Controversy over who gets to be a Dutch hero
A young royal leads in a way her great-grandmother did not
Last week outside Rotterdam Central Station a remarkable four-meter statue of a black woman clenching her fists in the pockets of her sweatpants was unveiled.
It was a big moment. Only seventeen percent of statues of specific people in the Netherlands represent women—mostly Queen Wilhelmina and Anne Frank. Fifty percent (!) of more abstract female statues (like the lady of justice or a woman representing, you know, peace) are half naked.
And there are only eleven statues of people of color in the entire country.
The artist behind Moments Contained is Thomas J. Price, a 42-year-old Londoner with a Caribbean background known for his sculptures of black men and women, which he calls ‘everymen’ and ‘everywomen.’ He said of the work:
[Moments Contained] is about the experience of being put away as ‘the other,’ of the marginalized position despite the strength of the individual… The fictional young black woman shown can be described as stoic, but to me she embodies resilience, self-confidence and vulnerability. She stands up straight, her hands casually in her pockets. You can see that that nonchalance is pretense by the print of her knuckles in her trouser pockets. She tries to control herself, perhaps repressing frustration.
Her full potential is limited by the looks around her. I like to make works that are about how people experience themselves and whether or not that fits in with the view of others.
Most people seem to love the statue. There are at times so many viewers wanting to be photographed with it that a line forms. You hear it described as iconic, strong, powerful, moving, etc. Rotterdam Mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb foresaw this popularity:
This will be the most photographed place in Rotterdam in the coming years. You can't get around her and that's exactly the point.
Tara Lewis wrote in Joop about the emotional experience of watching the unveiling:
I felt the collective relief of proud black women, who regularly feel reduced to second-class citizens by systems and people. But there, life-size and prominently placed, they were given the space to be who they are, in all their facets.
Typical Dutch
Moments Contained is remarkable for its depiction of race and gender, in terms of social status, however, the statue is typically Dutch.
The Netherlands tends not to celebrate military or political heroes like in the US, UK, or France. It’s much more likely for “normal” people to be commemorated—doe normaal, the Dutch philosophy of valuing modest and unexceptional behavior, in bronze.
The oldest statue in the Netherlands is of Erasmus, placed on the Grote Markt in Rotterdam in 1622. Historian Johan Huizinga wrote of the monument in 1924:
It remains highly characteristic that for a few centuries the only public statue in the Netherlands was not that of a warrior, monarch or statesman, nor of a poet, but of a scholar who had rather neglected that fatherland.
Another historical theory: all of these modest statues may be related to Dutch neutrality during WWI. After 1918 there were no mass soldier casualties to be commemorated—unlike in village squares all over France.
There are however more than 4,000 monuments to WWII in the Netherlands, a number that continues to grow as civilian traumas and casualties (not only those of soldiers) are increasingly recognized. A new monument to 52,000 men taken into forced labor in 1944 will be placed in Rotterdam in November 2023.
Shaking a fist at the lady with her fists in her pockets
Of course there’s controversy about Moments Contained, most of it centered around a furious and widely-derided column by Rosanne Hertzberger in the NRC. She seethes:
A statue for everyone is an insult to people who do heroic deeds.
This in a country with seventeen statues of Queen Wilhelmina, who along with the entire cabinet fled to London just days after the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in 1940, a move which devastated the Dutch population—who at that moment saw how they, and particularly the Jews, were then completely on their own.
Wilhelmina’s decision to leave and establish a “government-in-exile” in England allowed for the establishment of a more oppressive and deadly Nazi regime in the Netherlands than in other European countries, like Belgium and Denmark, where the royals did not leave, and was part of the reason why, as historians have argued, the Netherlands had one of the highest rates of deportation and murder in Western Europe.
She gave regular radio addresses from London, rousing in terms of resistance but which skirted around the issue of the Jews. According to journalist Hans Knoop:
After the war I spoke to Loe de Jong, who wrote the [London] speeches. He told me she left out the paragraphs about the fate of the Jews. If she had said ‘Stick your neck out for your Jewish neighbors’ there would have been fewer casualties.
Wilhelmina’s grandson, current King Willem-Alexander even criticized (if tepidly) her fleeing on Remembrance Day in 2020: “Fellow people, fellow citizens in need, felt abandoned, insufficiently heard, insufficiently supported.”
My point of this digression into WWII history: this is not the most heroic stuff.
And she gets seventeen statues.
Anyway. Hertzberger goes on ranting about the statue in Rotterdam:
[Moments Contained] is a product of a social current in which it is enough to be a marginalized party to gain sympathy. Just being a woman, having a disability, wearing a headscarf, a dark skin color or preferably a combination of these is enough to be celebrated, and especially in the arts…
The bar is lowered. You don't have to perform the same as others, purely because you are not privileged we therefore assume for the sake of convenience that you have had a hard time in life, and we make the world a little easier for you.
Or… maybe it’s the exact opposite in many Dutch public squares, which honor Wilhelmina more than any other woman, a queen who did not have to “perform the same others” because she was privileged?
And why shouldn’t the privileged class make the world a little easier for marginalized people? Let’s not forget that “majority rule, minority rights” is a fundamental principle of democratic governance and society. Protecting the rights, religions, and freedoms of minorities is… kind of the entire point?
Nazi rule being the most nightmarish possible extension of a disrespect of minority rights!
A young royal changes the game
Last week we were treated to striking example of a member of the privileged class expressing “sympathy for marginalized parties”—from none other than Countess Eloise van Oranje, the King’s niece (and therefore Wilhelmina’s great niece, as it so happens.)
In a clip from the hidden camera show In Your Face, an actor sitting on a terrace loudly disagrees with his friend’s relationship with black woman. “You don’t go with a black one,” he says.
Overhearing this, (the producers swear it was a coincidence that she happened to be on the terrace at the time of the filming) an outraged Eloise tells her friend that she has to go say something. She storms over and yells at the guy, over and over: “You’re a fucking racist, doe fucking normaal, we’re in the twenty-first century, put your ego aside.”
This was really big news last week.
You could say that Eloise speaking up made “the world a little easier” for the black woman sitting at the table. She “raised the bar” for the way people of color should be treated. The clip from In Your Face shows other, non-royal civilians speaking up against the racism, too. But Countess Eloise speaking out carries a bit more weight because of her privileged status.
Which is in a way what Moments Contained does, too—it assigns status to the marginalized—with its size, beauty, and physical location outside of Rotterdam Central Station.
The new statue is not an insult to heroes. It’s a demand to reconsider how heroism is defined in contemporary Dutch society.
“We’re in the twenty-first century,” as Queen Wilhelmina’s great niece shouted at a racist on a terrace last week.
🥳 Leuke Dingetjes
On June 5, 1995, a male duck flew into a window at the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam. Seconds after he died another male duck appeared and had sex, if that’s the word for it, with his corpse… for 75 minutes.
Marking the “first documented case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard.”
Last week the 28th annual “Dead Duck Day” was celebrated, “to raise awareness about the global problem of birds and windows.”
“Free me”
I hear a hint of 2011-era Washed Out in this chilled out dream pop track from Amsterdam-based artist Elias Mazian.
*all typos in this email are definitely deliberate