Specialist art spaces: independence at an intersectional-feminist bookshop, a Black archive and a hiphop platform

Together with Adil Boughlala, I hosted the most recent Creative Culture Talk at theatre LUX, Nijmegen, titled When Art Offers Space for Community. In it, we talked with researcher Nikita Krouwel of The Black Archives, musician k.Chi” and dancer Neema Souare of hip-hop platform The Mansion, and cultural producer Marischka Verbeek, owner of the first Dutch feminist bookshop Savannah Bay. These people organise some of the most important art and heritage spaces for/by/about marginalised groups in the Netherlands. After the talk, Adil and I reflected on the question: Do they aspire for their art or collections to be mainstreamed?

Written with Adil Boughlala

When someone starts a small art or heritage organisation, others may think that their aim is to grow bigger and more well-known. They are expected to start off by selling one kind of book, staging one kind of music, or collecting objects created by one group of people, only in order to become mainstream in the future. They are expected to want to have more stages and welcome more guests. To want their initiative to be included in more widely known festivals. To want their minority art to be recognised as important by mainstream media, and, next, to be acquired by national museums or archives.

But perhaps this is only what the mainstream thinks?

Specialised spaces

Recently, we – a student and teacher interested in sustainable art and spatiality – led a public conversation among a small group of people working at three very different art and heritage organisations in the Netherlands. This group included the owner of a bookshop, a researcher at an archive, and a dancer and a musician at a hip-hop centre. As diverse as this group was, they also had something important in common. Each of their spaces was founded with the intention of offering a place for heritage and art objects originating in a specific marginalised group and is run by people of the same group, following the logic “for us, by us, about us” – even if others are very welcome, too.

Savannah Bay started as a women’s bookshop, selling books by and about women – with attention to other, intersecting oppressed groups – and was directed and staffed by women as well. While the shop has become more gender-inclusive over the years, it remains true to its intersectional-feminist origins.

The Black Archives builds on the space and collections of Vereniging Ons Suriname: Society Our Suriname. It houses books, letters, research papers, and other objects collected by Black intellectuals and families in the Netherlands, and is run by Black archivists, curators, and organisers, with their primary target groups being Black school children and Black citizens in the Netherlands.

Hip-hop platform The Mansion was founded to encourage talented young people in the east of the Netherlands, coach them and keep them “off the street”. They are coached mostly by people who are young themselves, and active in the hip-hop scene. The coaches and organisers support each other as well so that in effect, there are no strict role demarcations. Everyone can help anyone, and anyone can start a new initiative.

In the conversation that these three organisations had, and in the lead-up when we visited them in their different locations across the country, we learnt many things about the significance of art and heritage for oppressed groups. For instance, how art and heritage can teach and comfort us, and make change possible. We learnt about the importance of having a place of our own. And, most pertinent to this article, we learnt about the internal and external struggles in the face of that eternal question: why did you create a special place for your art? Why are you separating yourself from the rest? Why are you not part of “general” art and of the “national” collections? All three places taught us something about this struggle.

Savannah Bay

In one sense, Savannah Bay did take a leap towards the mainstream in 1997, when it formally turned from a “women’s bookshop” into a “bookshop”. When this happened, some of its most loyal customers were afraid it had lost its special character. However, it kept its intersectional-feminist spirit. When entering the store, the first things Adil expected were women’s literature and trans and queer literature. Yet, right at the entrance, he was met with climate literature and books on Black and indigenous culture (the latter of which are not new, by the way). While including an ever-widening selection of works by, for, and about different groups, the shop still works hard to spotlight marginalised authors and themes to its audiences. It still sells books that you wouldn’t find in most physical bookshops.

There is another way in which Savannah Bay embraces its special position. During the evening at LUX, owner Marischka Verbeek was opposed to franchising: the bookshop works because of its rich history within the city and its close connection with its visitors. Black Archives researcher Nikita Krouwel chimed in on this, pointing out that each city has its own culture. Whether you run an archive, a bookshop, or a hip-hop platform, each city has its wants and needs, and a formula that works in Utrecht does not automatically work in Amsterdam or Nijmegen.

Finally, many heritage and art organisations depend on subsidies from municipalities and other government organisations. Without their financial support, these spaces would have to close, something which the bookshop has also almost experienced before. Despite that, Marischka Verbeek is a firm believer that the bookshop – and art and heritage organisations by/for/about marginalised groups in general – should be able to persevere without this financial support. This has everything to do with Dutch political history of the past few decades. After a period of governmental interest in gender emancipation, fuelled by the 1975 UN Women’s Year, funding for emancipatory non-profit organisations all but disappeared. Marischka Verbeek called this “the feminist winter”. She saw first-hand how women’s organisations in Utrecht that received funding from non- and anti-feminist administrators were nudged into a shared building, which was then used as a reason to decrease their funding and which, eventually, led to the disappearance of most of these organisations. While Savannah Bay remained in its place, it, too, was impacted negatively because of its dependence on these organisations as customers. In order to become and remain a physical space for individuals to connect, therefore, it is important to guard your financial independence. And so, the activities organised by the bookshop are not aimed at selling more books, but rather the other way around: books are sold so that these activities can be organised.

