditional local values and Westernized expectations. In 2003 Lebacs earned the inaugural Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds Caribisch Gebied for her book Caimin's geheim and in 2007 was honored as a Knight in the Order of Orange-Nassau. That same year, she completed her bachelor's degree in Papiamento at the University of the Netherlands Antilles and went on to earn her master's degree in 2011. Subsequently, she began teaching courses in Papiamento at the university for beginning students. In 2014, Lebacs debuted her first collection of poetry, Belumbe/De Waterlijn.
