Sabiso's Weekend Extravaganza

Het onderstaande artikel werd afgelopen week geplubliceerd op de Manne's World blog. Tijd om het ook op Surifatu beschikbaar te stellen.

De misvatting van het Surinaamse burgerschap

Het is alom bekend dat de Surinaamse identiteit een kwestie van trots is. Veel mensen die in Suriname geboren of getogen zijn, in Suriname hebben gewoond, een Surinaams paspoort bezitten of Surinaamse roots hebben benadrukken graag het feit dat zij Surinamers zijn. Maar wat defineert het Surinamerschap. Is iemand die langer dan 10 jaar in Suriname heeft gewoond meer Surinamer dan iemand die er maar 5 jaar heeft gewoond. Is iemand die een Surinaams paspoort heeft meer Surinamer dan iemand met de Nederlands of Amerikaans paspoort.

Het vreemde is dat Surinamers zijn gek van Suriname, maar het niet altijd aan een ander gunnen. Veel Surinamers die langer dan 5 jaar in het buitenland hebben gewoond worden door de locals aangekeken alsof ze een compleet ander volk zijn. Vorig jaar waren heel veel mensen om me heen verbaasd dat ik naar de stembus ging. "Yu na wan witman, fa y'e ab wan Sranan papira". Ja, ik heb sinds m'n geboorte een Surinaams paspoort en heb 70% van m'n leven in Suriname gewoont, maar maakt mij dat meer of minder Surinamer dan iemand die een Nederlands paspoort heeft, maar zijn hele leven in Suriname heeft gewoond. Ben ik meer of minder Surinamer omdat ik het Sranan tongo wel volgens de correcte spelling schrijf (in plaats van "Joe na witman, fa joe ab Sranan papira"), of maakt het me juist minder Surinamer of dat Surinaams een taal van de straat is die geen taalregels kent.

En ander leuke situaties is wanneer Surinamers achter een product staan waarvan zij vinden dat het een Surinaams product is, terwijl 95% van de mensen de achtergrond van het product niet eens kent. Het meest actuele voorbeeld is de 'Je weet dat je Surinamer bent als ..' groepspagina op Facebook. Een goed initiatief dat binnen een dag meer dan 10.000 leden binnen heeft kunnen halen (Nadat het boven de 20.000 leden kwam hebben de oprichters van de groepspagina en page aangemaakt, omdat de groepspagina een paar gebreken met zich mee bracht). Heel leuk en goed ontvangen, maar boze tongen gingen alweer dat de pagina is opgezet door mensen die niet in Suriname wonen. Los van het feit dat de oprichters van deze pagina wel degelijk Surinamers zijn (maar inderdaad woonachtig in het buitenland zijn), wat maakt het uit?

Manne's World: Long Time No See

If you know me, you know that I like to keep it moving. Chances are that while you are having a conversation with me, I might be texting, blogging this very piece or thinking of new ways to improve a product. I appreciate every single friend I have, but I can roughly devide them into two categories: the movers and the dwellers.

The movers are busy people. They live in the moment, more than anything. As a mover, meeting a mover is a wonderful thing, because you can dispense with the faux dissapointment, the bridge conversations and the chit chat and get on like you were just together yesterday, even if you haven't spoken in years. The dwellers are cerebral and egocentric. Some might even hold a grudge with you for missing a birthday or simply not calling them during a certain time periode. They always open with how long they haven't seen you.

All my friends know I take a hard line with dwellers. I dispense with any form of decorum. I refuse to list reasons for why I have been too busy. I turn it around and act as if I had zero interest in them. I do not engage in lightening the mood by listing any particular important activities that kept me from being an overcommunative friend, but instead feed into the rediculous notion that I would not WANT to spend time dwelling like the dweller does. In doing so, over the years I have managed to reprogram some dwellers into movers, at least when it comes to dealing with me and my fellow movers. No good friend of mine will spend to much time complaining about how long it has been. We can skip that part and move to the things that are important. Because true friendship isn't measured, weighed or accounted. Every mover knows that. Every dweller has yet to discover it.

