Foreigner

Interview with Kirsten Thorup

By : Synne Rifbjerg

If you think about it, everyone has felt like a foreigner at one time or another. You can feel like a foreigner in your family, if you are the "black sheep." You can even feel like a foreigner among your close friends, at a new job, when you start school, or, like author Kirsten Thorup, when you move from a village on Funen to Copenhagen. So, the idea of writing a theatre piece on immigrants and refugees was not foreign to her, and "Projekt Paradis" ("Project Paradise") became a journey through the story of thirty-five immigrants and refugees, which demanded a more nuanced and demystified picture of these foreigners, who are so easily pigeonholed in the same cubby. The trilogy's plays, De tyrkiske piger ("The Turkish Girls"), Talkshow and Strangebody, all dealt with people from Islamic cultural circles – precisely where we have conjured up our visage of the enemy. However, the stories take their primary starting point in the family, for the family is something universal.

"There are many things about being foreign I think I can identify with but which become pushed to the extreme, when the foreignness is made up of two cultures. I am intrigued by the whole concept of being foreign, which is something quite existential in our culture - you can find this complex about those who come from the outside all the way back in antiquity. The first foreigners in Greek history were actually women, the Danaids, and they were foreign in a double sense, because they came from Egypt to Argos in Greece, and because they were against marriage – indeed, against the family."

It is easy to marvel along with Kirsten Thorup at the inflammatory and often spiteful debate at the moment over immigrants and refugees in light of the fact that our history is, to a broad extent, built on exchange. Someone comes sailing over with goods, or we ourselves set out for foreign lands. Of course, it has not always occurred with equal gentility every time, but we have contributed something to one another's culture in this way.

"The challenging thing about having taken up this subject in an artistic context is, among other things, that the form was theatre, and theatre is an encounter in a pure physical sense. Who are these people, really, you read about in the newspaper on whom the whole debate turns and who are the victims of hate or, at least, mythologizing and prejudice? For if you delve into these people's lives, as I did during the long period I interviewed them, there are more things that unite us, of course, than divide us."

"For example, there is nothing foreign to me about such problems as how are my children doing, or how are things with my wife, or how can I fit into society, how can we make sense of the modern world? We, too, have difficulty getting our bearings in the chaos of the modern world. At least, if you grew up in the Fifties, as I did, there are many things that seem quite foreign. It is not so long ago that a nice girl had to be a virgin before she married. Or it was a catastrophe, if you had a child outside of wedlock. A lot has changed very quickly for us from a cultural perspective, but we now demand that immigrants and refugees from other cultures hop on board from one day to the next. Wear different clothes, eat different food – it is crazy to think this way."

This interview first appeared in Weekendavisen 7 November 1997

Translated by Russell Dees