MONTREAL
Met de eerste zes maanden van 2005 hebben wij al weer een vol verenigingsjaar achter ons! Het was goed en heel interessant.
Op 20 januari gaf Jake Knoppers, een van de eerste bestuursleden van CAANS Montreal, een verslag over “Bezoeken van Czar Peter de Grote aan de Verenigde Provincies.” Ook voor diegenen onder ons die veel aan geschiedenis deden, was het bijzonder boeiend en gaf het nog veel nieuwe informatie. Het streelde wel weer ons gevoel van trots voor ons oude land.
Henk Boshouwers vertelde ons op 17 februari over zijn ervaringen tijdens de Slag om Arnhem, welke hij, als jongen, heeft meegemaakt in 1944. Grote kaarten van de stad en het omliggende gebied werden gebruikt om alles nog duidelijker te maken. Fantastisch! Zulke persoonlijke herinneringen zijn toch altijd een belangrijke aanvulling op dat wat gepubliceerd is.
Dan kwam de beurt aan John Franken om ons te vertellen over de “Ervaringen van een POW in Japanse dwangarbeidskampen.” Als je deze herinneringen aanhoort vraag je je toch wel af hoe het bestaat dat Japan nu net kan doen of ze zich nergens voor hebben te schamen. Johns jaarlijkse demonstratie voor de Japanse ambassade wordt tegenwoordig met een kopje thee beloond!
“De stand van de levende poezie in Nederland, nominaties voor de VSB poëzieprijs 2005” was het onderwerp voor Maria van Daalen. Deze lange titel was ‘t wel waard! Zij behandelde werk van enige dichters als N. Wijnberg, B. Meuleman, A. Schaffer, A.Duinker en H. ter Balkt. Altijd leuk om weer eens “bij” te komen met ons landje, zoals het nu daar is! Ook goed om Maria weer te horen.
Onze laatste bijeenkomst was op 19 mei, toen Peter Tijssen ons een documentaire vertoonde over “Fons Rademakers, cineast,” met de vele stukken uit zijn repertoire en een documentaire over zijn leven, veel in Italië. Het was een erg interessante en wel georganiseerde presentatie.
En dan... de jaarvergadering. Peter en zijn vrouw Trics hadden alle leden uitgenodigd voor de vergadering bij hun thuis met een BBQ daarna! Bijzonder leuk - beste vergadering ooit! Veel dank. Wat betreft de vergadering, het bestuur werd in’t geheel herkozen en de plannen voor het komend jaar zien er erg interessant uit! Voorlopig kijken wij uit naar een goede zomer - hebt allen veel plezier!
VANCOUVER
Op de bijeenkomst van 10 maart gaf Margot Minjon, journaliste van de EO, een lezing over buitenlanders in Nederland. De vestiging van grote aantallen zogenaamde “allochtonen” is niet zonder problemen gebleven. Tussen 1990 en 2000 hebben een miljoen mensen uit niet-Westerse landen zich in Nederland gevestigd. Op een bevolking van in totaal 16,5 miljoen wonen er nu ruim 1,8 miljoen mensen van buitenlandse, voornamelijk niet-Westerse afkomst in Nederland. Er zijn een miljoen moslims.
Vanaf ongeveer 1999 is duidelijk dat de houding van Nederlanders ten opzichte van buiten-landers veranderd is. Was er voorheen sprake van tolerantie en vond men die buitenlanders met hun kleurrijke gewoonten wel interessant, of interesseerde het de mensen gewoon weinig, vanaf het einde van de jaren 90 is er een kentering in die houding. De grote populariteit van Pim Fortuyn heeft hiermee te maken. Hij keerde zich tegen de islam en vond daarmee enorm veel bijval. Eindelijk iemand die uitsprak wat velen dachten. Nadat hij vermoord was, werd het mode om te doen als Pim: zeg wat je denkt. Dit leidde tot een grote erwijdering tussen allochtonen en autochtonen, er ontstond een “Wij” en “Zij”-gevoel. Gaandeweg waren er steeds meer incidenten. Vooral de laatste twee jaar was het erg. En 2004 was een rampjaar. Een conrector van een school door een Marokkaanse leerling doodgeschoten, autochtone Nederlanders die worden weggepest uit niet-‘witte’ wijken, waarvan uitgebreid verslag wordt gedaan op de televisie, en dan de moord op Theo van Gogh. Er volgden aanslagen op islamitische scholen, moskeeën en kerken. Niemand lijkt te weten hoe het verder moet.
“Dit land is onherkenbaar veranderd,” schreven de kranten in hun Oudjaarsbijlagen. Voor Nederlandse immigranten die Nederland bezoeken, is hier op het eerste gezicht echter weinig van te merken.
