The Low Countries on the Road
Travel Writing in Flanders and the Netherlands

‘Travel is my private form of reflection’, the author Cees Nooteboom once



said. ‘You are transported, carried along, and that gives you time in which to look around. And if you look carefully, you start thinking. Travel sharpens your gaze’. This pioneer of Dutch travel writing breathed new life into the genre in the 1980s. He picked the right time. The Low Countries had gone through a period of considerable austerity in the years after the Second World War, but now there was once again money for enjoyable things such as travel. And the events of May 1968 had made the Dutch more aware of events in the rest of the world, such as America, Eastern Europe and Vietnam. The hippies had long since departed to trek across India and Pakistan, and the floodgates of mass tourism had not yet fully opened. For a writer, there were still a great many unspoiled spots to discover. Cees Nooteboom (see The Low Countries 1993-94: 137-152) was one of the first to undertake genuinely distant journeys, journeys about which he wrote very fine accounts. The fact that those early travel stories have stood the test of time is demonstrated by a recent reissue. It contains accounts of Nooteboom's journeys through lands such as Persia, Burma, Malaysia, Thailand and, above all, Japan, and every one of these accounts reveals the greatness of a literary traveller. Self-reflection, philosophical ponderings and an elegant style go hand in hand with an unerring feeling for important detail. And it is this same combination of qualities which made



his latest major book Roads to Santiago (De omweg naar Santiago, 1992) one of the best books ever written about Spain. Even the Spaniards themselves share this view; the Spanish edition is already in its third print run there.

Cees Nooteboom opened the way for a flood of Dutch travel writing. Serious anthropologists, well-read mountaineers, inspired journalists, seasoned men and women of letters and even poets: they all threw themselves into the literary travelogue. The boundaries between literature and journalism became blurred; or more accurately, the two fields began to merge. Writers ventured into factual observation, while journalists began to produce finer sentences with more introspection than they had ever been allowed to write for a newspaper. Nonetheless, the genre remains fluid, without strictly defined boundaries. Some authors oscillate between novel and travel story; others have opted clearly for the novel. An example is Adriaan van Dis, whose The Promised Land (Het beloofde land, 1990) and In Africa (In Afrika, 1991) contain magnificent accounts of reunions with old friends in South Africa, a country to which, as a friend of Breyten Breytenbach, Van Dis was long denied access. But he has also reported on the terrible civil wars going on in the neighbouring countries, and on the chaos and dreadful upheaval in that great Africa. Van Dis demonstrates an unequalled talent for bridging the gap between travel and writing: ‘Language is acupuncture for me; it removes my fear. And while the bullets are flying around me, I hesitate over the position of a comma.’

Jan Brokken too appears to have gone back to the novel for good. His travel stories always were interwoven with literary precursors, in whose footsteps he travelled. In The Rainbird (De regenvogel, 1991) for example, he unravelled some of the mystifications surrounding the Belgian author Georges Simenon, as well as some of the characters portrayed in the latter's novels set in the African interior. And in Good Evening Mrs Rhys (Goedenavond Mrs Rhys, 1992), set on the island of Dominica, he attempted to

solve the riddle of the author of Wide Sargasso Sea, struck as he was by certain phrases in that book: ‘Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too close by.’

While some authors have abandoned the travel story, however, others have stuck with it and grown into world-class travel writers. Not only that, but in recent years excellent new travel writers have emerged - most notably the two Great Ladies of Dutch-language travel writing, Lieve Joris and Carolijn Visser. Both continue to write remarkable travel stories; both are writers who have succeeded in elevating the genre to literary status: their books contain dialogues which could just as easily have been taken from a novel, and both writers have a gift for raising the tension at just the right moment. In short, they use all the techniques of the novel to reach the reader with their story, to lure him into their (travel) world.

It was Carolijn Visser who, like Cees Nooteboom, gave a completely new impetus to travel writing in the 1980s with her book Grey China (Grijs China, 1982). In contrast to the well-intentioned stories about the blessings of the Cultural Revolution, seen through the rose-coloured spectacles of the manipulated group tourist, to which readers had been treated up to that point, Carolijn Visser introduced the New Dutch Travel Writer: critical, inquisitive, analytical, fearless and accepting nothing she had not seen with her own eyes. Here were no outrageous adventures à la Redmond O'Hanlon, or the unseemly arrogance of Paul Theroux; instead, the reader was presented with an open spirit with a great hankering for the truth behind the apparent reality. Just as a novel provides insight into the soul or into human existence, so a good travel story creates a window into a country or another person's existence. Naturally, even the travel writer himself harbours doubts as to whether he, a passing stranger, can ever really discover the true soul of the country through which he is travelling. Carolijn Visser expresses this poignantly in Voices and Visions. A Journey through Vietnam Today (Hoge bomen in Hanoi, 1993) when at a certain point, after visiting the cities of Saigon and Hanoi, she decides that she might after all have more chance of finding the core of Vietnamese history in the countryside and thus sets off to visit a farming family: ‘Well, I think, here I am sitting in an isolated mountain hut surrounded by a Muong family with a glass of rice wine in front of me. It's just that the soul of Vietnam is not really becoming much clearer to me’. And yet she was able as no other to get through to the ‘ordinary’ people thanks to her disarming approach. Full of confidence - which is not the same as naivety - she marches up to somebody who catches her attention and then she sees how it turns out. Usually it turns out well. The result is that she quickly feels at home with people, wherever she may be in the world, and becomes involved in their daily activities or family outings. This is what makes her travel stories about China, Mongolia, Haiti, Estonia, India and Vietnam high points in Dutch travel writing.

