We took a walk on the Waaldijk, wide water, bushes and yellow reeds, but also greenhouses and chimneys; you want to find the landscape beautiful, but it rarely is. Back through the land behind the dike and through the village that is protected by it. Not a pretty village. There is a pamphlet hanging on a house that reads: ‘I don’t care whether asylum seekers feel at home’ and continues with ‘we want to feel at home in our own country without murderers and rapists’. Clearly.
“We love you, Europe, and we love the freedom you brought us when we came to you as refugees and ignored the racism that you try to sweep under the carpet when you sweep the living room,” read the Palestinian/Syrian poet Ghayath Almadhoun during a performance at the Nijmegen Winter Garden festival. A few years ago he was asked, I believe by the Swedish Academy, he is a Swedish citizen, to write an ode to Europe. He found it difficult, so he asked if he was free to write whatever he wanted and yes.
Well, there it went. His ‘Ode to Sorrow’ keeps repeating (in Djûke Poppinga’s translation): ‘We love you, Europe’. ‘We’ are not the Europeans, but those who come from outside: ‘from “the third world” as you say.’ This ‘we’ tries not to be bored by the constant questions about the position of women in Syria, while Swiss women only got the right to vote 22 years later. The tone quickly becomes grimmer: ‘You, murderer of original inhabitants (…) You, with your inquisitions. You who burned women because they were supposed to be witches. You, master of the slave trade. (…) You, who devised the destruction of the Jews, (…)[en die] in all your shamelessness you have paid compensation with Palestine, my country.’ The concentration camps, Islamophobia – everything is mentioned in that ode that also mentions good things (freedom of expression, just laws and human rights, etc.)
Just because there is a lot to be ashamed of doesn’t mean there is nothing to defend
Was the whole room embarrassed while we listened to that? I had the feeling so.
At least I do, especially because I’ve always been quite proud of Europe, despite everything that’s going on, sure, sure! was no good. But our civilization! The temples, the tragedies, Shakespeare and Bach, Paula Modersohn and Angela Merkel, the freedom of movement, the (I’m just coughing up the word now) tolerance. Somehow I managed to magnify all those things so that the shame didn’t have much of a chance.
It’s strange that you can so easily brush aside injustices committed in the past, right because you find it shameful, because then you (so!) have nothing to do with it. But you do feel you belong to what is good and beautiful and praiseworthy. And for the umpteenth time I wondered to which group you belong and to what extent you should identify with it, a subject that I can never quite figure out.
In any case, you feel very small in front of a Syrian poet, with your infatuation with ‘old Europe’ which, as he said, is not that old at all, think of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia.
Yet, despite the shame of my too-easy preoccupation with Europe, I still need to feel European, now perhaps more than ever. The fact that there is a lot to be ashamed of – see the Betuwe village street – does not mean that there is nothing to defend. Or even to love.
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