Other People's Countries: A Journey Into Memory
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The original vicinal began in 1888 and worked for just under seventy years, and by my reckoning the tourist train is well on the way to outlasting it. Père Doffagne passed it on to fils Doffagne as a going concern, and it is a hugely successful enterprise in the brothel of packaged sightseeing that Bouillon’s tourist industry has become.
Marx’s exact words are ‘Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.’ I would add that Marx forgot to add that Hegel forgot to add that the farce would last longer than the tragedy, and that the parody would outlive the original. But that sometimes you have to settle for the farce and the parody because they’re the only kinds of memory you’re likely to get, the only evidence that there was an original in the first place.
NATIONAL DAY
I’M THINKING OF those Belgitudinous sallies of self-mockery by which the country makes you patriotic despite itself, despite your distance, your irony towards the country and, most of all, the country’s own irony towards you. There are forms of ironic belonging we adhere to in Belgium at a national level, because they are alternatives to the abrasive separatism with which we’ve been threatened for the last several decades. Patriotism here is definitely a spectator sport, in the sense that there are more spectators than players. It is certainly true that the place was made both by accident and design, and that the two communities – three if you count the German community – have nothing in common and little reason to be together.
The fête nationale in Bouillon is unusual for the fact that it also plays the French national anthem, ‘La Marseillaise’, alongside the Belgian one, ‘La Brabançonne’. But already we have a problem, because the ‘Brabançonne’ is repudiated by many Flemish because it was written in French (the lyrics are in fact by a Frenchman). The last few years I’ve been the fête nationale in Bouillon has been dismally attended. It is held at the war memorial by the river, where the dead of two world wars and one UN soldier from Bouillon killed in Somalia, along with the executed hostages from World War Two, are commemorated on a stele with an iron statue of the Walloon cockerel, a cockerel ‘rampant’ as they would say in heraldry, on the top. Usually the only people who attend are, aside from me and my Welsh-speaking children, a few tourists, some local politicians who want to be seen by other local politicians, and a handful of old people of my grandmother’s generation.
There is a brass band that starts at the Hôtel de Ville and parades through the town picking up followers the way an old clapped-out vacuum cleaner picks up dust: no longer by suction, but by dragging its nozzle along the floor and hoping to engage a few tufts. The fire brigade and police are supposed to attend but last year the fire brigade forgot. National day doesn’t count for much when your real sense of belonging comes from the parish, the few square miles you’ll cover with your feet in a lifetime where stasis becomes indistinguishable from change.
The most poignant sight at my last fête nationale was an old lady, a contemporary of my grandmother’s, attending the ceremony while simultaneously pushing and being held up by a tartan shopping trolley on wheels. From it there hung a lucky rabbit’s foot dyed in the national tricolour of red, yellow and black, clipped to the rim of her trolley with a clothes peg. I couldn’t have put it better myself.
THE BELGIAD
CAESAREAN STATE:
every roadsign a mirror
every town a suburb
*
Magritte’s Saturn: all rings and no planet
the ever-provisional
coastline dreaming of sea
*
Maigret’s Liège stands in for itself
its anonymous crimes
sweepings from the poorhouse floor
Charleroi’s slow factories turn like the Ferris
wheel in The Third Man
*
Louvain, Gand, Anvers
river-cities face to face with themselves
Leuven, Gent, Antwerpen
*
Bruges one long aftermath, held breath
*
Bouillon to Blankenberg,
Martelange to Knokke
300 kilometres of frontier
united and untied
*
From the citadel of Namur, Baudelaire’s Paris
appears in a cityscape by Rops: France doubled,
*
doubly not. The Meuse rolls through
as many names as it has valleys to run dry in.
*
All has that faint emphasis, as if the place were in italics,
could look like elsewhere yet be nowhere else.
DÉJÀ-VU
TWO TENSES GRAPPLING with one instant, one perception:
forgotten as it happens, recalled before it has begun.
AFTERWORD
With this sort of writing it seems important to distrust the material, maybe even to make distrust itself the material.