Similar things can be said of Lieve Joris. She proved in Back to the Congo (Terug naar de Kongo, 1987; see The Low Countries 1993-94: 284-285) and The Melancholy Revolution (De melancholieke revolutie, 1990), which deals with the collapse of socialism in Hungary, that she had the ability to write atmospheric, intriguing and tongue-in-cheek travel stories, a trend which she continued with The Gates of Damascus (De poorten van Damascus, 1993), a penetrating account of her stay with a friend in Syria. And recent-

ly she surprised everyone with her latest work, Mali Blues (1996).

Lieve Joris, too, intuitively pursues people during her travels whom she suspects of having a tale to tell. For example, she is on her way to Mali, but no sooner has she met a clever Mauretanian sociologist, than she immediately changes her plans and embarks on a fantastic journey with him through the country of his birth. The long title story is the best in this collection. In it, Joris describes the meeting and her weeks spent with the famous ‘blues man’ Boubacar Traoré, who bears the nickname Kar Kar. She senses that he carries a sad story within him, and that is above all the story she wants to hear. At first she distrusts her own motives: ‘Am I perhaps in search of a noble wild savage?’ But Kar Kar promises her: ‘One day I'll tell you a story. You may have travelled much in Africa, but the story I will tell is one you have never heard; no man can bear so much sadness. You will weep, and all those who hear your story will also weep.’ When he finally tells his story, it is not only Lieve Joris who is brought to tears, but the reader with her. After The Gulf (De Golf, 1986), in which she travelled alone through the oil states of Saudi Arabia, the Arab Emirates and Kuwait, writing a book which has become a classic about those countries, and after The Gates of Damascus, Lieve Joris has come up with a top-ranking performance yet again with Mali Blues. Together with Carolijn Visser and Cees Nooteboom, she makes up the Golden Trio of Dutch-language travel writing.

But new talents are also emerging. For example, there is Marcel Kurpershoek with his Deep in Arabia (Diep in Arabië, 1992) and The Last Bedouin (De laatste bedoeïen, 1995). He is an Arabist and diplomat who has spent much time with bedouin tribes in the desert and spoken with descendants of poets, simple shepherds and even with women, who are not supposed to talk to a Westerner at all. These are marvellous books which provide a deeper insight than any anthropologist could give of an ostensibly impenetrable culture. His recent work, Reunion in Jerusalem (Weerzien in Jerusalem, 1996), is also an interesting mix of history and topicality: only now does the background to the conflict surrounding the notorious tunnel, which in 1996 almost brought the Arabs and Jews to the brink of war again, become clear. Harm Botje, who spent twelve years in Cairo as a foreign correspondent, had already written an excellent book about that period, Under the Spell of the Nile (In de ban van de Nijl, 1991), but surpassed himself with The Devil's House (Het duivelshuis, 1994). It is a compelling and often hilarious account of Algeria in the 1990s. He pokes fun at the blustering leaders of the country, whilst at the same time presenting a serious picture of the excesses of Islamic fundamentalism. But he also presents the views of the Berber minority, who often have little time for fundamentalism, and travels to the Algerian hinterland, with the snow-capped mountains of Kabylia and the vast mass of the Sahara desert.

Sjon Hauser, by contrast, is more of a city rat: in Thailand: Soft as Silk, Flexible as Bamboo (Thailand, zacht als zijde, buigzaam als bamboe, 1990), he throws himself into the exciting world of lovers of the seamy side of life, of small-time hucksters. The Flemish poet Herman de Coninck also regularly ventured into the wide world in response to invitations to read from his own work; he wrote fine accounts of his experiences in The Cowboy Chaps of Mary Magdalene (De cowboybroek van Maria Magdalena, 1996), a book with a pleasant sense of self-reflection: ‘I am not a true traveller. Travellers

like to depart. I prefer to arrive’. He travels through Israel, America (‘America is not a land in which to live, but a land to be passing through’), South Africa and Ireland, but is fascinated above all by Africa, because ‘here you occasionally still obtain a glimpse of how the world would be without civilisation. At least without what we term civilisation. Me, without myself’.

It was a very different, and unexpected, land through which the Dutch writer Benno Barnard travelled in Begotten by God on Europe (Door God bij Europa verwekt, 1996). He opted for the country which held him in thrall: Belgium, ‘a bastard begotten by God on Europe, a tangle of languages, borders and corridors, the cherished battlefield of the Great Powers’. He criss-crossed the country, beginning in that area right in the east where most people still speak German because until 1918 they were subjects of the Kaiser. It is a fascinating story, particularly because of the linguistic confusion which arises in his every encounter with a Belgian. Later he goes to Antwerp, among other places, where he gives a splendid account of Jewish life today, rooted as it is in a long history. Barnard has a fascination with historical events, wars especially. But he talks a great deal with ‘ordinary’ Belgians too, for as he - a Dutchman born, but now a ‘Belgicist’ - writes: ‘Every journey in Belgium, however short, however long, ends in a café.’ A journey with many stopovers, then, but many conversations as well, for as befits the true traveller he travels alone and therefore has to talk to people.

