Quotidian 1 (December 2009)Irene Stengs: Dutch Mourning Politics: The Theo van Gogh Memorial Space

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The first hours

The first question when I began to write the ethnography of this memorial was ‘where to start?’ Where to pinpoint the inception of the memorial? In general, what is the actual moment when a memorial comes into being? At face value, the placing of the first flower or attribute in memoriam of the victim would seem a self-evident starting point, as only then does a memorial actually begin to take its material shape. From another point of view, however, this act is as much the outcome of a chain of actions as it is a starting point: before the eventual act of placing the actor has bought his flowers or written his note, journeyed to the site, after having made up his mind to do so. Another ‘natural’ starting point of an ethnography would be the murder itself, a starting point I have chosen elsewhere, like many other authors on related topics. However, a murder only becomes a social reality when it is made public through the media. Therefore, I have taken the moment when the news reached me, albeit indirectly, as the starting point of my ethnography.

The radio announcements of an event like the Van Gogh murder may seem the mere passing on of a fact, or a piece of information. However, as I have already indicated, such news has immediate effects in the world and should therefore be seen as a mediation. The symbolic power invested in the media gives their voices the authority required to be effective, that is, ‘worthy of being believed, or, in a word performative’ (Bourdieu 1991, 69-70, italics in original). The Van Gogh murder news established what may be understood as a rupture, a distortion of the equilibrium of relationships that constitute society, an instant suspension of everyday life (cf. Turner 1987, 24). Such suspensions have temporal and spatial dimensions. Temporally, the news of the murder suspended everyday schemes and routines, making people do other things than they would normally have done, and allowing them the time to do so. Time that was already fixed and scheduled became open and empty. Spatially, the news suspended the normal functions of the place where the murder had happened – a bicycle lane and the adjacent main road and sidewalk – and transformed it into a place of mourning, debate and protest, and a hotspot of nationwide attention. This once ordinary part of public space was now delineated as out of the ordinary. To substantiate what the opening of this, both temporally and spatially, liminal space implied in the case of the Van Gogh murder, I will present a selection of the encounters I had with people on the Linnaeusstraat in the first hours after Van Gogh’s death, as well as of my observations of the transformations that the Linnaeusstraat itself underwent.

I arrived in the Linnaeusstraat within two hours after the assassination. As expected – my own actions were in any case entirely based upon the anticipated actions of others – quite a number of people had already gathered, between fifty and one hundred. The street was fenced-off with barriers on both sides, guarded by police officers: Van Gogh’s body was still lying there, halfway between the two fences, hidden from view by a blue tent. I decided to stay at the barrier on the Oosterpark side, intuitively the ‘main entrance’ to the street because this side faces the city centre. The broadcast bus of the NOS, the Dutch national broadcasting organisation, arrived at the same time as I did. Quite a few journalists and their entourages were already present.^[5] More than a mere symbolic boundary, the barriers from the outset functioned as the material demarcation, separating those allowed inside (people ‘in’ the media, in this case photographers, cameramen and reporters) from ‘ordinary people’ (i.e., people ‘not in’ the media), and visualising Couldry’s analysis of the naturalised hierarchy and power inequality that go with this categorisation. Simultaneously, the barriers illustrated the strong attraction of ‘the place’, which as I will explain below, may be understood as the attraction of ‘the real’ (cf. Lisle 2004, 15).

Everybody present was waiting for the things to happen, which basically meant, as I felt it, the removal of the barriers. Our attention was powerfully drawn to that spot halfway down the street, to the blue tent, the waiting ambulance and the investigators moving around in their astronaut-like attire. During that first hour of waiting, people were quiet, standing around and occasionally engaging in soft conversations. The shared knowledge of what had happened still consisted of sketchy details: the identity of the victim, the ethnic background of the killer, and that Van Gogh had been shot, and possibly a knife had been left, stabbed into his body.

A man, probably in his sixties, standing next to me answered to my question on why he had come, that he felt that by doing so he made a sign of respect to the victim, and that he felt the urge to ‘have been there.’ He had experienced this feeling before, in particular when Pim Fortuyn had been murdered [see note 2], but also when other people had been killed by ‘senseless violence’.^[6] Usually, he added, such events happened somewhere else, in another city and too far away for him. He was unable to leave his wife alone for long, so he never actually went. But the Linnaeusstraat happened to be rather nearby. He had a general feeling that ‘society was in decay’. ‘Therefore, I had to come and see for myself. In fact, I want to have been there where it happened because this murder will have a great impact.’ His explanation points to the interwoven significances of ‘place’ (‘the place where it happened’) and physical presence (the urge of having been there in person). The man felt the rupture and was seeking to locate himself physically in the event, in this ‘history in the making’, by going there.

