In the introduction to the recently published Dutch Racism, editors Philomena Essed and Isabel Hoving assert an exceptional quality to racism in the Netherlands. Describing it as “complex, paradoxical and a contested domain,” they suggest that the special quality of Dutch racism results from, among other things, its entanglement with willful ignorance and denial, the lack of a shared discourse on racism, a rise in populist mainstreaming of xenophobia, and the emergence of a discourse of the “right to offend” as part of the freedom of speech.1While Essed and Hoving's claim for exceptionalism may be an arguable one, its validity for my purposes here is that their project delineates the terrain within which artist Charl Landvreugd's installation Movement No. 7: On Edgar Cairo was staged at the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam between January and March 2014. For even if we are to question the need to bracket racism's exceptional tenure within the Netherlands, the importance of this recent publication, and indeed the importance of Landvreugd's work, is the fact of their timeliness. Both come at a moment in the Netherlands when anxieties over who is deemed to belong to the nation-state have arguably been at their highest point in recent years, fought out on a racialized battlefield. This contestation centers on whether those regarded as outsiders—often descendants of postcolonial or labor migrants—can claim belonging to the nation, or can even have a say in what constitutes a national culture.If the Netherlands was previously regarded as a wellspring of tolerance, the fault lines of such a happy discourse have widened recently, giving way to a marked rise in restrictive claims to citizenship and belonging. Several scholars have attempted to unpack these anxieties over belonging.2 Still, there remains an urgent need for further analyses of questions of race in the Netherlands, exploring, for example, the ways uncomfortable truths about racism can be drowned out within societal humor.Yet to concern oneself with such questions about anxious politics cannot be restricted only to the Netherlands. Rather, these politics must be seen as a Europe-wide phenomenon, bound up in an imagined earlier moment when the different European nation-states were allegedly homogenous, both culturally and racially.It is within this context that Landvreugd's work and the interview that follows can be understood. His is a project of questioning what it means to be black in Europe, or, said differently, whether one can be both black and European. Movement No. 7, the occasion for this conversation, was the second in a series of three contemporary art installations staged as part of the exhibition Black and White at the Tropenmuseum. This exhibition was mounted to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the Dutch Kingdom and intended to explore how “black” and “white” people have lived with each other in the Netherlands since 1863. The exhibition, while questioning in its narrative form, aimed at raising awareness of some of the trenchant issues of discrimination and inequality present in contemporary Dutch society.Several artists were invited to work with a partner of their choosing to explore these issues. Landvreugd chose to work with the Dutch Surinamese author and essayist Edgar Cairo.Wayne Modest: Charl, perhaps you will allow me to start with a question that in today's political climate in the Netherlands may seem quite impolite but is, however, a question that is necessary to set the ground for our discussion. Were you born in the Netherlands?Charl Landvreugd: No! I was born in Suriname, in Paramaribo, in 1971. I was born on the same day as Marcel Pinas (the Surinamese artist), I in Paramaribo and he in Moengo—which is funny. The same exact date, only a hundred kilometres apart.WM: In what year, and at what age, did you move to the Netherlands?CL: Nineteen seventy-five. I believe it was February. I can still remember the flight; I was almost four, but I can remember the flight. Everything was so blue. We even got to go into the cockpit.WM: Perhaps we could sketch a little bit about your early years. You moved to the Netherlands in 1975 and moved directly to Rotterdam?CL: Yes, I am a Rotterdamer—Rotterdam is what I know.WM: Do you consider yourself Surinamese, Surinamese Dutch, or simply Dutch?CL: Dutch, actually. People have often asked me, “Why do you call yourself Dutch and not Surinamese Dutch or Dutch Surinamese,” and I say it's because I'm Dutch and I have all the privileges, rights, and entitlements of being Dutch, that all other Dutch people have. If I am regarded as Dutch Surinamese, then I have only some rights or privileges, or so it is regarded now. It's a political choice.WM: I want to come back to that point later, but perhaps first we could talk about what led you to become an artist. Did you always want to be an artist?CL: I danced from a very young age; and I continued to dance, taking dance lessons until I was about sixteen. Through dance I got into the club scene in the late eighties. By the time I was in my early twenties, I became