Nina de la Parra (34) is not waiting in the hostel in Amsterdam’s Oosterpark where we have agreed to get coffee. She is standing opposite a tree, she texts. “Long black coat and yellow shoes.” She often meditates here. She finds peace at the pond.
On Monday she received the Neerlands Hoop, the cabaret prize for “the most promising theater maker with great future prospects”, for her first performance: God’s Ways. The jury called her pace “overwhelming”, her performance “a whirlwind”, her identity “liquid” and “her inner turmoil palpable”.
She will continue her tour next week. In between she has the deadline for her first book, make women come, an autobiographical novel aka feminist manifesto, due out February 1. Pluim Publishers promises “steamy sex” and insight into the “trail of destruction” that De la Parra is said to have left among Norwegian, Dutch, German, British and Surinamese men.
De la Parra would like to be photographed at home among her Surinamese stuff, because you can’t tell from her blond exterior that she is half-Surinamese. But she doesn’t want to have this conversation at home, because her work is already “so personal”, she gives “so much away”. She has to protect herself from blurring boundaries, she says, from talking to the press as if to a good friend. And we – the theater maker and the journalist – have known each other since we played in a comedy together in high school.
Are you now a celebrated comedian?
“No, I’m very happy with that prize, but the word cabaret misleads you. Cabaret sounds like ‘having fun’, to entertain. But my job is not meant to be fun. I don’t feel like a comedian, more like a writer slash performer slash musician slash artist. I’m looking for the depth, and that search is just funny.”
Also read this review in NRC: Powerhouse Nina de la Parra pops off the stage
If you show how you always pick the wrong man in a bar, that may be funny, but also painful to see.
“I also want it to hurt. Cause it hurts. What I do as an artist is radically exposing my own pain, making it political as well. That political is not the goal, but the consequence. I’m only concerned with: how the hell am I going to express this feeling. Because it’s about pain that I can’t express in private. I need the art for that.”
Can’t you go to the psychiatrist for that?
“Yes, I do. On stage I don’t talk about recent raw pain, but about painful things from which I already feel some distance. The departure of my father [de Surinaamse filmmaker Pim de la Parra] when I was six, the loss of my brother when I was fifteen, the sudden departure of my ex.”
Also read what Nina de la Parra’s parents were up to in 2013 NRC told about their relationship: ‘Pim is a collector just like me’
What happens if you don’t share those painful things on stage?
“I have lived like that for a very long time. Great confusion. Great confusion. And also great loneliness. That changed radically when I started telling on stage, and also got reactions back.”
Are you disentangled now?
“No, but I can accept it much more now: that there is sorrow, and that there is confusion. Because I know that from now on I will always be able to turn it into something that I can connect with others. I don’t care about the smile. It concerns the 55-year-old woman from Doetinchem with short hair – of whom I think: we have NOTHING in common – who comes to me with tears in his eyes after the performance and says: ‘I understand you completely’. So there is something that women carry with them, a sense of responsibility for everything and everyone, under which I have suffered terribly – and suffer, because I am so ashamed of it: because I see it and still feel it. That is the final conclusion, which makes many women come to me crying afterwards. I never expected that from people with such a different background. And then I think: wow we are all the same! And the biggest pain is that we don’t talk about our pain!”
Do men sometimes come up to you after your performance?
“Yes! I also do a piece about the Northwest European man who suffers from feminism, and they are very happy about that! They are paralyzed by the duality of what women want, namely: be a man, but be vulnerable. Be a predator, but never cross a border. There is always a lot of reaction to that, people start screaming and pointing at each other, men and women. Apparently they never hear anyone say – especially not a cute looking woman: I just want to be fucked hard by a dude without him asking [op huilerig toontje]: ‘Do you want this?’”
Also read the tip for free happiness from Nina de la Parra: ‘Nice sex with yourself’
Do you make such outpourings purely for yourself or do you also want to improve the world?
„Me, improve the world? Not at all. I grew up in developing countries because my mother [journalist Djoeke Veeninga] was a foreign correspondent in India, Indonesia, Tanzania, Vietnam. And when I was eight I went to live with my father in Suriname. As a child I was able to see the difference up close. Me: white, rich, EU passport. The other: shitty, no opportunities, abuse and violence. I don’t feel guilty about that. More of a very deep sense that we are all the same. I have always been aware: if I was born here, I would have been like that. So I’m no better than anyone else. So I’m not here to save the other one.”
We haven’t seen each other for twenty years, but I remember you well, even though you were four grades down. You already wanted to be seen then and you came to stand with older students in the schoolyard. At the same time you looked insecure, and I don’t see that anymore. Have you lost your insecurity or did I see or see it wrong?
