bordersworkshop

Laila Fantozzi

I have always struggled with some duality while growing up. I was born in the Netherlands, my mother is dutch, but I grew up in France for whole my life because my father is french. While growing up I always felt like the outsider in some way, not in a mean or disrespectful way, everyone was fascinated by my duality. However I still felt like I didn't belong in both cultures. I grew up in France, though there are many cultural normalities that I never knew about, likewise, I went to the Netherlands quite often (and I moved back a few years ago) but there are many things that I feel short about and that I just don't know.
The funny thing is, I was always fascinated by the Netherlands and I knew from an early age that I would one day come back and start a new life here and when it happened 4 years ago it was great ! I convinced myself that I am only dutch and that that was the better culture for some reason. Towards the end I even hated being in France and couldn't wait to move. I felt so distant from it and like I never really belonged there anyways.
I don't necessarily miss France and the places that used to be so familiar to me but for some reason I felt more and more grateful about that part of my life and almost feel sad about the things that I might have missed now that I see it from the other side. I've always called the Netherlands the other side, the better side even, but looking back on it now I have learned to embrace the fact that I both belong and don't belong to both cultures.
I believe the border that used to be so strongly engrained in my mind and heart while growing up is now slowly breaking down giving me the opportunity to see the bigger picture and appreciate all the benefits I can take out of this dual cultural upbringing.

Generally defined as someone who lives outside their "native" country

If POC (person of colour) or originating from an emerging economy, you are instead an immigrant.

Often only applied to colonizers and others originating from "western" economies. White people

Experiencing a dichotomoy in gender, at first not being able to see the spectrum, and trying to place yourself in a box.

I resonated with your story on 'el otro lado'. Where I grew up, the island Goerree Overflakkee, we used to call people living at the other side of the water "other siders". My grandparents still do.

This term is used frequently in the Netherlands but the the otherness it describes is far-reaching and significant. Interestingly, the term often doesn't even apply to indigenious peoples. In short, why does expat only apply to white people?

Separating logic and mind from emotions and the heart, instead of having them interact and connect.

A good day versus a bad day

upbringing in comparison to other family members

Esu lietuvė, qui a grandit au Luxembourg, who then went to study to The Netherlands. Therefore I have a 3 homes but none of them are for granted. Kitoje pusėje matau olandus, the Luxembourgish, les lituaniens. I have to take agency in how and where I create my home. While I believe to belong in Lithuania, it being the place I want to call home, I am never quite the other side. Unconsciously I have to tone down my critical thinking, my different background, my queerness to find a place. Yet in the Netherlands, where my other sides can thrive, it is my Lithuanian heritage I have to erase. I sometimes feel I am nothing more than just an international which is reductionist to how I see and feel myself.

I was fortunate enough to live a far more privileged life than my family back home, purely due to luck on my parent's side as they were able to leave relatively early during the war. This has always felt like a border to me, as I often feel 'othered' by my family members, and seen as ignorant, spoilt, and as having it easy. This has often meant that I cannot fully connect with my heritage - as I did not experience wartime or the aftermath (which is a huge defining event), nor have I ever lived there. This often comes with a sense of guilt on my behalf, as I view them, or, 'the other side', as having built a tough skin, being hard workers and more experienced in life than myself. I recognize that they have had to work 10x harder than I have, and as mad as it sounds, I sometimes feel as though I need to experience a traumatic event and tragedy like that in order to compensate for my privilege.

My border was created by being in a family different from a typical family in my country. Power has shifted with a working mother and a staying-at-home-father. Mother figure was not experienced as warm, safe or stable. Or in anyway a synonym to love & care.

