Goenawan Mohamad

A speech at the ceremony of the Alumnus of the Year 2007 award, at the Euroopean Parliament, Brussels, 6 December 2007

The honor you have bestowed to me this evening is a gesture of immense generosity – an act of reaching and remembering, because this opportunity is given to an ancien of Collège d’Europe coming from a distant history and geography.

On this occasion I wish I had more words of gratitude than I presently have at my disposal. I thank you not only for nominating me for the Alumnus of the Year award, but also to reconnect me with one of the most valuable memories of my life – which is learning about new things at the College, forging friendship with a delighful group of people — some of whom are here tonight — and simply being in Bruges.

For several months in 1966 I walked, almost every day, on the neatly paved cobblestone paths of this old Flemish town, where the past came to us and we became its guests. Each day, people drank their coffee, the newspaper boy went on his daily rounds, the streets gathered pace, buses resumed their duties, yet all such 20th century normalcy were linked with that which gave this town its pulse: the presence of history.

Almost invariably, at 8:30 am, I walked along the Rozenhoedkai canal, looking at the unhurried green of its waters between pebbles and brownstones. Every half an hour, the town’s residents would hear the call of the tower, the clanging of its 47 carillons, kept in one of the watchtower’s rooms; in those days, the time of day was made up of fragments of Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. Townspeople and tourists’ guides would tell you that the bellfry jutting out in the middle of the public market was a 14th century construction. It stood tall facing the field, a stake on the landscape that flanked the City Hall. They too would show the visitor just how the building’s roof, 550 years of age, remained unscathed by the climate, the brightness of its gilded ornaments perpetually undimmed.

Nothing was worn-down: the past was always present, routinely, proudly. In springtime, the townsfolks celebrate a collective memory, often solemn often festive: the procession of the Sacred Blood. Marked by bright and elaborate costumes, they enacted the Bible’s main episodes, told the heroic tales of the Crusades, and put together handsome illustrations of their forbears for all to see. In so doing, they constructed an entire catalogue of memory, from Jesus’ life in Jerusalem to the lives of local merchants in the Middle Ages, a medium where various brittle strands of the past were condensed and straightened out. And so does history become identity’s boundary.

Evidently, I found myself outside the boundary. I was the only non-white in a town of 50 thousand. Every time I walked past the marketplace – where in the past traders converged from different points of the globe – I realized that there were people who simply would never become “Brugeans”. Even if I were eventually to become a citizen of this town, and a sincere one at that, I would never be a legitimate part of its memory. I would still be on the outside.

My story is not unlike James Baldwin’s account of a Swiss village in his book, Notes of a Native Son — although decidedly less poignant. In the book, Baldwin is the first black man to have visited the village, which is actually quite an accessible one. It is only a four-hour drive from Milan. In fact, he is far from an unknown quantity; he has visited this town four times. They all know his name though they never greet him by it. They also know that he, whose skin is the color of soot and whose hair is amberblack and curly, is a visitor from America, even though in all their plainness and courtesy, they probably never really believe it. To them, something they utter without contempt, a black person has to come from Africa – as in all the blacks they have “aided” into Christianity, when they give alms to their village parishes for missionary activities.

A point is not lost on Baldwin. He realizes that history creates its factions; it transforms itself into an exclusive space, punctuating race, affirming biology. That he has a familiar entity to the place and its people is almost beside the point. The universe conceived by the Swiss villagers and their ancestors does not include him. It covers, in no particular order, European civilization, its missionary brand of Christianity, the conquest of Africa, its engagement with slavery. And, by extension: Swiss watchmakers, the pharmaceutical industry, giant but discreet banks, the prim and predictable streets of Geneva, even the urban expanse of New York – the one city that those villagers, from one generation to the next, have never laid eyes on, the city that is part of Baldwin’s life.

I am not saying that the proposition implied in Baldwin’s story remains uncontested. Today it is widely admitted that the boundary created by history has always been precarious and unstable. The line between the outside and the inside is blurred, if not totally problematic.

I happen to have to come across a book by the historian Roel Jacobs. It says that Bruges architecturally is not an original creation from a distant past. The marketplace and the watchtower’s summit are in fact replicas made in the 19th century. The Rozenhoedkai Canal, with its green waters, dated as recently as 1932. In Jacob’s account of Bruges, at least, we learn that the true gatekeepers of the town’s antiquated image were in fact British newcomers, at a time when the Belgians themselves probably could not care less.

In short, Bruges became aware of itself only insofar as outside of it there were outsiders to articulate the town’s possible identity. In other words, the production of memory can also be an appreciation of the other. To be sure, from time to time, the politics of the present colonalizes the past. However, there are pragmatic and ethical imperatives to recognize the finitude of the present. The recognition opens the present to possibilities and impossibilities of the future – to something different, something ungraspable.

This applies to an imagined community far wider than the town of Bruges. From this rostrum, I am speaking about Europe. Derrida’s words are worth quoting at this point: “…the duty to respond to the call of European memory, to recall what has been promised under the name Europe, to re-identify Europe… This duty also dictates opening Europe… opening it onto that which is not, never was, and never will be Europe.”

Now, more than four decades after my stay in Bruges, having learned so much about the idea of “Europe” in the Collège, I am watching it materialize on a large scale – and put to test by its very progress. I have the feeling that I am reading a narrative of a new Utopia. By this I don’t mean to ridicule it. In fact, I am of the opinion that Utopia is not something to which one should regret to aspire. To me, being a member of the Thomas More Promotion, Utopia is a wonderful excersise of irony. I learn that the word itself is a playful mix of ou-topos (no-place) and eu-topos (good place) and More’s main character is, as one translator calls him, a “Raphael Nonsenso”.

Such an irony implies a recognition of a split – albeit an affirmative one, which, to me, should be the idea of today’s “Europe”. This Utopia called “Europe” — something impossible but necessary — begins not from glory, but from a sense of finitude, not towards a carefully guarded space, but a boundless horizon of universality, signified by “justice”, “liberty”, or/and “peace”. At least, that is what I would like to see in this tremendous cultural and political space. At least, this is an appeal – a forgivable one, I think, coming from someone who lives in Indonesia, a former Dutch colony with an unpleasant history, but with fond memories of being a member of a community of friends at the Collège d’Europe.

Or, this is only my way of expressing my pride and joy of being re-connected to you all.

Thank you.