Back to: Publiations
Sjoerd J. Moenandar
[This is the introduction of this chapter. The full text can be found in Korthals Altes, L. et al (red.), Autonomy and engagement in literature at the two fins de siècle, 1900 and 2000 (Leuven: Peeters, 2007), pp. 241-260]
In the spring of 2004, a collection of short
stories appeared entitled Man zoekt vrouw
om hem gelukkig te maken. It was the debut of the young Moroccan author Yusef el Halal, a daring
mix of explicit erotic literature, youth culture, cultural stereotypes and the
problems that young Moroccans face growing up in the Netherlands. The back cover reveals
the main character Yusef el Halal – ‘bound by his legs to a herd of cows and by
his arms to a herd of camels’ – seeking recoginition as a writer and ready to address
the publishing companies’ desire for young allochtonous writers.[1]
As well as publishing companies, the reading public are also said to share this
desire. When El Halal performs at literary evenings, he suspects ‘that a large
part of the audience does not come for the literature, but (…) to see a
Moroccan in the chair.’[2]
The book strongly criticizes literary organisations for pressing allochtonous authors to only write about
their background and ethnicity,[3]
while El Halal wants to conquer the world with his language.[4]
The book also ridicules allochtonous authors Kader Abdolah, Hafid Bouazza and
especially Abdelkader Benali, authors with a Muslim background, for giving in
to such pressures all too willingly. However, in a message to the press, El
Halal explicitly states that he also wants to write about the problems faced by
a person in between cultures.[5]
Not long
after Man zoekt vrouw om hem gelukkig te
maken appeared, columnist Hugo Borst revealed that Yusef el Halal was a pseudonym
for a group of authors.[6]
This group included Dutch celebrity authors Ronald Giphart, Marcel Möring and
Ingmar Heytze, alongside lesser known authors like Ernest van der Kwast and
Steven Verhelst. The latter two claimed that they started to use the name Yusef
el Halal when their own stories were not published and as soon as they did so, ‘the
literary world opened up.’ [7]
Many saw this affair as proving right the suspicions that had repeatedly been
expressed following the literary debuts of a large group of young authors with
a Muslim background in the early 1990s: ‘This is what this affair makes
painfully clear: money and good words are not there for the best author, but
for the most striking background’.[8]
According to Bourdieu, the literary value of a
work is not something that comes into existence together with the work itself,
but is attributed in a series of ‘positio-takings’ in relation to the work by
authors and institutions (such as publishing companies, critics, authors,
literary juries and the reading public) who jointly constitute the literary
field.[9]
The authors behind Yusef el Halal – and their critics – could be paraphrased as
claiming that literary value is attributed for the wrong reasons, precisely
because these reasons are non-literary. Furthermore, they clearly present
themselves as challenging the dominance of these misguided reasons in the
literary field. When, for instance, the book ridicules publishing companies for
pressing authors to write about issues such as ethnicity or background, it
attacks the idea that literature should be about
something (socially relevant issues, or an insight in the authors’ ethnic
background) rather than just an attempt to ‘conquer the world with […]
language’.[10] Similarly,
when the authors and their critics (all those who chose to write about Man
zoekt vrouw om hem gelukkig te maken seemd to more or less sympathize with the
authors on these issues) reproach the reading public and other actors and
institutions within the literary field for being more interested in the ‘Moroccan
in the chair’, the person writing the book rather than the literary work, they
agitate against the tendency they perceive among literarty actors and
institutions to focus on the ‘striking background’ of an author, as they call
it, rather than on his or her literary work. What it is exactly that makes a
writer the ‘best writer’ remains rather vague, but by using these kinds of
phrases, those speaking up in the Yusuf el Halal affair suggest that a clear
distinction can be made between what they consider legitimate (that is, ‘literary’,
a concentration on the aesthetic qualities of a work, for instance) and illegitimate (‘non-literary’) reasons for
attributing literary value. The debate in the Yusef el Halal affair is
therefore mainly about which criteria can rightfully be used in the evaluative
discourse within an autonomous literary field (in which literary works are not valued
for non-literary reasons) and which criteria are ‘heteronomous’. Furthermore,
the protagonists in this debate claim that those heteronomous criteria
dominated this evaluative discourse at the time El Halal published his debut.