the creative manager for a club in Rotterdam. I had full control of the programming of the club. I had six dancers and six drag queens working with me at the time. It was one of the first clubs to also have black bartenders and not only black busboys. I was twenty-two then, and even at that age I was already a curator of sorts, a curator and artist. It was a great period. At age twenty-seven I had a major accident. I realized then that I could actually have died. And that's when I knew that I didn't want to do the clubs anymore, but it took some time to get out. It wasn't until I was thirty-one that I actually stopped.WM: Was it then that you started your art practice?CL: Yes. I really wanted to go to art school, but I didn't think I could make it. In 2003 I moved to London with my then partner and applied to Goldsmiths College. I chose Goldsmiths because they offered a combined fine art and history of art program; I was also interested in the theory. And that's basically when it all started. I had come to the program thinking about questions of cultural identity and hybridity. At that time I was making these pristine, white plaster works. In my second or third critique someone described my work as a fetish. I was really upset. I remember calling my mother and asking, “Why would they call this a fetish? It doesn't look like a fetish.” And her response was, “If you weren't black, they would not have said that.” That was a turning point for me. At that moment I decided, well, if they want fetish then they are going to get fetish. That's the moment when I decided to paint everything black. It was a decisive moment in my early career. I started painting all my works black. But more than the fetish comment, I was also not especially happy at art school. As I said before, I was interested in art theory and especially in questions of cultural identity and hybridity. But it was not until I was in my final year that I got the text on créolité. And, actually, it was from a tutor who had nothing to do with my course of study. So I was quite upset, disappointed, even felt a little cheated [by art school]. I became perhaps a little rebellious and almost failed. Eventually it was the theory that saved me.WM: What do you mean the theory saved you?CL: I was taking a theory class with Professor Simon O'Sullivan. I cannot remember the class exactly. I remember having to write an essay for him. When the essay was assigned, I had serious doubts about the question, which was about some Western philosopher whose name I no longer remember. Much of his work was based on Eastern philosophy. He had lived in the East for some time. My concern was how this French guy could go and live somewhere “exotic,” take these people's knowledge, and claim it as his own invention. So I protested and said that I would not write the essay. In response, Simon said, “If you want to make it through school, make it in academia, you have to do the assignments. If you disagree, then you need take your own position and defend it, convince us with your position.” That lesson stayed with me: if you want to get ahead then you must take your position and defend it. Yes, Simon O'Sullivan made a big impact on me.WM: Let's go back to what you said earlier about the change in your work to a focus on black in response to your work being called a fetish. That seems to have also been an important moment for you. Can you elaborate on this a little?CL: Yeah, that was the moment when I switched to black. Not only to black as color but also to black as a point of departure. Up until that point I had imagined myself simply as an artist; but then I became a black artist. And it is only now—that was 2006 and now we are in 2014—it is now that I am, if I may call it this, “unblackening.” That is how much time it has taken me. You have to understand, most of us in the Netherlands didn't grow up black, we grew up being Dutch. So for most of my generation we only realized we were black when we became adults. This extra layer needs—blackness; it needed to find a place within our primary Dutch subjectivity. I had to go through that process of becoming black; I wasn't black before that, not in any real conscious sense anyway. But, as I adopted or got exposed to more radical blackness, I also realized that that didn't work for me. So after eight years I feel I have a more nuanced relationship with blackness, a middle ground, if we could call it that, where I have tried looking at racial subjectivity from different angles. This has led me to think that blackness does not have to always be in a struggle for power with whiteness as its opposition. Rather, a black identity can be a self-referential space, with its own richness, rather than a space for struggle. For me, blackness is simply the lens through which I live as a Continental European. Blackness is me as fact.WM: Perhaps this is a good moment to talk about your art practice. There is a section on your website where your write, “Both theoretically and practically, [my] work is always looking for representations of the genesis of a new humankind.” It continues: “In a catchy visual