It is the day after the weekly cleaning in the Lisa Boersen house. The light Amsterdam house with high ceilings is indeed neat. A kitchen without dishes, a dining table without piles of paper. Steaming coffee in two rounded dark blue mugs, made by her brother, who is a potter.
After cleaning, the house will be tidy for exactly one day, says Boersen, because her children are eleven and fourteen, living in which clutter and lying around seem to magically become invisible – at least to themselves. “I used to be like that too. I could step over mountains of junk without registering it. And now they do the same. I tell them every day, sometimes several times: ‘Take that mess to your room. You can see it.’” Boersen smiles. “And then I immediately hear how my mother used to talk to me.”
Eventually, we all become our parents.
“Is not it awful? There is little that can be done about it.”
Lisa Boersen (48) writes children’s books, including the successful series Timo and the nanny ninjaand, together with Hasna Elbaamrani, the picture book A thousand and one purple djellabas. Boersen worked for a long time at pop venue Paradiso, where she put together cultural programs. A year ago she became editor-in-chief youth at broadcaster NTR.
She was born and raised in the Netherlands, but the older she gets, the more she notices that the Dominican Republic, the country of her mother, who came to the Netherlands for love, has shaped her. And especially the stories her mother told about it. In an effort not to forget and lose those stories, Boersen wrote them down in her first adult book. García Márquez and the Honeymoon Quiz is a collection of colorful memories of relatives through the eyes of her mother, but also reads like a collection of essays about the importance of stories for our identity formation: what we tell about ourselves and our past also makes who we are.
The stories are light in tone. Even the one about Boersen’s great-grandfather, who helped dictator Rafael Trujillo in the saddle but later joined the resistance and ended up in prison, where he died. She mirrors that story to her own life: until she became a mother, and stood bent over her son’s cradle, she always thought and hoped that she would be someone who would join the resistance in World War II. But “in those first vulnerable days of motherhood,” she was sure she would “look away, suffer humiliations, betrayal if necessary. As long as they would stay away from my child. Later it turned out that motherhood comes with just as much strength as fear.”
‘THE CORE OF ALL THE STORIES MY MOTHER TOLD US IS: ENJOY WHAT IS HERE NOW, TOMORROW IT MAY BE GONE’
García Márquez and the Honeymoon Quiz is full of such thought experiments that can excite the Dutch reader because they are set against stories from a completely different culture. Are the women in her family strong or are they oppressed? And the Dutch, are they really as level-headed as people think, or are they ‘easy to stir up when the circumstances are right’?
But the book started as a family project, not initially intended to be published. Boersen mainly wanted to write down the stories for her sons. “I felt very strongly that I wanted to pass on the stories I had grown up with, otherwise the education would not be complete.” When I turned forty I decided to make time for that. I took half a year off from work.” She spent hours and hours interviewing her mother at the dining table of her parental home in Pijnacker.
Was turning forty a symbolic event for you? You mention it so explicitly.
“Yes. I had kids growing up. You see them grow up, making the passage of time very tangible. Raising and passing on takes on a different, less basic form. I also wanted to give these stories as a gift to myself, for my fortieth birthday. And I also got it from my friend. We had to break our piggy bank for it, and also not want to move to a bigger house just as the children were growing up.”
The first version of the book was a collection of 45 anecdotes, which Boersen typed out and put in a ring binder. That book is still in the closet, for her sons. “It was an enormous amount of work.” Laughing: “My mother is very talkative. But it wasn’t a book yet.” Over the years, she spoke regularly with publishers because of her work, and sometimes the family project came up. Would she not want to do that anymore?
“I thought, yes, but what is the point I want to make? How interesting are my family stories to others?”
While your book contains a very clear point. That the stories that we are told, and that we tell ourselves, also shape us.
“I wrote the collection of anecdotes and family stories in 2015. Only during the corona crisis did I see more clearly why those stories could also be of value to other readers. The crisis was felt by many people in the Netherlands as a huge landslide. People here are very used to the idea of security of existence. And while I grew up here and have had the luxury of security all my life, I wasn’t brought up to think it’s normal, because it’s not normal in the Dominican Republic. Of all the stories my mother told us, the core is: enjoy what’s there now, because tomorrow it could be gone. You are not entitled to anything. At that point I really felt like I had an edge because of my background in having more than one frame of reference. What wealth. Only then did I realize: that is of course also why I want to pass on all those stories to my children. I want them to learn coping mechanisms other than just the Dutch ones.
