In Zutphen, I attended Jeroen den Herder's congenial small-scale cello festival. There, two young Portuguese students gave a lecture/recital on their research project on the music of the fado singer and composer José Zeca Afonso, an important voice in the 1974 Portuguese Revolution. At home, I looked up that music. It turned out to be the perfect background when reading "Friesland, my love" by Oeds Westerhof.1 The mixture of nostalgia, sentiment, Heimat feeling, political agitation, contrariness, deliberate sounds. Book and music intermingled.
The publisher praises the book as an ode to Friesland, a political manifesto and a declaration of love all in one. Indeed, a novel it is not. 'Love of Life' is purely an invoked Muse who calls back at the end. Not a flesh-and-blood woman with whom a history develops. But there are plenty of such books already.
Pars pro toto
Nor is it just a political manifesto. Westerhof packs the message, in loving memories of his parents, in retrospect on his own coming-of-age, in political reflections, and in lots of Frisian landscape, culture and quirkiness. In which, after all, Friesland also turns out to be a pars pro toto, an example. For the writer wants to move towards an administrative scale of regions and towards politics that gives togetherness opportunities. Moreover, he packs his political reflections into language: in admittedly long, but effective and often beautiful sentences with a twist.
Oeds Westerhof is a einzelgänger with a strong sense of community. He was and is an administrator, director, adviser to mainly cultural organisations. With authority and charisma, but as he himself writes, with too much individuality/quirkyness, which makes him not to be chewed by the more regentesque administrators. As a result, for instance, his period as creative director of Friesland Cultural Capital came to an end too soon. Much earlier, he was director - and very much in place - at Keunstwurk Fryslan. After which he became an advisor at a consultancy firm.
Winners and losers
A Friesian child, offspring in a socially-minded family of a carpenter and his wife, together also sexton in the church next door. Music was close to them. Both had not had the chance to 'continue learning' due to circumstances, like many of their contemporaries, even though they had it in them. The father's life could be described in a novel. Or better still, in a film; Frisian film culture features a lot in the book.
Father Westerhof was scarred - and perhaps gained character - by the war and forced deployment to the Dutch East Indies. Once with a family, he tackled work wherever it presented itself; he was not only a builder and sexton, but also an orchestra operator with the Frysk Orkest. "My father was not among the notables, he was more of a tribal chief, consulted on very different issues by what was then called the common man, whose wife also often consulted my mother."
Capitalist bosses
How much we have gained in the past decades; how much we have lost. How rich we are today; how poor we have become. Common sighs about economic, political and social processes. Oeds Westerhof translates them concretely into individual experiences. Sometimes with restrained anger about the capitalist bosses in the 50s/60s, about today's grabbers and the politicians of overblown market thinking. ("The market is for groceries, for anything that does not resemble that, the market does not fit."). Rightful anger, thankfully often expressed in tongue-in-cheek humour and in raunchy, if not vicious, witty sentences.
Many ordinary people pass by - uncles, aunts, neighbours, local shopkeepers - who saw the processes wash over them. How rich and free they became: one could go on holiday abroad, one could move elsewhere, beyond place of birth and region. But how they were robbed of social cohesion, influence on their surroundings, of collective caring. The writer also passes many times himself, not only as a child and adolescent, but also later as a cultural director, as a consultant. The consultant often visits many municipalities throughout the country, you get to see something, you get to know the country, even all those regions other than Friesland, with their own peculiarities.
Across the
In 22 chapters, Oeds Westerhof reflects, comments and, above all, thinks about how things can be done differently. Rather courageous, as well as overconfident and also a little megalomaniacal (he writes himself). Name a subject and he gives his views on it: the administrative division and organisation of our country, the healthcare system, education, cultural policy, social security, taxes, housing policy, agriculture, public transport, heritage. Only defence and foreign affairs come off a bit shabby.
So it is a lot, perhaps he should have made a little less hay. But that's me saying, who wouldn't have dared to do this. Had he begrudgingly made some hay, he would have been less himself. He would have been able to maintain his fresh writing style more consistently then, though; now it gradually becomes more stately language at times.
Whiffs Omtzigt
The strength of "Friesland my love" is that it not only criticises where things went wrong, - how God disappeared from Jorwerd, how society lost caring for each other, via the government. (Incidentally, kind of witty that he notes that not everything that disappeared before has also stayed away. Today's delivery society, for instance, had a predecessor in the days when the baker, butcher and grocer delivered groceries to the home).
It inevitably exudes hints of Pieter Omtzigt or Caroline van der Plas. But Westerhof also outlines how things can be done better, with vistas or concrete ideas, more creative and considerably less conservative than this from the CDA 2.0 (Omtzigt) or the Farmer's Party 2.0 (Plas).
Subsistence security? Encourage and expect people to get moving themselves (and work at least 1,500 hours a year), but for those who cannot, realise a generous general guarantee income. No basic income, but also no more jungle of benefit schemes.
Basic Income
Cultural policy? Also bureaucratised. "I am very curious to see what happens if we take exempting people for the sake of the future and the long term again as a guiding principle in subsidising art, science and philosophy." He therefore again argues for a guarantee income, which I suspect he now means, however, a kind of basic income and thus advocates the return and expansion of the Work and Income for Artists Act (WWIK). With this, the cultural institutions have covered their main personnel costs and can get on with their public income.
Schools? Educational institutions of every level can be grouped together by region into one organisation. This eliminates a lot of bureaucracy and ends compartmentalisation and the risk of growing up in a bubble.
23 short points
Don't be surprised that the book eventually culminates in an election manifesto that says where it needs to go in 23 short points. Because his 'Love of Life' or alter ego criticises him at the end: "this repetition of words, it really can't be done in this day and age. You are explaining yourself far too much." This is true, but as a reader you are left thinking, sometimes exclaiming: "exactly, that's how I see it too" and sometimes grumbling in opposition with practical objections to proposed solutions. These are indeed the conversations we need to have. As the lamented Clairy Polak invariably opened the TV programme Philosophical Quintet: "...in which listening is at least as important as speaking and fathoming is the motto".
"Friesland, my love" is not in Frisian. That makes (reading) listening and perusing for non-Frisians so easy.
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