Black label/ white hangover #1 - a salute to Charl Landvreugd

On July 21 2011 yet another Dutchman flew over the cuckoo’s nest of colonialism. It was on this day that the Dutch newspaper Volkskrant published Michael Tedja’s bitter piece about Charl Landvreugd’s exhibition Agnosia. Landvreugd’s showing is a collection of art made by Black artists and the opening took place on Thursday July 14.

Tedja opens his tirade with: “It is absurd to select an artist solely based on skin colour. It should be about the quality of art.” In the Netherlands this can be interpreted in two ways:

1. I make it my business to confront and attack all racism because whenever race is used as an excluding factor this is always unacceptable.

or

2. Race should only be mentioned in the context of illustrating the negative results of this multicultural society and if you try to use it to specify anything that so much as leans towards excellence I will not take this lightly.

In the first paragraph Tedja states that Landvreugd made many historical errors and in the third paragraph he illustrates this by mentioning that on the Biënnale exhibition of 2003 (entitled: ‘We are the World’) curator Rein Wolfs showed the work of, and I quote “[…] an African. A pitch black artist, if you will. His name is Meshac Gaba.” Then he continues by stating that Fiona Tan, too, had her work shown. He mentions that "everybody" must have seen that Fiona doesn’t look like your typical Dutch valley girl and he wonders if she might have escaped Landvreugd’s radar because “[…] her light brown skin probably isn’t black enough for skin specialist Landvreugd.”

Man, Charl… Tedja sure told you! We all know that in a country where allochtonen* make up 14% of the entire Dutch population it only takes two examples to send you and your manifest of Black identity straight to the sewer. And no, the fact that Fiona Tan is Indonesian and not Afro-Dutch doesn’t matter because when someone is in the midst of a deranged delirium about race -and the politics that constructed its ever so Eurocentric boundaries- one cannot be bothered with logic or reason. While trying to face the frantic fear of ‘the other’ one has no time for questions about facts. With your Blackness… How dare you, Charl Landvreugd… how dare you???

Dutch tradition has it that Black is a label that should only be applied by white hands. A worrisome number of Dutch white folks thinks it’s up to them to decide when we are Black and when we have behaved well enough for them to consider us and/or our work beyond adjectives. Or, at least beyond any adjectives that may ‘remind’ us of our heritage. A robber who’s Black isn’t just a robber. More often than not news reports will describe this criminal as a Black (fe)male. If they really have a moment to spare they might even mention that (s)he is from Suriname, the Antilles or Africa.

When a Black person produces an amazing piece of art you will be heart pressed to find a review (if they pay any attention to it at all) that mentions the person’s Blackness and/or heritage in the first 4 paragraphs. Unless of course that person suffered genital mutilation, came her as a refugee and/or is diagnosed with sickle-cell.

And if you decide to do so yourself? “Well… that’s just very unpatriotic and highly oversensitive.” Why? “Because we’re all human. Skin colour doesn’t matter and the sooner we morph into one big happy rainbow the sooner we can spend that pot of gold at the end of it.” Or should we say 'at the end of us'?

Brother Landvreugd, I salute you for putting together Agnosia. Our people don’t only need artistic celebrations like yours… we, as a nation of people who are constantly assaulted by the arrogance and hypocrisy that fuel Dutch racism, deserve it. Our sense of self and readiness for renaissance are being built on initiatives like yours.

Due to a complete lack of interest I have no idea about Michael Tedja’s ethnical background but I truly hope he’s white. And not just any regular kind of white… Aryan white. Because honestly… it would be a damn shame if a non-white person is so busy preaching the white man’s Eurocentric gospel that he fails to realise that at the end of the day he will still end up in the back of the church.




*Allochtoon - a loosely used political term meaning non-Dutch, mostly meaning non-white, more than often referring to people from Suriname, the Antilles, Africa (the country, not the continent) and Morocco (not the one in Africa, the other one).

Untitled ('cause it's just that random)

At5, Amsterdam’s local television station, can never go too long without bothering us with their mediocrity. The intro of one of their items published on Thursday July 21 informs us that the police are looking for two boys who robbed a 60-year old woman.