As an international student in The Netherlands

Coming to The Netherlands I thought I would meet many dutch people with who I will be friends. It unfortunately turned out to be not that easy. Since my study is separated in an English and a dutch track, we do not really interact on campus. Meeting people aside uni, I find more difficult. I experience the dutch people as very friendly but in general not very eager to make friends with international students. For example, I used to have two dutch roommates and they often just spoke dutch when I was with them in the same room (even though I don’t speak dutch very well). This I found a bit rude and not very including. My Bulgarian friend was in a volleyball team and the whole team, except her and another international student, were dutch – that’s why they only spoke dutch with each other, even though in a team sport one should consider all members and, in this case, include them by speaking English. Trying to understand the other side, I know myself that it is just easier to speak your native language and it is a bit more effortful to switch to English. This could explain the two examples. Furthermore, it is easier for dutch people to make dutch friends instead of international friends and, therefore, we (as international students) don’t get approached as often. I don’t want to blame dutch people in not approaching internationals because I think the issue comes from both sides.

https://www.iamexpat.nl/expat-info/dutch-expat-news/netherlands-ranked-one-worlds-worst-countries-making-friends#:~:text=Making%20friends%20in%20the%20Netherlands&text=52%20percent%20of%2
0expats%20in,global%20average%20of%2038%20percent.

born and raised in israel until age 10
then moved to and grew up in france throughout my adolescence
lived and studies in the netherlands and new york and the netherlands again

do i consider myself israeli?
yes; my grandmothers live in israel and hebrew is my mother tongue
no; i do not share any views nor beliefs with the israeli government
and do not wish to live under their regime

do i consider myself french?
yes; i defined my personality in france and learnt to love in france
i learnt to be an independent adult in the french system
no; i do not have the french nationality nor the french mentality

living and studying in the netherlands and new york
do i feel like i belong?
...
i feel like i can find my place
create my space; i learnt to do that

what do you learn when you are born, raised, and based in one city?
when you know your friends for over 15 years and can still see them regularly?
when you have know the streets so well that your sense of belonging is that whole?

sometimes this division makes me feel like i'm missing out on a profound level
that there is no way for me to go beyond the surface level of wherever i am

is that true?

The "other side" is nurturing & affectionate, and it is the one which I identify with.

Filippo Deorsola

I would like to explore the gap within myself. That which is specifically relating to how I am, how I dwell, how I perform yet remains unnamed because it is not a defined space as such, but the split between two spaces.
First , to get a better glimpse into myself, I would like to know what those spaces are, what they tell me—in their round-about way—about what I am and what I should be. What do they smell like and maybe if they smell like something I have now forgotten. I imagine this would be a pleasant kind of perfume, although it could also be the case that those spaces would be congested with a nostalgic-scented miasma.
What they feel like and if maybe they feel like something I have longed for.
How those spaces resonate within me and how I resonate within them. How we exist into each other.
What can be done about that border in me ? It is just lying there, unsure as to where it should belong and what it should divide, since I am neither of those spaces but a copy of me exists in both.
I see this gap as a door. A door inaccessible from both sides. It is half closed and, for both copies of me, I can risk a guess as to what is behind that door but can never tell for sure if it was just a fleeting impression of what I would like to be there if the door was to suddenly slam open: the answers that would finally coincide with what I secretly and shamefully desire those spaces of identity to tell me about myself. One cannot help but feel within him or herself an unnatural fixation towards this door, half opened in the frozen promise of possibility.

I gaze upon the half-closed door
Stuck in between what I thought
What I thought I should have been
What I thought I would become

I gaze upon the half-closed door
And I cannot help but wonder
If you were ever really there.
Perhaps just an echoing image bound to bounce between the space of the the syllables
And the sounds which will never be
Set in stone
Stuck
Sucking my eyes in the black gap I cannot stop staring at.

I gaze upon the half-closed door
I gaze
Stuck in between what I thought
I should have been
What I wanted to become.
I gaze until
I am no more

And the door finally opens

And the sounds
And the syllables
And the images
They fall into place

I will never see them
As they were meant to be
So intent was I
on needing them otherwise.