These motivations and sentiments are by no means unique or exceptional. Virtually all sites of violence or catastrophe attract vast numbers of people who come to see the sites for themselves. Lisle, in her analysis of tourists ‘gazing at Ground Zero,’ rejects the easy interpretation that these people are just unreflective and merely disaster tourists, because this interpretation ‘fails to account for why people feel the need to gaze upon sites of tragedy in person’ (Lisle 2004, 16, italics in original). Instead, she connects our desire to ‘consume sites of atrocity’ with our desire to touch ‘something real’ (Lisle 2004, 4, 15). Such sites, in her interpretation, are considered the only places left untouched in a world where ‘everything else is mediated, simulated, banal’ (Lisle 2004, 15). The seductive element is their quality of authenticity, the promise of access to the real.

At that moment (about 1 PM), there was no time to reflect on what I was being told. All of a sudden a potted plant in a circle of six round, golden burning candles had appeared on the other side of the barrier. It must have been placed there less than a minute earlier, but unfortunately I had missed it. A man in the crowd standing in front of the plant pointed out the woman who had placed the attributes. I approached her to ask why she had done so, and how she had chosen these attributes. At first, I thought I understood what she was saying, only to suddenly realise I did not.

She started telling me that she was a very, very open-minded person. But that this event was the ‘bloody limit’; that it actually was beyond comprehension that something like this could happen. So far I felt we were on the same track, but then, she began repeating that she was a liberal and hospitable person, and that she had travelled around the world, meeting all kinds of people abroad, and did not resent foreigners at all. But now it had become clear that all of these Arabs really did not belong in our country, and that it would be much better if they all just left: all of them, right now, back to where they had come from. And that it had come this far, gotten this bad, was definitely the fault of Job Cohen [Amsterdam’s mayor], and his soft policies. She was also upset with having to wait here, with nothing happening and the body just lying there. Something needed to be done; a sign had to be made, a ‘sign of respect’ for him. And therefore she had returned to her house – she lived just around the corner – and had brought the plant and the candles because these were the only things in the house that seemed appropriate for the purpose. But that didn’t seem to matter because the only thing that mattered was that a sign of respect had been made.

To me, the account was bewildering and shocking. Within two minutes the woman had reasoned from ‘being liberal and hospitable’ through ‘going abroad and meeting foreigners’ to stating that ‘all Arabs should leave the Netherlands’ and then blaming the mayor in particular. How had all this come to her mind? At that moment I was sure that this was the extreme standpoint of a single individual. In the subsequent days I would learn that this woman’s view was widely shared (although many other opinions came to the fore as well). This viewpoint stated basically that Arabs/Moroccans/Muslims were, in a general way, responsible for the murder of Theo van Gogh, together with everyone in favour of a permissive immigration and integration policy, the epitome of this type being Job Cohen. The immediate impact of the conversation with that woman was that I now saw the attributes she had placed (which for a brief moment constituted the entire Theo van Gogh memorial) in a totally different light: they had transformed from a materialisation of sympathy or respect, into a sign for seclusion and exclusion.

Whether other people felt an urge to do something while they seemed to be waiting so long, or whether the appearance of those first attributes triggered others to follow, I cannot tell. But while I was still taking notes of what I had just heard, I noticed that someone had, in the meantime, laid red roses on another spot some ten meters away. I also failed to notice the person who had laid a bunch of yellow roses on that same spot soon afterwards. Next, a man appeared with a bouquet of sunflowers, an attribute indexical to Van Gogh by association,^[7] and a brief note. Soon, bouquets of sunflowers would become the hallmark of the memorial. This association had also been made by others, by inspiration or independently. Next to the sunflowers, a man placed a film container. He told me that he appreciated Theo van Gogh because of his movies. When he heard about the murder on the radio, he immediately left to bring the container as a tribute to ‘Van Gogh the moviemaker.’