The robbery happened on the afternoon of Thursday June 2. One of the boys grabs the iPhone of a 60-year old woman who was sitting in the subway with her husband. The woman reportedly was pulled to the ground and slammed her head against the seat in front of her. At5’s item also shows us two photos of the boys and a video shot by various surveillance cameras. To give the good citizens something to work with they inform us that the boys we should all be looking for are of Surinamese, Antillean or African origin.

Before I continue let me make very clear that truly I hope hell has a special swamp for folks who rob the elderly. I don’t see how being mugged can be anything less than traumatic but if you combine this with the fact that far too few seniors have the physical ability to protect themselves from their attackers –and/or the mental ability to fully recover from the fear that comes with this – it really makes the horror complete. These boys need to get caught and serve some serious time in a cell with a big breasted man who will refer to them Puddin’ and Fatback.

But while trying to make this happen let’s have another look at the text on the Wanted-posters. “[…] two Negroid boys of Surinamese, Antillean or African origin.”

First things first: All people –Black, white and bounty- need to stop using words like neger (negro) or Negroid.

Second… it is with these kinds of reports that At5 proves to be just another media outlet that fell victim to Dutch mediocrity. Because seriously… how do we know where these boys are from and how will information about the country/continent where they and/or their (grand)parents were born will help people find them? Did they do anything specific that assures us they’re not from Jamaica, Brazil or Argentina? And what does an African look like? Let’s, if only for a second and because we owe it to our own intelligence, consider the fact that if Africa is the world’s second largest continent there might be a variety in what Africans looks like.

Now don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying the woman who got robbed should have asked the boys to fill in some Nazi-esque census form that states all 190+ countries of the world but I am saying that unless the police is asking us to find two boys who are continuously rocking body suits and facemasks made of national flags they need to be a little more specific with their information.

Catch up, Kechiche! - in response to 'Black Venus'

Abdellatif Kechiche’s Black Venus has to be the laziest and most cowardly attempt to summarize someone’s life. It’s not even a film, it’s a still of an idea without direction. Which, for a director, is problematic at best.

Kechiche failed miserably in his attempt to paint a picture of Sarah Baartman, the woman who is unfortunately best known as the Hottentot Venus. It, by lack of a word that’s even more nondescript, is purely a cinematic chain of catastrophes. Dancing, cracking whips, humiliation, drinking, humiliation, cracking whips, dancing… times a thousand. A change of scenery comes when we are introduced to Georges Cuvier and his hoodlums, a crew that tries to hide their cruelty under the cloak of science. Touching, poking, resistance, rage… Suddenly we’re in a brothel. A doctor tells Sarah she has a venereal disease, she continues to work as a prostitute, she dies and one of her abusers takes her body to Curvier. He, being the monster that he is, cuts off her genitals and breasts, removes her brain from her roughly opened the skull, peels the skin from her skeleton and double checks if the classroom is nice and tidy for his next lecture. The end.

As the closing credits roll, the left side of the screen shows no more than 2 minute worth of snippets of the return of miss Baartman’s remains to South Africa. On August 9th 2002, 192 years after after she was taken to London, Sarah Baartman is ceremonially welcomed back home. The P.S.-like manner in which this is shown clearly states that after 3 hours of abuse, sexual exploitation, intoxication and numbness director Abdellatif Kechiche ran out of time and the story behind the Sister didn’t make the cut. To Kechiche the fact that Nelson Mandela asked for the return of South Africa’s daughter in 1994 and it took the French Parliament 8 years to finally take their hands off her obviously wasn’t as interesting as yet another extensive scene in which she dances in front of a crowd consumed by horror and horniness.

Upon her return home president Thabo Mbeki delivered a powerful speech that included the following statement:
“As the French Parliament debated the matter of the return of the remains of our Sarah to her native land, the then Minister of Research, Roger-Gerard Scwartzenberg said: "This young woman was treated as if she was something monstrous. But where in this affair is the monstrosity?" Indeed, where did the monstrosity lie in the matter of the gross abuse of a defenceless African woman in England and France! It was not the abused human being who was monstrous but those who abused her. It was not the lonely African woman in Europe, alienated from her identity and her motherland who was the barbarian, but those who treated her with barbaric brutality. Among the truly monstrous were the leading scientists of the day, who sought to feed a rabid racism, such as the distinguished anatomist, Baron Georges Cuvier, who dissected Sarah's body after her death.”

