Black Man in the Netherlands

An Afro-Antillean Anthropology

Francio Guadeloupe

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781496837028
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Afroamerikanische Studien

Francio Guadeloupe has lived in both the Dutch Antilles and the Netherlands. An anthropologist by vocation, he is a keen observer by honed habit. In his new book, he wields both personal and anthropological observations. Simultaneously memoir and astute exploration, Black Man in the Netherlands charts Guadeloupe's coming of age and adulthood in a Dutch world and movingly makes a global contribution to the understanding of anti-Black racism. Guadeloupe identifies the intersections among urban popular culture, racism, and multiculturalism in youth culture in the Netherlands and the wider Dutch Kingdom. He probes the degrees to which traditional ethnic division collapses before a rising Dutch polyethnicity. What comes to light, given the ethnic multiplicity that Afro-Antilleans live, is their extraordinarily successful work in forging an anti-racist Dutch identity via urban popular culture. This alternative way of being Dutch welcomes the Black experience as global and increasingly local Black artists find fame and even idolization. Black Man in the Netherlands is a vivid extension of renowned critical race studies by such Marxist theorists as Achille Mbembe, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, and C. L. R. James, and it bears a palpable connection to such Black Atlantic artists as Peter Tosh, Juan Luis Guerra, and KRS-One. Guadeloupe explores the complexities of Black life in the Netherlands and shows that within their means, Afro-Antilleans often effectively contest Dutch racism in civic and work life.

PART 1

MY WORLD

ON URBAN POPULAR CULTURE AND CONVIVIALITY

CHAPTER 1

THE BEGINNING OF AN ANSWER

Nowadays, it goes against the grain to get critical interlocutors to see the Netherlands as I see it. To appreciate my political project in solidarity with those Afro-Antilleans and others whose act of decoloniality is to go against the grain and acknowledge that les Pays-Bas is part of the Dutch kingdom and belongs to the unruly multiculture that currently resides here, I begin by offering a clearing by way of a seemingly unrelated letter I wrote several years ago:

Dear Alyah,

Your aunties Sabah and Naima, with whom I have been best friends for years, asked me to write a eulogy to commemorate the passing of your father Yusef. I started doing so, but with every line I wrote, I recognized that I should actually be addressing you. Yes, you, a five-month-old infant. It is in you that his hopes and dreams live on. If your father did not have faith in love and life, he would not have conceived you. No matter how bleak a moment you will face when you grow up, and those moments will surely come, you must always remember that you are a symbol of his faith.

I address this letter to you not as an academic to a child, nor as the learned man to the novice. Such is the foolishness of those who take their social status far too seriously. I am writing to you because I realize that one of the most important aspects of human life is the passing on of advice. What I offer is advice. Sift through it, and you can use what you like.

I cannot offer you a credible explanation as to why your father was murdered. All I can say to you is that God, the beautiful name men and women of all cultures have given to Universal Justice, does not sleep. And God was not asleep the day your father died. So why did God then let such a terrible crime happen, you may ask yourself when you are old enough to fathom what happened. I advise you to never contemplate such thoughts. Such a question is not worth asking. It leads to madness and what’s more, it is actually not the right question to ask.

You should be addressing your question to humankind, for it is we who constantly show disregard for each other’s lives. Your father’s death, and I do not mean to trivialize it by saying this, is an echo of one of the consistent sounds our species has been making. When you realize this, despair disappears, and hope appears. For anything that we have created, we can re-create differently. God can lend a helping hand in these endeavors, for goodness comes to those who struggle and fight for their goodness and the goodness of others. I/We, meaning I am because We are, and We are what We are because of how each and every individual acts and thinks, is the simplest and truest philosophical formula. You will do well to remember this formula.

All this means that when you grow up, you will have to decide what role you will play as a co-creator of the kingdom of humankind. In the Netherlands, this little hamlet of that global kingdom, persons of Moroccan descent have a bad name. From my fellow academics who earn their bread and butter researching the so-called marokkaanse probleem, the Moroccan issue, you can get all the statistics about the felonies committed by Moroccan problem youth and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism among this sector of the Dutch population. From the mouthpieces of popularized barbarism, and by that I mean populist politicians and columnists, you can get a sense of the current sentiment that lives in the hearts of too many Dutch citizens.

