If you stay without the right papers in the Netherlands, you are punishable if it is up to the Lower House. Only because of your existence, because of your feet on Dutch soil, inhaling the Dutch air, do you run the risk that our state will pick you up and throw you in jail for six months. Not only that: the people who help you, like the doctor you treat when you are sick, the friend you offer a room, the neighbor who gives you a lift are also punishable. That is stated in the Asylum Act, which took the House of Representatives the first week of July. The pre -voters did not care that experts have been warning for some time.
And while in Europe Pride Marches Being forbidden and at the same time the president of America stated that there are only men and women, our outgoing cabinet withdrew into the Transgender Act in the same week of July. Outgoing State Secretary Teun Struycken (Legal Protection, NSC) decided that this law, which would significantly improve the life of transgender people, was not even worth discussing.
It was also the week in which I The Handmaid’s Tale Herlas, the classic dystopian novel from 1985 by Margaret Atwood, translated into Dutch by Gerrit de Blaauw as The story of the maid. “I would like to believe that what I tell is a story. I have to believe it,” says Vanfred, the main character. She is in a difficult situation. Orthodox-religious men have grabbed power and feed a cruel dictatorial patriarchal regime, Gilead. Vanfred is not her real name. She is now from Fred, the man she serves. She doesn’t know if her daughter and loved one still live. In the event of a misstep, she is executed or banished.
It’s not for nothing that the book is a classic. It has a blood -curdling exciting plot and contains frightening current social criticism. “That is what you are used to,” says one of the female oppressors, a ruthless henchman of the system, called euphemistic ‘aunt’. “Everything may not seem that normal now, but in a while it will be different.”
The novel is a hair -raising warning how easily you can lose freedoms in a ‘normal’ -looking world and how soon people join a insane reality. “We lived by ignoring our ordinary life,” says Vanfred about the time prior to the grip. “Ignoring is not the same as not knowing, you have to make an effort for it.” I wonder how long we persist, when we reach the point that the situation is so extreme that ignoring is no longer an option.
But The Handmaid’s Tale Is more than a compelling page gymnast or a sharp social criticism. Vanfred gives a testimony in striking poetic language. “If this is a story, then I have the end in my own hands,” she says. She clinges that shredded control in a world in which she has no control whatsoever. Vanfred’s power lies in witnesses. By taking the word, she revolts. It is a story about the resistance in telling.
In Gilead the men have taken the floor the floor. Reading and writing is forbidden to them. But in mind, Vanfred weighs her words carefully. She refuses to call the room in which she is staying ‘my’ room: that would be a knee. She does not mention her real, forbidden name, but introduces him as a treasure that she will dig later. She sees her name appear before her eyes when she goes to sleep. In the cupboard in her room she finds a clandestine message from another woman scratched in the wood: Nolite in Bastardes Carborundorum. Don’t let the bastards get small. She praises the spell during the public prayer. The words enable her to imagine that there are other women who resist. “I believe in the resistance as I believe that there can be no light without shade; rather: that there can be no shadow if there is no light.”
It reminds me of the recent book Resistance women From historians Agnes Cremers and Mark Bergsma. The authors highlight the lives of ten women who did important resistance work in the Second World War, but rarely received the same recognition as those male resistance fighters after the war. They are all moving stories of ordinary people, ordinary women, who suddenly found themselves in an absurd reality. Their resistance work varied from helping Jewish refugees before the war, to hiding people in hiding during the war, from the forging of identity cards to stealing weapons. These women refused to ignore in exchange for a ‘normal’ life, they refused to accept the new reality.
Marie Blommaert is one of them. She ends up in prison as a twenty -three -year -old when she gets caught for her courier work: she transported food vouchers and the illegal resistance newspaper Fidelity. Her cellmate can let her wash at home and Marie borrows a towel. After a major interrogation, Marie embroider a secret message in the Zoom. “I am interrogated and threatened with everything […] But no names. Never be afraid because they don’t do anything. ” She removes the words by sewing the hem the towel.
Only telling is not enough. It must also be heard
The fact that Vanfred is looking for the words for what happens to her is an expression of hope in all misery. “If it is a story, even if it is in my head, then I have to tell someone at the moment.” There must be a listener somewhere, in a safer place. That means she is not alone. “I will you,, “ you say, like in an old love song. ” If she is not alone, the situation is not hopeless.
Perhaps that is what artist Aat Breur Dreef, another woman who tells Cremers and Bergsma. For her resistance work – the falsification of identity cards and the manufacture of bombs – the Germans send her to Ravensbrück concentration camp. There she records the horrors of the camp. She draws the dead cart, which transports the stacked corpses through the camp to the crematorium every day. Another drawing shows a crowded tent with women and children, who later on transport, into death. Another drawing shows a sick woman, dragged by two people in an old dress. Mothers with newborn babies who had no chance to survive. These drawings are also testimonials, documents that a recipient assume. I look at them On the website from the Rijksmuseum. They fill my screen. I force myself to study the faces of the women, their bodies, their eyes and what they saw. Perhaps Aat focused on someone outside of her world while drawing, on the other side of hell. An you. “You Can mean more than one. You Can mean: thousands, “says Vanfred.
Only telling is not enough. It must also be heard. The sadness of the stories Resistance women Is that in many cases the resistance work of these women is extensively documented by themselves or by others, but that their role is nevertheless not included or only incomplete in the standard works about the Second World War. They did say, but there is insufficient listening to these women. With their book, Cremers and Bergsma put that wrong right.
Towards the end of the novel Hapert Vanfred. Telling hurts her. “Once was enough: wasn’t enough once it all happened?” And after the war, Aat Breur puts her drawings away in a drawer. She doesn’t want to be confronted with it. Only when her daughter asks for thirty -five years later, does she bring them out and she will be open to it.
Vanfred also continues, with “this sad and hungry and filthy, this limping and mutilated story.” Again she brings a listener to life. “Because I tell you this story, I want you to exist.” In English it is stronger: “Because I’m count you this story, I will your existence. I tell, Therefore you are.“
Rarely have I felt so directly addressed by a novel. Vanfred has that I exist. That I read her testimony makes me witnessed. She gives me a role in the story, say about the plot. Because what do I do with what she told me?
“Just what you’re used to”. They criminalize people without papers. They hardly see asylum seekers as people. They limit trans people in their freedom. They take a walk with human rights, with the rule of law, with democracy. If we keep witnesses and make each other witnesses, tell each other again and again, this is not just, don’t get used to it, then we don’t choose not to ignore it. Then our resistance begins.