After Crossing Borders . . . What Do You Do?

I've started to recover from my cold, thanks to Jessa and those strange clear capsules she gave me.

I spent most of the day yesterday in bed, reading the other writers' articles. I was impressed by how diverse they were: Yan's spontaneous humour; Marek's capacity for cultural and historical analysis; Kaweh's fascinating narrative games and the complex relationships he creates between himself and the characters he writes about.

I finally decided to leave the room around 5pm for lunch and a little walk before my reading. With the first waft of cold air on my face, I let out a powerful sneeze.

Ugh, not again.

I thought I had travelled through time, or that my fever had returned — I was suddenly seeing what I assumed must be hallucinations. In the street was a massive parade: hundreds of people wearing bright, colorful clothes from centuries past. Most were, for some reason, wearing gold earrings in their right ears. They were walking along and being cheered by the bystanders.

There was music and strange kinds of animals, among them a creature midway between a donkey and a goat. The horses were shorter and fatter than I was used to seeing. In the midst of all this a steam car passed.

It was the Sinterklaas carnival.

I started doing what everyone around me was doing: pulling my cell phone out and taking pictures, smiling, receiving candy and gifts from the black slaves. Isn't that what it means to interact with the other and get to know different cultures and civilizations?

Does interacting with the other really have to begin with finding something strange, then feigning an attempt to understand it, then imitation?

I didn't like the candy I was given — it was cinammon-flavored — and I was uncomfortable seeing hundreds of people painted black in a country with a long history of trading in African chattel.

I had read before that this celebration creates controversy every year. I was thinking of this, turning the matter over and over in my mind, as I climbed the stairs of the National Theater, heading to the last floor, to paradise...or Paradise Hall.

Crossing borders absolutely does not mean agreeing with or being tolerant of everything we find — just as we don't feel completely satisfied and in perfect harmony with the place we come from. Sometimes being critical, looking deeper to what lies beneath the covers, the colored clothes, is key to crossing another border that lives within you — the borders of your notions of the world and your understanding of it, getting past the preconceived images of things.

When I arrived at Paradise Hall, Kaweh Modiri's film was being shown on a small screen. The film tells the story of a novelist living in Amsterdam, who — like a professional killer — follows a troublemaker who has stolen his personal computer.  Modiri's film was closer to my heart, with its complex plot and its characters at play in an absurdist maze in the streets of Amsterdam. I saw in the film a more complicated and stimulating picture than that which appears in festivals and tourist guidebooks.

As I was leaving the hotel in The Hague, I glanced through the souvenir postcards, since I have an old habit of collecting them from every country I visit. There were pictures of windmills and green meadows, natural landscapes and statues of historical figures. None of them appealed to me and I ended up not buying a postcard. I wished that, instead, I could find an image of Ome Omar, the lead character of Modiri's film. Perhaps that, to me, represents Holland more.