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[This page contains the first six pages of the book Depraved Borderlands. Encounters with Muslims in Dutch Literature and the Public Debate (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2013)]
1. Introduction
Us and them – I’m fed up to the back teeth with
that whole debate. All the attention for those Muslims, their prophet, and
their holy book, all those endless analyses, opinions and talks, can’t we
switch to another subject?
Apparently not.
Martin Bril
1. ‘Only one subject that really matters’
In the
autumn of 2003, writer Nico Drost published an essay in a Dutch literary
magazine called Tirade, which opens
with the following lines:
For a
writer who wants to deal with politics these days, there can only be one
subject that really matters: the relation between Islam and Western society.
Yet, there are but few Dutch authors who have dared to touch this sore spot.[1]
Drost names
Morocco-born Hafid Bouazza as a “pleasant exception”, but Bouazza was not the
only author publishing in The Netherlands who has taken up this subject. For
sure, Bouazza’s literary work offers a number of striking representations of
relations between ‘Islam’ and ‘the West’, such as his second novel Salomon (2001), in which a barbarous
Muslim invades the house of a Dutchman and drives him insane. Before that,
however, famous author Kader Abdolah published The Voyage of the Empty Bottles (De reis van de lege flessen, 1997)
in which a naïve Muslim woman from Iran visits her son, a refugee living in The
Netherlands, and ends up in shock when she sees the two men who live next door
making love to each other in front of the open window. In the theatre text Unclean (Onrein, 2003) by
Abdelkader Benali, a dog resembling the populist politician Pim Fortuyn, known
for his criticism of Islam, invades the house of an embittered fundamentalist
Muslim. And in 2004, Robert Anker published the novel Hajar and Daan (Hajar en Daan),
in which a love story between a Dutch man and a Moroccan girl is presented as a
contemporary Romeo and Juliet, with
‘Muslims’ and ‘Dutch’ as Capulets and Montagues.
These are not just random examples. In the
short stories, novels, poetry and theatre texts by these four authors, the
‘relation between Islam and Western society’ is a recurrent theme, most often
represented as clashing civilisations and multicultural tragedies. In this
study I analyse the meetings between Muslims and non-Muslims characters, as
well as the juxtaposition of ‘Islam’ and ‘the West’, in the work they published
between 1990 and 2005. I will discuss how they used this work to experiment
with dichotomies such as ‘Muslim’ and ‘Dutch’. I will examine how their work
relates to societal and literary contexts, such as the public debate about
Islam in The Netherlands and discussions in the literary field about literature
and engagement. I will especially pay attention to the ways in which the
specific literary form of these works have made such experiments possible. What
do these literary meetings say, imply, suggest about Muslims and non-Muslims?
In other words, which identities for Muslims and non-Muslims are constructed in
these representations and which convictions lay behind this? Which
(im)possibilities of contact between Islamic and non-Islamic are being
suggested by these works?
2. Basic assumptions for this study
In this
study, I will concentrate on the fifteen years between 1990 and 2005. These
have been a transitional period for The Netherlands, during which the
perception of Islam shifted from a first and foremost foreign phenomenon to a
local issue. At the same time, the relations between the original Dutch
population and immigrants from countries with a Muslim culture (often referred
to as ‘Dutch’ and ‘Muslims’, suggesting that these two categories are
necessarily exclusive), became more and more strained. The title of Samuel
Huntington’s famous The Clash of
Civilisations became a central phrase as public discussions focused on
whether the presence of hundreds of thousands of Muslims would lead to
collisions or not.[2]
As I will discuss in paragraph 4, that question was increasingly answered in
the affirmative, in a heated nationwide debate that was fanned by, among other events,
the aftermath of the Rushdie-affair (1989), the so-called El Moumni-affair
(named after a Moroccan imam in Rotterdam called Khalid el Moumni, who caused a
national uproar in 2001 with his remarks that Westerners were lower than pigs
and dogs because they tolerated homosexuality), the 9/11 attacks and the murder
of filmmaker and infamous critic of Islam Theo van Gogh (2004).
While the supposed “clash of civilisations”
increasingly became the topic of conversation in the streets, in radio and
television talk-shows and in the op-eds of national newspapers and magazines,
the authors that I will discuss in this study used these social dynamics as the
raw material for their literary work. That this would happen, seems obvious –
and not just because writers feel a need to, as Nico Dros phrases it, “deal
with politics”. A meeting that leads to friction is, after all, the ideal
material for an enticing story, with characters that the reader will identify
with and care for: communication breakdowns and problematic encounters are what
much, if not most of world literature is made of.[3] And few
encounters are as rife with communication breakdowns and the resulting friction
as the meeting between ‘the West’ and ‘the Muslim world’, ‘Muslims and Dutch’,
the ‘Islamic’ and the ‘Western’, between ‘East’ and ‘West’, or whatever terms
have been used to describe these particular clashing civilisations.
