Dutch Distorted

Dutch culture today is marked by a complicated double imperative: on the one hand a principled intent to respect cultural difference in all its manifestations, on the other hand a principled suspicion of this intent fuelled by the recognition that such multi-cultural openness may well amount to an insidious recuperation of difference in terms of the same. The ‘host’-system bends over backwards to welcome the voice of the other, but the migrant writer's voice threatens to be smothered in the self-congratulating grasp of this embrace. Prior to being allowed to make a difference, the migrant writer's voice is already solidly configured as, precisely, same difference. Momo, a novella by Hafid Bouazza, a Dutch author of Moroccan descent, is a case in point. In what looks like a perverse refusal to play the game, Bouazza carefully eschews any transparent reference to his double cultural background, opting instead for an extremely disciplined representation of run-of-the-windmill Holland. Yet the other will out, and Bouazza intelligently channels this inevitable irruption of alterity in an uncanny allegory of Dutchness that leaves everything to the imagination

Aesthetics · Art · Literature · Media studies · Novella · Openness to experience · Political science · Politics · Representation (politics · Sociology · Uncanny · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · History · Law · Migration, Policy, and Dickens Studies · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Psychology · Social Psychology