language that mixes science fiction, futurism, kitsch and refined aesthetics, his work speaks about the possibility of colour losing its meaning and of creating an apolitical humanity.”3 But from what you have just said, at an earlier stage in your work there was a moment when you were trying to sort through what it means to be black. How do these two moments relate?CL: This text on humanity is a more recent text. This is a new way of thinking that I came to over the last year and a half. Before that, aesthetically and theoretically, black was my point of departure. I was trying to investigate what black meant on different layers. Why, for example, if I make the sculpture in white everybody says it is gorgeous and when I do it in black they become scared, even though it is the same sculpture? Why is it a fetish when white and “not done” when black? That is where my interest was at the time. You would not believe how often people said to me, “But if you made it in white it would have been awesome.” So I had to get my head around that, to come to this point where I do not have to be so literal by painting it black. Now I believe that I already think it through a gaze of blackness. I therefore do not have to make it black, in a literal sense; it emerges from my black being/presence. So it was both blackness as color and as identity maker that I was interested in at the time.WM: What does this shift to exploring this new humanity entail? Are you suggesting that this awareness of your blackness, as a more self-conscious claim, means that the work automatically addresses the experience of being human? How do you see that as working?CL: Well, it took me some time before I realized that I did not have to “blacken” the work. It's going to be black anyhow; it was going to be about the black experience. But what I found even more important was to critique the position that blackness had held for many. The black experience is always, or is too often, related as a minority position, in relation to a dominant majority whiteness; [it is] always the position of the suppressed. But I do not care to speak about the suppressed. That's what I meant earlier about blackness as self-referential. I want to speak about humanity, since I see the black experience as a tool to speak about humanity as a whole. Until now it is not being regarded as a lens for speaking about the whole. Why is it that the white experience is conceived as “humanity,” [whereas] the black experience [is perceived as] “minority”? To put it differently, I was always very much amazed and interested in what I call “normal space.” What is normal space? Normal space is “man.” We say “black man,” but we rarely say “white man”; a white man is a man. A man is running down the street; if I want to say it's a “black” man, then I need to specify that he is black. But we never have to specify whiteness. White is seen as normal space. And I am at the point now where I am ready to experience normal space as a black space, or blackness as normal space. It is not that I am denying whiteness its space. No, it is not my intention to try and occupy the same space as whiteness, but rather to find my place within a black space and the canon of the black space, where blackness is normal space.WM: Are you saying that you no longer want to see blackness as exceptional?CL: Exactly. What I want to do is to claim normalcy, where one's knowledge and vision of one's self, whether white or black, can exist without having to be referential to the other—blackness not as referential to whiteness. The implicit consequence of this is that the politics of representation, or rather the politics of blackness as alterity no longer has the same salience as it did before. We would have to rethink the importance of these issues in that normal space. Because if I let you enjoy your privilege and rights and whatever comes with it, since I have my own privilege and rights and whatever comes with that, then I believe we can exist next to each other without having to occupy minority/majority positions.WM: But is that so, though? Because once you acknowledge that there is a space where black privilege can happen, which you can claim, and a space for white privilege, you are claiming that these two spaces are different, exceptional, and outside of each other. But can it really work like that, without there being hierarchies?CL: I would like to think it could work like that. It is perhaps an idealized vision of the world, I know. But it is a world I like to imagine as possible. And it may not be such an unreachable ideal after all. What I like about African Americans, for example, is that they seem to have a greater awareness of who they are; they know what they have contributed—without them there would have been no America. So there is a certain sense of self and entitlement engrained in that awareness.WM: I wonder if you do not paint too nice a picture of America. But perhaps what you attempt to understand is something that I too believe is important, which is, how blackness works differently in different spaces; the ways a different racial logic might operate