Talking to white Dutch-born people about racism and other forms of othering in the Netherlands can be frustrating; no matter their broader political convictions. Not always, but often enough. For one, the existence of systemic and institutional othering in this country is denied by many. Why? Because it doesn’t resemble either the US or Nazi Germany. So, it is implied that social inequity often isn’t considered problematic until it involves explicit violence by a dominant force. But aren’t they forgetting about Dutch colonialism? Of course not: some even buy t-shirts that celebrate it. Second, stories of lived experience are generally individualized. As a result, incidents are commonly considered to be nothing more than incidental. “Well, you must have done something to look suspicious.” “Sometimes you’re just forced to interact with an asshole. That’s life. Deal with it.” As someone who has experienced his fair share of racism in this country – from casual microaggressions to fearing for my life, – these conversations can feel disheartening. I don't understand how people bear to hold on to that kind of willful ignorance. But I can understand that learning to realize how othering works in this country can be a scary experience for some people. It entails acknowledging your own biases, even the implicit ones that you were not aware of. I guess some people just feel like they are not emotionally equipped to handle that kind of self-confrontation.

My borders,
by Francesca

As a Sicilian woman, living in the Netherlands and not speaking Dutch I find it quite hard to feel integrated in the Dutch society. I often feel like I am falling behind at school because at Willem de Kooning most people in my department would rather speak Dutch for efficiency rather than make everyone feel included, and to me it is a bit harder than a Dutch person (or at least a Dutch-speaking one) to find jobs and to built a network for my professional career.

At the same time I have been living here for quite some time and every time that I go back to Italy for vacation or other purposes I feel less and less at home, like I don’t recognize it anymore. I also lost some “finesse” in my Italian speech as I gained more and more fluency in the English language, plus starting to learn Dutch. My border is definitely of a linguistic nature with my “other side” being the Dutch but not only. The culture is very different here and there and I still struggle to understand or get used to certain Dutch habits and at the same time being less and less used to Italian/Sicilian ones.

In me I recognize also other borders. I was born and raised in Catania, Sicily. In a way us Sicilians feel different from the rest of the Italians. Being geographically detached from most of the country and having our own historical heritage (which is intertwined but not the same as the one of Italy as a whole) we have developed a sense of separate identity. Our whole border being the Mediterranean see which surrounds the island, we only can get to Calabria (the most southern region of what we call "lo stivale", the boot, so the part of the country being attached to the rest of Europe) by a ferry that crosses "lo stretto di Messina". Arriving to Villa San Giovanni for Sicilian people doesn’t only mean entering Calabria, it means physically entering Europe. Our past generations used to refer to the short ferry ride from Messina to Villa as a ride to "u continenti" (the continent), which I found very funny when I was little.

This idea of the “continent” became clear to me when I moved first to Milan and then to the Netherlands. As I and many others who share the same experience would tell, it seems to get to a different continent every time that we land in Sicily after being away for a while. Although we are in fact still in Europe, geographically and politically speaking, the atmosphere is very different. Sicily is louder and more colorful, dirty, old and eroded, people are traditionalists, they are rooted, the cities rough around the edges, full of music and artists on the streets, while “the continent” (here conceived as in Northern Europe) is cleaner, it’s bigger, modern, avant-garde, progressive it is shiny and quiet, cordial but not expansive.

Sicilians like their sense of regional identity and their being islander. Most people are even against the building of the quasi-mythological "ponte sullo stretto", the bridge, that would link Sicilia and Calabria, a project that started decades ago but was never actually done. I think that besides all the political and economical interests Sicilians want to keep physically isolated and ideologically separated, protected by that little yet crucial strip of water. It is not casual that lo stretto di Messina inspired some suggestive myths and legends. Because cruising along those waters was considered to be dangerous due to winds and currents, in antiquity it was thought that there were two monsters called Scilla and Cariddi who were guarding the two banks of the “stretto” putting the sailors in danger.

Being in there, surrounded by the sea, in the between Sicilia and the “continent”, means being torn with one monster trying to drag you on one side, and another reaching with its seven heads to bite you. It’s the perfect metaphor for us Sicilian living away: one one hand we are called and dragged to the opportunities offered to us by moving to “the continent” (as another old saying goes: “cu esci arrinesci”, who goes away -from Sicily- will succeed in their life). But once we are there, the sharp bite of nostalgia and our hunger for family and tradition are something you either learn how to live with and fight, or you won’t make it long.