In the life and work of the Dutch writer Abdelkader Benali (1975) themes of travelling, migration and movement are closely connected. Benali has lived in Beirut, Rotterdam and Rome, and uses these and many other places as backdrops of his literary imaginings.  During the Travelling and Translation event at UCL’s new Centre for Low Countries Studies, the author explains how traveling can set off ‘language machines’.

An accomplished long-distance runner, Benali is always on the move. Before he came to London, he ran the Marrakech half marathon in an hour and a half. Morocco also provided the scenery for his debut novel Wedding by the Sea (in Dutch: Bruiloft aan Zee (1997)), which launched him into the Dutch literary scene at the age of 21. In the novel Benali created alluring images of migrants returning to, what he calls, ‘their authentic place’.

Having moved from Morocco to the Netherlands himself at 4 years old, he argues that the impact of migration sharpened his sense of early memories. Whilst learning Dutch at his new school, he intuitively understood that grammar positioned him in a complex society: ‘I am; you are; he is… I soon realised that language is always about social relationships.

Benali recognises creative possibilities in passed-on memories too. He refers anecdotally to his parents chatting about their Berber village, at home in Rotterdam: ‘My parents definitely weren’t storytellers, but through gossip, through their fascination with personal relations, I always felt I knew the people in their Moroccan village well.’ It was exactly because communication in the 80s was limited, that his imagination came into play. His grandfather would travel 30 miles on horseback to find a phone booth in the next big city to call his father.
The imagination of the young eavesdropper sparked when Benali picked up snippets of conversations about rainfall and potato growth: ‘It is the absences in gossip, the gaps in communication that allow a writer to create interesting images of place.’

An attentive teacher at his primary school noticed Abdelkader’s talent for observation. ‘Mister Bart’ encouraged the boy to bring a notebook on his family’s travel to Morocco during the summer holidays. The notebook was bound to get lost on the journey, but this ‘memory gap’ eventually inspired De stem van mijn moeder (2009, My Mother’s Voice). Benali describes this novel about a Moroccan family in Rotterdam as a study of different responses to migration. The novel’s main character is one of a twin, a successful photographer – a nod to the importance of visuals to Benali.
Though ‘My Mother’s Voice’ roughly discusses the same themes of his first novel (a migrant family re-visits Morocco), there are clear differences. Less echoes of Rushdie’s magical-realism; more – often funny – contemporary sketches of intergenerational misunderstandings, prejudices about migrants in the Netherlands and mid-thirties anxiety. Many voices occur in the novel: in the end, it is up to the reader to figure out whose story she has actually heard.

Perhaps forced upon him since his early debut, Benali has gradually acquired a self-assured public persona and skilled social media presence. He is often asked to present ‘the Moroccan migrant view’ in Dutch media or to comment on multiculturalism. It seems natural that he has become more outspokenly political.
Frustrated with the harsh speech that has hijacked conversations about migration in his country, he says: ‘People who are younger than me, who lived in the Netherlands far shorter than I did, now tell me I should leave and go “home”… I remember when the Berlin Wall came down; the sense of hopeful excitement amongst teachers at my school stuck with me. The EU is now encouraging the building of walls everywhere.’ Not without irony he refers to Moroccans in Morocco echoing the current migration debate in Holland: ‘In North Africa they complain about migration from the South now: “These migrants, they will take our jobs; they will steal our money…” Migration, movement, curiosity about others: they’re not bad things at all.’

Benali’s use of the expression ‘language machine’ is apt given that his entire oeuvre seems to generate movement into creative and societal engagement. He has broken down a few walls too, with a contagious and optimistic view on connecting with others. The very literal movements of global migration and exile, of global tourism have a political and environmental impact that shapes all our individual lives. It is an uplifting reminder to hear that there is much creativity and humour to these movements and machines.


This post originally appeared on the UCL Events Blog. Travelling and Translation was the first in a series of events on Dutch language, art and literature at UCL's Centre for Low Countries Studies.

Over the past few weeks, I got to know someone special. It sparked off as an online encounter – an email trail about translations.
Her name is Ester Naomi Perquin, and she is an award-winning Dutch poet. I was invited to translate her work for the Contemporary European Poets series.

Translating someone’s poems is a slightly schizophrenic experience. Whilst weighing Ester’s words and analysing her work, I felt I was peeking into her brain, aligning my thoughts with hers. I quickly realised her poems were products of literary craftsmanship: with depth and a refreshingly humorous side to them, though often heavy in subject matter. However, when Perquin flew over last Thursday to read her poetry in London for the first time, I realised that to meet the poet Ester Naomi Perquin in person is something else. This live bi-lingual poetry event allowed for an inspiring dialogue about literary translations, and poetry, as a means of erasing the poet.

