ULTRAMARIJN By Henk van Woerden

Reviews

PAROOL

Rumpelstiltskin with Turkish Roots: NOT ONLY A PAINFUL BUT BEAUTIFUL, NECESSARY BOOK

His name may be very Dutch but Henk van Woerden is a writer with international allure. His work is available in more than fourteen languages – his books often take place abroad – and he won not only Dutch literary prizes but also the prestigious Sunday Times Alan Paton Award, a prize for the best book from South Africa. Van Woerden got the prize for A MOUTHFUL OF GLASS, the last part in his trilogy about South Africa.

At nine years old Van Woerden moved with his parents to Capetown. He also lived in Greece. The traces of those moves can be found in his work. Van Woerden’s new novel ULTRAMARIJN involves quite a few moves. The great thing is that it is not clear where the story principally takes place. The cover text says that it’s about a port on the Mediterranean Sea. Sometimes it appears to be Albania or Greece, sometimes Turkey. It’s not off putting as Van Woerden paints the environment in smells and colours, sunny tints, the sight of date palms, mountains, olive trees, a bay.

Later when one of the protagonists moves to Germany, it’s bleak, grey and full of concrete. A little while later we arrive in the flat Netherlands. Then it is not the colours with which Van Woerden gives his images such sharpness and atmosphere, but the observations that hit the mark, in which the flatness of the land comes through in various aspects. The writer showed this talent earlier in his South African trilogy.

That two-fold narrative drive makes ULTRAMARIJN readable on (at least) two levels. Firstly there is the love story. The love between Joakim and his half sister Aysel. We are in the mid fifties, in the little town of Kusaliman. The father of the two was a teacher, who was not accepted by his colleagues because he, a former Jew, converted to Islam. When he discovers that his children have made love to each other and Aysel is also pregnant, he sends Joakim to a military training camp. The boy, not yet 20 years old, is abused and raped there. They are disturbing opening scenes, but they are so convincing, composed and described from within that Joakim’s experience becomes the reader’s. At such moments you might wish that the writer doesn’t have so much to offer. But art is allowed to hurt a bit.

A family member of the man who rapes Joakim is a popular, blind lute player, names Udi Ozan. Later Joakim learns how to play the lute via this Ozan and also becomes a famous musician.

In the meantime Aysel has been taken to Germany by her father. There she gives birth to a daughter, Ozlem. Ozlem grows up, flirts with her stepfather Moerat, and one day leaves for Amsterdam. There she ends up behind glass (as a prostitute) and she observes the Dutch. Carefully Van Woerden builds up the tension. That father and daughter will meet is sure but how and when is the question that is only answered towards the end of the novel.

In this story other stories resonate. The story of the two ‘koningskinderen’ (a story of two lovers not meant for eachother), or that of Oedipus, but turned on its head. There are also echoes of the Rumpelstiltskin tale when Ozlem who, as a prostitute uses a fake name, finally hears her love call out her real name. Which is when the dramas start. In ULTRAMARIJN all these primal stories are captured. You read one but simultaneously hear the other. Also where that’s concerned Van Woerden is multilayered.

Then there is the other story. The political background in ULTRAMARIJN is schematically drawn. In different ways people are mentioned who belong to a particular group, but feel different or are seen as different by others. So the story of the Sabbatians, Jews who converted to Islam, but aren’t seen as real Muslims. Comparable is the character Babette’s situation. This prostitute is seen as a woman by men but is a mail transvestite with breasts. And then there is Ozlem, who has multiple identities. She is German, and at the same time not German. European and not European. Lover, daughter, niece and in all these capacities, she says, she feels a different person, and she is ‘what others see in her her’.

In de Volkskrant on Tuesday a boy was talking about his identity. He feels himself to be Dutch but said ‘that he would always remain a Turk, because others see him as one’. It is exciting how close a novel can come to reality.

That Van Woerden is an engage author was already obvious. ULTRAMARIJN is also about a lot of actual problems in society. That the novel also carries fraternization in it – all parties in this novel fine their origins in the same spring – is an extra. In that light the union between brother and sister, between father and daughter, can only be seen as extremely hopefull. And that makes ULTRAMARIJN not just a painful and beautiful but also a necessary book.

FINANCIEEL DAGBLAD

The Jury report of the Frans Kellendonk Prize already got to the heart of the matter: “his style is effortless’. This was said in reference to his trilogy about South Africa, the country where Van Woerden lived from he was nine until twenty. EEN MOND VOL GLAS was the successful conclusion of the series. His style has stayed effortless, now that, after 7 years without a novel (though during which time he published a short story collection), he has written ULTRAMARIJN. Precisely by scouring past everything, Van Woerden leaves grazes behind; casually painful. It’s an effortlessness that contains everything: finesse, story, warmth, wisdom.