“In the Netherlands we all talk each other into the pit more. In the Dominican Republic, people are more likely to make a beautiful story out of something. That is not necessarily true to nature. You can spice it up a bit. That gives a lot of color to life.”
Which mechanisms do you want to include?
“Humour. Pride. To trust. If something bad happened, my mother always said: you never know what you were spared. It could have been much worse, she meant.
„’Al mal tiempo, buena cara’, is a well-known Dominican proverb. In bad weather, put on your good face. It is precisely in the face of adversity that you must adopt a positive attitude. La vida es un carnival.”
Do you think you can have that much influence as a parent?
“Everyone continues to relate their whole life to how they grew up. In the Dominican Republic, children add a little more to the lives of adults. When my friend and I just wanted to have children, we were at a family party and there was a two-year-old child sleeping on a pillow in a corner. My friend thought that was remarkable and told the parents, but they were fine with it. That relaxed attitude appealed to both of us. Children really belong there, but they are less the center around which everything has to be organized. That’s how I grew up, and that’s how we apply it now.
“The fact that I have a Dominican background is not addressed in many situations in my life. But in parenting I really felt like an immigrant. Dutch children can be brutal, and parents often allow it. We don’t do it that way at home. I am relatively authoritarian. What matters most to me is that you treat each other with respect.”
Boersen recorded the stories from her mother’s mouth, and sometimes called relatives to check whether they remembered it that way, but she did not check all the facts. One of Boersen’s stories tells of her grandmother, who had lost all her money after her husband’s death and had to live in a poor neighborhood, “where a house made of bricks was quite something.” One day Grandma decided that things had to be different. She saw a number in the drawing of a plant leaf, writes Boersen, and that number would be the winning lottery ticket. Together with a neighbor, she visited all lottery ticket sellers in the area – you were allowed to choose your own lottery ticket. After a day of searching, they found the lot with the corresponding number. Sure enough, she won the grand prize. With that money she had a whole new house built.
That story seems almost too good to be true.
“I have talked to relatives about it, and they confirm that it happened. That is also what this story stands for in the book: incredible things happen in life.”
CHILDREN NEED SUCH A TIME. THEN YOU SHOULD NOT THINK AT THE TENTH THAT IT WILL NEVER BE ANYTHING AGAIN’
The anecdote about the lottery also underlines the view of life she inherited from her mother: we, our family, were lucky. “My mother said we can trust that the world will ultimately be kind to us,” she writes in her book, “that luck will be ours—we had the stories to prove it.”
“When I first read the stories of Gabriel García Márquez (from Colombia), I recognized a lot. He describes a world made up of bright colors and great and unbelievable things. Lives that are full of unexpected twists. That ‘magical realism’, as seen in the Netherlands, is part of life in the Dominican Republic. I think it makes the world richer.”
Do you think you’ll be happier if you can fool yourself a bit by telling yourself the beautiful stories about life?
“Actually yes. Anyway, I think the opposite is true. If you mainly tell yourself the negative stories, I think you will become less happy.”
You have recently become editor-in-chief youth at NTR, so you help determine which stories the youth see. What window to the world do you want to offer them?
“We want to inform children and arouse their curiosity. Offering recognition, but also introducing them to the unknown so that their world expands. And we want to show that there is often something to laugh about. I think titles like Het Klokhuis succeed very well in this. We make programs about intense subjects, such as bullying. But we also always offer hope.” Laughing: “They still have such a time. Then you should not think at the age of ten: that will never be anything again.”
Boersens only wrote for children before this. Imaginative books, like the series Timo and the nanny ninja, about a ninja who is careful and is amazed about the Netherlands. In a crowded shopping street, he wonders if there are enough people for so many clothes. In Hotel Intermediate (2013) children hide in the toilet out of shame, and there they suddenly end up in a hotel, where they muster up the courage to go out into the world again. Her next book will probably be for children again.
Why do you love telling stories to children?
“Perhaps because there is much more fantasy in it. This magical world is naturally present in children’s books. The Dutch literature for adults that I grew up with is often gloomy.”
Boersen notices that García Márquez and the Honeymoon Quiz makes readers want to look for their own family stories. In her in-laws, this is precisely a story about not speaking and not telling – perhaps typical of the Dutch post-war generation.
“An old grandmother in my friend’s family was missing a leg. There was always a blanket over it. She had lost that leg in the war, but nobody knew exactly how, because she didn’t speak. The children in the family really wanted to look under the blanket, but didn’t dare. One day the children were playing with two cars, and they crashed into each other. “’Boom, broken,’ said grandma then. And that’s all they’ve ever heard her say.”