EPTI feel a bit awkward about blogging since my last entry was so recent, but the stars are aligned and something happened tonight which put me in the mood.
For those of you who don't know, I was born and raised in Suriname. My parents were regular, white German people, but I once read that Germans far outnumbered "die Kaskoppe" in this South American paradise. My memories are scattered, but I remember crossing several borders until we were finally able to board a plane for America, and thus, for a better future.
One particular memory still gives me nightmares. I was home alone with my father and I was outside having a piss and noticed a local, a black man, peering into our windows. He had a son, around my age, with him so I didn't think twice about approaching him and trying to talk to him. He ignored me when I asked what he was doing. Feeling confused, I approached his son and that was when he turned around and lifted his shirt to show me the pistol tucked into his pants.
I could have shit my pants right then and there. But, my daddy, in his typical fashion, appeared out of nowhere and immediately realized what was happening. This was a real, actual burglary. Every neuron in my daddy's brain fired off the signals of "KILL THAT MOTHERFUCKER", but he took one look at his young son and began to yell in his confused mixture of German/Dutch/Local Surinamese creole, "Raus aus meinem eigendom! Eigendom, raus! Yu me sabi-sabi?! Yu mu way!"
And with that, the man fled with his son. Knowing there was a deep civil conflict in the country and that local people were being ripped off by the local 'kasmoni' system and that his children had no future in this country, my daddy took all of us to America.
My next memory of my father is of him enrolling me in my brand new school for kindergarten. They wanted to enroll me in an ESL class (English as a Second Language), but he made the biggest fit. It was such a comfortable atmosphere with cinnamon rolls and orange juice available to all parents and children, but as I was chewing into my free food, I heard my father boom:
"I HAVE ENGLISH. MY SON HAS THE ENGLISH!! MORE AND MORE THE ENGLISH!!!"
Not wanting to upset this gigantic motherfucker, the tiny, white females all agreed that I should be placed into a normal kindergarten class. As my mother tongue was dialectal German, I wouldn't speak a word during class. I didn't understand a single word which anyone would speak. My teacher quickly picked up on this and requested a private parent-teacher conference with both my mother and father. My mother was perfectly fluent in English since she worked in the medical field. My daddy was barely literate, but he tried his best. As my mother tells the story today, the exchange went like this:
Teacher: "Your son won't participate and I'm not sure that he fully understands ..."
Dad: "HE UNDERSTANDS, HE IS NOT STUPID"
Mom:" Well, he had a big move and he may be scared to speak--"
Dad: "MY SON UNDERSTANDS, HE IS NOT STUPID"
Mom: "... We'll work with him at home"
Keep in mind my father had no formal education and as such, he believed that I would become as fluent as him in English, My mother knew better and every single day I came home from school, my mother had picture books, math books, and all kinds of shit to help me learn English. My daddy basically knew by the time I was first grade that I had better English than he had ever had and thus laid off on that subject.
But, as my daddy, he would drag me to the flea markets and then would make a round-trip to the beer store. He kept his eye out for any German tapes, but one day, he bought something completely inexplicable ... a Jewish-Yiddish musical tape. He understood basically all of it and his favorite song by far from this Yiddish musical was this:
Flits feygele (Fly away, little birds)
Flits getraye, auf der malke Esters dak (Fly my darlings, to Queen Esther's window)
un zingts azoy lang (and sing until she wakes up)
Since he's been gone for two years, I decided to search out these lyrics
and by the grace of god, I found this:
... What can I do? I can barely see the screen because of the tears in my eyes.