Another writer who travelled alone, but who through anxiety was not able to penetrate to the true heart of the country, was Ellen Ombre in He Who Means Well (Wie goed bedoelt, 1996). Her chief aim in this book was to highlight the failure of development aid in Benin, with which the Netherlands has a cooperation treaty; in order to achieve this she loads her little Renault aboard the cargo boat which is taking her to Benin. There, everything goes wrong: the authorities refuse to release her car, she does not get on with the family she is lodging with and she has virtually no success in getting

hold of aid workers. Of the latter she says: ‘They came and went, were relieved by other do-gooders with a lucrative charter for a better life in the tropics. They lived in the finest houses in the most expensive districts.’ Nevertheless, her book remains suspended somewhere between an indictment and a travelogue.

Former colonies offer the Dutch-language travel writer a constant supply of interesting material: for Belgians there is the Congo, and for the Dutch there is Indonesia. The ‘grand old lady’ of Dutch travel writing, Aya Zikken, talks wistfully about the land of her birth in books such as Return to the Atlas Moth (Terug naar de atlasvlinder, 1981). In The Spines of the Pig (De stekels van het varken, 1993) Duco van Weerlee created a sharp but loving portrait of Bali, where he lives and where he sometimes encounters difficulties (‘All those cultural misunderstandings, you get fed up to the teeth with them’), as well as an extraordinarily interesting journey in Irian Jaya, the former New Guinea, where he stays in the Baliem valley with the Dani tribe, who have a reputation as head hunters and cannibals. After many wanderings and conversations he comes to the conclusion that he is opposed to the old struggle of the Papuans for independence from Indonesia: ‘More than 250 languages are spoken in Irian, and the same number of tribes distrust each other. There are so many scores to settle that, should the Indonesians ever leave, more

arrows would fly above the island than cockatoos.’ Wiecher Hulst, who had already written brilliantly about Indonesia in From Sabang to Merauke (Van Sabang tot Merauke, 1988), has also produced one of the best literary travel stories about the former Dutch colony with his recent work A Friend on Lake Toba (Een vriend aan het Tobameer, 1995). He starts and finishes at his favourite spot, the Danau Toba, the holy lake of the Bataks in Northern Sumatra. Between start and finish he travels to Medan, takes the old Deli railway, treks to Padang or to the as yet undiscovered (by tourists at any rate) island of Siberut. The common theme running through his account, however, remains the problem faced by everyone who travels and is in search of undiscovered regions or self-supporting tribes: either they have to adapt to the changes caused by tourism and other economic inputs, or they die out. Hulst writes in a very witty and ironic style, encapsulated in splendid dialogues, about development aid workers, religious fanatics, European drop-outs and other moronic tourists, about government officials who do not like his questions (‘YOU ARE WRRRONG!!’); but his concern about developments in the new Indonesia, where the gulf between rich and poor is becoming ever wider and frustration at the lack of liberty and equality is increasing, is sincere. Elsewhere in this book there is an interesting interview on this subject with the renowned author Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who is censored in Indonesia.

Alongside all these exotic adventures, then, Cees Nooteboom may appear somewhat tame. But that is mere semblance, because in Roads to Santiago he expresses in the best possible way the motives and motivations of the true travel writer: ‘I am about to undertake the journey one more time, and even now I know that I will be side-tracked, a tour being synonymous with a detour in my experience, the eternal, self-contrived labyrinth of the travellers who cannot resist the temptation of side roads and country lanes, of a branch road off a main road, of the sign pointing to a village with a name you have never heard before, of the silhouette of a castle in the distance with only a track leading to it, of the vistas that may lie in store for you on the other side of that hill or mountain range.’

 

rudi wester

Translated by Julian Ross.

List of translations

benno barnard:	‘An Autumn Day in Bohemia’ (Tr. David Colmer). In: Leopard III: Frontiers. London, 1994.
jan brokken:	‘The Last Judgement’ (Tr. Tony Briggs). In: Vengeance! A Passport Anthology: no. 6. Huntington (Cambs), 1993.
	The Rainbird (Tr. Sam Garrett). Melbourne / Oakland / London, 1997.
lieve joris:	Back to the Congo (Tr. Stacey Knecht). London, 1992 / New York, 1992.
	The Gates of Damascus (Tr. Sam Garrett). Melbourne / Oakland / London, 1996.
marcel kurpershoek:	‘The Ghost of a Bedouin knight’ (Tr. Sam Garrett). In: Icarus 10. New York, 1993.
cees nooteboom:	Roads to Santiago (Tr. Ina Rilke). London, 1997 / New York, 1997.
carolijn visser:	Voices and Visions. A Journey through Vietnam Today (Tr. Susan Massotty), Boulder (co), 1994.