I was pleasantly surprised by Dutch literature this week. And I turned away from it with a yawn, that too. To start with the good things: the new issue of The guide came out. I read contributions from people I didn’t know, which were so incredibly beautifully written that I wondered whether I was paying close enough attention to literary developments in our country. What a special, incomparable and yet universal story about the human desire for (in)finity wrote Hamed A. Nadoshan, who has only lived in the Netherlands since 2018. And then there was the ultra-short but incomparable story of the Syrian-Palestinian poet Ghayath Almadhoun, who has spent his life in exile in Stockholm since 2008. He wrote, here in a translation by Djûke Poppinga, about the love of a man like him for a Swedish woman. “Isn’t it surreal,” writes Almadhoun, “that I live on a continent that guarantees freedom of expression while I cannot explain to you that time will be late for its appointments if you undress?”
It brought tears to my eyes because I had forgotten how great the feelings can be that can also be expressed in our practical, pointed Dutch. And, to complete the sentimental violence; what an eternal wonder it is that these stories reach me in a language in which they were not originally invented, but which touch on something that makes me believe in a shared human experience.
And just, just when I was satisfied with the state of our literature, my phone lit up. And again, and again. First it was my daughters, then friends, and then a sister. Or I had followed which book had been released by my publisher. No, because I gave up looking at the biannual catalog a long time ago. Not out of disinterest, but out of modesty. After all, anyone who sees how many wonderful books are being published can easily lose heart. So no, I didn’t know anything about that one young writer.
It was a debut, I soon understood, about a white, rich girl who moves to the ‘dreary flats’ in the Bijlmer so that she can fuck all her ‘black neighbors’. This sets the tone, so I will spare you the rest of the unsavory quotes.
I read the book this weekend reluctantly, or worse; I read it in complete boredom. The black people talked about have no depth, the Bijlmer becomes no more than what all the scared outsiders have been writing about for decades, and everything of color has only been created to encourage the psychological development of a white character. It has been happening in Dutch literature since Leon de Winter, since Joost Zwagerman, since Robert Vuijsje. There is nothing innovative about that; it is the same literary laziness in a moth-eaten second-hand jacket.
The writer, who is only a few years older than my daughters, with whom she undeniably arouses my sympathy, defended herself in an incoherent story about art, subjectivity and – there it is – freedom of expression. The child had done well to practice the same modesty I just mentioned; First ask yourself what your work adds to the existing literature.
These writers also prove; not the freedom to write what you want, but the human imagination assures us of beauty. Anyone who limits his imagination to one type of person and uses the other as a cardboard set piece to investigate his own psychological drama, exposes himself as a writer who lacks imagination. Or simply as the umpteenth person who is looking for a slightly too big stage for her own petty-bourgeois family traumas.
Karin Amatmoekrim is a writer and man of letters. She writes a column here every other week.
A version of this article also appeared in the September 19, 2023 newspaper.