Handle with Care

Handle With Care - the installation Patricia Kaersenhout and I made for the exhibition Zwart & Wit (Black & White) at the Tropenmuseum, we are now invited by the Dutch ambassador to exhibit in Dakar. The work deals with prostitution as contemporary slavery. In Dakar, a preventive program will be linked to it, to warn young women how their 'dream future' could turn into a nightmare of forced prostitution. We immediately said yes - only then did it dawn on us that it would be quite a job to install the work in Dakar.

We brought a mountain of luggage. The enormous rug, made from worn, red women's clothing, plus tools, audio-visual equipment, and lots of presents - syrup waffles, kitschy blue and white porcelain figurines, notebooks and colored pens. The embassy is providing the exhibition space and the opening, but has stressed that we must arrange everything else ourselves. There is less than two weeks to organize and install things. Tomorrow we have our first appointment, with Cheikhou. He works as a cameraman and has most of the equipment himself, he also knows actresses who will recite some of the stories of trafficked victims of forced prostitution at the opening. We may even use his house for rehearsals.

The four actresses read their texts aloud - they are true stories of women who fell prey to human traffickers because of problematic home situations. Once in the Netherlands, they were forced to work as prostitutes. There is more discussion than rehearsal. About befriended women who got into similar trouble and were never heard from again. About the patriarchal society, and how it is still the women who are stigmatized. About the cost of education and the lack of government support for women with children. About how prostitution and human trafficking cannot be seen in isolation from neo-capitalism, privatization, and the ever-increasing poverty and despair.

The parquet floor in the ambassador's residence, where the exhibition is to take place, must be protected with a layer of plywood so that we can staple the red carpet to it. We buy the wood in a neighboring neighborhood, a half-hour walk away, where a man with a large two-wheeled handcart is hired on the spot to deliver the boards. The three young men sent by the carpenter to the residence to lay the 70 square meter floor arrive with only a small backpack of tools - a tape measure, a pencil, an angle, and a handsaw (!) But in no time they have cut everything to size, and Patricia and I can start laying the rug. The four videos are installed. One video shows images of escaped women wearing a mask made of a paper bag painted with their self-portrait. These images are interspersed with shots of ordinary, everyday Dutch streets with cyclists and passersby - streets where women have actually been trapped. The sound consists of children's songs, sung by the trafficked women themselves. In two other videos, white actors recite a story of an African woman. The last video shows a short trailer. All this material had to be subtitled in French.

On the day of our inauguration, riots are expected because of the ruling in an important court case against the ex-president's son, who has been holding back a lot of money. Perhaps it will be quiet at the opening because people do not dare to walk the streets. Two of the actresses arrive late because cabs had to make detours because of cars that were on fire. But in the end everything goes very well, the actresses even all memorized their pieces of text. And despite the threat of riots, more than 60 people showed up.

The next day I am woken up by the ambassador. There is a piece in the Telegraph that headlines: "Panties Diplomat Shocks Senegal - Lingerie Show in Fight Against Migration." What...! He thinks it's funny himself, "No such thing as bad publicity!" It is, of course, an irresistible combination - a high-class diplomat, spicy underwear, and immigrants from a Muslim country - probably the only way political art can make it into the Dutch newspapers!

Here, in the main Senegalese newspaper, L'Observateur, is an in-depth article about our exhibition, which captures the essence well. And from the Quotidien almost the entire culture page is devoted to our exhibit. The headline reads, "A Plea for the Women Victims of Human Trafficking." The Soleil features a photo of our actresses with the caption "The Exhibition Handle With Care States Critical Questions about Sex Work" and a long article with a quote from the ambassador explaining that 80-90% of the women working behind the windows in Amsterdam are victims of human trafficking - nice!

Every day a different group of women comes to the exhibition. What a special experience to talk to these women about our installation, and to tell them something about Dutch prostitution policy and my work as a crisis buddy for the (mostly African) women who are in reception in Amsterdam. The rug also needs to be explained; that red with us is the color of prostitution - the 'red light district', the red lights. How the visitors' walking on the dress symbolizes walking on women's rights, and how anyone who turns away from this problematic subject is actually also guilty of trampling on women's rights.

Many of the women from AWA (an association of sex workers) don't understand French, so everything is translated into Wolof. When asked what they would like to see changed about the prostitution law here in Senegal, the discussion breaks loose. There is a special policy of tolerance here - in a country where 95% are Muslim and where prostitution is prohibited, selling sex is nevertheless tolerated with a blind eye and checks are made on prostitutes. Women who "sortirent," as it is called here, must have a carnet - a personal health record that must be kept and checked every month. Anyone who goes out on the street without this booklet in order is stopped by the police and fined or imprisoned. There is fierce discussion about the unfairness of this system; the fact that there are girls of 15 who are not entitled to health checks, because you are not eligible for this until you are 21, and that there are also many other clandestines working without a booklet. But the biggest annoyance is the police - they detain the women even if the carnet is in order, try to extort money, and threaten everything. The discussion is so busy in Wolof that we can only watch as the women exchange stories and annoyances among themselves.

Actually, I strongly support the Swedish model - criminalizing the buying of sex, not the selling. But here the general poverty and social position of women are so problematic that a ban on paying a prostitute will presumably exacerbate their marginal position. A whole other layer of complexity reveals itself....

The next day, another group of sex workers arrives. Beautiful and vulnerable, they listen to the explanations and to each other's stories. One woman, dressed entirely in black, in stark contrast to the others in their bright colors, wipes the tears from her cheeks as she tells how her husband died, and she has no money to feed her children, and that is why she started doing this terrible work. All of them click along in agreement - none of them would do this work if it were not out of necessity, if they had another option, if they had been allowed to get something of an education. Poignant. One of our actresses is present and recites her story, in Wolof. The women are visibly touched. Then they leave again. We are also visited by a group of women from the Medina, a very poor neighborhood in the middle of Dakar. They have a collective that promotes alternative work for women - there is one group that dyes fabric with batik, and another that makes soap. Soap is important because washing clothes is a crucial source of income for the poorest women, so by providing these women with cheap soap, they're hitting two mosquitoes with one punch. On the last day, a group of girls from a training center in the deprived district of Pikine visit. Since there is no actress present, I read a story aloud in French. It is translated into Wolof sentence by sentence by the teacher. It is extraordinary to see how she translates, without hesitation, how a young woman flees her village out of fear during the FGM [female genital mutilation] ceremony.

One of the male teachers also wants to share something. He is actually a sociologist, and once had to do a report on the street prostitutes in the district. Beforehand, he thought that these women were all bad, or even evil. But after hearing their stories, his attitude completely changed. He realized that the evil is not the women, but the system that forces them into prostitution. Nice that he could be so open with the girls, telling them how he had been wrong. The evil of the system is a recurring theme.

Many of the attendees turn out to know girls who left to work abroad, and our stories hit hard. None of them had imagined that European Valhalla could turn out to be such a nightmare. We now really feel that our work is bearing fruit. These girls have been warned and will hopefully not fall prey to human traffickers. The girls will also continue to tell the stories - so we are reaching a lot of young women. When we started this project we did not expect the results to be so immediate.

Our time in Senegal is already up. At the airport, it turns out that our luggage is not up to snuff. We have to leave part of the carpet behind. In the middle of the departure hall, we stand tearing this giant carpet of all red women's clothing, underwear and all, in half. Besides the piece of carpet, we also leave a piece of our hearts here - what a beautiful country, fantastic people. We want to come back as soon as possible!

Jimini Hignett - HowToGoOn.com
pkaersenhout.com