I was in an auditorium of a high school in the east of the country. The students had read a novel of mine, about a migrant child that went to the gymnasium. They had prepared questions. Most were about how truthful the novel was. One girl asked: “Why are you writing?” I thought for a moment, and answered, “Because I want to understand the world.”
After the performance I drove home. I thought about the students, about the country in which they grow up. About the political climate in which my own high school time took place: the nineties, the conviction of Janmaat. The working -class neighborhood in which I grew up, the distrust of the neighbors to people like us. Was it so much better than now? Maybe not. But at least something was pursued from decency, even in the extent to which people expressed racist.
I wrote it before: the anti-migration protests in The Hague have touched me deeply. It came in, as it is called popular, in a place in me that I did not consider to be available for others. Since then I have been carrying it with me, and I have not found any way to shake it away. A friend and I had viewed the images together, including those of the right -wing extremist protest in London, a week earlier. More than one hundred thousand people were brought up there – a quantity that we breathe us. They held protest signs with texts like ‘Get Theme OutAnd “Save Our Kids. ‘ We clicked through image fragments in which people said that Great Britain should remain traditional-English, without external influences. It sounded like an ultrasound of the Netherlands, from America, from Germany.
“They really hate us,” my girlfriend said softly. It was an unfocused remark, but no less true. We are the idea, the ideology, the ethnicity against which in recent years has been successfully operated by politicians, opinion makers and multi -millionaires, all of whom have no sense in their own way of sharing the cake of every thinking of everyone, “it is you to be you, to be you, to be you, you are you to be used to you,” Strangers and acquaintances to reassure me.
Friendly, undoubtedly. But it lacks the essence of the case. Namely that fascist beliefs are being propagated more openly, and are supported broadly in our society. It seems to me that we should not reassure each other in this. Moreover, it is about me, and about people like me: we are the other person who is confronted with his own. It is precisely those who are not the other person – instead of appeasing migrants with empty words – to check with themselves whether this budding fascism should have a place in the Netherlands.
In my literary work I have always searched for love, in the sense of a humanism that focuses on humanity. I know it is still hidden somewhere, somewhere in people, and in literature. But the expanding resistance towards everything that is different from pure Dutch, takes over the sight. The fact that people like me are constantly being used, are constantly weighed and viewed, limits the distance I need to look at the world.
While writing, I understand better and better in what kind of environment I live. But instead of guiding me, it goes out of hope for something better. That is why this is my last column for the time being. I am going to write off two books, read countless books, and I hope that the literature will offer me what it always did: a hiding place, a memory of human value, an idea of love.
Karin Amatmoekrim Is a writer and literary. This is her last column for the time being. She returns as a columnist after completion of her books NRC.
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