“I am super insecure. When I have written something for my performance, I often read it to my director trembling and crying. But I can also use my insecurity in my work. Look, if you’re really sure of yourself, why the hell would you stand on a stage, why on earth? Then you’re just going to have a really nice life. And don’t always want people to give you something, namely attention to that one thing that is wrong with you, that crucial thing in you that has not been seen. My insecurity is the fuel that makes me dare to be vulnerable.”
What struck me in other interviews is that you often say that you are not nice. I do not believe that.
“Hahahaha. Okay. I am very sweet indeed. But I’m talking about a different kind of love. I’m talking about the world’s expectation that the greatest quality of a woman is that she is sweet. That she is caring, makes room for others, serves. That expectation does not give me a feeling of freedom – that I can say: no, I don’t want this. The reason for #metoo is, of course, that women are constantly rewarded for saying yes. And if saying no is already hard for me, as a standard white, young, not overweight woman – the perfect picture, kind of Sleeping Beauty – you have to consider how difficult it is for a woman of color to say no, without immediately being called an angry bitch. It should not take up space. And if she does, then she has her gender and her color really against her. She always has to do it right. Work extra hard to love. The latter also applies to Moroccan, Turkish and Surinamese men. That’s basic racism.”
I feel much less torn now, and no longer a half-blood. I feel double blooded, I have two cultures and embrace them both
Have you never been jealous of people who show that they are half-Surinamese? They do not always have to explain that they feel bicultural.
“That has been a confusing quest in the past. Until a Surinamese friend said to me five years ago: ‘fuck it! Fuck it that you can’t belong because you’re white. Fuck it that you always feel you have to prove yourself to the Surinamese community. You are just Surinamese. Whether you wear a pangi on your head and go to a slavery debate every night or just walk around like Nina, you just are. Ready out.’ That had such an impact on me. That was so fat. I realized: I don’t have to eat pom all the time. I don’t have to do anything, I just am. I feel much less torn now, and no longer a half-blood. I feel double-headed, I have two cultures and I embrace both.
“But five years ago I was really at the bottom of my cultural confusion. Before that I was not involved with Suriname, because I lived in England, Scotland, Germany, I was just Dutch there, they didn’t even know where Suriname was. I think I escaped it a bit too. But when I came back to Amsterdam, I suddenly found myself in a completely white, Dutch theater world, and that felt very strange. Something wasn’t right. I was greatly drawn to the toko’s in the Dapperbuurt. Because Suriname is not a distant country from my father’s stories, I partly grew up there. I was completely confused for a moment. I thought: damn, Who am I? Can I be Surinamese if you can’t see it? At that time I often went to the toko with a pangi on my head and then talked to Sranan. But then they said: do you have a Surinamese boyfriend or something? Luckily I can always play the card of Wan Pipeli, the film my father made, all Surinamese know it. And Surinamese also understand very well that there are so many variations in color. My grandfather was a colored man. So that I got so white is just funny.”
Also read a report about the screening of the restored film Wan Pipeli in Paramaribo in 2010: ‘Still struggling with mixed marriages’
In your performance you tell that your Surinamese ancestors, originally Sephardic Jews, became rich from their nineteen plantations and 734 slaves. Do you feel guilty about that?
“No not at all. But I think it does raise a question about what guilt is. I also find it astonishing. And it is a source for me to be able to question empathy: I use my own background to question what it is like to be human. What it’s like to be Jewish and to be expelled from Portugal, and how it is possible that you pick up that whip yourself in front of a woman from Ivory Coast on a plantation in South America. How does that work? I’m very curious how that literally went. And I’m afraid it was very banal, that they just went along with existing structures. I probably had also done the bookkeeping of the train transport in Nazi Germany or reported my Jewish neighbors. I probably would have started running those plantations too. And I find that interesting: to what extent is there guilt and is it transferred in my bloodline? Because I believe in that 100 percent – in that respect I am Surinamese spiritual – I believe that guilt, shame, pain, trauma are in the blood, in your DNA. My grandfather was very ashamed, because his grandfather had done that to his black fellow man. I don’t feel any guilt. But I do feel a certain pain and trauma that I know is not mine. And I feel responsible in a way, to find out what’s going on.”
So after her theater tour and her book launch, De la Parra sets off on a long journey to Suriname to collect material for a new performance.
First she joins the tai chi group on the other side of the pond. The dazzling prize winner, who overwhelmed the cabaret jury with her fluid identity, merges silently with the slowly moving group of oriental martial arts practitioners.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC Handelsblad of 30 October 2021
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of October 30, 2021
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