Manne's World: No Dat A No Ala

The most important record in Suriname Hiphop to me is No Dat A No Ala by Papa Touwtji. Picking any one track out of Touwtji’s rich body of work is tricky. Santo Boma exploded on the scene like molotov cocktail. Gangster was and still is bigger than any other rap record, local or not, that the Nation ever heard. But to me, no other track has had the impact, the power and the value that No Dat A No Ala has.
Papa Touwtji is Suriname’s 2pac for several reasons. His militant mindedness and role as a voice of the ghetto youth, combined with the agressive way in which he carried out his message, while destroying anyone who even thought of testing him, along with his stints in jail and his many run ins with authority made him a controversial and notorious public figure. Much like Bob Marley, he was a folk hero, a true musician and a practicing Rastafarian.
From the moment that the strings introduce the surprisingly melodic track and the beat drops, Touwtji’s energy can be felt as he laces the intro:
Mi na wan test man a tru mi no sabi.
The hook follows and is remarkable in its sing songy catchiness, reminiscent of the style invented by A Tribe Called Quest, perfected by Bone Thugs-N-Harmony and later popularized for the mass market by Nelly.
Touwtji effortlessly switches from hook to verse as he kicks the most memorable flow in Surihop history, using both rhythm and melody to produce a smooth and addictive rhyme:
‘Hee dibi dibI DJ fawaka/ jow jere tak a bad wan fut man doro baka/ skoifi pkin boi ef I no wan ie baka panja/ ma mama no ben bari fi no prei nanga faja/ gangster na master ala san no abi fu plata/ snuitjes uit un mofen in in wan saka/bar eng gi den Touwtji papa kon baka, mow verhoisi deng ala mala pot na in mi saka.’
He abandons the same rhyme pattern, only to later pick it up and add: ‘fu sen den ala kon a mek mi trap ondro mi patta/um sji eng lek wan rasta shi fa deng e feti den brada/ nofo respeki di mi seni gi almighty jahjah/ na eng e krin mi pasi en e jep mi dat hoor mi baka’.
Touwtji switches from braggadiccio to word play, to religion, all the while referencing hinting and involving. It works on many levels. The deceptive aspect is that his voice and delivery sound playful, while he lays out dangerous and potent threats to competitors, keeping contenders at arms length and professing his religious beliefs. His genius is evident, if not fully understood, even before he launches into a historic narrative by relaying his personal experiences as one Suriname’s hiphop icon involved with the discovery and cultivation of another.
Basja Rankin is a legend in his own right. His smash hit ‘Laf Grap (siki tap a bedi)’ and his involvement with several Suriname artists such as Danitsja Sahadewsingh are well known. Basja is a skilled MC, but more so, a charismatic entertainment with broad appeal. Basja and Touwtji were close, but legend has it that on a trip to Holland, the two had a falling out of sorts, resulting in a beef that lasted several years and was dragged out through live performances and mixtape tracks. Touwtji could have used his street buzz coming off hits like Gangster to strike at Basja hard. Instead, he took the opportunity to relay his version of history and offer to burry the hatchet.
Touwtji tells of their first meeting, his subsequent mentoring of a young Basja, their shared religious beliefs and hints at the animosity between them. Then, he proceeds to lay out the invitation to Basja Rankin to praise Selassie together.
Touwtji, like all great MC’s has fired off some contradictory calls to unification and war, revolution and peace. This record isn’t short of either. Touwtji both invites and threatens challengers while invoking a call to peace. But the story and genius behind it all amplify the tracks status as a historical treasure of Suriname’s hip hop history.

Manne's World: The Ten Year Itch

Approaching the tenth anniversary of life abroad is very confrontational. One is confronted with the symptoms of a directional crisis. The weight of choices and the passage of time occupy the minds and conversations of peers. Several factors dominate what seem like important life choices. The aging and mortality of parents who live in the home country, especially when, like many middle class families, yours is depends on the income of a family business. Marriage and childeren raise the equally important question of what kind of society you want your childeren to grow up in and what kind of environment and values you want to surround them with in their formative years. The flow of friends and family members who remigrate grows and as they share their experiences, very few sound dissapointed.

Manne's World: Needing A Win

As a little boy, sports were an obsession to me. Like most boys my age, I dreamt about holding the World Cup trophy high after smashing Brazil or Holland in the Finals, hopping on a private jet to the United Center and arriving just in time for game 4 of a clean sweep in which i dropped 60+ points (slightly below my post season average) and collecting my Finals MVP. As faith would have it, my ambitions slightly exceeded my attention span (and perhaps my talents, but mostly, really, my attention span). In those days, I passionately rooted for teams and got my fill of wins. Romario's Brazil won the World Cup in 1994 and Michael Jordan's Chicago Bulls dominated the NBA. I remember faking sleepwalking to catch a glimpse of the score when games were past my bedtime, or my father waking me up with a smile to tell me that my favorite team had won. Sports were everything and there was no feeling in the world like having your team win.

