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Going Dutch
Aidan Chambers
De Götenborg Bookfair (najaar 1997) stond in het teken van ‘The Dutch Languages’ in The Low Countries. Nederlandse en Vlaamse (kinderboeken)auteurs kwamen er voorlezen uit eigen werk. Op verzoek van For Dagens Nyheter, de kwaliteitskrant van Zweden, schreef Aidan Chambers een artikel over de Nederlandstalige kinderliteratuur. Een persoonlijke en ‘buitenlandse’ kijk op binnenlandse aangelegenheden.
The Dutch have a saying: Being normal is weird enough (Doe maar gewoon, dan doe je gek genoeg).
Dutch-language children's books have never been particularly strong on fantasy or the romantic pastoral whimsies of talking animals, in the way of English books for the young. They have never sported a Victorian Alice living it up in a topsy-turvy wonderland, or a Peter Rabbit over-dosing on stolen lettuce, or a gang of furry friends pottering about in a men-only version of an Edwardian garden of Eden where the wind in the willows carries an anesthetic whiff of nostalgia.
The Dutch pride themselves on being a sensible, down-to-earth, tough, even hard-nosed trading nation, a people who have battled with the sea and built out of it a land fit to live in. Like the Swedish, they are also a nation which cherishes their children and cares for them very well. Not surprisingly, therefore, their classic childrens' books are about rural families like the one in Afke's tiental by Nienke van Hichtum (1903) or gutsy rapscallion street kids with hearts of gold, like Dik Trom in Uit het leven van Dik Trom by C. Joh. Kieviet (1891).
In the last twenty years the Dutch, and more recently the Flemish have enjoyed a high summer in their publishing for young readers. It is a blossoming that has produced some of the most enlivening and innovative of, not just children's books, but children's literature appearing anywhere in the world. And the feature that seems to me to mark it out is the nature of human life it best depicts, explores and
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celebrates: the weirdness of normality, the oddity that inhabits everyday life, the crazy peculiarity of even the most ordinary moment of the most ordinary experience.
What began years ago as an appeal to children for conformist behaviour - don't do anything that will draw attention to yourself, don't try to be different from everyone else - has been recycled into an ironic recognition of just how crazy, foolish, ridiculous, odd (the Dutch word gek means all these and more) ordinary life and the most conventional of people are. If you look beneath the surface and if you bring the inside secrets out into the open. Which is exactly what the best of modern Dutch children's writers do.
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The true queen
This change of attitude began in the 1950s with the writer some call ‘the true queen of the Netherlands’, Annie M.G. Schmidt. The Dutch equivalent of Astrid Lindgren, from whose hands, appropriately, she received the Hans Andersen Award in 1988, died just after her eighty-fourth birthday in May 1995, a nationally adored poet, writer of songs and plays and stories that are still among the most popular of any with both children and adults. One of my favourites of her books available in Swedish is her children's novella Minoes (1970). A social comedy in which a young woman who was (is?) a cat befriends a naive young journalist whose career she revives and whose life she invigorates when both seem to be going nowhere. The plot sounds banal, but the telling has enough claw and bite to draw blood. It's a story which in a gentle, amusing way is as radically political as it is satirically romantic.
Among Schmidt's literary herits is Joke van Leeuwen. As Schmidt once did, Van Leeuwen performs her own cabaret act. Unlike Schmidt, she is a graphic artist as well as a writer. Her books blend words and inventive black-and-white drawings into a song-and-dance whole: a cabaret in a book. Her central characters, always busy on a journey, see everything around them from comically skewed, sometimes almost surreal angles, either because of where they come from or because of their peculiar cast of mind. Her stories, full of jokes and gently mordant wit, question conventional logic with a child's naive and unsettling bluntness. Yet, even in her most extreme fantasies like
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her latest, Iep! (1996), in which a strange feathered creature, half bird and half human, is adopted as their own child by a man and his wife, her tales always seem to be entirely realistic.
