Worlding Modern Literature in the Low Countries

Abstract

In 2007, the Flemish-Moroccan writer Rachida Lamrabet published her debut novel Vrouwland. The main narrative centres around Younes, a Moroccan adolescent who meets Mariam, a Flemish-Moroccan girl who is spending some time in Morocco during the summer. They fall in love and the day before Mariam leaves, Younes asks her to marry him. Jestingly, she agrees. But back in Belgium, she never responds to his letters. Finally, having obtained a university degree but struggling to find decent employment and with several years of unresponded letters sent to Yasmine, Younes decides to travel to Belgium to search for his long lost love and, perhaps, to build a better future for himself. But the boat that transports him is shipwrecked and Younes drowns in his attempt to reach the European mainland. Interwoven with this heartbreaking story of unrequited love, migration and adolescent aspiration for a better life are a myriad of adjacent stories of characters that lead their lives in a world in which Belgium and Morocco, Europe and Africa are not separate entities but closely intertwined worlds. When Lamrabet’s novel was published, it was hailed as a turning point in Belgian Neerlandophone literature addressing the topic of migration in the Low Countries. Vrouwland was welcomed as a superb form of migrant literature, a genre that in ‘Belgian Neerlandophone [literature] . . . started to flourish only in the 2000s and has principally been led by second generation Moroccan-origin authors.’ Lamrabet was seen as part of that new generation addressing the intricacies of migration in Belgium. Migration obviously plays a crucial role in Vrouwland. Yet, what is truly striking about the characters and their stories, is how the world they navigate was a self-explanatory web of multiple regions and ways of life, woven into each other in the way that life, as it unfolds, tends to do. In that sense, rather than allowing itself to be compartmentalized in the literary subgenre of migrant literature, Lamrabet’s novel invites us to reflect on outdated compartments like the national framework in which we tend to read and interpret many of the literary works that are produced within the Low Countries. Like the characters of Vrouwland, the Low Countries is a region that has always already been shaped by different regions, cultures, ways of life. The challenge for modern Neerlandophone literature is perhaps less to subcategorize this insight into a specific literary genre, but to become attentive to the presence of this phenomenon in literature itself. Neerlandophone literature from the Low Countries is thoroughly embedded in a globalized world and when studied up close it provides ample representations of the lingual and cultural superdiversity of the region as well as its enmeshment with global culture. In most Neerlandophone literature we find characters, perspectives and