The story starts with the young love between Joakim and his half sister Aysel. When Joakim is sent away to camp, Aysel embarks on an affair with a Greek man. She is discovered and is sentenced to death but her father manages to protect her and they escape together to Europe. Joakim is never actually told the true course of events, and despair stays lodged in him; the only thing he can do is take good care of Aysel’s bird.

Even in this first part, ‘Azure’ which takes place from 1955 to 1958, all sorts of things hurt. The initially optimistic physical then melancholic tone shows extraordinarily clearly how Joakim develops. And how not knowing everything is a heavy burden for his character.

That heavy burden gets heavier. In the second part ‘Ceruleum’ covering 1971 to 1977, the author introduces a new central character – Ozlem. She is the daughter of Aysel, now living in Frankfurt. She dreams about Frau Holle and believes the fairy tale land of the feather cushions is in the Netherlands. In Amsterdam she has found her vocation, captivatingly powerfully portrayed: ‘her body curled over a chair like a Christmas’. She is a whore.

In the meantime we hear that Joakim is also drifting around as a lute player. He loses the woman he loves when she sleeps with another and he lets it happen: ‘He wants to feel shards, pay the price here that is being extracted there.’ Then the lives of both characters rub against each other’s.

Ozlem goes on holiday to the summer island where Joakim is playing. He exposes her, breaks her heart open like an oyster and she makes his bleed because she looks so much like Aysel, but other than that they each go their own way.

In the last section, ‘Lazuli’, from 1989 to 2000, Joakim and Ozlem do finally come together as Joakim lets himself be comforted by a lady companion. This produces some harrowing moments with the weathered whore Ozlem seeing right through the drunken old man. Still they finally become lovers, there is attraction. Only after a while when Joakim dreamily utters Aysel’s name, does Ozlem realise the truth of their situation. All their luck is shattered. Everyone is alone in the world.

Van Woerden brings to this book some aspects of his previous work. There is his lust for travel, that he gave free rein to in the story collection NOTITIES VAN EEN LUCHTFIETSER gave form to. In an interview Van Woerden once said: ‘My father is buried in South England. My mother’s grave is in South Africa. From the perspective of this geographical confusion I write all my books.’

Something else that recurs, albeit it in a new setting, is his eye for immigrants. Lack of homeland marks all van Woerden’s books. Not for nothing does he let his characters drift with pain and longing for something that they can never find, sometimes no longer in their own land that has been changed by tourism. Everyone lives with a double landscape in their minds, but immigrants even more so.

Henk van Woerden has written a book of unparalleled beauty, precise and which cuts right to the bone. It is a novel so rich, so perfect. A novel that asks to be reread and that will carry on giving meaning, revealing secrets, for all time. Van woerden writes poetry, ice-sentences that still give warmth, through light irony or surprising word images. Simply masterful.

TROUW

At the end of ‘Ultramarijn’, which is set in post-war Turkey and Europe, a father and daughter have an affair. It’s a murky relationship, and there is more about the book that is ambiguous, because not only does the father end up in bed with his daughter, the child is the result of a relationship between him and his half-sister. And bi-sexuality also plays a role in the novel. It could be said that these murky, many-sided relations represent on a small scale something that’s also true on a bigger scale in this world: we are part of a melting pot.

In Ultramarijn that melting pot begins in Little Asia. The precise country is not mentioned, nor are the name of the ‘Founder of the Nation’ or the topographical references like Iskanderiye or Dogrun reducible, but it is clearly about Turkey.

Udi Joakim, from a Jewish Sabbatan family from Saloniki, makes love to his half-sister Aysel, and as a result is sent to a training camp, while his sister and father relocate to Europe.

While Joakim becomes a famous lute player, Aysel tries her luck in Germany. Her restaurant isn’t working, her new boyfriend Moerat falls for her daughter Ozlem, and the latter moves to Amsterdam where she lands into the world of prostitution. When she and her transsexual girlfriend Babette go on holiday in ‘Turkey’, Ozlem stays there and at a local sexclub she meets the lute player Joakim, starts a relationship with him and later discovers that he must be her father, a fact which she keeps from him to the end.

Pfff, you may be inclined to say about so much sensuality; you certainly can’t call this novel average but at the same time Van Woerden gives it a sort of universal primal force, the fact that he stubbornly doesn’t mention the name of the country being a symbol of this.

