A rusty iron fence, the bars crooked. A gritty path over a yard overgrown with weeds. A young barn owl who apparently flew to crash and has been laid down at the drip -free front door, carefully folded around the body. And then, inside the twilight, on a hard wooden bar chair: the Flemish writer Chris de Stoop, known from Bestsellers as This is my court (2015). A theater performance has now been made that will premiere on 30 August at the Zeeland late summer festival.
This is my court Is about the loss of the farmers in Flanders and about the mental need of his brother, who was three years older than he was and wanted to be a farmer before everything – until it was no longer possible. In the night of 4 to 5 December 2010, he committed suicide, fifty -six years old. Since then, Chris de Stoop has been driving almost every day of Wommelgem, where he lives with his wife, after the dilapidated farm in Sint-Gillis-Waas to sit by the window. “As if I,” he says, “has to pay off a debt to my brother, and to the farm that has given me so much.”
I went to a therapist with him, but therapy doesn’t work so much if you’re not a talker. Farmers are not talkers
He was born there in 1958 and went on his 21st way to study, as the first of all generations of farmers above him, in Leuven, Germanistics. He worked as a journalist for the Flemish Weekblad Knack And traveled the whole world for his reports. His brother, who had continued the company with their mother in 1980 after the death of their father through a brain tumor, saw it as a form of desertie. “I abandoned things. It was often about between him and me, although at the end I was with him every few days, and certainly every Saturday to help him with the farming work.”
Shortly after his brothers death, Chris De Stoop stopped Knack And now he almost exclusively writes books in which he tells as a socially turbulent researcher about the farmer’s world who is disappearing, about his odd uncle Daniël, who was murdered in his farm in Hainaut by a youth gang, about the last occupant of the Damiaanhoeve in Limburg, who was suspected of the murder of his wife. He also has some fields, on which he grows washed in the neighborhood with the last farmer. Last year sunflowers, this year grass and corn.
Since the death of his brother, Chris de Stoop has been driving almost every day to the derelict farm in Sint-Gillis-Waas to write.
Photo Wouter Van Vooren
You were in Haiti when your brother died.
“To write a report about small farmers after the earthquake that had been there. After five days, I was called by a family member who is a family doctor. It took me two days to return Keep drinking trays open, and to water the calves, cows and bulls from the only tap that was still working.
“That Friday night the thaw was started and then you know that some animals are in the water the next morning because the leaks started spraying. It must have made him desperate. His trough calf, a lean scharminkel in which he had put so much care and affection, was dead next to the manure, the legs from the sky, the frozen tongue”
He neglected the vegetable garden, no longer read the newspaper, did not watch TV, was smoking whole nights there
Your mother was already admitted to the nursing home.
“Just before that last summer she fell, but then she was able to return home rehabilitation. She went back to work, at the age of 82. She took care of the calves, she gave them the bottle if she was not drunk well – my brother had a suckling cow company – and did the household. But in October she fell again and then she would never have been broken any more on the rod. returning.
“In the summer he said he didn’t like it anymore. He thought of death, he said. Who would stand around his coffin? He neglected the vegetable garden, did not read the newspaper anymore, watched TV, was smoking there for whole nights.”
Chris de Stoop points to the black sofa at the table on which his laptop stands.
“I went to a therapist with him, but therapy does not work as badly if you are not a talker. Farmers are not praterists. Afterwards the therapist told me that the process had been busy for several years. If a few things come together at a criticism, the danger of suicide is very great.”
Photos Wouter van Vooren
You also tell in ‘This is my court’ also his fear of the government.
„Ik zie nog het gruwelijke beeld van mijn broer die elke keer dat ik kwam aanrijden vanachter een muur stond te kijken of het niet weer een controleur was. De controleurs mogen elk moment je erf binnenvallen en hij was een keer betrapt toen hij achter de schuur hout aan het opstoken was, zoals hij zijn hele leven gedaan had. Maar nu was het verboden. Hij had een nieuwe milieuvergunning nodig en hij was heel bang dat zijn oude, nog niet afgedekte mesthoop een probleem zou worden. Het meest extreme was The hormone brigade of the house search.
“My brother was questioned as if he were a criminal, calculated my brother, who worked traditionally and small -scale and feeded his animals with his own crops. What would he work with hormones? A raid was it. All cupboards and drawers were pulled open here, the mattresses were turned around. For the old -fashioned affair here. My brother had to wait weeks until his seized animals were released again.
He was surrounded, you write, by parties who wanted him to have gone.
“In the sixties there were twelve farms here in the street and almost all of them disappeared, as millions of farms have disappeared in all of Europe by choosing a course for large -scale, industrialization and intensification. On the other side, where there used to be our best meadow, a lease wei, there is now a large furniture store. Bulgarian women are sorting in a amazing pace, pure agro-industry, a villa was built on the right. My brother cut off the polder where his cows ran in the summer. “
De Stoop is surprised by the projects around the farm, such as the construction of a highway and a wind farm.
Photo Wouter Van Vooren
The polder that was partly taken to create new nature.
“To compensate for the expansion of the port of Antwerp. It is difficult for farmers to understand that good agricultural land was specified for this. Farmers have always thought that they are working in and with nature, and then suddenly people say: you are busy in a totally wrong way, what you do is the opposite of nature. One generation ago you had a Nobel profession, you had respect in the village.
“Now you are an environmentally scornful and an animal executioner. And then the nitrogen crisis that has been added. It has increased the existential uncertainty among farmers. This is my court Was just the book was The cocks beams from Lizzy van Leeuwen, about suicide in the countryside. It has already been established that twice as many farmers as civilians leave life. ”
De Stoop was born on the farm in 1958 and lived there until he was 21.
Photo Wouter Van Vooren
Your brother would have liked a family.
“It never came. He was a very popular boy in the past, much more popular than me. He also had many more relationships with girls than me, but after a year, at most two years, they always jumped off, for those girls did not want to farm. Until he was 40 he went to bars and discos, sometimes I went with him. If he had found a woman in this way, it was the great sorrow of my mother: what is a farmer without a farmer’s wife?
You continue to blame yourself for haiti left.
“All the direct relatives of someone who killed herself continues to wonder why they did not prevent it and whether they were not partly the cause. My brother and I had a very good and warm relationship. Until the age of twenty -one I have – he pulls the door behind him -” Slept in the upstairs room with him in one bed. “
What are you going to do with this farm?
“It is horrible to break the centuries -long bond with the ground and the ancestors. I am not even the last link, I am the tongs that cut the last switch. The farm is old and worn, no longer viable. I hope to have my writing place for a long time, preferably until my last day.”
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