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Relocation, crisis
Around 3:30 PM a hearse carried Theo van Gogh’s body away from the Linnaeusstraat. Instantaneously, people from the Amsterdam sanitation department arrived to carefully collect, with the assistance of the ‘ritual expert’ introduced earlier, all of the attributes on a small lorry for transportation, to rearrange – or should I say ‘translate’ – them into a memorial on the spot where Van Gogh had died. Subsequently, the barriers were removed, an act which had a – for me – unforeseen effect on everybody gathered there, including myself. We all rushed to the memorial at a quickened pace, as if attracted by a magnetic force. I found the moment weird and also embarrassing: what were we heading for, after all?
Again, I want to return to Lisle’s analysis of the need to see for oneself. Following Jenny Edkins in her discussion of Dachau concentration camp tourists, Lisle speaks of a ‘need to face the horror’ (Edkins quoted in Lisle 2004, 16). Gazing at catastrophes reveals a voyeuristic need, which entails both attraction and repulsion. In the Linnaeusstraat, we all knew that we would find a small memorial; consisting of the attributes we had just seen before, on the spot where Van Gogh had been killed. The attraction to the place implied a forbidden desire to see traces of the violence (‘the real’) conducted a few hours earlier, a desire fed by the knowledge that such traces, should these indeed be visible, would fill us with abhorrence. This desire for the object of horror is taboo, which accounts for the embarrassment experienced by myself, and no doubt by others as well. In Lisle’s words: ‘[we] were driven by the possibility of witnessing something authentic, but shamed by the voyeurism required to gaze upon “the real”’ (ibid., 17).
The place of the murder, as argued above, had been ‘delineated out of the ordinary’, which was also materially manifest from the site of the memorial being fenced-off. This did not imply that the boundaries of the site had become fully determined. In the hours and days that followed, city officials adjusted the barriers to the expanding collection of flowers, drawings, notes and objects. The conversations and the initial attributes discussed above, already indicate the main themes of the social crisis:
- the danger of Islam
- weak politics and politicians, in particular on issues of immigration and assimilation
- the decay of Dutch society and Dutch values (tolerance and freedom of speech in particular)
- (senseless) violence as a social problem
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Detail of the memorial site, showing various more or less political messages. The red text reads: ‘What’s to me today, tomorrow to us. Because it does not get beyond words again.’ Photo: Irene Stengs. |
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Illustration 5: ‘Leftist wallies for Cohen’, an expression of disdain for Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen’s so-called ‘soft, leftist policy’. Photo: Irene Stengs. |
Citizens took sides and urged authorities and politicians to take appropriate measures, with the general anxiety being that the murder might release a chain reaction of violent actions between autochthonous and Muslim or allochton Dutch. The first redressive initiative had already been taken on the day of the murder. In his press conference of Tuesday afternoon (1 PM), the mayor made a general appeal for people to come to the Dam Square in Amsterdam that evening for a mass ‘noise wake’.[14] Precisely the use of cultural performances – which potentially encompasses any genre ‘from tribal rituals to TV specials’ – is characteristic of this third, redressive phase (Turner 1982, 108). In the next section I will present the noise wake as such a kind of ritualised cultural performance that is meant to redress the crisis and yet articulates its contents at the same time.