in Continental Europe in comparison to America, or even Britain. But tell me, might there be a certain contradiction in what you speak about or in what you have been trying to work through? Let me explain. The contradiction that I see is that while you are attempting to move away from this idea of blackness, toward humanity, you at the same time claim that what you are looking for is an African diasporic aesthetic in Europe. So how is that different from what you are saying you are moving from—an investment in a notions of blackness?CL: Here is the major problem as I see it. For me, the whole idea of Afro-European, or Afropean, as they call it, does not yet exist as fact. What we have is based on an African American discourse. So I am also looking to move away from that. I am not claiming that there is an Afro-European aesthetic practice or discourse yet, but, rather, I am interested in trying to find out whether the specific conditions of being black in Europe produce different aesthetic practices. So this is rather an investigative process. The question is, what does this specific Continental European condition produce? At this point, I believe that we often draw from the African American race discourse to analyze what it means to be black in Europe without sufficiently thinking through what the specificity of this place does for us. I believe that there are artworks that emerge out of this condition, art that could not have been produced in the United States because of the specific race relations here in Europe, which are different from those in the US. I see art works produced here to which African Americans respond critically, calling us racist or self-hating.WM: Could you be more specific? Can you give me an example of such work?CL: For example, Makode Linde's Cake.4 That work could not be made in America; it would be impossible. And that a minister of culture actually participated in the performance by cutting the cake, that would be impossible in America. Nor could it happen in Great Britain, I think. But it can happen on the Continent. It is similar to the Zwarte Piet discussion here in the Netherlands.5 When talking about Zwarte Piet, it seems to be infused with an African American language, based on an African American discussion. And I am not saying that it isn't a difficult issue. But ours is a different history; we do not have a history of black minstrelsy shows, for example. We did not have that painful history of ridiculing people through stereotypes in the same way. We had our own, but it was not the same. But, I believe, we are approaching our experience as an American problem, within the framework of an American struggle. And this is where all of the resistance is coming from because we so easily call people who embrace Zwarte Piet racist. But people do not feel themselves racist. While I understand how it can be understood as racist, I sometimes wonder if racism is the right term to use to describe what is happening within our context. For me it is only when we find the right language to describe what exactly is happening that we can start to contribute to a Continental black European discourse. But if we continue to think about it within an Afro-American view of racism, then this does not push us hard enough to understand it.WM: Interesting that you say that, but is it not so that even if Europe didn't have similar minstrel practices, such racialized practices were part of a more transnational movement. Racist ideology of the nineteenth century was not restricted to America, and, in fact, traveled widely across colonial empires. So why should it not be defined as racism?CL: Yes, totally true. You speak about the transnational forms of racialized practices, but the problem is that if we approach this only through that American race discourse, then we are cutting ourselves short, because there are other things at play, which are not addressed by only looking to racism. In the Netherlands, for example, we do not speak about race, we speak about culture. This has to do with things in our history such as the Second World War. Can we or should we, therefore, approach the Zwarte Piet discussion through questions of culture or heritage and not race? What other kinds of issues would such an approach bring up? Anyway, I believe that a step was made in the discussions recently when it moved from the question of racism to one of a culture, a shared heritage, and that to live with this as a shared belonging we have to address how this affects some people negatively and not others. It was only then that the discussion started to move on. When we call others racist, they stop listening. So in my project about finding a black European aesthetics, the problem is how to see people not first and foremost as black but as European, and as a part of the nation-state to which they belong.WM: That brings me to another interesting point on your website, and this is exactly about questions of blackness and Europeanness, where you say that your work “speaks about the possibility of colour losing its meaning and of creating an apolitical humanity.” But what do you