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Shervin Nekuee: No dialogue but dialectics Learning how to handle cultural differences, that is the biggest challenge of our times. How can we coexist peacefully in a world in which people with diverging standards and values are getting increasingly tied in with one another? Identities and localities tend to overlap less and less. We have to deal with an explosive diversity, both as nationals of the same state and as residents of the same street. We no longer self-evidently share the same habits and customs with our neighbours. It is no longer a given for our children to grow up with the same heroic legends. We no longer cherish warm feelings for the same memories or for a shared history. Historical events are losing their function as moral standards for staking out good and evil. The firm cultural and historical ground under our feet is shaking. How are we to deal with this unsteady multicultural situation? Cultural differences are cropping up in all corners of our neighbourhoods. From our living rooms, we have a worldwide view of all current events, and, conversely, the world at large is ceaselessly penetrating our domestic interiors. How should we handle this world-citizenship that has become our unbidden fate? Are we pleased with our new multicultural and cosmopolitan condition? And with all those we encounter in it? No, in spite of what naive multiculturalism and aristocratic cosmopolitanism were hoping for, many people’s first response has not been one of liberation and joy. Diversity creates confusion. It disrupts the peace and quiet in our streets and in our social world. It creates chaos in everyday life, especially in our minds. And our first response to this new human condition, therefore, is one of aversion and evasion. Our desire to turn away, however, is hardly an option in the dynamic and modern world of today, in which everybody has grown dependent on everyone else in a complicated and subtle nodal network. And if evasion is not an option, we go for collision. This is what has actually happened in the Europe of the past few decades. This is everyday reality in the Danish provinces, the Paris suburbs and the streets of Amsterdam. The revelation of our multicultural condition, especially the rise of Muslim minorities in the European public domain owing to assertive second and third generations, has produced collisions and polemics all over the place. Not a trace is left of the multicultural Valhalla that the official policy documents of the nineties said Europe would become. There are precious few people who can live in a permanent state of war with their own neighbours and fellow citizens. Only few people have an appetite for engaging in daily polemics with their colleagues or with neighbourhood youngsters. This is why, slowly but surely, a new desire for consensus and stabilization is growing. We are assiduously and impatiently looking for a stable common ground, a shared centre and a new collective identity. As each is conducting this search in their own way, however, our search is leading us only further astray into a diffuse society. What are we to do? About a year ago, the magic word ‘dialogue’ suddenly emerged in the jargon of those watchdogs of the public funds for art and culture, the civil servants in The Hague. In a country in which virtually all art, culture and intellectual activity is dependent on subsidies, it should cause little surprise, therefore, that everyone is now pretending to be engaged in promoting dialogue. ‘If only we will be able to keep talking to each other and to voice our fears, questions and desires openly and honestly and weigh them in public on the scales of reason, all will be well with us and with this new world of differences.’ This, in a nutshell, is the idea behind the new glad tidings that are supposed to drag us out of the bottomless pit of the multicultural drama. This new call for dialogue as solace for the diversity issue, I think, is a soft and rotten recipe. We do not lack conversation, debate and dialogue. We are chock-a-block with talks, arguments and counter-arguments. What we lack is an ability to form an idea of the Other and of a society that could produce a true coexistence with the Other. We lack mental pictures. The uneasiness that clings to diversity has nothing to do with lack of self-assertion, or inability to listen, or lack of information. It is our imagination that is letting us down. We want to know how we are to live with differences, but we do not know how to conceive it. What is it like to be a Muslim in the demystified West? What is it like to be the last Dutchman in an old neighbourhood that has grown into Little Morocco? We want to know why the lovely little girl next door with her curly hair will suddenly cover herself up with a long veil, but we have difficulty imagining the motives that make her do so. We want to respect homosexuality but we fear to imagine it. You will not find out any of this by having conversations, but by putting yourself in the position of the Other, by becoming the Other, by transforming into her or his emotional self. That is when something starts happening. By bearing the Other in our selves, we also change ourselves. This is a process that is going way beyond dialogue. This is dialectics. All this requires imagination and people who can mobilize such imagination: sculptors, storytellers, draughtsmen and musicians who can put a face and a voice to the strange faces around us and to the confusing human condition that we find ourselves in; theatrical producers who can stage our urban lives with all their differences before our very eyes and can enact their dramatic, aesthetic and comforting elements. We want to see, hear, feel. The meaning of our new life must be nourished. More than ever before, we are urgently looking for artists and intellectuals who have the power to seduce us, to carry us away to life in the new human condition, where we have been lingering for a while but which we are, as yet, unable to cope with. Shervin Nekuee  |
Nummer 21
Frantz Fanon (1925 – 2005)
