

Losing a parent is something you can never prepare for. I lost my mom in the summer of 2023 at the age of 75, two years after I interviewed her for my artwork, ‘The New Plantation’, which I made for Open Archief1. The work dealt with her experience during the squatting movement in the Bijlmer - Amsterdam Southeast - in the 1970s and 80s. The squatting movement was an exciting time for her; I still remember her laughing as her memories were for the most part focused on the great times: they cooked, they danced, they shared, they squatted. If she could not dance at the revolution, she didn’t want to be part of it.2
With my dad she squatted in the Bijlmer, a neighbourhood in Amsterdam also known as the Black neighbourhood of the city. The Bijlmer was a place for Surinamese people to reclaim their rights of residence while they were largely discriminated against throughout the Netherlands. My mom was part of one of the earlier generations of squatters. The Bijlmer squatting movement is now seen as one of the first expressions of Black activism in the Netherlands3. But my mom never saw herself as an activist, rather saw herself as a person who made use of her civil rights.
The Bijlmer plays a significant part in her story, as she lived there until the end of her life. If we look at the Bijlmer through the eyes of my mother, it is more than a multicultural neighbourhood. It’s a history of resistance; it was a home for many (forced) alternative ways of living. Like many Black Surinamese womxn in the Bijlmer, my mom was more than a migrant, she was more than a squatter; like many Black mothers there is often an unknown history that is ready to be uncovered. Our (grand)mothers are living archives who have been silenced for centuries. In our Surinamese culture, it’s known that ‘mama is heilig’, our (grand)mothers are saints, they are our protectors and we always will honour their lives. Their hardships uncover their strength, their superpowers. With tears in my eyes, I am writing this piece to secure their place in our history and memories, and respect our Black mothers’ efforts to raise us, prepare us as children for a troublesome, toxic and patriarchal racist, classist society. I write to honour their choices and sacrifices, because the hardship of motherhood is often overlooked. In order to survive, my mom also became a sex worker to run her business, and from what I understood she helped other Black sex workers to perform their work.
Within the context of me working on honouring, grieving and memorialising my mother I need to allow feelings and emotions to take up more space than my rationality and ability for intellectualization. I must write less from the head and more from the heart to understand the meaning of identity and motherhood for womxn like my mom and how the Bijlmer played an essential role in the choices they made. In media and literature I miss a lot of narratives around Black sex workers, their choices and histories. And seldom did I read stories of the children of sex workers in general. Much of these narratives are probably overlooked or have been kept in secrecy because of shame or fear. It is time for me to build a new relationship with my mother knowing her role as a sex worker; and while you are reading this, you become a witness. You are now part of this journey, too.
I can write that this essay is about the politics of social and spatial segregation and how the colonial legacy in the Bijlmer was inextricably linked to her choice to become a sex worker, but also how she built the resilience to exploit and entertain a classist, racist and colonial system that was meant to overpower and keep colonised communities in their subordinated place. But the truth is – I miss my mom. And part of that intellectual stuff is true. However, for the most part I want to take you into my own personal journey of grief and honour as we go through her archives to understand the deeper meaning of why I interviewed her for ‘The New Plantation’ in the first place.

Black sex workers are superheroes
Before anything else, my mom is my hero. When she passed away, her property became her archive now that it will be all permanently moved out of her old house. It was time to clear out her belongings, and of course it was, and still is, very hard for me to throw them away. Seeing all her items brings back memories, and also the painful realisation that I won’t be able to make more memories with her. My mom was also a hoarder, which I believe was due to her traumatic experience of poverty in Suriname. At the time of its independence, Suriname was the largest colony of the Dutch colonial empire. It became economically poor, so the Dutch could become financially rich. But the colonial exploitation of my mother’s people, country and its natural resources, is something her generation never learned in school, nor did I learn much about it even at university in the Netherlands. As a hoarder, she kept everything just in case a rainy day would come. With each object I would wonder if she wanted me to put it in the trash, or what it would mean for her. In the process of grieving, you realise you might need some time before throwing stuff away. Despite it strongly contradicting my ambition for a minimalist lifestyle, I decided to put her belongings in various boxes and throw them away when I noticed I no longer care about it anymore.
In such a process, you realise what is most important to you and I decided to keep her business administration and materials that identified an unknown story that I was willing to tell the world when I was ready for it. I remembered that I asked her multiple times, do you want me to tell your story about your escort business and as a sex worker? And without a doubt, she said yes. She did not hesitate. There was much my mom could be ashamed about, but being a sex worker was definitely not one of them. As a consequence of her strong belief that sex work = work, I feel blessed to have never felt deeply ashamed about my mom’s sex work, or sexuality in general. I did sometimes feel embarrassed to speak about my mom’s work and understood that it was eventually nobody’s business until now. Although I felt the stigmas about prostitution, my mom was a very open person which made me never internalize the idea that sex work as dirty work. To me, her life shares important notions about the experience of sex work for Black womxn in the Netherlands. Sex work was a choice, but it was primarily about survival. She embodied survival, like many Black mothers in our lives.
