The Dutch writer Frank Westerman researches his relationship to his surroundings. Is he able to relate to people belonging to a completely different culture? His studies and his work brought him to different continents, he stayed in West Africa, he studied and researche on Jamaica. Is he able in all these differents worlds to relate to the people he has met there?

In his search he takes as his leading light a search for El Negro, the negro. This El Negro was a displayed dead negro, he met in a small museum in a village in Spain. What is the history of this person? Where did he come from? Which way did he travel, dead or alive? What impression did he make on the people he met, when he was alive in in his dead days? Was he the odd man out? Where there other people like him? Was he like those people who were displayed at World Fair in Brussels, together with their traditional huts? Were they objects to look at and to wonder? Or are they people you can relate to?

When you start reading this book, you will dragged along in this beautiful search.

Frank Westerman – El Negro en ik – Amsterdam 2004 – 251 pages