I took the Eurolines bus from Lille, France to Brussels, Belgium. Lille wasn’t that pretty from the inside of a bus, but what town is? In my experience Greyhounding across America, I’ve come to realize bus stations are almost always tucked into the taint of a town: somewhere between the asshole and the genitalia.
I’ve never seen Salt Lake City, supposedly one of the most pleasant cities in the country, but for its Greyhound station. If I gotta judge from that experience, the seat of the Mormon faith and host of the 2002 Olympics is a cigarette-burned bathroom covered in graffit of the “Hector gonna kill a mofo named Ronnie if he don’t stop runnin’ wit Maria” school of thought.
The bus rolled north, through soggy green fields, all a-drenched in gray French winter. I’m not sure when we passed into Belgium. There was no black, gold and red welcoming banner, no sudden presentation of lambic beer and chocolate. As billboards go, the landscape was consistent; you pass from France into Wallonia, the French-speaking portion of Belgium, so there’s no language shift.
Eventually fields gave way to highway interchanges, which gave way to roundabouts, which gave way to handsome old buildings. A woman flapped laundry out of a window set in the sort of old apartment block that screams, Dude, you’re in Europe.
Hanging out clothes somewhere in Belgium.
It was a handsome building, ledges and edges set off by fine stonework, a structure built for beauty and durability, unlike the brutal concrete tower blocks that dot the outskirts of so many European towns. My Euro friends always give me shit for the often rotted out state of American city centers. But they never realize that those centers are offset by rings of generally attractive suburbia. In Europe, the center is often preserved and inhabited by the middle class, and good for them: these may be the roots of increased pedestrianism and reliance on public transport. All good things. But the poverty and immigrants are still there - they’re just shunted to the Towers of Terror in the hinterland.
Although in Brussels at least, the new arrivals are living in the city center, or at least by Brussels North station. I got on the metro after departing the bus and noticed almost the entire car was brown, black or brown-black skinned; a mix of Middle Eastern, African and occasionally, Asians. There were maybe two or three white passengers at each stop. Everyone else was an ethnically ambiguous sea of caramel.
Being mixed-race, I fit right in; an old woman said something to me in Turkish and I nodded and smiled at her and moved out of her way (which seems to always do the trick when you’re in a close quarters I-don’t-understand situation).
I’m sorry: did I say I got on at Brussels North one paragraph up? I meant Bruxelles-Nord/Brussel-Noord. In bilingual Belgium, I feel the need to translate everything twice. The linguistic split is both the heart of and major trauma of Belgian identity.
In short: Wallonia takes up about 55 percent of Belgium’s space and Walloons about 33 percent of its population. Most of the rest are from Flanders and speak Flemish, a dialect of Dutch ( a small 0.7 percent of the population tucked into the Eastern cantons speak German). All this in a country roughly the size of Maryland.
This division of tongues impacts everything in Belgium. In London, a friend who has been working with Belgian tourism promotions threw up his hands while describing being shunted around between two different tourism boards - one Walloon, one Flemish - that never communicated with each other. In 2007, the election of a Miss Belgium who didn’t speak Flemish re-sparked serious discussion, which continues today, of secession between Wallonia and Flanders.
Funnily enough, all those afore-mentioned African and Asian immigrants are more removed from the Belgian linguistic split than Walloons and Flemish are removed from each other. The Belgian immigrants I encountered had little regard for debates over French/Flemish language and identity. That wasn’t their fight.
I got into a conversation with a young Arab-descended Belgian about the French/Flemish thing, and he dismissed it - “I speak both, and English, and can cross half of Europe speaking Arabic anyways.” What he did care about was European perception of Muslims like himself.
He rattled off an odd mix of revolutionary rhetoric, mild homophobia and anti-feminism that occasionally crossed the line into misogyny. The gist: Muslims were always treated like criminals, these people got no values, man, lookit them let the gays out, their women are so immodest and of course the society is messed up but its not us, man, its them, lookit what they let their kids get up to.
I nodded and grunted throughout in that sort of daze I enter whenever I get ranted at, and wondered what happens when a liberal, relativist society clashes up with an orthodox, black-and-white morality. Because the latter was the Islam this guy was preaching, and it made the Christian Coalition sound like Unitarians. At the same time his message carried more weight because he also spoke of some real concerns. However tolerant Europe likes to consider itself, it can still be a pretty prejudiced place against different-skinned foreigners.
Such are the real issues and often idiotic posturing of identity politics. Divorced from Europe’s traditional communal tensions, immigrants ignore them, and get by without getting involved in the fights of Old Europe. But some of the same immigrants bring their own cultural baggage and end up picking the fights that define the New Europe. Sometimes the fault is that of the host society, sometimes it’s the fault of some immigrants, and sometimes everyone’s to blame.
Sint-Gillis/Saint-Gilles, Brussels
Take the issue of the hijab (headscarf), which was banned last year in Flanders. Some Muslims argue they are not allowed to express their religion publicly; schools argue all students must be dressed equally to be treated equally; some Muslims claim the hijab is crucial to their identity, some say they’re glad to be rid of it and some say the whole thing is blown out of proportion to feed the anger and vitriol of the other sides’ extremists, who are the only ones who really benefit from communal tensions.
I think the last opinion is right. Crazy white Europeans and crazy Muslim Europeans feed off each other and secure power within their communities by pointing out the faults and oppressive practices, perceived and otherwise, of their counterparts. Just look at the comment thread on this article.
That’s not to say Muslims don’t deal with issues of real prejudice in Europe, or that white Europeans don’t have the right to question how their country’s character will change with immigration, or that the Flemish weren’t historically screwed by the Walloons, or the Walloons aren’t currently economically lagging behind the Flemish. But often, these issues become excuses for a lame sort of jingoism.
Isn’t this supposed to be what the European Union, seated in Brussels, is against? Isn’t the EU supposed to facilitate trade and travel, and create a Europe where folks don’t hold their language or culture over someone else’s? I had a feeling this wouldn’t be the first refutation of the New Europe I was to encounter on this trip. But it was odd to experience it so quickly, in the capital of that experiment.
