On city poets and city poems. About Vers Brussel
2004. Antwerp was the first to have one. Ghent followed. And so Brussels had to have one too: a city poet. Politicians drafted resolutions, but still there was no city poet. How could one poet grasp a city that was so fragmented that it turned into a different city in a hundred minds and a hundred neighbourhoods?
At Passa Porta’s request, David Van Reybrouck and Peter Vermeersch set up the Brussels Poetry Collective, a meeting between languages and genres where, they hoped, new languages and genres would take root. With Vers Brussel, Passa Porta took another initiative: to grasp neighbourhoods in words, and to grasp words in artworks. A meeting between a poet and a visual artist, passers-by, and a poet and a visual artist with a neighbourhood and its residents. Poetry and art should get a permanent place in the public space in the neighbourhood, so that the meeting from which they emerged could lead to new meetings, and to new meanings for those who would later pause before them. Writing a collection of city poems with the public space as your page. These became stations of a cross, as it were, not 14 but ultimately 10 in as many years. Brussels is complex and has its own complaints: it concedes itself no beauty.
An item in the evening news of 12 December 2017. A man in Wilrijk had made a snowman. Not just a snowman. A work of art. A woman. A grandiose woman, a divine woman. ‘She could be my mother.’ As he said this, the camera showed him rub his hand against her cold thighs and breasts. The snowwoman was met with gazes of admiration, with happy faces and friendly greetings from local residents and passers-by. The artist, Raed Alobedi, turned out to be a professor of ceramics who had fled his homeland seven years earlier and had ended up in Antwerp. When not playing with snow, he made sculptures that revealed his Babylonian origins and his quest for the way in which his Iranian self could take root in Antwerp. And vice versa. And so reality influenced his imagination, and his imagination, reality.
If he had been sitting on a bench in the improvised refugee camp in the Maximiliaanpark, no passer-by would have smiled at him, let alone greeted him. The psychology of the meeting: we are what we look like until we become what we do. Vers Brussel draws a modest trail through ten neighbourhoods in Brussels. Ten places where, as the residents of Wilrijk did in relation to the newcomer behind the snowwoman, you can pause, can see the area through the eyes of a visual artist, and read it through the words of a poet. These are notes, signatures in the public space, which incite you to see that corner of Brussels differently, or perhaps simply to see it, tout court, for the first time. For those who live there, those who are passing through, and those who, guidebook in hand, are visiting the area.
Diversity only exists where a meeting takes place. Otherwise there is only difference and fragmentation. There are a lot of Brussels residents whose capital city is elsewhere, in their head. Because they are never ‘at home’ in Brussels but are ‘guests’, and because they then look for their self in the birthplace of their (fore)father, or in the perception they have of it. Family-tree identity. If Brussels needs to look for an identity that connects its residents, it is that of the imagination, as resistance to unshakable identities.
In 1968 Witold Gombrowicz wrote that he ‘did not trust religions, doctrines, ideologies, institutions. And so all I could do was stand on my own two feet. But I was a Pole, cast in the Polish mould, living in Poland. And so I had to look elsewhere for my “self”, at a place where I was no longer a Pole but simply a human being’. And so Gombrowicz joined the Polish diaspora and spent all his life giving shape to the Polish identity by opposing it.
Whoever is looking for their self in a place where they are no longer Flemish, Walloon, Moroccan, Turkish or Dutch but simply human does not have to go so far. They can go to Brussels. Not because Brussels is the capital of a people or a nation, but precisely because Brussels is not that, or does not want to have to be that, and must oppose that.
Fourteen years after the unexecuted resolutions, Brussels still has no need for city poets, but all the more need for poetry in the city. Vers Brussel is stopping here. For art in the public space, a stopover.