My brand new Surinamese friend does not want to join me and my team for dinner. “But why not?” I ask him, confused and a little hurt, when he declines my invitation to have dinner with my director and saxophonist at a renowned restaurant, where my director – a culinary fanatic – has befriended the masterful chef and then convinced him that he was special to us, off the menugoing to cook.
Friend swerves, whirls around the theme. Then the high-pitched word comes out, mumbled a little, while he half looks away: ‘I never quite know what to say sitting at the table so neatly. What should I say?’
‘What do you say? Just join in the conversation and talk about your life.’
“But who’s interested in my life?”
I look glassy at him. “Uh, my teám. These are my people. And you are an interesting person. Just tell them how you got into tourism and all the crazy things you experienced in the interior of Suriname. tell them I don’t know anything. They want to get to know you, that’s why it’s okay.’
‘Yes, but you bakras They have a very different conversation culture, don’t they? This is not self-evident for me.’
I’m not hearing this for the first time. At the beginning of our collaboration, I had a similar clash with the Surinamese theater maker with whom I am now developing a play, about the fact that ‘getting to know’ for me means that we sit opposite each other at the table and talk for hours.
“Can you see that how you want to know me is different from how I want to know you,” she said then. ‘It is viewed from your European way of thinking. But when you sit across from me, girl, and start questioning me, it feels like you’re a detective or something. What does this woman want from me, I think. It feels like an interrogation. How I want to get to know you is very different, isn’t it. I just want to drive you around in my car and take you to my cookie lady who bakes delicious cornstarch cookies and drive you along the Hermitage Mall or sit down by the water at Anton Dragtenweg and stare a bit over the river. That’s getting to know for me.’
I thought I was somewhat Surinamese, but I’m not. I have a Northwestern European language mindset in me, especially when it comes to ‘having conversations’. That’s why mi na wan skrifi woman anyway (that’s why I became a writer). Sitting at a table and ‘having conversations’ is a natural fare for me. And my own whiteness hits me in the face.
Nina de la Parra lives and works in Suriname this summer.