Doesn’t this statement deserve as much attention as the countless close ups of her bottom? Doesn’t Sarah?

Besides a short scene in an English court when she is asked if she has children and the scene when Hendrick Caezar, one of the two main abusers, yells something about how she used to breast feed his babies there isn’t a single moment that gives the viewer any insight in who she was. I’m not saying Kechiche should have summarized the complete colonial history of South-Africa but there’s at least one political event that should not have been left out. Why wasn’t there more emphasizes on the initiation of the law with the derogatory name ‘Hottentot Proclamation’? One would figure that anything that prohibits a Khoi woman from going anywhere without a pass and forces her abusers to literally smuggle her to London is significant enough to pay proper attention to.

To not mention any political events is one thing but failing to understand the necessity to give the audience something, anything that would connect the main character to a family, a people, a country, a town, a time and a tongue is an unforgivable shame. We needed to be taken back to 1789 to see the then still untouched Gamtoos River Valley where she was born and, where besides the constant threat of lions and Christian missionaries, her community lived peace. We should, be it in high speed, have been shown how the colonizers succeeded to make their way to Gamtoos and yes, there had to be at least one shot of a little 6 year old girl with eyes that mirrored a childhood drenched with fear caused by the violent wars between the original South Africans and the Dutch and other European colonists. Mind you that in none of the shots her father nor her Brothers, Sisters and the members of her community should refer this little girl as Sarah because ‘Sarah Baartman’ isn’t the name she was given at birth.

She should have been shown as a young woman who was engaged to a young man named Solkar who gave her the tortoiseshell pendant she continued to wear for the rest of her life. If not to show her as someone who loved and was loved then to at least pay subtle homage to the necklage that is depicted in so many of the drawings they made of her. Black Venus should have featured scenes of a young woman who, after yet another outburst of violence, lost her father and her husband-to-be but was bold enough to love again. There had to be a glimpse of the young soldier who stole her heart, took her out, found the house they called their own, was a father for their newborn but who left her in the midst of grieving the death of their baby. How would she later refer to these tragedies?

These events, questions and answers didn’t have to be shown in chronological order but somewhere throughout the story the unfamiliar viewers should have been given the chance to understand how we got to the point that’s being presented as ‘the now’. Without a proper preface to the present no film has the right to give the impression of being biographical. Kechiche’s little cinematic cringe looks, feels and smells the same as any history book that allows or even justifies people to think that slavery was the starting point of African history.

Black Venus is nothing but yet another cinematic crime in a long line of attempts to portray iconic Black figures in the Eurocentric history of slavery as symbols instead of syndromes. Symbols can spark a simple kind of sentiment while syndromes demand further investigation. One portrays a person, the other represents a people. With not paying any attention to the mosaic of personal, social and political misery that caused the numbness that Kechiche so rudely tries to play off as intoxication, he robs the viewers who aren’t familiar with Sarah’s saga of developing ideas about historical and contemporary fixations on Black bodies.

The legacy of her abusers finds its revival in every moment a Black woman is subject to Eurocentric ‘curiosity’ and unauthorized actions of affection, admiration or disgust. She is every girl who verbally, physically and/or spiritually revolts against people who ‘just’ want to touch her hair, skin or body and who feel they can do so without asking. She is Nicki Minaj when Regis Philbin decided the combination of white privilege and male superiority was justification enough to slap her booty and Whoopi Goldberg when stylists grabbed her dreadlocks and told her that they had no idea what to do with “that” hair. The ongoing obsession with The Black Female continues to be more grand than anything Kechiche could ever squeeze into a vulgar, nylon body stocking.

I can't help but be unpleasantly intrigued by Abdellatif Kechiche who wanted to make a film about a Black woman’s behind while all he did was make an ass… of himself.