‘Oh, you are the daughter of Pim de la Parra?’, a Hindu man on the Jodenbreestraat in Paramaribo exclaims enthusiastically.
‘My march, Daddy! Roy, motherfucker, you’re mine!’ he yells and he laughs out loud. For the bakras (cheese heads) among us who are now like sorry, what are you talking about: my father made an iconic Surinamese film in 1975: Wan pipel. The texts that this man will be spouting at a rapid pace in 2022 are all Wan pipel-quotes.
‘Okay sir, bye, let’s go again!’ I call out just a little too elated. I can still hear his voice blaring across the street: ‘Aaaaai is good. Madam!! HOLLAND HAS MONEY!’
Holland has money. Famous sentence from the film, which is pronounced when the main character Roy Ferrol needs a plane ticket to come from the Netherlands to his dying mother in Paramaribo. ‘But money, daddy, do you have money?’ the sister asks. To which papa Ferrol, the father from the film, replies: ‘Money? Holland has money!’
I walk on, through the broken streets of Paramaribo, the city where I partly grew up, hand in hand with my brand new Surinamese lover.
I think of the man who contacted our Surinamese producer and asked for 500 euros for photos he had made of our saxophonist during a jam session twenty years ago. I think of the bizarre taxi ride in which I was two weeks ago with a depressed taxi driver who took me to my niece on Hendrika J. Veldkampstraat and already started saying at the Star Shoes on Domineestraat that he was ‘looking for something’ and that ‘something ‘ turned out to be an older woman with a Dutch passport who wants to guarantee him against payment, so that he can circumvent the IND in a sham cohabitation contract in which he actually lives in a room in her house (with his own bath and shower, according to him). and doing chores for her.
At this point in his story his taxi stopped, in the middle of Kwattaweg, I looked past the window, which could not be opened, at the holes in the shattered asphalt. In the end I gave him 300 SRD (12 euros) because his car’s battery had apparently died and he also had to take care of his sick mother (as proof I was shown a yellowed photo of the mother on a rickety IV).
‘Hey babe.’ I am startled by my lover’s voice. We have arrived at our favorite warung.
As a matter of course I take my wallet and give him the 200 SRD (8 euros) for the telo terie to be paid with pitjil and bakabana.
Holland has money.
Nina de la Parra lives and works in Suriname this summer.