Talent is often developed thanks to considerable opposition. Rodaan Al Galidi got talent for life thanks to more opposition than a white, former blond Dutchman like me will ever meet. He escaped from Iraq and then spent years in the purgatory of the IND and COA, the abbreviations that define the border of the Netherlands. He wrote down what he experienced. It gives us a unique look at a side of our country we otherwise never hear about.
From Rodan's painfully ironic book 'How I got talent for life', a play has now been made. With a stage full of real actors and dancers, plus dozens of experience amateurs. I went to see it on Friday 6 March in Utrecht and discovered that, in such a case, it makes no sense whatsoever to conclude that the book was better.
Strange
Al Galidi's narrative is so gentle on the Dutch people he meets during the long, hopeless years on our land border that it hurts. This loving punishment is difficult to transfer to a stage with real asylum seekers, people who still experience daily what it is like to be grateful while being humiliated at the same time. So the sold-out Utrecht theatre auditorium, where there was remarkably little coughing this time, felt a little strange to me.
Could be my personal hang-up, but the festive evening also felt uncomfortable. Especially when at the end of the performance, the newcomers spread out across the room, telling their stories in their own languages. Unintelligible to me, painfully recognisable to the headscarfed girl diagonally in front of me. She didn't keep it dry, I stood outside.
Will you then stand up and give a standing ovation? For what? For the misery they went through, for endurance in our extreme bureaucracy? For the fact that they did not commit suicide? Tricky, tricky.
Afraid of destitute
It could be a welcome party, in which we 'Dutch' show our proverbial hospitality to hunted people who have found a safe haven within our borders. But we are no longer that hospitable, since adherence to old anti-Jewish repopulation theories has become salonable again thanks to Baudet's Forum. Now applied to people who left everything behind to find a better life here. We are terrified of destitute people. To be ashamed of.
Should everyone experience this performance? Of course, just as everyone should read Rodaan Al Galidi's book. Those who should really get more talent for living together from it will only prefer to eat their hat rather than be infected by the humanity that radiates from this work of art.
Quite a shame.
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