As life progressed my interests changed and sports took so much of a backseat to other passions, that I fell far behind my decimal quoting season average knowledgable friends. It happened gradually. At first, I could only name the top 5 of the topscorers list. Soon, players started coming of the bench and I wouldn't know their names. Until finally, some hot young superstar would be on the cover of an NBA or Fifa game and I wouldn't have the slightest clue of who he was.

Of course, sports talk dominates male conversation everywhere and backing down from a discussion on any topic is admitting defeat and failure in the most embarrassing way possible to someone with an ego as outsized as that of a Surifatu Man. Also, some of my friends have remained as passionate about their teams in their twenties as they were as little kids. I had a friend yell at me on my birthday because I joked about the score of a game during the replays, only to have every male guest at my birthday agree with him. Our group traditions largely revolve around watching important games together.

So, you pick a team and you stick with them. Technically, this should give you more favorable odds than the die hard fan who stuck with his team through thick and thin. After all, the fortunes of sport teams wane, along with their finances. So, the logical step would be to back a team with an excellent history, a rich bank account, very famous players and a coach with a proven record.

So far, this hasn't brought me any luck. Chelsea was moderately succesful, but never captured the only trophy that really matters in club football, the Champion's League. Miami, with all its superstars was defeated by a second rate bunch of hand me down veterans with a German choker as their biggest star. Real Madrid, despite having the undisputed best coach in the world and two Fifa Player of the year winners in their ranks, haven't been able to deliver any substantial bragging rights.

So I backed out of it, let the Barcelona fans have their fun and hoped that things might get better. Sunday's performance was promising. But last night, once again, my much needed win didn't arrive. Let's hope for the best this season.

Manne

Manne's World: Forever Plan B

Less than five years ago, the Surifatu Men, or NNC as the group was then known, used to spend every single weekend together. On Friday, everybody would arrive at the designated room with their backpack, somebody would start for the kitchen to cook a pot of bruine bonen and the ambassadors would get to work, while some heavy Fifa, NBA 2Kwhatever and Halo scores were settled on the X Box. This would last til sunday, and every now and then, somebody would step out for kapsalon (a despicable crime against culinary principles, but a drunken man's salvation), Cola or Oven Pizza's.

Manne's World: Bruine Bonen Wars

The kitchen of Suriname has among it's many treasures a dish called 'Bruine Bonen met Rijst' or 'BB met R' or simply BBR for short. This simple, but delicius dish consists of brown beans and meat and is served with rice. It is incredibly easy to cook, but very tasteful nonetheless. It is also the focal point of the Surifatu cul

inary experience for those very reasons.

Every Surifatu Man is thoroughly convinced that his BBR is superior. At first, this notion and the competitive spirit in the group resulted in what can only be described as a thinly disguised cook off. One friend would invite the group over to play X Box and another one would be in the kitchen working on his secret recepy and tweeking it to perfection. If it tasted good enough to result in praise from his fellow Surifatu Men, another would head down to the store the very next time we all met and head for the kitchen with intensity.

Manne's World: The Ambassadors

A funny thing that happens in the group dynamic in our group of friends, is that because of the strong characters, strong opinions and heated debates, it is very difficult to take a loose position on anything. Any statement you make comes with a certain burden of responsibility and an ownership of both the argument and the view you take. Maybe, it is ego among men, just another way for the alpha's in a group full of tauruses to butt heads until one falls down exhausted and the other one is the proud owner of bragging rights and a weeklong concussion.

This brings about an interesting phenomenon. The ambassadorship. When say 'yes' to something, you own it forever, or so Ayn Rand famously wrote in her masterpiece The Fountainhead. Something similar happens with the Surifatu boys. When you open your mouth to say 'yes' to something, in our world, it is not like pressing the 'like' button on Facebook. It is the equivalent of flying your flag over that confirmation or support for a person, a movie, a book (not many books, a shocking amount of my very intelligent, very academic friends have a strong aversion to or phobia of, books), but mostly a sports team, an artist, an actor or an athlete. You become the spokesperson for it, him or her. You become its ambassador. This requires an astonishing commitment on your part, because you have to be able to defend your item of choice with comparative statistics, triumphs, records of accomplishment, income statements, popularity polls, reviews, recaps, filmographies and in some instances resort to demagoguery, populism, dirty tricks. Indeed, the only thing that can arouse heavier emotions than a discussion are our epic sessions of board games. Family members and most friends already refuse to play Risk with me and my very good friend Fatukel.