Text opening speech and the Arts Lecture - Opening of the Academic Year

Opening speech by Thony Visser, Dean of the FoA

On behalf of the board of the Faculty of Arts, I would like to welcome you all to the Arts Lecture. Traditionally, this lecture marks the start of the new Academic Year.

The lecture usually takes place in the Aula of the Academy Building.

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have been teaching and working ‘remotely’ for a long time. Offering and receiving teaching exclusively online was not ideal. This also became clear from surveys among students and staff. Both students and staff have missed real contact in the past one and a half years. Not just because in-person meetings raise the level of our teaching, but also because these meetings affect our wellbeing. That is why we are genuinely happy to be able to welcome our students back in our lecture halls.

I would especially like to welcome our first-year students who are starting their studies at our Faculty, but also our second-year students, as, for many of them, this is the first year they will be attending lectures at the Faculty.

I would like to stress that we managed to keep our lectures going in the past one and a half years thanks to the efforts and flexibility of our staff members. Even though not all activities could take place as planned, we have managed to achieve good results not only in teaching, but also in the area of research and impact. For this, I would really like to congratulate everyone involved and express my admiration for their achievements. This also applies to our administrative and support staff members, as well as our lecturers and researchers.

We obviously hope that we will soon be able to start working more and more at the Faculty again. At the same time, we are very much aware that the coronavirus is still among us. That is why, for now, only colleagues who need to be on campus will be working there. With these and other measures, we want to try and mitigate the risk of infections, so that, hopefully, more measures can be lifted soon. I would therefore like to stress to all students and staff members the importance of following the current measures and recommendations.

And now it is time to offer a special welcome to Abdelkader Benali, who will give this year’s Arts Lecture. Abdelkader Benali was born in Morocco and moved to Rotterdam when he was four years old. He completed his history studies at Leiden University and currently lives in Amsterdam. Abdelkader made his debut in 1996 with the novel Bruiloft aan zee (Wedding by the Sea), which was awarded the Geertjan Lubberhuizen Prize a year later. This was followed by many appealing novels and various honourable awards, among them the Gouden Ganzenveer in 2020 for his contribution to Dutch literature. Abdelkader Benali is currently curating an exhibition of Modern Moroccan Art in the Cobra Museum, which is scheduled to open in spring 2022.

We are looking forward to hearing which lessons Benali wants to share with us, lessons that he has learned from life and that have become extra clear to him during the pandemic – and which role the arts have played in this process.

The past year and a half has been a time for reflection and self-reflection, not just for our speaker, but for all of us. As I have said before, it has made clear how important interaction is. Nobody wants to stare at a screen of black rectangles all day. We want to exchange knowledge and opinions with colleagues and (fellow) students. We are not so much interested in someone’s background as revealed by their webcam, we want to see and experience someone’s talents while exchanging ideas. Interpersonal contact is essential in cooperation and knowledge acquisition.

It is no surprise, then, that ‘encounters’ is the central theme of our new Strategic Plan. In this Strategic Plan, we present our vision and ambition for the next five years. We want to develop innovative solutions for issues that are important for the academic world and for society. We stress the importance of dialogue, between students and lecturers, among students, and between the University and society. Collaboration with societal partners helps us to achieve our ambitions in research and teaching. This is why the programme of requirements for the renovation of the Harmonie Building, now that the Faculty of Law has left the building, is mainly aimed at facilitating all these different types of encounters.

It is important that we continue to show our strength. When reading the news online or in a newspaper, you can no longer ignore it: it is the Humanities that study how people deal with small and large societal issues. This is why the insights developed by our students, alumni, lecturers, and researchers are essential in our society. Not only because we can interpret current events by looking at the deeper causes, but also because our perspective contributes to the agenda of the future.

