I drink a Borgoe cola with my father at Zanderij. Actually it’s called JA Pengel International Airport Suriname nowadays, but for me – stubborn kiddy who first appeared here in the 1990s as Unaccompanied Minor got off the plane – it remains Zanderij.
From the sandy plains of an open piece of land in the forest I will soon fly back to the Netherlands, a country where everything goes fast. But first the usual farewell ritual of satay, fries and a Borgoe cola on one of the tables with a bench, accompanied by a hungry street dog and loudly talking men in white undershirts at the table next to us.
This ritual has been going on for 26 years. Then my father moved back to his native country and I came to live with him for a while. Since then I have come to Suriname every year. And so I had to say goodbye every year.
“There is a time to come and a time to go,” he says, for the 26th time. I drink deeply from the Borgoe and wonder why the feeling doesn’t get used. Saying goodbye 26 times, aren’t you used to it once? Am I ever going to sit here on this bench and not feel like a part of myself is being ripped out of my body? Every time I leave a piece of myself behind in Suriname.
And this time it’s not just a father, a family, friends, theater colleagues and a husband. It is the part in me that is barely perceptible when I am back in the Netherlands. As if a Northwestern European insulation hood is pulled over me as soon as I board the plane and later land in the air-conditioned corridors of Schiphol, back in Bakrakondre, the country where everything ‘works’, at Schiphol even the toilets flush automatically. And there a woman always looks at me from the mirror, a very Dutch woman. It’s like a morph to my Dutch side, which can already be felt from the movement from one country to another, and that movement starts here, on this bench, with some good Surinamese rum.
So I drink that last sip of Borgoe, because what else can I do? It burns in my throat.
My father takes me to the entrance. We hug each other. I bite away my tears. I stand in line behind a fence, covered with black tarpaulin. First I see my father’s red Chinese umbrella peeping between the wall and the fence, then his mischievous little head with the dark blue cap. We send each other some air kisses. Then he’s gone.
Nina de la Parra lives and works in Suriname this summer.