The speedy appearance of mourning attributes made me realise that something similar might be happening on the other side of the fenced-off part of the street. Or would the general perception be that this side was the street’s main entrance and hence ‘the place to be’? I forced myself to leave and have a look over there. It was much quieter by the other barrier, with only a few ‘media people’ and two police officers keeping around thirty bystanders at bay. A few meters behind the barrier, a portrait of MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali had been laid on the bicycle lane, partly covered by a bouquet of sunflowers. The sunflowers had clearly not been freshly purchased but came from a vase; the portrait was torn from a magazine. The poignant juxtaposition with the blue tent down the street evoked a possible future in a split second: Ayaan Hirsi Ali as the next victim. Not long before (September 2004), Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Theo van Gogh had co-produced Submission, a controversial short movie highlighting the relationship between the abuse of Muslim women and the Koran. The murder cast a shadow over the fate of this strongly anti-Islam MP, a former Muslim herself. Texts had been written around her portrait as incantations to prevent a similar fate from befalling Hirsi Ali. Two of the texts were clearly visible from behind the barrier: the Sixth Commandment Thou shalt not kill and the sentence Keep your bloody paws off our bloody little A.^[8] Both messages allow for more than one interpretation. The biblical commandment could be read as, ‘Thou shalt not kill Ayaan Hirsi Ali’, but, in a broader sense, may be seen as a religious conviction of the Van Gogh killer and his – then still presumed – religious motivation. The second message requires a more extensive explanation for those who are not familiar with the details of Dutch politics. First of all, it is a rephrasing of the famous WWII Amsterdam expression ‘Bloody Huns, keep your bloody paws off our bloody Jews’, but the connection here was probably indirect. A few years earlier, the expression had been rephrased by Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen, in a tête-à-tête with the then Amsterdam alderman for Education, Youth and Integration, on the evening after the city council elections in 2002. Unaware that the conversation was being recorded by a television crew, the alderman had spoken of ‘fucking Moroccans’ and the mayor’s sound reply had been “but they are our ‘fucking Moroccans’”. At the time, the broadcast had led to considerable controversy. The rephrasing of this saying on the Hirsi Ali portrait thus carried an anti-discrimination message and seemed to show support for Job Cohen in the political debate on the integration issue, and opposed to the opinion voiced by the woman quoted above, for instance.

Because not much was happening at this second barrier, I returned to the other side of the fenced-off area. The ‘sunflower annex film container spot’ was already developing into a more extensive memorial. The film container was almost covered now by bouquets of flowers and candles had been lit. Cigarettes had appeared as a new kind of attribute. Van Gogh had been an enthusiastic smoker, and, in direct opposition to the general tenor of the times, was an ardent campaigner for the right to smoke. Meanwhile, an ‘ordinary person’ had dared to enter the ‘in the media’ area: he had confined himself to the task of arranging and rearranging the memorial, and (re)lighting the candles. To an outsider he may have looked like an ordinary citizen; as a fieldworker on memorial sites in Amsterdam, however, I recognised him from earlier sites where he had performed the same self-assigned tasks as a ‘ritual expert’. Someone, for instance, had placed a small cactus – the first of many to follow – a direct reference to Van Gogh (‘sharp and cutting’) and his former television programme ‘A Pleasant Conversation’ (Een prettig gesprek). Van Gogh always concluded his talk show by presenting a cactus to his guests, which they had to kiss (as a symbolic act to demonstrate that they were not afraid of the consequences of their actions). The ‘ordinary person/ritual expert’ moved the cactus to a more central place, that is, on top of the film container. It is my observation that such ‘ritual experts’ are part and parcel of virtually all public mourning sites and related events.

His task allowed the ‘ritual expert’ to stay behind the barrier, and within the boundaries of the police and media space. The possibility for other ordinary people to transgress the fenced-in area for a brief moment to bring their attributes to the evolving memorial further illustrates this potential of ritual. If the barrier had only been placed there to demarcate the zone of police investigation, nobody would have been allowed to cross. Yet, the presence of the media in this zone also lent it the character of a media space. The media, however, were present in anticipation of the common ritual responses to an exceptional death, by public violence or of a celebrity. This anticipation had already transformed the place into a ritual space, and the inherent liminal character of the anticipated ritual granted the transgressability of the boundaries. Once entered into this ‘ritual space of the media’ people cannot but perform: they present themselves and their opinions, implicit or overt, intentionally or not.

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