mean by an apolitical humanity? This statement, too, seems contradictory, when one looks at your work, since you ask for an apolitical society yet your work is distinctly political.CL: Yes, that is true. I am aware that an apolitical society is a utopia, an unreachable ideal. But as I said before, my interest is to try to create a space where the racial categories are depoliticized.WM: Interestingly enough, the background for our conversations is exactly political: the exhibition Black and White currently on at the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam.6 Your work is part of this exhibition. How do you see your work engaging with the broader theme of the exhibition? Were you already engaged with some of the questions the exhibition poses, which made your work an obvious choice for inclusion?CL: The idea of the exhibition, at least as I understand it, was to basically pose the question of, today in the Netherlands, after 150 years since emancipation, after the end of colonial slavery, how we as a society move on together, how blacks and whites live together in the Netherlands today. This is in many ways also my focus; we know what happened, we should not forget it, but the question is how are we going to move forward? In this, I believe that black people should start from their own place of power rather than try to copy, imitate, and mimic whiteness. The idea is to move away from a particular idea about blackness rooted in colonial history and to try to reimagine our lives from the point of view of the present and future modes of being on the Continent. The question is, What does it mean to be black—here, today.WM: And in response to the exhibition you did this project, called Movement No. 7: On Edgar Cairo, which you suggest asked the following questions: What does it mean to be black in the Netherlands today? In what ways does the history of the slave past live on in the present in the Netherlands, and where are we now, 150 years since emancipation? On your website, you go on to say that the “daily experience of ‘being different’ forms the basis of a question that affects us all: how do we want to live together in the Netherlands?”7 This seems to resonate with a lot of what we have just been discussing. One of the things that I wondered was why you chose Edgar Cairo as your partner for this exhibition? Why engage with Cairo now, in the Netherlands?8CL: One thing that is important for me about Cairo is his exploration of a kind of self-evident blackness. When he started to write his columns, he was embraced by the white liberal establishment here in the Netherlands. His texts were, however, aimed at the black Surinamese community, who basically ostracized him. Now, this is what I find really interesting, because what he was already trying to do, which is the point I am trying to engage with now, was to question the ways blacks saw themselves in Europe. Most people were from the backyards in Suriname, with their own cultural practices, and once they arrived here in the Netherlands they tried to be more Dutch than the Dutch. Cairo's response was to say that it was okay to try to be Dutch, but you should not forget where you are from and what you brought with you. Cairo was asking how the black Surinamese in the Netherlands could incorporate their own history into the life that they now had. A lot of people wanted to forget their history and just be Dutch. So I find Edgar Cairo really fascinating because he was attempting to understand these things as early as back then. It is exactly the same things that are happening now with the rise in black awareness in the Netherlands; Cairo's concerns are exactly the concerns younger black kids now are trying to grapple with in the Netherlands. How can we define ourselves through our history, from Suriname or the Dutch Caribbean, yet be Dutch at the same time? In the very same way that's the question that Cairo was asking in his day. And then of course he was gay, which you know, is also important for me.WM: Can you explain this a little further? What is the importance of him being gay?CL: What happened is that I saw Isaac Julien's film Looking for Langston. I even wrote an essay about it.9 Two things struck me: First, what Isaac Julien did was place himself within a history, he identified what the guys did during the Harlem Renaissance as his inheritance—it was his springboard, where he comes from. Second, he opened up for me what I would call the triple-consciousness, which emerges, I want to suggest, when one is not just black but black and gay. With [W. E. B.] Dubois's double consciousness, one is struggling with issues of race, a struggle between blackness and whiteness. As a gay black man, even within black society you are at the edges, so you are even further removed from the main struggle. So your commentary, your critique, takes on a different kind of urgency, because your struggle is not just about whiteness, about European norms. Actually, one could say that it is first and foremost about your sexuality; it is first a fight between you as a gay man and your fellow black man. So, through the