The Bust
Squatters thronged in their drab multicolored outfits faded by detergents and time outside the redbrick Amsterdam edifice they had come to call home. The people looked like an eerie painting I had seen in the nearby Kingdom Museum, in which St Martin evangelizes to bare-chested Goth barbarians wearing colorful scraps of textile, as they perched cradling their infants on cold stone beds.
They gathered beside the purring police van. Despite the murmurs of indignation, there was an odd coziness between these two poles—anarchists and police. Neither party seemed particularly concerned about the threat of violence from its adversary. Perhaps self-help literature had taught the anarchists to master their urge to tug and tip over their evictors’ black metal pigpen or set it aflame. The squad-vehicles’ black oblong panzer vault made me think of an old-fashioned clothes-iron, the ones that didn’t use electricity, the ones that women would heat in a fire like I had seen in a fortress back home in Barranquilla.
Here and there, one could pick up on the minutest fibrillations of dissent: Sanne, a young woman with dyed braids asking the fuzz to turn off the van’s muffler “for the environment” while conducting the bust, her pierced nose wrinkled in disgust. The cop said, “We will overlay, Wij zullen overleggen.” Sanne raised her voice: “So much electric going to waste from this noisy smoky vehicle, all in the name of your holy gentrification!”
Cops clutched their Javan rattan wooden shields, and slowly, aimlessly waved big cricket-like paddles of hollow titanium and rubber as if they were rowing an imaginary boat. These trinkets looked somehow pagan, the relics and artisanry and customs of people who sacrificed to some wicker-man to conjure the thaw, to herald the spring. The crowd milled slowly in begrudged cooperation with the police, despite the passive-aggressive antagonism like static electricity that bristled in the wet Holland air—these anarchists seemed to be obeying a deeply collective urge that strung them and their umpires together under that wan sun. I noted that many of the Dutch people’s lips were the color of the apples they periodically bit while cycling, to get through the day while skipping lunch. Had they eaten witch’s apples that had lulled them, made them docile? Some of the anarchists, with heads half shaven and half dyed or dreadlocked, and wearing black nail polish and ashram yoga pants, kept up their diplomatic banter with the authorities, displaying at times that uncanny ability of politicians to laugh and jostle jokingly alongside sworn enemies in public. All that seemed missing was the tea, then again, we weren’t in England, but on the other side of the North Sea, under that dim sub-Nordic anglers’ heaven.
Weren’t they themselves too genteel to condemn the gentrification? As soon as the police introduced solar and wind powered raids and armored vehicles, would everybody be happy? One anarchist used the meek slur “asociaal” “asocial” to condemn the behavior of paranoid neighbors who had reported the alternative community as a neighborhood nuisance. The malady of being “asocial”, which carried a meaning distinct from merely “not being sociable”, was a loaded accusation in the Netherlands. In the culture, one could be a model citizen and at once grumpily absorbed in one’s private space, precious impermeable radius, one’s very own square meter of pirate-anarchist republic, hostile to anyone who would snap one out of cerebral isolation or distract from the focus of getting from A to B. There was work and leisure, and a hydroelectric bus to tension, called Spanning, and a bus to relaxation, Onstspanning, and no terrorists would monkeywrench the gears of this well-diagrammed society. Solitude, that precious capital was a reward you fetched in exchange for accepting your limitations, due confines, while pledging to spare countrymen of hassle. “Asocial” meant the imposing presence, the noises made by miseducated folk who do not keep to their allotted grids, those maladjusted ones prone to stray from their lanes in heaven’s causeways, prone to leer at a passing woman’s or man’s figure, a curvy or a hulking silhouette, to loiter or to strike up conversations with strangers in the street like lighting a match. Foreigners were more inclined to disruptive behaviors. Allochtoons as they called us foreigners—a new Dutch word for foreigner that a public TV-intellectual had recoined from Greek—as opposed to the Autochtoon.
Steering wheels of bikes along the paths at times resembled the horns of goats, goaded by a great unseen shepherd along the causeways of the cities and shires of the Netherlands.
The Arabian Lottery in a red commie bookstore of the Netherlands
The leadership of our cell of student demonstrators, Rijnlands Studenten Protest, was holding its bimonthly half-secret gathering at de Rode Meeuw, the “Red Seagull” communist bookstore overlooking a canal in the thoroughly Dutch city of Ordrecht. The socialist books for some reason normally cost between 35 and 50 euros. To save money, volunteers had dialed down the bookshop’s radiators in autumn since we were having what was called “good weather, for the Netherlands”. Ferdi, the Kurdish militant and me were the only congregants in sweaters—mine was of grey-black wool, full of holes. I had decided to emancipate my mind of the old Sephardi Jewish superstitions which had always nagged me and my mother Estrella—the belief that wearing clothes with holes in it invites poverty into one’s home, for instance. After all, Karl Marx’s own mother Henriette was a Sephardi Dutch Jewess, and Marx wore coats with holes in them his whole life and he still had abundance in Friedrich Engels’ daddy’s wine-cellar, so shut up old wizard-lizard councilmen.
Eefje Folckema, one of the main coordinators of the student group, moderated the discussion. Folckema only made jokes about sex with girls if he had drunk too much Amsterdam sailor-gin while having forgotten his epilepsy medication. Eefje kept himself perpetually busy with numerous projects: such as translating the works of Howard Zinn into Dutch with the aid of local communist publishers such as Rode Glimworm, (“The Red Glow-worm”) or the more mainstream and academic Rode Lucht (Red Sky) or alternatively, the contrarian Roode Morgen (Red Morning). He was also striving to unite the scattering of divergent leftist sects throughout the provincial, Mondrian-painted local landscape of regions that made up this Rhineland delta, places that had been, up until very recently, affluent and uneventful for as long as anybody wished to remember.
Eefje had founded a Dutch Anarcho-Syndicalist Bund movement in his quest to unite the forty or so splinter-cell cliques throughout the Dutch provinces into a single national movement. He had chaired lectures in Amsterdam on Emma Goldman, and Bakunin, he had co-produced video-recordings of Noam Chomsky and Toni Negri interviews. For his paladin efforts to unite these warring tribes, Eefje had been at some point called the prophet Mohammed for the Dutch left. But our emerging public intellectual, wary of cultural appropriation, politely declined that christening. He was always working on activism and on the lookout for wherever some suppressed ember of the long-ago Spanish Republic would begin to reignite, whether in 21st century Barcelona, in Athens, in the Occupy movement; in Ramallah, or, for that matter, in the university metropolis of Ordrecht.