“What do you call it when everything is taken away from you? Tax? Charge?” Mother Zafirah collapses Fight slowly off. The play follows the life of a mother with two children – played by actress Nadia Amin – who is devastated by the benefits affair. Fightdirected by Zephyr Brüggen, was nominated last month for the BNG Bank Theater Prize, an incentive prize for young theater talent.
Maxine Palit de Jongh (29) wrote the theater monologue that premiered six months ago. It is her first play text since she graduated in Writing for Performance at the Utrecht School of the Arts in 2020. She had to think about it for a while when production house Likeminds asked her to write a piece about the benefits affair, she says in a café in Utrecht.
Why?
“It is an important theme, because it exposes institutional racism in the Netherlands and says something about a non-functioning system. I also wondered if I was the right person to make it. I believe that as a creator you should always ask yourself that question. The victims do not have to turn their trauma into an art themselves.
“The surcharge affair is an important event for the history and future of the Netherlands.” During the affair, thousands of parents were wrongly labeled fraudsters by the tax authorities and had to pay high fines. As a result, many parents got into serious money problems. More than half of the victims had a migration background.
“So then I thought: okay, then that’s the perspective from which I’m going to tell it. I want to make the voices that have long been ignored louder. That is why the piece is in the form of a monologue by a woman of color, there are not enough of them yet.”
How did you prepare for writing this piece?
“I looked at a lot of existing material and soon found that the more sources I took in, the more I knew that the factual story was not what I wanted to tell. I want to translate an elusive experience into a human story, so that the audience can empathize with the loneliness of Zafirah. For this I got close to one mother’s skin. She symbolizes all the parents who have made the whole journey from the first envelope on the mat to everything that is taken from you.”
Have you also spoken to parents who were victims of the affair?
“I only spoke to a mother once while writing this. I did that on purpose; before telling this story I saw no added value in speaking with multiple victims. I find it difficult to ask people: Gee, tell me where it hurts and I’ll make art out of it. There is enough material to make fiction out of.
“Into the world Fight is our world, but a different version of it. It’s fiction, but it’s based on the destruction of real human lives and my own imagination. Like in one of the last scenes of the play, when Zafirah turns into some kind of animalistic creature who wants to protect her children. It is precisely in that magic-realistic movement that you can interpret a political story.”
You didn’t know if you were the right person to make this piece. Why did you do it anyway?
“I think that, regardless of my personality, I think carefully about what I want to say as a writer anyway, because I’m not used to getting a stage for granted. You can now see that there is more attention for voices of color, but I and many people with me still have to do my best for that. Then you also want to tell the right story.
“I had the desire to show that destruction from a malfunctioning system could, in principle, happen to anyone. But that it is distressing that people with dual nationality or non-white surnames are more likely to be at risk or victims of this. I also wrote this performance precisely for the people who have experienced it, but for those who have not: being able to imagine what it is like to lose everything, I think is an important exercise in understanding the other.”
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