eyes of the once removed, so to call it, the gay black man, the double consciousness once removed, your critique has a greater urgency.WM: I somehow like the idea of the once removed, which you should develop further. In fact, it might give you the opportunity to explore the lives of some other gay black intellectuals to address questions such as how we the subjugated can subjugate others for other markers of difference without seeing the contradictions embedded in such practices. Before we go any further, perhaps you could tell us a little bit about when, at what moment in your career, you came to the work of Edgar Cairo.CL: I discovered Edgar Cairo in 2005, I believe, but it was not until 2008 that I bought all his books. At that time it had to do with a class I was taking about Caribbean intellectual discourse, and I could not find anything about the Dutch Caribbean in there, so I thought, this is the moment where I have to talk to my professor about Edgar Cairo. For my class I bought everything I could from Edgar Cairo, calling my mom from time to time to ask what does this or that mean. Because I couldn't understand all that it was saying. So that is when I got interested in Edgar Cairo.WM: It is interesting you say that, because I too have been interested in the absence of Dutch intellectuals from a Caribbean intellectual tradition. In my preliminary search to find out about this lack, the first name that comes up is Antón de Kom and his book We Slaves of Suriname, not Cairo.10 To what extent did the writing of de Kom influence the work of Cairo, or influence your own interest in that Caribbean intellectual tradition?CL: Well, to be honest, I have not read much of the works before Cairo. I know of de Kom, I know that he is one of our [Suriname] heroes, but I am really invested in Edgar Cairo and his views, which I consider to be very contemporary. For me, Edgar Cairo is for us in the Netherlands what [Frantz] Fanon is for the French, even though [Cairo] may be less known. There is, however, a resurgence in interest in Cairo on the part of a young black Dutch intellectual community that is trying to find its place, their blackness and their Dutchness at the same time. Cairo provides an example of that because he did just that. And his texts give insights on how to approach that complexity. Unlike Fanon, however, Cairo is relatively unknown outside the Netherlands. Perhaps it's because there are hardly any English translations of his work. I am very interested in seeing what his place would be if placed together with the other black intellectuals of the Caribbean. Because he was Dutch speaking, there is a threshold to cross to come to his work. And French-, Spanish-, and English-speaking intellectuals do not know of his work.Differently from Fanon, whose major works are from the fifties and sixties, Cairo was from the seventies and eighties. This is like a fifteen- to twenty-year difference in thinking about the lived experiences of blackness in Europe. I believe that Cairo's approach was different from that of Fanon. He wasn't so concerned with the psychological effects of whiteness on the black body but more on how to remain black within a white society. That was his concern. It is a small nuance, but I believe it to be a different approach to the same problem. Where I feel that Fanon is very important for an anticolonial or postcolonial struggle, I think Cairo's work can be drawn into the contemporary as we negotiate a more self-evident blackness, at least in the Netherlands.WM: I do believe, however, that some would still see Fanon's work as urgent for today and not just for the past. But perhaps what you are saying to me is that the urgency of this work now is exactly, in a sort of broader discussion, occurring within the Netherlands and perhaps Europe: trying to understand what it means to be Dutch or European and black at the same time—so it is an excavation of questions of citizenship in present-day Europe.CL: Yes, citizenship and belonging; those are the two main themes in my work. And for me as an artist, it is important that if I am going to speak about the self-evidence of being black, I relate myself to black artists from the past, to a tradition.WM: This is what you mentioned earlier in terms of Isaac Julien's work?CL: Yes, I see myself within a tradition, and especially of black Dutch artists from the past. For example, there was a reference in the work to the Dutch artist Stanley Brown, because the sculpture in the work is exactly my height. The drawings that were on the wall were from This Way Brown. I took a lot of these This Way Brown drawings and put them together to make a kind of collage. Stanley Brown's work was all about measurement: how tall he was, how big his foot was … . One of the reasons I compared Stanley with Cairo is that while Stanley did not speak about his blackness, Cairo did. Stanley Brown has become one of the most important Dutch artists. Similarly, Cairo had a particular style of writing named for him. So it was important for me, like Julien did, to locate myself within a tradition of black (Dutch) artists who made