The ground under your feet is sacred. It is, in these times of left-wing identity politics and emerging right-wing blut und boden thinking, quite a risky remark, but Faustin Linyekula used it anyway, in an answer to a question from the audience. That question was about the need, to defend your own place in an increasingly globalised world. Because Linyekula does care about that ground under your feet, where your roots lie. He returned there, to Kisangani, to make art in a metropolis where even the water is not pure.
Because, the choreographer and dancer argues, if you dig deep enough into that soil beneath your feet, you will naturally end up with the water that others drink from too. Beneath the most local and most individual is always the most collective: our planet.
Aimé Cesaire
Now Faustin Linyekula did not get this quote from himself, he had to admit, but from the French poet and writer Aimé Cesaire. And he balks at that, because this Cesaire was the founder of the phenomenon of négritude. And that black emancipation movement is something Linyekula doesn't like. I regularly have to defend myself against African intellectuals who think my work is not African enough. While it remains to be established what that African means. My surname may sound African, but it was imposed by the Belgian occupying forces in 1930.'
It happened during the more fun phase of the afternoon talk show at the Holland Festival on Sunday 3 June. Linyekula and William Kentridge, the two associate artists of the 2019 Holland Festival, were taken to task by Quincy Gario, who is best known here as a fighter against The 19th century invention 'Black Pete'. And where Gario usually shows himself to be a warm advocate of precisely a Dutch kind of négritude, he kept a low profile here. So did William Kentridge, who, as a native South African, was more than aware of the sensitivities surrounding white privilege: he avoided the subject. His responses focused on the universality of art: 'Ulysses by James Joyce may have been written in Dublin, but when you read it you create your own city in your own mind, based on the cities you can think of yourself.'
Frenchness
However, that very universality is a thingy, as it turned out a day later, when it was exactly about those négritude went. Because, university lecturer Joseph Jordan explained in Frascati, the whole idea of universal art is a white idea. The statement emerged in a forum discussion with a number of leading thinkers on the concept of négritude. This was the term coined by French poet Aimé Cesaire with the intention of escaping the Frenchness perceived as stifling. That Frenchness, explained Professor Tracy Denean Sharpley-Whiting, meant that France directly turned residents of colonies into French citizens. Colonies fell directly under French rule, residents were instantly 'citoyens' and no one recorded what skin colour, religion or origin you had.
That might sound like the height of enlightenment, but was thus also perceived as a total denial of self. Against that assimilation arose the négritude as a movement to look for precisely what made people, apart from being 'French', also 'black'. And that in a positive sense.
Black Renaissance
At Frascati, it was long about the origins of the movement and its relationship to the black renaissance in the US, which emerged around the beginning of the last century. It was also about the relationship between black people 'in the diaspora' and those left behind in Africa. The latter had little to do with the strong colour consciousness of the négritude. Just as Faustin Linyekula said a day earlier, there are other issues at play in Africa that still have everything to do with the colonial past, but skin colour is the least important of these.
Whether there is a direct link between that attitude and the rejection by many Arubans of their African roots, as noted by publicist and PhD candidate Inez van der Scheer, remained to be seen.
Incomparable
In any case, the whole Dutch situation remained somewhat outside the discussion. Joseph Jordan merely noted that the Netherlands was incomparable to the US, had nothing at all to do with France and that Belgium was actually on another planet. So every culture has its own way of dealing with origin and identity. However, all those present agreed that it should be less about perpetrators and victims, and more about art.
And this was amply available in the form of two members of the trio 22xLoud. Who sang very beautifully.
Good to know
English (UK) 
Nederlands 
Français 