On Thursday 14 April Joost Blom outlined some of the major features of Dutch and Canadian law. He began with their origins. Canadian law was built on the foundations of English law except for the private law in Quebec. That developed from French law, which the (British) Quebec Act of 1774 guaranteed would continue to apply in Quebec. The Canadian federal system, which dates from 1867, took the United States as its model, but with important differences: for instance, criminal law, marriage and divorce are federal matters - and, of course, Canada kept the British monarch.
The legal system of the Dutch Republic, a confederation of seven provinces, was dominated by customary law. In 1815, after the French occupation, the new Kingdom of the Netherlands adopted a constitution and a civil code largely based on those of France. The Constitution was comprehensively revised several times, the last time in 1983. The Dutch legal system has been profoundly affected by the law of the European Union, which takes priority over the laws of the member states and potentially covers all matters touching on the economic union. Joost went on to compare the court systems of the Netherlands and Canada, the powers of the courts, and the different styles of legal reasoning in a code-based versus a judicial-decision-based system. One example is the law of negligence (a "tort" in the common law system). In Dutch law it stems from article 162 of the Burgerlijk Wetboek (Civil Code). In English and Canadian common law its basic concepts are traced to a 1932 case of the House of Lords, Donoghue v. Stevenson, which was the first modern exposition of the basic concept of negligence (and involved a snail allegedly found in a bottle of ginger beer).
Dank je wel Joost voor de heel heldere uiteenzetting!!
Op 4 mei vond de herdenking van de bevrijding plaats. Wij willen hierbij onze hartelijke dank betuigen aan Dr. Julia van Norden en de heer Frank Gerber die CAANS vertegenwoordigd hebben bij de kranslegging.
Doeshka Timmer, secretaresse
AANS NEWS
The April 2005 newsletter has come in. The president, Jenneke Oosterhoff (Minnesota), announces that the next ICNS conference will be held in Albany, NY in June 2006 in cooperation with the New Netherland Project. The working title of the conference is “From the ‘Halve Maen’ to KLM: the persistence of New Netherlanders in the New World.” She continues: “The call for papers will focus on the transmission and persistence of cultural attributes from the Low Countries into the New World and vice versa, thus allowing for a broader perspective on issues of migration in both the old and the new world. One session of the conference will be devoted to the Rensselaerwyck Seminar, a special session will be devoted to the teaching of language and culture, and keynote speakers from the Netherlands and Belgium will be invited.” Closer to now, there will be a session on Dutch at the MLA as usual this year, in Washington DC, on “Tolerance and identity in recent letters,” on “Theo van Gogh and the limits of tolerance,” and on the relevance today of Max Havelaar. Tolerance and liberalism are clearly the key themes here.
There are brief announcements of the annual Rensselaerwyck Seminar, to be held in Albany on September 17; the sixth biennial ALCS conference, to be held at University College London on January 5-7; and looking further ahead, of the Historians of Netherlandish Art in Washington DC and Baltimore on November 8-12, 2006 - but session and workshop proposals for this conference should reach H. Perry Chapman at by October 1st this year. (The HNA web site is The College Art Association (web site will hold a conference in Boston on February 22-25, 2006 entitled “Rubens and friends revisited in the 21st century: aspects of the organization of 17th-century Antwerp large painting workshops,” and the deadline for submitting abstracts for that conference has already passed! Of the several art exhibitions around the US announced here, some are still open: one of oil sketches by Rubens at the Cincinnati Art Museum (till September 11), one of Rembrandt’s late religious portraits at the Getty (till August 28), one of Jacob van Ruisdael at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (till September 18), one of Pieter Claesz at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC (till December 31), and one on “Kalligrafie in Nederland” at the Universiteitsbibliotheek, Singel 425 in Amsterdam (till December 23).
We also have a report by the holder of the AANS scholarship for 2004-05 on the progress of his research in The Hague, “The Art of laughter: society, civility and viewing practices in the Netherlands 1600-1640.” This has involved him in studying a volume called the Miroir des plus belles courtisanes de ce temps (1631).
Contemporary publications of interest discussed in this newsletter are:
- Marieke van de Doel et al, eds.: The learned eye. Regarding art, theory and the artist’s reputation, Essays for Ernst van de Wetering. It is a tribute of fifteen essays in honour of the director of the Rembrandt Research Project.
- Jan Noordegraf: Een kwestie van tijd. Vakhistorische studies. A stimulating compilation of the author’s research into the history of Dutch linguistics, “in the very broad sense of the term.”