From defenders of the Moroccan “community”—academics, liberal politicians, and columnists—you can get counterarguments to demolish the equating of the term “Moroccan” with crime and religious fanaticism. I refuse to offer you that.

I refuse to use your father’s death as a social cause, whether it is a liberal cause or a conservative one. Your father did not die for a cause. He died so that many of us can reduce ourselves solely to passion-driven beings because we are socially reduced to unthinking beings. Your father’s killer was such a being. You have every right to be angry with him. You do not have any right to hate him. Anger and hatred must not be confused. My way of not confusing them is to always remember that the person I am angry with is also somebody’s child. Hating him or her is dehumanizing that person and therefore indirectly doing violence to the mother and father of the perpetrator of the offence. Moreover, it makes the hater a passion-driven being, a being that does not combine passion with thought.

You must never let that happen to you, and we who love you must do our utmost best that this does not happen to you. And if we do our best and you do yours, when you are a grown woman, the Moroccan issue will be but a distant memory. You will be able to climb into trams, walk in the parks, and go to job interviews, without the sneers and the fears. You will also be aware of the new scapegoat (a recently arrived group). If you remember that I/We philosophy, you will not participate in that latest hysteria. You will combine passion with rigorous thought, which when done well breeds morality.

I promised your aunties Sabah and Naima to write a eulogy. I wrote a letter to you. I hope that one day you too will write a letter to someone who needs to hear words of hope in the storm that we call life.

Yours Truly, Francio¹

CHAPTER 2

THE SECURE DUTCH WORLD OF MY TEENAGE YEARS

Let me offer some background information before I explain how this letter relates to thinking about the Netherlands as though it were a Caribbean island—by which I mean, a place where living with difference is a fact of life. I arrived in the Netherlands when I was eighteen years of age. It was 1989. I went to live in the south of the Netherlands. The city of Helmond to be exact. The neighborhood where I settled was working class and multiethnic. I moved there because the apartments were cheap and affordable for a Dutch Caribbean student like myself attending university. For the most part, working-class Dutch of Surinamese, Moroccan, Turkish, Indonesian, Sinti, Roma, native Dutch, Antillean, Moluccan, West African, and East African descent and mixtures of all these groups lived there, sometimes side by side, sometimes indifferent to each other, sometimes fighting each other, sometimes with each other, but always cognizant that cultural difference was an inescapable fact of life. In this way it was like the West Indies, where people cannot experientially or conceptually live a life of cultural homogeneity (Benítez-Rojo 1992; Mintz 1996).

Sabah and Naima, born in Morocco but having moved to the Netherlands at the ages of eight and eleven, respectively, were some of the first persons I met there. Both parents had died. One after the other. A tragedy. Naima, just turned twenty-one, was charged with taking care of eighteen-year-old Sabah and Sulaima, her younger sister, who was ten at the time. Naima’s older brothers in turn supervised her, but they had their own families, and this meant that she had an enormous amount of freedom and responsibility. We immediately hit it off based on our love for urban popular culture. Shabba Ranks, Bell Biv DeVoe, Joe, New Edition, Michael and Janet Jackson, Keith Sweat, En Vogue, Kassav’, Juan Luis Guerra, Toni Braxton, Romario, Michael Jordan, Chaka Demus and Pliers, UB40, and Karyn White were our idols.

These forms of urban popular culture were primarily identified with the style of the Afro-Antilleans and Afro-Surinamese—Caribbean modes of being—and it was we who acted as the major cultural brokers.¹ What must be mentioned is that these expressions had a wider impact than more localized music/cultures such as Raï music identified with North Africa; the same holds for West African Azonto. Today, the latter is fully part of the urban scene in the Netherlands. Being urban and being hip means being Afro-Caribbean like. I was not aware back then that “urban” was becoming a cultural identity marker that can encompass the various ethnic groups who live on this Caribbean island called the Netherlands (to stick with the metaphor with which I began this chapter). The evolution of this encompassing identity will be discussed in part 3 of this book.