Free of any moralising, the writer (who debuted with the African bildungsroman ‘Moenie kyk nie’) portrays a world of magical bonds and mythical relations that measures itself against the world of modern freedom and frivolity. For him porn or prostitution is something natural, even on the lowest level. In one of the most salient scenes the little whore Ozlem drives a dildo in the shape of Jesus up a farmer from Havelte: “She takes hold of the rubber Christ and begins to nudge it into him, gently, with the help of a generous amount of gel, soon gaining a smooth passage between the two white cheeks of his behind. A slim and pious figurine, a tongue in his crack: Johan tightens his grip on the Saviour, clasping and unclasping Him involuntarily. His tail-end is on fire, and release, when it comes, is sudden and violent. He wails, and secretes. Rock of ages cleft for me, let me hide myself in Thee. Could my zeal no respite know, could my tears forever flow, all for sin could not atone; Thou must save, and Thou alone.”

Blasphemy? Of course not, but definitely a tableau that shows up the state of the western world, the degenerate freedom, the corruption of inheritance. In opposition to this stands a world of elementary forces, represented by the shimmering sounds of Joakim’s lute, by the iridescent blue that gives the book its title. And those differences of lightness and depth come together in Van Woerden’s story. His subject matter is the border-crossing culture that in ‘Moenie kyk nie’ was the torn land where he himself as a Dutchman lived, so in Ultramarijn it is the tear that now runs through Christian and Islamic societies.

But with Van Woerden the social conflict is not central. He goes into the depths, on the hunt for the roots of norms and passions. His novels are therefore a lot less society-minded and moralistic (‘conscience is an absurdity’) than most modern multiculti novels.

His world is one of magical religious powers, like here, when father and daughter blend together: “Through a haze of alcohol pleasant memories well up in him. He has come back. With Aysel who isn’t Aysel. The gods are pleased. He is lying in a room in Iskandariye under a girl of twenty-four and a chasm gapes that stretches thirty centuries down.”

In Ultramarijn Van Woerden succeeds in veering his novel of multicultural society off the path it has constantly been taking recently: a sociocultural essay, dressed up with some fictional decorations. This writer searches for more than inter-personal explanations, he touches the unknowable, the mystery. That makes his book wonderful, intriguing and sometimes also a little beyond our grasp.

NRC HANDELSBLAD

Up until now, whenever the name of Henk van Woerden has been mentioned, it has been associated with South Africa. His first novel MOENIE KYK NIE (1993) was about a Dutch family that emigrated in the 50s to South Africa to start anew. The book was, in his own words ‘totally autobiographical’. He was that boy with the glass eye who experienced all those awful things. His second and third novel were partly based on his own experiences in South Africa. In 2001 he decided to leave this path. In an interview with De Volkskrant he announced that he now wanted to show that he could also write a novel without going back to his own memories or experiences. He was planning a European novel.

Now, four years later, we can confirm that he has fulfilled his promise. ULTRAMARIJN is not Dutch and not South African and actually not strictly European, but Mediterranean. Van Woerden lets his characters not just revel in all sorts of shades of blue, but also lets them gaze out over the Mediterranean sea or dive into it, to briefly get away from the heaviness of life. It features a lot of Turks, but also Egyptians, Greeks, Germans, Swiss, Australians and a few more or less lost Dutch.

If Van Woerden meant this novel as his masterpiece, we can reassure him. With ULTRAMARIJN he shows that he can also write about countries he has never lived in, languages he doesn’t speak, landscapes he doesn’t frequent daily and people and cultures he hasn’t grown up with. And the book doesn’t just have international

appeal; it is also intense. It opens with the rape of a juvenile and plays itself out in the shadowlands of incest, racial tension, emigration, alcohol abuse and prostitution. Over the top

sentimental the novel certainly isn’t, no matter how often something ultramarine is sung: the clear azure blue of the sea, mountains and air.

The country being put on the literary map here must be Turkey from the 1950s onwards, although it remains unnamed. We have to make do with ‘the Republic’, ‘the motherland’ and ‘the fatherland’. Although Van Woerden doesn’t delve deep into political issues and doesn’t, for example, go on about Turkey wanting to join the EU, he does highlight all sorts of things from the past: tension between government and the opposition, voting disputes, xenophobia, a military coup, the hanging of a premier, censorship, the restricting and banning of all too free thinking citizens.

Why does Van Woerden not give his main character’s country a name? Is it, for him, about the human condition and not about a specific country with specific characteristics and problems? This seems most likely. And fits well with Van Woerden’s style, which doesn’t particularly invite recognition or identification but rather provokes thought and wonder.

Henk van Woerden (1947-2005), Ultramarijn (“Outremer”) roman, 2005, 300 pages EditionsPodium, Amsterdam.

Henk van Woerden a travaillé à ce beau roman au cours des quatre dernières années de sa vie. Il voulait s’évader désormais, pour son œuvre romanesque, de l’inspiration autobiographique et de son expérience de l’Afrique du Sud. Il y a parfaitement réussi avec ce roman, qui est une sorte d’ode au monde méditerranéen. Si Van Woerden a vécu en Grèce, il a préféré situer son roman dans un pays qu’il ne nomme jamais, mais qui ne peut être que la Turquie.