- Robert L. Tusler: Willem de Fesch, “an excellent musician and a worthy man.” The subject is the life and work of an 18th-century violinist and composer
FROM THE JOURNALS
FLANDERS
The articles in no. 65 (April 2005) alternate nicely between the technical and the artistic. On the former front, we learn about a Kortrijk company called Barco which specializes in screens, for advertising in places like Times Square, rock concerts, cockpits, traffic control, power stations and more. The Flemish have created a training centre in applied micro-electronics to modernize that industry in Brno in the Czech Republic, by upgrading the skills of technical college teachers and engineers. At home, the Interdisciplinary Institute for Broadband Technology has been created to work towards a society where information will be “accessible to the user at any time and in any place” by a wide variety of electronic means. It comprises a number of university research groups concerned with health care, logistics, the media, and access to government.
On the artistic front, the lead article celebrates the Floraliën in Ghent, a show of flowers and plants which goes from strength to strength. In the world of millinery, Flemish hat designers -Christophe Coppens, Bina, Fil & Baukis, Award/t - are in demand worldwide,. And an article introduces us to three contemporary Flemish painters. Luc Tuymans produces series of paintings whose meaning outside of the series, like our memory, is partial and unreliable. Raoul de Keyser’s work is “a reflection on painting” designed to make us think about “the way we look at things, from the most concrete to the most abstract.” A similar program can be seen in the work of Roger Raveel, “the doyen of Flemish painting,”who has his own museum in Machelen aan de Leie, where he was born and still lives.
DUTCH CROSSING
Vol. 28 nos. 1-2 (Summer/Winter 2004) is not only a bumper double issue but also has a wide variety of contents. Giles Scott-Smith (Roosevelt Study Centre, Middelburg) tells us about the US State Department’s Foreign Leaders Program in the Netherlands under Ambassador Tyler in 1965-69. The program hosted “up and coming and prominent” people from many countries on six-week visits to the US on an itinerary of their choice. It was of great importance at that time of growing Dutch opposition to the Vietnam War, but there is a tendency to choose for such programs those already favourable to your position, and in the Netherlands a large number of those chosen were young politicians in the conservative VVD party.
Erin Griffey (U of Auckland) continues her investigations of self-portraiture in Dutch art. In the 17th century artists modified the traditional view of themselves as painting out of desire and pleasure, and wish to be seen as family men inspired by conjugal love. Their children and their art works, they imply, are both contributions to posterity, and both appear in their self-portraits.
Edward Dutton compares evangelical Christian student associations at the universities of Aberdeen and Leiden. They share the same theology (rejecting evolution, for example), but the Leiden students rely on the example set by the lives they lead, not presuming to actively convert anyone; they have a reputation for throwing good parties, and beer is served at their meetings. In Aberdeen they talk to people on the street, and at their parties someone stands up in the middle and preaches about Hell.
The next two articles are on literature, albeit from very different periods. Augustinus Dierick demonstrates that the Enlightenment, so far from favouring reason over emotion(sense over sensibility), in fact sought to keep them in balance; pre-romanticism tipped the balance in favour of emotion. He shows this by describing three epistolary novels of the 1780s. Sara Burgerhart shows a balance. The heroine escapes from an unduly rigorous religious morality but comes to accept social standards, even marrying a man she admires but feels no passion for. Rhijnvis Feith, author of Julia and Ferdinand en Constantia, in contrast, is driven by a desire for ideal love connected with the hereafter, which must remain pure of earthly desire. For him, sensibility is “a way to enlightenment, albeit a religious and aesthetic rather than a philosophical enlightenment.” This is a (pre-)romantic and modern viewpoint.
Henriette Louwerse (Sheffield) looks at Paravion, the most recent novel (2003) of Hafid Bouazza, Of Moroccan origin, he has found various ways to write about the migrant condition but displace the question. The plot of Paravion, told in “wonderfully achieved sensuous prose,” is complex and fantastic. The men of a village all leave for the distant paradise of Paravion, which isn’t one, and the village turns into a pastoral utopia run by women - but then, as joyful sex gives way to family responsibilities, it becomes a place where you have to stay and work. At home or abroad, whether driven by desire or need, we are all migrants, but arrive nowhere new. Only love could change men’s lives, but men want to keep their old power over women.
The last articles are on language. Maarten Klein (Nijmegen) revisits the rule that the beginning of a noun-, adjective- or prepositional phrase cannot be moved out of the phrase (or conversely, no other part of the phrase can begin the sentence). Klein here disproves the contention that has been made by generative grammarians that adverbial phrases of quantity can be extracted from the noun (etc.) phrases and put first: such adverbial phrases, he argues, are not part of the noun (etc.) phrase. Roel Vismans (Sheffield) did a survey of students at Sheffield, Hull, Cambridge and UC London to establish students’ understanding of when to use the different second-person pronouns; on the basis of the results, he recommends to teachers what to stress when teaching this question. And Miranda van Rossum (London/Hull) also reports on a survey, this one being on the effectiveness of the interactive multimedia study packs created for the same four universities. There are packs on L. P. Boon, a sonnet by P. C. Hooft, the history of the Dutch language, and two on the Dutch Revolt.