Sabah and Naima were forerunners. They were Afro-Caribbean like without relinquishing what they most cherished about their Dutch Moroccan ways. Sabah and Naima professed Islam while I did not profess any faith really, but contrary to what most people might think, this distinction did not create a barrier. Being into the urban was already in the early 1990s implicitly our encompassing identity. With them, I shared those vital years of transitioning from teenager to young adult. To me, they were like sisters. Their older brothers trusted me. We were family, so Yusef, the eldest son of Naima and Sabah’s brother Appie, was my family too.

Yusef my nefi, Sranan Tongo for “my cousin,” as I used to call him, was shot in the head when he sought to intervene in a conflict between two rival gangs. This happened in the southern Dutch city of ’s-Hertogenbosch, where he lived. Yusef was always trying to show renegade Moroccans another way of living. Trying to do a good deed proved fatal.

Sabah immediately called me when she heard the news. We cried together. I soon realized, however, that Sabah’s tears were not only about what had happened; they were also about the way the murder was immediately being framed. Once again, it became an ethnic issue: Moroccan gangs. Once again, it was being forgotten that Dutch Moroccans are Dutch too! I understood her.

The hegemonic message in the media and policy documents is that there are the truer Dutch and then there are us, the others; the newcomers (Essed and Nimako 2006; Geschiere 2009; Guadeloupe and de Rooij 2007). No matter that the others were born in the Netherlands, are of mixed ethnic parentage, or have lived here for years, they remain the “Others.” This unfortunately is also unwittingly conveyed in many historical and sociological publications bent on keeping it real—giving truthful accounts of what people often think and sometimes do. This is what the American scholars I seek to answer in this book read and hear about in conferences. There is much to commend in highlighting the “othering” of newcomers. There is rampant ethnic discrimination and institutional, everyday racism; there is no denying it. Yet it is my contention that we need to develop a language that does not unwittingly reinforce these divides. It goes without saying that university-based intellectuals are not the only ones in need of a new language. Some organic intellectual spokespersons of newcomers also frame the matter in exclusivist Us and Them terms. Ethnic and religious specificity and the figment of pigment become their badge of honor. Hegemony would not be what we conceptualize it to be, if it did not include the spokespersons of those deemed lesser humans. This habitual exclusionary Us versus Them framing is part of what contributed to Sabah’s grief.

Knowing that I write essays and give talks on multicultural conviviality and racism, Sabah and Naima asked me to write a eulogy for Yusef. They wanted a description that reflected their multicultural becoming, the mix of cultures that had shaped Yusef and them. Not a media representation that reduced them to being only Marokkanen afkomstig van het Rif (Moroccans from the Rif area of North Africa).

As I sat back and reflected on what I had put on paper, I realized that it was a poetic exultation of my teenage years in the Netherlands. All those whom I was closest to—who had no real institutional power back then—implicitly worked on what we had some control of, namely our embodied senses of personhood. Looking back, I realize that as an implicit act of decoloniality, we were collectively busy balancing the Conquistador and Nativo logics of being in ourselves.

The “us” I am referring to are not only Sabah, Naima, and myself but also Geertje, Mike, Dragana, Hassan, Martijn, Sonja, Mercus, and Wincho. We were Dutch citizens belonging to various ethnic formations—Surinamese, Moroccan, Yugoslavian, Moluccan, Antillean, and native; expressions of the unruly multiculture that had emerged primarily in the urban centers of the Netherlands. This was what “Dutchness,” or Dutch people, symbolized to me; it was us, too.

None of us denied our cultural roots. In fact, we were proud of our ancestry. Yet to limit the possibility of the erection of walls of cultural incompatibility that ethnic and religious pride can cause, we practiced our version of what in urban popular culture is called “the dozens” (Wald 2012).

We involved ourselves in contests of verbal dueling, whereby two or more of us cast aspersions on each other as others cheered on. You had to think on your feet and be quick with your tongue. You lost if you (1) began to curse, (2) got angry, or (3) could not respond quickly enough. We made harsh stereotypical jokes about each other’s background.