Whenever I look at Van Leeuwen's books I'm somehow reminded of Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Only instead of her characters hanging about like Beckett's in one place, waiting for someone who never arrives, hers go off in search of that elusive someone-or-something they need, meeting along the way weirdly ordinary human beings and surviving adventures of the kind, it seems to me, Estragon and Vladimir must have encountered before they ended up where we find them in the play. Certainly Godot's inseparable pals prove how true it is that being normal is weird enough. I think the truth probably is that Van Leeuwen's characters are the children of Beckett's wayside philosophers. Judge for yourself in Swedish editions of two of her best books: Deesje (1985) and Het verhaal van Bobbel die in een bakfiets woonde en rijk wilde worden (1987).
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Mysterious story of childhood
One of the most extraordinary of modern children's books, a tale that resists categorisation, is available in Swedish. Pretending to be one thing while being another, short in length yet dense and profound in
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thought and rich in its use of language, it combines words and pictures in a formal, classical arrangement to tell a story about a simple domestic episode (a child playing with her doll, putting it to bed, punishing it for being naughty, hugging it for comfort) which at the same time is a psycho-drama that reveals an awkward secret of the unconscious which most of us keep locked away. Lieveling, boterbloem (1990) with text and pictures by Margriet Heymans deliberatily uses the conventions of children's fiction to demolish the artificial boundaries that divide literature for children from literature ‘for’ adults.
Heymans has matched this miniature masterpiece with another on a larger scale this year. In De wezen van Woesteland (1997) full-color illustrations weave through the words as a teacher who is too good to be employed in school - she reveals truths most adults prefer that children do not hear - tells three of her ex-pupils who come to visit her a mysterious story of childhood that requires the children to be as active in the story-telling and the solving of the story's puzzles as the story-teller herself.
This astonishing and beautiful book comes from Querido, the publisher that dominates Dutch children's literary publishing. People worry that one house is so powerful, but it must be said that as well as maintaining the highest of editorial standards, the quality of their book production, in typography, choice of paper, design and format, reminds us that good books are themselves, as objects, works of art and that children deserve the best.
The Querido editors understand what authors like Heymans and some of the best Dutch authors know, which is that children's literature is not simply for children or about them, but that it has grown into an art form in its own right. It is an art with its own poetics and its own aesthetics, which its creators and critics are busily developing and studying. Not less valuable or easier to write than the literature of adulthood, they are connected in parallel. It is a literature that engages and includes children, inviting them in rather than excluding or ignoring them. It is a form that, as the English poet Ted Hughes puts it, adults often ‘listen to in secret’ or pretend that they are only reading it, professionally or parentally, on behalf of children, while actually reading it for themselves, I am not saying that the majority of books published for children are like this any more than most fiction published ‘for’ adults is anything but journalism. However, more and
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more adults are openly recognising that what might be called the literature of childhood explores life in a way that no other form can and that we are better off for its existence.
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Cultural movements
Among those who acknowledge this is the Flemisch author Bart Moeyaert. He began his career as a teenaged writer of extremely popular teenage fiction. In his twenties, as he grew in his craft, he began to see what was possible within the conventions he was using, what it is in writing that he most values (the density of language itself, its nuances and music), and where his talent could take him. His first fictional expression of this understanding was his youth novella Kus me, published in 1991, which brought him admiring critical attention as well as commercial success. It won the premier Flemish prize, the Book Lion, and the German Jugendliteraturpreis, as well as being adapted as a play.
Now in his early thirties, Moeyaert's range has widened and he has become a literary artist who won't be confined by assumptions about what is and is not ‘for’ children. His little book Mansoor of hoe we Stina bijna doodkregen makes play with the very idea of any separation between children and adults, for this remarkable very short story is about a Flemisch family gathering during which a ‘war’ breaks out between the children while the adults have an argument. It is a fictional study of power and conflict, and it won for its author the Flemish Book Club Award 1997.
Moeyaert is completely aware of modern cultural movements, and makes use of them. But he is also thinking out the possibilities (and the limitations) of the ‘old fashioned’ book, which he realizes is about to be released by the new electronic means of communication to enjoy a future as significant as that of painting after the invention of photography. The camera freed painting to be something it could not be before photography took over the routine requirements of documentary representation. Rather than putting an end to painting, as many thought photography would, it allowed painters to concentrate on the particularities of paint itself, and out of their rethinking of what painting is about came Impressionism, Cubism, abstraction, and the flourishing of painting we have witnessed in the twentieth century.