We are happy that the PwC report stresses the importance of the Humanities and the necessity for adequate funding, especially after the previous harsh judgement in the Van Rijn report. Our importance is also translated into a growing number of students: this year, the Faculty of Arts is the only UG faculty that shows growth. We hope to see this recognition in the government plans after the formation of the new Cabinet, if this is ever concluded: funding for higher education is an important issue, we need cash on the nail to manage the heavy workload.

Now it is time to hand over to Abdelkader Benali. As indicated, this is an interactive lecture, which means that all of you, both here in the Aula and online, will have the opportunity to ask Abdelkader questions during the second part of the lecture. This interactive part will be moderated by Stijn van Nuland, one of our MA students in Journalism. But first, we would like to hear Abdelkader’s story. May I invite you to start your lecture?

Arts Lecture by Abdelkader Benali, writer

Dear assembled guests, and in particular dear students,

It is a great honour for me to be invited to address you today, as someone who gave up their history studies at the end of the nineties to become a writer. Even so, my university years were my formative years.

Abdelkader Benali before his studies was a different person from the one after his studies. Before I started my studies, I was pretty self-confident. I believed that I could handle the world, I believed no academic challenge was beyond my reach. During my studies I lost that self-confidence. It was replaced by something else. If I had remained self-confident, I would now have been a millionaire who, under the pretext of doing good, would have sold hot air disguised as face masks to the government. It took me many years to understand why I had lost that self-confidence, that natural feeling that the world belonged to me.

What I experienced was an intellectual culture shock that nobody could have prepared me for. I ended up in a cultural environment that was completely different from the environment that I had left behind. My parents were poorly educated. I had obtained my diplomas thanks to my own efforts. I considered myself a self-made man who had complete control over the world because he had read many books. In reality, I was still wet behind the ears. I had barely seen anything of the world. I preferred to stay close to home. In a way, I had a fear of travelling.

At university, it turned out I was not the only one with a smart brain. There were lots of people like me. Everyone was intelligent, handsome, and eloquent.

And it wasn’t just the students who made me neurotic, the lecturers did too. Some of them belonged to the éminences grises. They were almost part of the furniture. Some of them even looked like furniture. Some talked like furniture. I could look up to these hotshots, because the gap was too wide. They only really walked around in the lecture halls to be admired. They were what we could become if we studied hard for four years and then continued to work on research and our PhD. We would end up belonging to the éminences grises. We would end up as the furniture. Their language was like one-way traffic.

It was the younger lecturers, some of whom had just finished their own studies, who exuded so much academic authority and wisdom and autonomy that their glance petrified me.

How had they managed to develop so much intellectual capital in just a few years after their graduation? It discouraged me. I was such a silly goose compared to those owls of Minerva.

I ended up in a personal crisis. Luckily for me, Oprah Winfrey managed to frame my lack of self-confidence as part of a spiritual journey. Oprah Winfrey pointed us world citizens the way to our new Self, with a capital S.

I watched her talk shows from the water bed of the tenants that had rented a room to me. My tenants were two men who lived together with their Thai lover boy. At night, the three of them slept in the water bed. During the day, when they were out, I watched Oprah Winfrey preaching the gospel of the nineties: Love yourself and the world will love you. There are no limits, only challenges. If you believe enough in what you want to achieve, you will achieve it.

This contrasted sharply with how I was raised. I was raised with the idea that love isn’t just given to you, you have to earn it. With hard work. And keeping your mouth shut. Man does what he can, and Allah what he will. Mercilessly. And I was raised with the idea that you were worthless as an individual. You had to keep a low profile.

Literally everything that I had considered normal and natural became unsettled during my studies. My descent, my religion, my world view, what I liked to eat, how I dressed, sexual orientation – as it turned out, my world was based on conventions, clichés, and stale rituals. I was hopelessly antiquated, yet so young.

I sank deeper into the water bed and Oprah Winfrey was radiant as ever, becoming richer and richer.