Outsiders would call some of these pranks downright sexist or racist. For us, it was all so outlandish that we knew it was really just a joke. In our play of the dozens, we never sought to totally humiliate each other. And we were milder in the presence of outsiders—family members or friends of friends—who we felt would not understand. A fight never broke out, because the cardinal rule of the game was that we would also make jokes about our own background. For instance, my mimicry of the speech of Hassan’s uncles trying to make themselves understood in Dutch would earn me a curse-out by Hassan, even if I also made fun of older Antilleans’ speech patterns. Yet he, too, would be the first to be critical of Dutch Moroccans who sneered at anything Dutch—those who were in our estimation too religious or ethnic centered. He would make jokes that they were much too enamored with the idea of cultural incompatibility. And whenever I began to excessively exalt my “Arubaness,” I would be on the receiving end—Naima would tell stereotypical jokes about the laziness of Dutch Antilleans. When Wincho, one of our Antillean friends, did not show up on the block on time, she would say something to the effect of: “hullie Antillianen kennen wel het goeie leven; Wincho die doet net als de mensen op Curaçao, de hele dag uitrusten zodat hij s’nachts beter kan slapen” (You Antilleans know about the good life; Wincho behaves like the people on Curaçao, he rests the whole day so he can sleep better in the evening). I, too, had to acknowledge that not all that was Antillean or specifically Aruban was good. There was a lot of complacency and in my estimation suspect use of facile arguments among Afro-Antilleans to excuse immoral behavior, such as, “Our ancestors worked hard, so we are entitled to work less and have a right to collect unemployment benefits” (I imagined our great-grandparents, who did not want handouts but respect and a fair share, turning over in their graves). No one was excluded from this process. For instance, Sonja and Geertje, whose grandparents were both born in Helmond, had to admit that, behind a lot of the talk, buitenlanders (foreigners) weren’t hired not because they lacked the so-called Nederlandse normen van punctualiteit en arbeidsethos (Dutch norms of punctuality and an untiring work ethic); there was also the cold, hard fact of racial and class prejudice. So, our version of “the dozens” was a way of teaching and helping each other to be open to other cultural ways by being critical of our own. Looking back, I realize that, every day while hanging out on the block, we built a common world through transcultural play that allowed for difference while deconstructing the walls of coloniality that kept us from truly seeing each other.

What was equally remarkable was the manner in which we positively embodied all the cultural material that was at our disposal. Knowing and being able to imitate cultural types was an asset. A way of crossing seemingly ethnic-specific lines until what mattered most was the quality of one’s crossing, not the ethnic group to which one belonged. This was our decolonial work; it wasn’t driven by extensive knowledge of critical race theory or related academic wisdom. Yet making the crossing of ethnic boundaries habitual—and thereby rendering ideas of racial essence an ineffective banality—is a powerful everyday expression of decoloniality at work.

CHAPTER 3

APPRECIATING DUTCH CARIBBEAN WAYS OF BEING IN THE NETHERLANDS

I am smiling as I listen to and watch “Money Like We,” an urban hit featuring the rappers Sevn Alias, Kevin, Josylvio, and Kempi. It is part of a Dutch tribute album to the American rapper Tupac Shakur. The ethnicities of the rappers—Surinamese Dutch, native Dutch, Egyptian Dutch, and Antillean Dutch, respectively—don’t matter to most lovers of the music I speak to about the tune. It’s about how convincingly all of them perform the urban, namely being at ease and embracing life come what may. To be urban is to have artistic skills, a cool demeanor, material goods, and enough money to live a happy life. When you perform the urban well enough, you believe you are what you enact, and others do so as well, regardless of what takes place after the lights and cameras go out or after you are no longer in the gaze of those you are trying to impress. The clip and soundtrack of “Money We Like” remind me of summer days on the block in Helmond when my friends and I were playing at being urban; when, to use Tracy Chapman’s phrase, we dreamed of having “mountains o’ things,” when...