Three books are reviewed in this issue. Go Dutch! (Bussum: Coutinho, 2003) is a language and culture programme on CD-ROM for university exchange students. One can learn a lot from it. It was marketed before it was complete, it ignores cultural questions of today, and it takes the grammar too fast, but what it does cover it teaches well, using all the AV resources a CD-ROM can offer. Wybren Scheepsma’s Medieval Religious Women in the Low Countries. The “Modern Devotion,” the Canonesses of Windesheim and their Writings (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2004) is an important book about an important pre-Reformation spiritual movement, and it is a pity its major points are so swamped in detail. And Bettina Noak’s Politische Auffassungen im niederländischen Drama des 17. Jahrhunderts (Munster, Warman, 2002), unlike previous works on the subject, examines a long period of time (1560-1670), and firmly ties the plays she looks at to the evolving political debate of that time on the best way to govern the new republic. An excellent study which suggests to the reviewer all sorts of interesting new questions.
SEPTENTRION
On commémore actuellement aux Pays-Bas le 400e anniversaire des rapports entre les Pays-Bas et le Maroc, et une partie importante du nº 2 de 2005 est consacrée à ces rapports. Ils remontent à 1605, quand les Néerlandais ont cherché auprès du Sultan une aide contre les pirates. Il n’était pas assez puissant pour tenir sa promesse, mais jusqu’en 1704, date à laquelle les Anglais ont pris Gibraltar, les Pays-Bas ont été “le partenaire commercial privilégié” du Maroc. À vrai dire, après cette perte, les rapports ont repris seulement vers 1960, quand des Marocains ont commencé à venir aux Pays-Bas comme travailleurs “invités.” Au cours des années, ils ont eu de plus en plus tendance à rester et a faire venir leurs familles, nombreuses. Le gouvernement néerlandais, en omettant d’organiser la formation de tous ces gens à la vie européenne, a préparé la crise qu’on voit actuellement.
Cet anniversaire permet donc de réfléchir sur les rapports actuels entere Marocains et Néerlandais à l’intérieur des Pays-Bas. Abdelkader Benali, écrivain néerlandais né au Maroc, trouve qu’il est temps que les Néerlandais deviennent curieux au sujet de ces gens venus s’installer parmi eux, car “Là ou règne la ségrégation silencieuse, croit l’âpre plante du fondamentalisme.” On nous présente aussi le poète Mustafa Stitou, avec un choix de ses poèmes, qui remettent en question les images que nous n’examinons pas: de notre nation, de la nature humaine... Fouad Laroui n’est pas trop enthousiasmé par la conversion du centre d’Amsterdam en un lieu touristique, ni par le nouveau quartier d’affaires à Amsterdam-Sud, ni par les jeunes musulmans qui n’ont pas appris la tolérance néerlandaise. (Lui aussi est né au Maroc). Mais “feignons de nous en accommoder ... Il y a encore quelques belles années à vivre dans la capitale de la pensée libre.”
Les Occidentaux ne sont pas oubliés pour autant dans ce numero. Considérons d’abord les rapports entre Wallons et Flamands. Les premiers ont créé des industries lourdes (charbon et fer) à partir de 1815, mais ils n’ont pas évolué au XXe siècle, se contentant de blâmer la Flandre pour leurs maux économiques. Heureusement, depuis 1980, ils se ressaisissent en misant sur le tourisme (on visite notamment les anciens lieux industriels) et les beaux-arts. Un artiste anversois, Jan Fabre, acteur, metteur en scène et sculpteur, nous fait voir intensément les corps humains, mais en même temps il suggére leur absence, leur transformation en un au-delà. Le mouvement néerlandais Droog Design a connu un succès fou partout au monde, mais aujourd’hui, aux Pays-Bas même, on reproche à leurs conceptions de ne pas se vendre sous forme de produits fabriqués. Non, sans doute: “l’attitude créatrice typique de Droog est chargée, expérimentale, autoréférentielle et ... assez complexe,” du fait paradoxal que ce mouvement veut favoriser le recyclage et l’artisanat, mais finit nécessairement par “fabriquer des nouveautés et ... ajouter à la surabondance existante.”
Complétons ce tour d’horizon en revenant à la littérature. On nous offre un extrait traduit de Zwarte tranen de Tom Lanoye. Ce livre fait partie d’une trilogie de romans “dans lesquels il brocarde, voire caricature de façon magistrale, certains côtés pas très reluisants de la politique et de la société belges,” dit la rédaction. Certes, la tentative de suicide d’un colonel, qu’on voit ici, n’est pas un exploit guerrier.