I felt like I was on a walk that took me further and further away from my starting point. Instead of ending up on a beautiful mountain from where I could enjoy a sublime view, like a Casper David Friedrich painting, I sank deeper and deeper into a dark valley overgrown with the most hideous weeds.

This despondency was exacerbated by the fact that I had very cautiously started to experiment with drugs and alcohol. I say very cautiously, because the first few joints almost gave me a psychosis, and when it came to heavy drinking, I was always the first to give up. My fellow students drank, I drank and threw up. I don’t think anyone has put their head as far into the toilet bowl as I did to have a conversation with their Supreme Being.

During my first year as a student I also made my debut as a writer. At first, I tried to keep it quiet, until curious students began to ask whether I was ‘that writer’. I admitted it. Yes, I was the writer. And from that moment on, I was the writer. I became a columnist. I gave lectures. I made beautiful trips. I was nominated. And I was given the opportunity to offer my opinion about the world. Life unrolled before me like a Persian carpet. All I needed to do was to step on it. And everyone listened to me. I couldn’t stop talking. Inwardly, I soon tired of all this talking. Outwardly, I kept going.

I was surrounded by a bright light. This bright light literally kept me from sleeping. I counted the beams in the ceiling of my raised bed. The mosquitoes kept me awake, I read The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster. It didn’t make the mosquitoes go away, but it provided me with some relief.

Fairly soon I discovered that the freedom I was swimming in, or rather in which I was trying to keep afloat, was teeming with sharks, and those sharks were called Isolation, Frustration, Loneliness, Depression, Anger, and Resentment.

I felt surrounded by all those sharks. And the more I was thrown back upon my own self, the more I started to hate this self. And I was afraid to talk about this with anyone, because I was afraid of Rejection and Lack of Understanding. My vulnerability became my prison.

As with any good resurrection story, there has to be a moment of salvation.

The one thing that saved me, that gave me relief, and that reassured me to such an extent that I even found the tears to weep over my irrational condition, was the story of the Other. A lot of the things we do to get closer to the Other are mere life buoys to escape from the stifling sea of the Self. And the Other is never just anyone. Encountering the Other is to be open for the encounter. But sometimes the encounter forces itself upon you. Sometimes the Other strikes into your life like a meteorite. It’s what we call love.

To be able to Understand the other’s story, you need to create space. That is why in literature, places of encounter are always described in detail. The side of a pool, a sanatorium, a city affected by the plague, an apartment block on the Via Merulana, a train compartment. A lecture hall, the attic of a townhouse. When I look back on my student years, my most favourite places were the refuges where I could recover, where I could catch my breath, where there was no room for the Self. The places where ideas were exchanged, physically and unconditionally.

In 1998 I visited the literary café Flanor. I remember it well, because it was my first visit to Groningen and I had just returned from a visit to Bamako in Mali. Funnily enough, it took a detour to West Africa for me to find the way to the far North.

I was accompanied by a fellow student, we shared a room in a simple hotel that the literary society had booked for us. The lecture was in a room on an upper floor somewhere, I can’t remember where exactly. Less than twenty people attended. Maybe even less. Maybe it was only ten people. We were not alone.

We were picked up at the station. Literary societies pick up writers from the station, thus paying tribute to one of the most literary places in every city: the station, the point of arrival and departure of stories. The stronghold of the Others. It is where we wait for the Other about whom we have heard stories, but whom we have never met in real life. Whom we invite into our own world, but whose world we secretly think we already know very well. The first handshake, sometimes kisses (when this was still possible): each time was a surprise.

I want to talk for a moment about the friend who accompanied me. He was a fellow student. I had noticed him reading an essay by literary theorist George Steiner and this made an impression on me, because as far as I knew I was the only person in the world who read essays by George Steiner. I also thought I was the only one who understood George Steiner.

We went to a café for a drink. We sat on stools opposite each other.