Black sex workers are superheroes, and their secret weapon is the understanding of how a political power play on their bodies can be turned into their own gain. For Black sex workers, sex work is more than reclaiming and appropriating the female body and advocating for sexual freedom. For Black sex workers, it is also an economic escape route to (economically) benefit from a body that has been exploited for centuries. Many Black womxn, like my mother, have tried since childhood to escape the poverty once created by colonialism. My mom did not succeed in finishing school, but she succeeded in travelling to the metropole. Like many migrants, they came to understand that colonialism is actually everywhere if you are not white. There is no escape from racism and its economic oppression; it is a global problem. Our parents fled to Europe; among Surinamese people they would say “Holland is the paradise”; only to find out that in a postcolonial world Black people are still kept hostage in their place: in poverty and marginalisation. What I realised about my mom, and other Black womxn who worked with her, is that the superpower of Black sex workers is to reappropriate the system to reclaim their own economic gain. Instead of being exploited or fetishized by white m*n/people, they would demand their worth: in this case, their money and therefore their socioeconomic status which could mean they could raise their family and send their kids to school. There are a couple of things that I learned from my mom since I was a young teenager about sex work:
- Never call a prostitute a whore. A whore is that person who will sleep with your husband for free. Prostitution is a job.
- Mxn commonly exploit womxn emotionally, sexually, physically and financially. Why would I spread my legs for free? I can use their money.
- Prostitution has been legal in the Netherlands since 2000. Sex workers pay taxes. That makes the Tax Authorities the biggest pimp in the country.
There is probably much more I learned from her, but this is what stuck with me all my life. Until this day, I can’t figure out if it all was toxic or not. Like I already mentioned, to join the field of sex work had nothing to do with sexual liberation for my mom, but a trauma-based decision to take care of herself and her youngest child, me. My mother would also not encourage me to enter the sex industry; it was a sacrifice which she hoped she could save me from. It shows the privilege of sex work, if it is your choice. Privilege is about having a choice and taking these choices for granted. I understood my mom’s sacrifice when I once took a walk at the Red Light District in Amsterdam, and came across a poster at a window to protest against the erasure of the area. It said, in Dutch, “My job makes sure my children are able to go to school and university”. I felt that. It was this poster that made me feel less alone. In the Netherlands, there is this saying: “being born a dime and never being able to become a quarter”. My mother’s aim was to prove society wrong; if she wasn’t able to finish school, then her children should, and we did. There are many other children who, like myself, are able to dream our dreams because of the sacrifices our parents made. We carry these sacrifices in silence, in fear, often with shame. For us as their children, sex workers are our superheroes and that should not be forgotten; they saved us from the cruelty of being at the bottom of the social ladder.

The Bijlmer
And now you probably want to know, what did my mother actually do that is so particular? I interviewed her for ‘The New Plantation’ because I knew that sex work is not the most celebrated field in our society, as it’s looked down upon, disrespected, and stigmatized. Sex work is often associated with being ‘dirty’, ‘unclean’, ‘uneducated’, ‘dangerous’, ‘being a whore’ and more. And as a family of sex workers, we often are not proud to share what comes with this world, but fortunately times change and the struggle for ‘sex work = work’ has become more acceptable. So, how would I share this part of my mother’s story with the world when it is still taboo for many people?
For me, the Bijlmer is an interesting area and great starting point to unfold this story, and understand how various systems of oppressions intersect. My mother is definitely one of the first squatters that understood how a racist society functions. She was also the eldest resident of her flat, Gravestein, which was one of the first flats to be squatted in the 1970s when it was still known as Gliphoeve. Through letters, documents and photos I was able to identify how my mother and father migrated, squatted and lived in different places in the Bijlmer.
My mom was in love with the Bijlmer until the end of her life. When it was announced a couple years ago that her flat Gravestein would be ‘renovated’, a code word for gentrification as all residents (read: all old squatters, and mostly Black citizens) had to be relocated and leave their house with a small financial compensation of 4-5,000 Euro, she refused the offer and would still refuse to leave the place that was sacred to her. It was her safe haven in times when society was not safe. I grew up in a 5-bedroom apartment in Bijlmer, which was squatted by my parents. In 2023 she paid 740 Euro, which means in past years she paid even less. In the context of the recent developments of gentrification in Amsterdam, we know the new residents will pay double or triple the amount that she paid for the house. Anyways, to keep it short: gentrification is just another cousin of colonisation which never benefits those who live at the bottom of the societal ladder. And since she migrated to the Netherlands she was quite aware how race and class interact, so making a living was always based on access and opportunity.