It is especially in the representation of a
meeting between ‘Muslims’ and ‘non-Muslims’ and the ‘Islamic’ and the ‘non-Islamic’
that the contours of these two categories appear and the borders between them
are explored. Descriptions of meetings have always played an important role in
attempts to shape and contain the confrontation between different cultures.
They are often informed by the conviction that there is a fundamental
difference between the juxtaposed cultures, while at the same time confirming
this same conviction. According to Edward Said, for instance, such descriptions
are a quintessential part of Western conceptions of the East, in which the
latter is represented as inferior. In his classic study on the subject, Orientalism, Said shows how in Western
descriptions of meetings between representatives of East and West, the Orient
is approached “almost in the manner of an audience seeing a dramatic event
unfold”.[4]
According to Said, the supposed fundamental difference between the Orient and
the West appears clearest in the representation of the meeting of the two
worlds – and this is exactly the purpose these representations implicitly
serve: “both East and West fulfil their destinies in the encounter”.[5]
The same is true the other way around, as studies on Eastern conceptions of the
West – so called Occidentalism – show.[6]
In the descriptions of such meetings, a dichotomy
is stated: the world consists of East and West. This becomes the basic
assumption for a world view in which these categories are presented as natural
and fundamentally different. The dichotomy then serves to create a distinction
between that which belongs to ‘us’ and that which belongs to ‘them’. In such a
world view, the identity of ‘us’, the self, is completely dependent on the Other, as the Indian literary critic
Gayatri Spivak, following Jacques Lacan, has called it. The Other is everything
that the self is not, and that which the self is, cannot be the Other. Such a
dichotomy makes those of whom we assume they do not belong to our own culture,
literally ‘aliens’, representatives of the ‘not-self’, the alien. At the same
time, and here we recognise the Freudian origins of Spivak’s concept, this
Other is the manifestation of the repressed desires, fears and frustrations of
the self. This process, in which the unwanted is exorcised by attributing it to
an Other, Spivak calls othering.
The main question in this study is how this
othering takes place in the texts that will be analysed. However, it is
important to note that othering is here not conceived of as a process in which
a difference is produced between a (Western) self and a (non-Western) other. After
all, who would be the ‘self’ and who would be the ‘other’ in the literature
produced in a multicultural society such as The Netherlands between 1990 and
2005? One of the most important results of the fact that a society is not
monocultural may well be that its members are continuously confronted with the
realisation that there is always someone for whom they are an Other. In this
study, I have aimed to analyse how these Others are made. How, for instance,
‘Dutch’ and ‘Muslims’ have been imagined to be fundamentally and mutually
exclusive categories, how they have been made into each other’s Other – or not,
of course. Thus, othering is here conceived of as a continuous negotiation of
the borders between the categories of possible dichotomies. It is used in the
sense of an almost Heideggerian verb: to other is to continuously produce
otherness, creating ‘Others’ in the process. We will see that in many of the
short stories, novels and theatre texts that will be discussed in this study,
the meetings do not, like the ones in the work of the Orientalists that Said
writes about, only serve to show that ‘East is East and West is West, and never
the twain shall meet’. Indeed, that definite dichotomy between ‘us’ and ‘them’
often seems to be deconstructed in surprising ways which lay bare a process of
othering, in which ‘Muslims’ and ‘Dutch’, when confronted with each other, are
also confronted with each other’s Other – i.e. their selves as produced by the
other.
One of the basic assumptions of this study is
that literary texts show what is found to be important in the culture from
which they stem, and how that what is of importance is made meaningful – and
vice versa. To a certain extent, literary texts published between 1990 and 2005
in which meetings between Muslims and non-Muslims are represented are
necessarily charged because of contemporary current events. After all, words
always call forth certain connotations, since the reader will remember other
texts in which the same words or the issue they address were found. The reader
will automatically make connections between these texts, resulting in what
Mikhail Bakhtin, Russian scholar of literature and linguistics, has called dialogicity: “The word, directed towards
the object, enters a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment”.[7]
That goes for all words and their objects, but, I would say, even more so for
heavily charged words like ‘Muslim’ and the concept it refers to in The
Netherlands around the turn of the Millennium.