Perquin’s observant, almost distanced outlook on, for instance, a shooting in a shopping centre may come from her endeavour to get rid of all individual connotation. Poetry goes beyond the personal, she says: “I write to erase myself. A good poem has nothing to do with me.” Erosion of the self also rings through in a poem in which Perquin describes a response to a misdialled phone call by a woman who asks for “a Richard”:

There are people from whom I differ less than a number

but their mothers do not know me, will never call

You are wasting your time, I merely exist out of partial voices

partial faces, not worthy of a Richard, not a dog

have I ever brought more than hesitant semi-presence

But Perquin introduces and reads out her poetry in such a personal and engaged style. She readily admits: “It’s a difficult process; I simply cannot not be myself.” She returns to the seemingly contradictory ideas of both erasing oneself and the individual poet’s creative approach, when discussing gender: “I do not approach writing poetry ‘as a woman’. But I can’t help being a woman. I understand that women have more, and more complex, social layers than men; I appreciate that. But a thing that women often do is to pretend these layers aren’t there.”
Perquin beautifully expresses her awareness of social pretence, among a group of teenagers on the beach, in ‘The Girls’:

Untouched from tip to toe

there they all lie, with the same voice

discussing the same mother.

What they are sums up all of their

eternities. This silent and sunlit sharing

of age, body, sun lotion.

Perquin's ideas about translation are well-defined and, at the same time, humbling: “Translation enables me to look at my work afresh. I am lucky to understand enough English to comment on some of their work, but I have to trust my translators and let go. A good translation is a work of art in itself.”
Of course, she says this in exceptionally good English. Then she starts reading out her verses in Dutch, and silence reigns among the mainly English-speaking audience.
To listen to poems in a foreign language, live, is surrendering to a new rhythm, foreign sounds, feeling at loss for a moment. Before you capture what has been said in translation, you briefly inhabit a lyrical landscape of in-between. Live poetry is something else.
 
Perquin’s work has been translated into English previously and some of these translations are available online.

The Contemporary European Poets series was an initiative of the School of European Languages, Culture and Society at UCL, in partnership with the Arts & Humanities Research Council and Poet in the City.
It brought to London celebrated poets from Hungary, Holland, France, Germany, the Faroe Islands and Italy, for showcase events at Europe House.

This post originally appeared on the UCL Events Blog. I convened the event in May 2013 and organised   another evening with Ester Naomi Perquin in September 2014 at Senate House.

It is exactly this personal scale that Benali and Matar say is essential to literature written in response to political events. Their own writing seems to focus on small gestures, family ties, relationships.
Neither of them feels the need to write ‘the Great Arab Spring Novel’. “That simply sounds ridiculous,” Benali said. The two writers share a fear of ‘Big Histories’, especially when it comes to describing the recent revolutionary events in the Arab countries.

Benali expands: “9/11 has brought the Big Story back. And it is suffocating. I am looking for more nuances.” When Benali lived in Beirut during the Lebanese war in 2006, he felt it was important to speak to people on the ground. The chance meetings he described as a result were very different impressions of war than the ones the Dutch media presented. Matar: “It is difficult to understand what it is – what we call – the Arab Spring. I don’t claim I do. I find it tough to pronounce.”

Because of his personal history, Matar is often seen as a natural spokesman for freedom of expression. But the author quickly says that writing never made him feel particularly brave. To speak out against the dictator Gadaffi brought more anxiety and instability to Matar’s life. “It was perverse, more so than heroic; it was a tangible trauma. I secretly admired the ones who could stay quiet.”

Benali can relate to the attachment of shame to writing. His debut novel was written at his parents’ place, in a house that contained no more than two books, the Koran and the Yellow Pages. He was told to stop reading before his eye sight would turn bad. “I wrote about my family whilst I was living under their roof. I felt sad and guilty, watching them as if I were an anthropologist. It was as if I took revenge on them.”
“Literature is rebellious by nature, because it detaches itself from reality,” according to Matar. And, therefore, writing is a solitary protest: “In the end we are alone, because we distance ourselves through writing”.

I might argue otherwise, saying that Benali’s and Matar’s writing has brought readers closer to political events – both up close and personal. Though the exact rebellious impact of literary writing is impossible to measure – and may even be quite uninteresting – this event showcased a humanity and humility in writing from the Arab world, and a variety of protests against Big Narratives that are favoured by oppressors.

The event Time Travels in Literature and Politics (January 2012) was organised by the UCL Department of Dutch, with support from Index on Censorship and the Royal Dutch Embassy.
My blog first appeared as part of the UCL Event Blog.