How homogenous was the evaluation of such works
within the literary field up to the moment that Man zoekt vrouw om hem gelukkig te maken was published? Was there
indeed general agreement on the criteria for attributing value to these works,
and does the analysis of the process in which this value is established confirm
the dominance of ‘heteronomous’ criteria? I shall try to answer these questions
by (1) analysing the reception of the work of Dutch authors with a Muslim
background and (2) analysing the way these authors have positioned themselves
over two periods – pre- and post-9/11.[11]
These authors are often referred to as ‘migrant
authors’ or allochtonous authors.
Both terms are highly problematic. According to the Dutch governmental Central
Bureau of Statistics (CBS), the term allochtone
refers to all those living in the Netherlands who were born in a
foreign country, or one or both of whose parents were born in a foreign country. The CBS makes
a distinction between non-Western allochtones
and Western allochtones.[12]
When the word is used in contemporary Dutch society, it is hardly ever used in its wider sense,
but almost exclusively to refer to the non-Western category. Apart from that,
its Muslim connotation has increased remarkably over the years.[13]
Similar attitudes can be found in reviews about literary work by authors with a
Muslim background. Although they may be called allochtonous or migrant writers (a term which has a similar connotational
complexity), the connotation seems tob e Muslim – when critics give other
examples of allochtonous authors,
non-Muslims are hardly ever mentioned and their supposedly common themes are
sometimes discussed in a religious light. It seems that Muslims are conceived
to be so foreign to Dutch society that they have become the foreigners par
excellence. It is for this reason that I shall concentrate on authors with
a Muslim background in this paper.
[3] Ibid., pp. 90-2
[4] Ibid., pp. 94.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Serdijn, ‘Hollandse El Halal vilein en leuk’. Similar statements are made
in Borst, ‘Schuilnaam Yusef el Halal’, Speet, ‘Whodunnit voor de grachtengordel’,
Luyten, ‘Yusef, de schrijver met vele gezichten’, Bessems, ‘Over tieten en
ballen’, and Borré, ‘De nieuwe generatie salonrebellen’.
[10] Interestingly enough, of course,
‘Yusef el Halal’ himself does not always adhere to this, releasing a message to
the press in which he declared he wants to write about the problems a person in
between cultures face. Was this message meant to further confuse, perhaps by
showing how important the demand on authors with a certain background to deal
with social relevant issues has become today, or did ‘Yusef’ just want to sell
his debut (or maybe both) – or was El
Halal copying the behaviour of authors with a Muslim background that has at
times been contradictory in a similar way?
[11] As a source for this, I have used LiteROM, a database
containing literary reviews and interviews with authors published in newspapers
and magazines. Although I will focus on the three writers ‘El Hallal’ mentions
in his book (arguably the most well known writers of Muslim descend), I have
read and will quote from a wide range of reviews and interviews about and with
Yasmine Allas (Somalian background), Kader Abdolah (Iranian background),
Mustafa Stitou, Hans Sahar, Hafid Bouazza, Naïma el Bezaz and Abdelkader Benali
(all with a Moroccan background).
[13] Cf. for
instance a 2004 report by the largest public opinion and market research
organization in the Netherlands, TNS/NIPO, commissioned by one of the leading
daily quality newspapers, De Volkskrant, in which the terms are used
completely interchangeably (TNS/NIPO, Gevoelens van autochtone Nederlanders
t.o.v. allochtonen/moslims [Feelings of autochtonous Dutch regarding
allochtones/Muslims] (Amsterdam, 2004).
