As soon as presenter Griet Op de Beeck gives a little counter gas, the interview is running into Summer guests (NPO 2) Just off the rails. Her first guest, writer and TV maker Özcan Akyol, shows a video clip by Chris Brown. Akyol wants to put down the popular R&B singer as “outsider” that is ignored by the “mainstream media”.
Op de Beeck has a different idea. Chris Brown, she recalls, often comes in the news because of mistreatment, especially of women. Why does Akyol praise the perpetrator as he previously condemned the misconduct of TV presenter Matthijs van Nieuwkerk? Akyol shoots back immediately: “We can now play the decency police …” According to him, you must strictly separate the professional qualities of a person from his personal shortcomings. He trivializes Brown’s violence as ‘straps’. Van Nieuwkerk calls someone “who may led an editors a little too vocally”.
This skirmish about cross -border behavior leads to little and it does not fit on the Beeck either. It is a strange comparison, Brown and Van Nieuwkerk anyway. If the presenter really wanted to make a point, she could have pointed to the relationship of the various “outsiders” to whom Akyol mirrored this evening. Many are “Bon Vivants“Just like Akyol’s violent father. Chris Brown also abused his wife. Writer Bukowski wrote a lot about violence against women. Writer Jan Cremer and footballer Ronaldinho are known as womanizers. Akyol regards himself as a sensitive, feminine man, what does he do with all those macho thesis?
Op de Beeck leaves it out, or she didn’t see it. Not bad, Akyol also has an interesting argument, personal and socially inspired. Based on Turkish guest workers in the documentary Deventer Blik (2000), The films Menace 2 Society (1993) and GEEGEN THAT WALL (2004) He shows what it means when the world rejects you and predicts you for a life in the margin.
From the ghetto
Akyol says that he comes from an Alevi Turkish family, “a minority in a minority.” His father hit, his mother was depressed. In the Cito test he scored at VWO level, but the teacher sent him to the Mavo. Akyol took his first steps on the criminal path. “Many jobs are not intended for us so you will create your own work.” But through education and literature, he pulled himself out of the ghetto and raised a successful writer and TV maker.
He links a refreshed version of the old elevation ideal to his life path: “You can repair everything in one generation.” That means that you should not exclude migrants and acknowledge their added value. He shows that with scenes from the German documentary Favorites (2024), About loving education for migant children. And with The word saved me (2009), A portrait of Rodaan Al Galidi, self -proclaimed “asylum seeker of the Fatherland.” This writer who fled Iraq looks at the Netherlands as an outsider with humor and wonder.
Akyol’s social climb has cost him a lot, he says. “It is very difficult to get out of your social class.” He is still suspicious of people, quickly looks up to them, feels that he has to prove himself by working hard, and he feels “orphaned” when he comes close to happiness. “I thought for a long time that I had no added value.” This also fits his self -image as an outsider that is not accepted by the literary world.
Now akyol it to Summer guests Has kicked, the Pantheon of the Elitaire VPRO, he can no longer profile himself with good decency as an outsider. Does not matter, he is already where he wants to be: “My great ambition was not to become my father. And we succeeded.”