a contribution to fine arts and literature—that while I create my own oeuvre, as I try to negotiate this self-evidence of blackness, I connect with those who came before me, those black European artists.WM: Perhaps we could call this interview “On the Self-Evidence of Blackness” and perhaps something about traditions. I think what you are invested in is the tradition within which black intellectual and artistic practices happens, excavating a tradition within which Cairo's work fits as a more Caribbean whole. Is that so?CL: As a Caribbean, yes, but also European.WM: Can we talk a little bit about the performance, the staging of Cairo's Temeku? (See fig. 2.)CL: The performance, now that was interesting, especially the second one. Because the second performance is where tradition, academia, performance, and fine arts came together. And somethingFigure 2.Performance of Edgar Cairo's Temeku, with Arthur Cairo (Edgar's brother) and Surinamese singers dressed in traditional clothing. Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, 2014. Photograph by Irene de GrootFigure 2. Performance of Edgar Cairo's Temeku, with Arthur Cairo (Edgar's brother) and Surinamese singers dressed in traditional clothing. Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, 2014. Photograph by Irene de Groot© National Museum of World Cultures, Netherlandsexciting happened. Because these women sang two songs that we call kot' odo [a proverbial saying]. I am sure there are similar traditions across the Caribbean. I was reading the text, right? And I could not get through it. So they [the women] came in with the song about how sometimes when you are trying to do something, your tongue can “break.” It is a happy song, but actually it is a stingy song, it was a reprimand, because I could not get the text right. I just had to laugh, because these older Surinamese women were basically putting me in my place, in a traditional way.WM: Perhaps you could explain a little about how you see the performance in relation to the installation itself. Because, there was the installation and there was the performance piece, of Temeku. You staged this performance of Cairo's work as part of the Movement No. 7, and it was to be recorded using iPhones and used in the installation itself. So the two were part of the same project. But what was the motivation behind the performance, especially presenting it in its original language, which many people in the audience didn't understand—and were, in fact, frustrated that they did not understand it?CL: I wanted to stage it for young people who identify as Surinamese. The older Surinamese people would get perhaps 90 percent of the songs. Arthur Cairo [Edgar's brother] was telling the story, which was in Surinamese, and you could understand it if you understood Surinamese. The singing was the difficult part; it is simply classical Surinamese songs, but many young people today would not understand them. So for me it was about the tradition, the loss of tradition, and how we reinvent it. I chose not to print the text for the audience, and that made a lot of Surinamese people frustrated. They felt that they should have understood what was going on. It felt like home, or at least had a certain familiarity; it felt like, Oh, this is my culture. But is it really your culture? That is the point I wanted to drive home. The white people in the audience didn't understand it, but their experience was different; they felt the singing was beautiful and the women were beautiful—they expected not to understand. The black people, however, were frustrated because they only understood it in parts, and they wanted a printed translation to be better able to understand everything. And this is what I wanted to bring home to them. What now?, I wanted to ask. If you really do not understand, then how will your children understand? To understand, we have to reinvent ourselves in this new place in the Netherlands, in Europe. And this is where the invention of black Dutch comes in; here is where we are going to start reinventing, reformulating.WM: Is it that you want the tradition to be reinvented, or are you confronting them with the fact that they should leave it be, since it is no longer their culture?CL: I would not say leave it alone, but, rather, that it is not your culture—that is where your culture comes from; the culture one has here as a black Dutch person is different. Listen, I went to Suriname thinking, I am going home. And within two days I felt the difference. They were different from me. And they thought the same of me—they actually called me white there.WM: Well, thank you, Charl, for the stimulating discussion and also for the opportunity to think about, think through, the Caribbean. For me, the Caribbean provides an important place from which to think. I may be wrong, but thinking through the Caribbean forces us to rethink many of the categories that we have come to know and offers a new lens with which to think. So I am really pleased for us to have had this discussion.CL: You're welcome.
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Mar 22, 2024
Kamil Lipiński 