Kotomisi

The Afro-Surinamese dress of koto, jaki and angisa, and the woman who wears it.

Kotomisi is the traditional dress of Creole women in Suriname, and also the name for the woman who wears it. Koto is the dress, misi means lady: a kotomisi is literally a lady in koto. The dress has three parts: the koto itself, a wide skirt often worn over several underskirts, the jaki, a jacket for the upper body, and the angisa, a starched and folded head tie.

The koto arose in the time of slavery. A widely told story is that slaveholders and their wives imposed the dress to clothe enslaved women modestly and unattractively. The women made it their own. Because speaking freely could be dangerous, clothing became a language: the way of wearing it, the fabric, the colour and above all the fold of the angisa could say something about a mood, an event or a message for those who could read it.

There are kotos for different occasions, such as a birthday, a wedding, work or mourning. The koto is still worn on festive days, at a koto-dansi and above all on Keti Koti, 1 July, the remembrance and celebration of the abolition of slavery. The kotomisi belongs to Afro-Surinamese culture as a whole, not only to Winti, but in a Winti reading of a dream it often plays a part.

In dreams a kotomisi usually appears as an older woman: a grandmother, an aunt, an ancestor. Many Surinamese readers connect such an image with the bigisma, the elders, and with the family line. Whether it is a visit from a yorka, a memory or a message about where you come from depends on who she was, how she looked and what she did. The occasion counts too: a mourning koto in a dream is read differently from a festive one. Dreamkin reads such a dream as a possibility, never as a certainty; whoever finds the dream weighs heavily discusses it with their own family.