With Bakhtin’s notion of diologicity as a starting point, the literary can be used to
explain the non-literary and vice versa. They can, as the American New
Historicist Stephen Greenblatt phrases it, be made into each other’s “thick
description”: by confronting them with each other, “a network of framing
intentions and cultural meanings” can be constructed, which can then be used to
interpret literary and social phenomena.[8] This
study can be seen as an attempt to reconstruct the dialogically agitated and
tension-filled environment in which literary texts came about, by reading those
texts in coherence with contributions from the social and literary debate.[9] Such a reconstruction would, of course, first and foremost betray the
limitations of the scholar creating it – after all, he or she is the one
linking one text to another, departing from his or her own knowledge and
insights. Yet, a careful and informed analysis of the way in which authors
(consciously or subconsciously) let certain discourses on ‘Muslims’ and
‘non-Muslims’ echo in their literary work and the ways in which this enables
the literary work to show and explore the limits of what a ‘Muslim’ and a
‘Dutch’ is, can give us meaningful insights into the cultural matrix out of
which these texts stem. That is to say, insights into what the members of the
society in which these works were created deemed ‘realistic’, but also into
whatever they feared and wished for, when it comes to the co-existence of
‘Islam’ and ‘the West’.
“Something happens to objects, beliefs and
practices when they are represented, reimagined and performed in literary
texts,” Stephen Greenblatt writes in an essay on the concept of culture,
“something often unpredictable and disturbing…”[10] This
study is an attempt to trace that “something”, by analysing how a certain
author has dealt with the same subjects, convictions and acts in different
genres and media. Therefore, when looking for case studies, I have selected
authors who have not only been active as producers of literary texts, but who
have also spoken out on the literary and societal consequences of the presence
of Muslims in The Netherlands in op-eds, interviews and essays. Furthermore,
the oeuvre of each of these authors will not be studied in isolation. I will
try to pinpoint the medium-specific ways in which the literary work relates to
literary and public debates by reading it, wherever relevant, together with
contributions to those debates by others. The method that I will use for doing
so, will be discussed in the next chapter, after which I will present the case
studies in four consecutive chapters, analysing the contributions to public and
literary debates, as well as the literary works per author. In the remainder of
this introduction, I will discuss why I have selected these four authors for my
case studies (paragraph 5) and sketch the societal and literary context of
their work (paragraph 3 and 4).
[1]
“Voor een schrijver die zich in deze dagen met politiek wil bezighouden is er
eigenlijk maar één onderwerp dat er werkelijk toe doet: de verhouding van de
islam tot de westerse samenleving. Toch zijn er tot nu toe weinig Nederlandse
schrijvers die zich aan deze smeulende kwestie de vingers hebben willen
branden”. Nico Drost, “Over
schrijverschap en politiek” (2003): 48.
[2] Which is actually a reduction of
the contents of Huntington’s book: The
Clash of Civilisations does not just deal with the conflict between the
Muslim world and the West. Huntington claims that since the last decennium of
the twentieth century the world consists of seven or eight civilisations
(Western, Latin-American, African,
Muslim, Chinese, Hindu, Orthodox, Buddhist and Japanese). In his book
Huntington mainly examines the relations between each of these civilisations
and the West. The Chinese and the Muslim civilisations are singled out as the
most important rivals of Western civilisation at the time of writing. Samuel P.
Huntington, The Clash of Civilisations
and the Remaking of World Order (2002 [1997]): passim.
[3] Cf. Lisa Zunshine, “Introduction.
What Is Cognitive Cultural Studies?” (2010): 24
[4] Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1995 [1978]): 137.
[5] Ibidem.
[6] Cf. for instance James G. Carrier, Occidentalism. Images of the West
(1995), a collection of anthropological studies on Occidentalism among both
Westerners themselves and non-Western people; and Ian Buruma & Avishai
Margalit, Occidentalism. The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (2004), a
polemically phrased, but well-researched overview of Occidentalism – mostly in
the form of hatred towards the West – since the Second World War.
[7] Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays
(1986): 276.
[8] “The greatest challenge lay […] in
making the literary and the non-literary seem to be each other’s thick
description”. Catherine Gallagher & Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (2001): 40.
[9] Bakhtin formulates the aim of such
a reconstruction as the coming to “an understanding of the dialogue of
languages as it exists in a given era.” Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays
(1986): 417.
[10] Stephen Greenblatt, “Culture”
(1995): 230-1.