We performed our task, we told our story. And what happened will surprise you, but after we had shed our ideological, ethnic and religious feathers, we ended up talking about George Steiner’s essay, which turned out not to be by George Steiner, but by the Indian-British writer Salman Rushdie, who had written the essay in reply to George Steiner, who had claimed in The New Yorker that the novel was as dead as a doornail.

George Steiner offered arguments why the novel was dead, but none of these had convinced Salman Rushdie, which is understandable, because if you interfere with a writer’s source of income, his novel, and you declare it null and void, you interfere with his livelihood. But there was more to it. In the nineties, it was all about the end of history. The wall had fallen. Optimism prevailed, because globalism brought the world within reach. Trains could go anywhere and didn’t stop at the border. And now that the ideological conflicts had disappeared, the novel, the illusion of the conflict, had lost its purpose – that is what I believed George Steiner had written. The novel is where dialogues take place, where characters clash with each other over norms and values. But now that history had ended and there was only one truth left, we had little left to say.

And Salman Rushdie did not agree with that. As long as there are people, there will be conflicts. And as long as there are conflicts, there will be stories. And as long as there are stories, people will need to internalize them. Hence the novel. The novel as the travelling companion of the doubting human. The Novel as the hiding place for all the Others, the Republic of the Outsiders. Oprah Winfrey said: you are the truth. The novel says: the Others are the truths.

But that is not what I wanted to talk about. That discussion is beyond this lecture. I want to talk about that moment in that café when it seemed we had nothing left to say and, to our delight, discovered that there still was a story waiting for us. And that the stories wrote themselves. And that one story led to another. And we had another drink. And we talked to each other. And he asked about my religion and I asked about his religion. He said he was Jewish. I asked what this religion meant to him and he started talking. And he asked what religion meant to me and I started talking. And our questions weren’t questions, but they were like the southern wind that sets a ship in motion.

And when the café closed and we were standing outside, we knew one thing, without saying it, that the Jew and the Muslim still had a lot to talk about. A hunger inside us had been struck. A hunger that I profoundly hoped and believed could, no, should never be satisfied. Most of all I just wanted to continue to sit on that bar stool deep into the night and ask questions that would draw out stories. The story was an entity all by itself, between us, as a mediator, but a blind mediator, like a Tiresias from the Greek tragedy, who can see far ahead, deep into the past, allowing him to provide insight into how people interact in the present, yet stone-blind to what is in front of him. That blindness is his mercy. That we didn’t see ourselves, that was my salvation at that moment. We only saw each other.

I cherish that moment.

The place where we are shapes the conversation we are having. I remember a conversation afterwards with members of the literary society Flanor in café de Wolthoorn.

I can’t remember what was being said, all I can remember is that I was surrounded by people. I was surrounded by people my own age who, just like me, were curious about whether literature can answer the pressing questions of life. And in this café, while we were served beers and we could hear the ticking of billiard balls in the background, these peculiar types of conversations developed in which the silences are more important than the words that are spoken. All the sentences that flowed were the result of a tacit agreement that what we were telling each other had a certain holiness about it, that, no matter how small the company, like the men of Emmaus, whatever we shared with each other, was just as nourishing as the spare ribs and the nuts and the bread we had shared. Talking about literature is like sharing spiritual bread. It is a conversation in which the big questions of the various religions are presented to us bare, without the paraphernalia and ornaments those religions have attached to them for centuries, so we can revise them. Literature has many ways to handle those questions, but, more importantly, the conversation doesn’t have a set place of assembly. The church of literature is everywhere, and even though literature is a collection of texts, this collection of texts can only exist if it is countered by criticism, criticism that will consist of questions rather than answers, which are based on doubts rather than bold statements. It was crowded during the conversation in de Wolthoorn, we were surrounded by other conversations, and it was exactly this cacophony that amplified our polyphony. It was as if the noise formed the wall that we needed so we could scratch our symbols on it, where our symbolism found its place.

And we were sitting at the table, the Muslim, the Jew and all the Others.