I once read an article about a tribe of Arabs who had, sometime in the late nineteenth century, invented a set of picturesque traditions for the benefit of explorers and Orientalists who came to photograph them, measure their heads, barter for goods and generally anthropologise them for newspapers and academic articles. A group of elders had been in charge of developing these traditions for the anthropo-tourist market, and when the anthropology season was over, the craniometers packed and the tripods folded, this tribe of inscrutable and exotic ‘Others’ went back to living a life which, give or take a few differences of climate and diet, looked pretty much like everyone else’s. A century later, the tribe still practised the same traditions, but by now they had become real traditions: divorced from their initial cause, they had taken on the authentic mystique of genuine identity-markers. They had become what they had pretended to be.
But it’s not just them, it’s all of us. Here in Bouillon I have watched small traditions or tribal habits and beliefs – a street festival here, a patois phrase there, a local legend or a piece of manufactured family history – change from things you tell or perform or invoke for others to things you tell yourself, that you invoke and perform for yourself in order to be and to remain yourself.
*
In my mind, Bouillon was never changing but never static either, like endlessly falling never-settling snow. Just the idea that Bouillon might go on while we weren’t there, that it might have a normality we were not part of, was troubling and melancholy. ‘What do pets do when humans aren’t looking at them?’ my niece once asked me. It seemed as if she’d been saving up the question for me, since I clearly had the air of someone who had been troubled by similar problems.
I remember wondering why things changed all the time, why they seemed to have to change, but never changed in Bouillon. Sameness has its wonders – you just have to eye its static mysteries from the proper angle and with the right apparatus. You have to understand that duration is not measured only by events – though it’s by events that we are taught to understand time – any more than life can be understood solely by movement. But how else could it be done? Our attention to events prevents us from comprehending processes, beside which events are just the spume that rides the wave. Then I read Lévi-Strauss: continuity needs as much explanation as change, he wrote. He was right. We were asking the wrong question. Instead of wondering why things changed, we should really have been asking why they didn’t.
My mother left Bouillon, then Belgium; my aunt Collette, married to Claude, died childless and my uncle Jean-Pol moved to Martelange on the Luxemburgish border, where he and his wife adopted Yann, a boy from a Vietnamese orphanage who is now grown up, gay, and lives in Brussels; my sister lives in Edinburgh and I live in Caernarfon and Oxford. Our parents are dead. This house, in which scores of people lived and died, ate and cooked and worked and slept, fucked and gave birth and argued and laughed, is empty for all but a few weeks in the summer and Easter. There are no more Lejeunes in Bouillon, an
d all it took was one generation – one early death, one infertility, and one emigration – to put an end to hundreds of years of our branchline of people and place. Is that continuity or is that change? And does it even need explaining? Compared with the millions of brutal, extreme, violent and tragic stories thrown up by the twentieth century about places and people, this one barely counts.
What I want to say is: I misremember all this so vividly it’s as if it only happened yesterday.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’d like to thank various people who helped me with this book, and who, in different ways, enabled me to capture things I thought I had lost, or who helped me find the angles of vision and the ways of thinking and feeling that gave the material its interest: John Redmond, Charles Mundye, Gilles Ortlieb and Sarah Cochran. My children and their mother have always appreciated Bouillon and understood what it meant to me: the fact that I still have it at all is down to their willingness to return with me several times a year and let me marinade, like my ancestors, in the place’s Wallonitude. Then there is my family, for whom I have yet to write a book in a language they can read; Claude Feller, Guy, Agnès, Patrick and David Adam, and Johnny, Marie-Paule and Yann Lejeune. No one could wish for better people to have grown up with.
A large part of this book was written in Brussels, during residency in Passaporta, to whom I owe grateful thanks for a reflective stay in the post-national city-state that our capital has become. I am especially grateful to Sigrid Bousset and Anne Janssen: hartelijk dank.
I am grateful for permission to reprint ‘The Belgiad’ from The Canals of Mars (2004) and ‘Empty Courtyard’, ‘The Old Station’, ‘Déjà vu’ and ‘My Mother’ from Jilted City (2010), both published by Carcanet Press.
‘Doors and Windows of Wallonia’ first appeared in the Literary Review and ‘The Bouillon History Circle’ in PN Review.
All the photographs were taken by the author.
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Copyright © Patrick McGuinness 2014
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