We sat at one of the terrace tables in front of a brown café. It was an unexpectedly mild evening, we drank gin and tonic and watched the people walking by. A man I had seen inside the cafe sitting at the round table in the back came out to smoke a cigarette. I offered him a free seat, which he declined. He looked at me a little longer, and I thought maybe he recognized me from the newspaper, that happens sometimes. Then he asked; “Are you from our former colony?”
It remains a strange habit; people ask about their origins, preferably at the most unexpected moments. For those who are wondering at what times a question about my origins is to be expected; you can ask when I made a tasty chicken liver sambal, for example, and wonder where I learned that. Or when you hear my last name and you want to know where such a wonderful interplay of letters was invented. Those are moments when I think, yes, now you can ask.
The man had thought about it for a long time, it seemed. Asking the question in a way that wouldn’t offend me. I thought of him as being aware that he couldn’t be careful enough, with all those easily hurt people these days.
I have sympathy for people who do their best in the minefield that is modern society. And yet, those words ‘our former colony’. It was as if he appropriated me. It implied, oh so subtly, that he owned something. And not just anything, but my personal country of birth. Which created a suggestion in school that I was a bit of him, he who didn’t know me.
“I am from a former colony,” I replied calmly (because my mother taught me to always remain civil when confronted with silliness), “but probably not from the colony you mean.”
“Ah,” he said, “then you are definitely from Suriname.”
When he understood that I am not from Indonesia, as he had thought, he talked about how well he knew Suriname and that he had a girlfriend who was from there and what was good and especially wrong with the country and how exactly that came about. The question about my origins was – as is usually the case – not so much about genuine interest, but mainly functioned as a stepping stone to share one’s own experience with that specific country (culture, women, political malaise).
When men counter women’s expertise with their self-confidence and overconfidence, we call it mansplaining. What do we call it when people start telling you what is actually going on in your own culture? Whitesplainingmaybe.
He was a cultured man, a journalist at that, who had had a few too many drinks. He realized at a good moment that he had perhaps expressed himself a bit clumsily. He even came back out to apologize. Something I found extremely kind but also unnecessary. We all say strange things sometimes, and I’ve had crazier things thrown at me.
I thought it was perhaps worse that he did not realize who he was dealing with. I mean, he was an editor at a magazine that I won’t name here, and I have a column in the best newspaper in the Netherlands. Any journalist would have known that I am not from Indonesia, but from Suriname. That little bit whitesplaining that took place, I can live with that. My bruised ego – that’s a lot harder to get over.
Karin Amatmoekrim is a writer and man of letters. She writes a column here every other week.
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