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So it must be in the next few years with the Book. And more than any others, the best writers of children's literature are currently rethinking what the Book can do that no other form of communication can.
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Poetry and pictures
Among these in the Netherlands is an author-artist who seems to me to epitomise everything of the best that is happening in that country and in children's literatur generally. Ted van Lieshout is a poet, novelist, playwright, and a trained graphic artist. Aged forty-two, he has already produced a body of work that marks him out as exceptional. His picturebook of poetry, Mijn botjes zijn bekleed met deftig vel (1990) is all-in-one: a book of poetry, a book of pictures, a book of poetry-and-pictures, a story of a boy's life, a history of painting, a commentary on the Netherlands, and a drama of childhood. I know of no other children's book anything like this.
Van Lieshout latest book, Een lichtblauw kleurpotlood en een hollend huis (1998), is an artwork of a similar order. A boy celebrates his tenth birthday by making a book, the pictures in which are full-color collages composed of little domestic items that have been important to him. The words are texts, mostly poems, he has cared for at some point in his life. On transparent pages that interleave the picture pages are dialogues, mini-scenes, between the boy and his mother that are sometimes about the pictures and sometimes play with language inspired by poems we see through the transparent pages. The light blue pencil of the title belongs to a box of pencils ‘all the colours of the world’ that the boy asked his mother to give him for his birthday. The running house is a snail. Both are metaphors you must read the book to decode.
Child and adult together in the book, text and pictures, the point of view controlled by the consciousness of the ten year old, the object of the book itself being an integral part of the drama, and the reader involved in the making of meaning: much that I was trying to say about children's literature as an art form is epitomised in this one handsome volume.
Equally signifant is Van Lieshout's most recent youth novel, Gebr. (1997) in which a teenager comes to terms with his younger brother's
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death and his own sexuality through his reading of his brother's secret diary, to which he adds, sometimes writing between the lines, thus creating a dialogue that both keeps his brother alive and yet also acknowledges his loss. A deeply moving short novel, its best feature is the author's rare ability to express simply and precisely the most deeply personal movements of thought and emotion in a direct, uncluttered and witty manner. You can taste some of Van Lieshout's qualities in his children's story, De allerliefste jongen van de hele wereld (1988).
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Embarrassing incomplete
The Dutch have not produced a body of literary youth fiction of the kind we are familiar with from English-language and Swedisch authors (Peter Pohl's novels are greatly admired in the Netherlands). But the signs are that this is a developing area. In Flanders Ed Franck has been working at it for years. Besides Moeyaert, among newer voices is Anne Provoost, who has enjoyed rapid success with three novels which deal with ‘issues’ like incest and the environment in Mijn tante is een grindewal (1990), racism and the far right in Vallen (1994) and her latest a shift to magical realism, De roos en het zwijn (1997), based on Beauty and the Beast, a saga of guilt and penance, mercy and justice in a magical setting. In the Netherlands Imme Dros, Anton Quintana, Willem van Toorn, Karlijn Stoffels and others are adding to the list.
All this is partial and embarrassingly incomplete so vibrant and productive is the Dutch scene at the moment. I've said nothing of well-known Dutch writers and illustrators such as Paul Biegel, Dick Bruna and Max Velthuijs, nor of author-artist Wim Hofman who ranks among the highest, nor the Aesopian fabulist Toon Tellegen, nor poet Willem Wilmink and the resurgence of poetry for children after a slump since the nineteen seventies. I've not mentioned the novels of Els Pelgrom and Guus Kuijer, omissions which would be considerd by some Dutch readers almost a crime, nor the work of Veronica Hazelhoff or Hans Hagen, André Sollie, Peter van Gestel and many others.
Examples of their work will no doubt be on display, along with some
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of the authors themselves, at the Göteborg Book Fair. The odd fact is that my own books are read more in Sweden and the Netherlands than anywhere else. Naturally therefore, I rather like both countries. So it is a pleasure to know that the one is celebrating the Children's literature of the other. |
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