SUMMARY
Suriname is located in the extreme north of South America in a region called Guyana Shield, that includes French Guiana, Republic of Guyana, Suriname and part of Venezuela and northern Brazil. It’s literature is marked by cultural and linguistic ethnic plurality and the thematization of social contradictions. In the case of the literature of Suriname, the narratives that compose this space inscribed in the heterogeneity are populated by characters historically silenced, as enslaved women, workers of the plantations, "bushnengués", among others, but who speak, despite being intermediated by a writer, as representatives of cultures not valued and/or little known. In this sense, this article will discuss two Surinamese historical novels written by Cynthia McLeod,The free negress Elisabeth: prisoner of color (2004) and Tutuba: the girl from the slave-shipLeudsen(2013), addressing, more specifically, how her literature questions the current literary paradigms and discusses the problematic of women’s voices, whose legitimacy is continually put in question.