After ‘The New Plantation’, my aim was to interview her more and elaborate the hidden stories Black motherhood/parenthood holds: the complexities of oppression, trauma-based decisions and various tactics of survival. Black motherhood/parenthood serves as a great foundation to understand how systematic racism manifests within homes, and how resistance slowly moves into the public domain in various ways, through struggle or trying to make the best out of it.

The Golden Lagoon: Barbara and friends
Before I delve into her archival material, I need to say that my mom never made it a secret that she owned a prostitution business in the 1990s/2000s. It was named ‘The Golden Lagoon’ and she called herself Barbara. I knew, my family knew, my school knew. There should be video material of her business from the SBS6 show ‘Sex voor de Buch’ which I am still looking for. From what I remember you would also see me as a little girl when Boudewijn Buch interviewed her at home. The Golden Lagoon was what she called an open sex salon: a massage salon, where people and couples were able to explore their (sexual) pleasures and intimacies. There was a bar, a sauna, a private room and she also sold lingerie. From what I remember from my childhood, all the womxn were Black, Indigenous, and womxn of colour and her friends, who I called my aunts. In Surinamese culture, calling someone an aunt or uncle outside the bloodline shows a level of trust, community and family-building. And, of course, for some of them, I knew their children as playmates. In my mom’s archives I also found pictures of their children which shows again that I was not alone. I wonder if they think their parents were superheroes, too?
According to her archive, she ran the business between the late 1990s and early 2000s in Amsterdam South, which is a total opposite area in comparison to the Bijlmer. South is generally known as a more upper class area. When I Google her business I cannot find any results. It’s only her archives, my memories and stories of family and friends that know about its existence. I come across plenty of photos, leaflets, newspaper advertisements, business cards, discounts cards, bar menus, notes, pens and envelopes with logos, her financial and business administration, letter communication with other sex workers, clients and her admirers. There are also music cassettes, CD’s, erotic VHS tapes and videos of the business. In the photos I was able to identify the many people who played a role in my childhood, including my dad who ran the bar. In some of these photos I see myself as a young child, smiling with my mom at The Golden Lagoon. Sex work was a trauma-based decision for my mom, but how I know her and understand her archive, she also enjoyed the field of sex work. She saw it as a form of care, she said once. I already made the decision that this archive must be anonymized, but I can say with confidence that it sure looks like they had a great time. It releases a bit of the sadness when grieving: they enjoyed the work, they loved their field, my mom looks great as ever, and I especially remember that the women who worked with my mom felt so lucky to have guidance from my mom, a Black womxn who owned her own business in that industry. When I had to announce that she was no longer among us in a physical state, many of her old sex worker colleagues and friends immediately started to cry. One of them closed her hands and prayed. I remember that she also always kissed my mother’s hands at The Golden Lagoon. For them, my mom served also as a protector so they could do their work in safety and peace.
Perhaps the Golden Lagoon served as a safe space? I wanted to know. As I delved further into the material, I never really got to understand why it had to be closed, but bits of her archive offer answers to that question. According to her youngest sister, my mom was so generous that if some womxn didn’t have any clients that night, she would still hand them over some money. I also remember a huge lawsuit between her and the landlord who raised the price of the building, making her unable to pay the rent. My mom left behind the papers of the lawsuit and in them I found a new narrative: that the building was set on fire. A newspaper article and photos confirm this. But I also wondered, what were her motives to open up this business and what would it reveal about herself? What were her experiences and stories beside everything I already know? What were her further inspirations, ambitions and dreams for her business? How did she make sense of having plenty of Black sex workers in her company? And how did they deal with the stigma and earn a living within this business? How did they give meaning to sex work? And how did she make it possible to develop an environment that made me less ashamed and think differently about sex work?
As you can see, opening her archive unfolds many more questions and narratives, asks for understanding and invites me to explore a hidden history of a Black womxn who’s a sex worker and owned a prostitution business in Amsterdam in the 1990s/2000s. The more I write about her, the more I understand the complexity of Black womxn histories: she was one of the first squatters in the Bijlmer, she was a sex worker, a businesswoman, a caretaker and much more. After writing this piece, I understand her superpower was to transform sex work into a safe place for herself and other Black womxn. Whether it was the squatting movement or the field of sex work in the Netherlands, she tried to make a home in spaces which were not always seen as a safe spaces for (Black) people. I have always felt truly loved, and with her I lost a loved one: my mom is my superhero. And if you have a great relationship with your parents, I hope you start to perceive your mom like that too: because motherhood and its sacrifices are systematically undervalued. In the face of societal and personal challenges, my mom showed levels of resilience and strength, for Black mothers carry the burden to nurture and protect their children while also navigating structural racial inequality, often by themselves.