But how do you find your travelling companion if you have to social distance, and have had to for over 1.5 years? Will we ever be able to trigger random meetings when our movements are so limited? I see the large masses of people, especially young people who assembled as soon as the measures were lifted, as a tribute to the spontaneous meeting, the necessary contact to make us feel again that we are people of quality, not just quantity. Not a frame on a screen, separated from others, but a disorderly bunch that happily keeps crashing into each other like bumper cars. Long live presence.

Isn’t the most important quest of our time to find some Other, or, to quote Nijhoff, as Nijhoff is always the most restless refuge of our poetry: ‘I am looking for a travelling companion’. You don’t look for a travelling companion, you find one. But to find a travelling companion, you have to have a space where you can find them.

But how do you find this travelling companion after a long period of social abstention? During the plague, people locked themselves up in rooms and told each other stories while they awaited the Apocalypse. In the past two years, people locked themselves up and started Zooming, not to tell stories, but to talk about being lonely, which of course is a story as well, but what is loneliness in a time of forced isolation?

Without my fellow students, I wouldn’t have been able to discover world literature. I would not have been able to do this on my own. It is nigh on impossible to discover the world of literature, because you don’t learn anything without enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is a virus that has made humans curious about the world. When you are touched by that virus, you want to know what the other knows. More importantly, you want to feel what the other feels. Why? Because investing yourself with the most valuable insights the Other has to offer, gives you the feeling that you are not alone.

Because when the other has a passionate urge to share with you what goes on inside them, this is an act of love that, for just a moment, cures us of all the sorrow we feel inside us. The other’s enthusiasm is contagious. And for it to be contagious, we need to experience the other’s presence, the distance to the other should be less than 1.5 metres.

To be touched by the virus of enthusiasm, you need to be close to each other.

I believe that, in the past two years, we have lost a large part of our zest for living because we have killed enthusiasm by social distancing. Using digital alternatives, we have made fruitless attempts to find a substitute for the presence of the other. It was of no avail. A Zoom meeting exhausts rather than vitalizes. It has been said that the COVID-19 pandemic was a blessing for introverts. That is nonsense. I am very much an introvert. I prefer to stay inside myself. But without the physical presence of the other, I ruin myself.

The arts is a field of study rather than a deepening of the world of books, a study of our motives as human beings. The most important question that humans have asked themselves is how to tolerate the other. In a relationship. To quote Chekhov: ‘If you are afraid of loneliness, do not marry.’ How on earth do you tolerate the other? Why do we still want marriage, despite the suffering?

Algorithms, the codes used by digital providence to write our fate, excludes all coincidence. There’s an Arabic proverb that says: ‘A random encounter is better than a thousand arranged meetings.’ And that is why the twisting roads in old city centres always lead to the centre, to the square; that is where, sooner or later, you would always end up, where there’s a café, so you could sit down to see the Other, who, just like you, had ended up there; the square where, sooner or later, everything and everyone comes together – the square that facilitates the random encounter.

When will we meet each other again in this era of social distancing? How are we going to rearrange this square? Who has the courage to say: to hell with this algorithm? I do not let a swipe or a like determine my life; instead, I trust on coincidence, on the fickle finger of fate.

In the past year, and this can’t be a coincidence, I read a number of travel stories that started out as a search for the Other. The destination was not a city, not a square, not a location, but a Person. The Other was an absent father, or a daughter, the Other was a father in Surinam, a father in Pakistan, a daughter from Groningen whose Liberian father told the story about his search for freedom and happiness.

Because there was no proximity, I looked for proximity in literature. And between the lines, I read this thirst for intimacy, the thirst for conflict, the thirst for coming home to the Other. These books inspired me. They showed me that all great stories start with the urge to discover, the urge to encounter, the urge to burst the membrane of isolation. The urge to be part of something bigger. Friendship. Family. The urge to finish the conversation with the Other.

Here. Now. Everywhere.

Thank you for your attention.