The Black Archives

As this suggests, one problem faced by small art spaces is their lack of resources, such as paid and trained staff, climate-controlled rooms, and digitisation facilities. This problem could be solved by merging with bigger institutions. However, merging always means submerging. In our conversations with The Black Archives, they explained that if they deposited their collections at a national archive, these would become harder to find for visitors interested in Black heritage. The collections would drown in the masses of material, not only because a national archive stores so many collections, but, more importantly, because those people managing European national archives have never been very good at constructing finding aids and key words relevant to Black cultures. Their visitors would moreover miss the guidance from collection specialists and the intellectual and emotional support that can only be offered by visitors or staff with similar experiences of racism and a history of (forced) migration. At the current Black Archives, archivists can sit down with a group of visitors, go through the items most relevant to them, and retrieve further histories through personal story-telling. In contrast, a national archive in a white-dominated country like the Netherlands may be a hostile environment where you rather not set foot at all. Lastly, part of the magic of this archive lies in what it has collected, literally. Different types of materials, such as books, posters, and music records, can be found together in one room because they used to belong to one person. This tells valuable things about the life of that person. In a national archive, those materials might become scattered and the collection as a collection may lose its meaning. All in all, a specialist archive that is mainstreamed does not only win a few things, but it also loses a lot.

The Mansion

The thriving of these organisations does not only depend on the safeguarding of a space of one’s own. At first, Anna thought, after browsing the online presence of The Mansion, that their wish was for hip-hop to be heard and seen primarily in club spaces, and that therefore they choose to organise their events on the floors of a skatepark, where the difference between performers and audience is blurred; where anyone can join the jam or a spontaneous battle; and where visitors are allowed to make noise, walk in and out, or bring a drink. Yet when Anna asked the organisers of The Mansion about this, a second story surfaced. There seemed to be a certain sadness or dismay at the idea that hip-hop “belongs” in the “street” and only in the street. After all, why wouldn’t hip-hop audiences, too, want to sit in plush chairs in a heated room, where the equipment is impeccable, you can hear every vibration, and see every blink of a performer’s eye?

Does this mean that hip-hop should merge with the mainstream, after all? Should its content, makers, and audiences become indistinguishable from other art forms? Not necessarily. Rather, it means that hip-hop should get access to the better-funded spaces that are currently run by people who are not so into hip-hop. And it means that in those spaces, hip-hop artists should not only be invited as guests (let alone as “the diverse guest”), but as programmers, producers, and managers who, through their expertise, will be able to present the full width of dance and music styles.

We hope that the evening at LUX and this subsequent article have inspired people to visit these three spaces. What’s more, we hope they encourage people to seek out other art and heritage spaces by, for, and about marginalised groups, or even create their own.

The people in the conversation were Marischka Verbeek of Savannah Bay, Nikita Krouwel of The Black Archives, and Kachi Yip (k.Chi”) and Neema Souare of The Mansion. We also learnt from their colleagues Roche Nieuwendam, Debora Heijne, Mich Fesenmeier, Deveney Eeltink, Mira Bruggeman, Steve Baptist, Isabelle Britto, Camille Parker, and Savitri van der Velden, and postgraduate researcher Merel Van Bommel, as well as from several of the books Marischka Verbeek listed here. The wording of the ideas in this article, however, including potential mistakes, is completely our own.

The evening was produced in collaboration with Pim van Dijk and Leoni Bolleboom of LUX. The Creative Culture Talks are a series by Helleke van den Braber of Radboud University’s Art and Culture Studies. Photos on this blog post are by APHG.

How to pee on a train in the year 1900

It’s summer, travel in Europe is going ahead at full speed again now that the fear of CoViD-19 has lessened, and so, pleasure trips and long-distance train journeys are as accessible again as they always were: more accessible for some, less accessible for others. But even if you are not railing away romantically as we speak, you can always take a peek at this beautiful historical train kept by the German Museum for Technology:

Promotional photo for the online exhibitions of the German Museum for Technology, https://technikmuseum.berlin/ausstellungen/online-ausstellungen.

It is a miniature railway carriage from around 1900, part of a series of around fifty carriages and locomotives kept by the museum that were originally built by railway companies to show off their services. The museum has created a wonderful opportunity to walk through them so I encourage you to take a peek. Every little detail of these scale models of real trains can be seen: from the radiators to the little signs that prohibit the eager traveller from peeing while the train is at a station.

In fact, three loos have been recreated on this carriage. But what do we see there?

There are two cubicles for men, and only one for women. Of course, women did travel by train around 1900. Perhaps the logic of these train builders was that each gender should have an equal amount of space allotted to them, but that women had wider skirts and therefore needed a bigger cubicle, while the same space would offer room for two cubicles to serve men?

Yet it is a well-known fact that people with smaller bladders, who are pregnant, or who menstruate – usually women – need the toilet more often and for longer. This piece of unpractical design thinking that we often see nowadays – people who need less space get more space -was clearly already around more than a century ago.

Then again, another remarkable thing is that the cubicle containing the urinal offers no facilities to wash your hands. Another thing that men did not need?

Instead, as an extra service, they received: a horizontal bar to hold on to…

How to colonise a bit of land for four days

On my way from work I saw this:

Tape and chairs and even an entire sofa on a usually empty lawn along a busy road in an upmarket part of town. What is going on here?

I had seen some things like this before in the Netherlands, but never on such a scale and with such an array of furniture. It had to have something to do with the upcoming hiking event, held annually in the town to which I moved three years back, although because of COVID this is the first time in three years it is happening. The Nijmegen ‘Four Days’. Organised since 1909. Four days of long-distance hiking, seven days of partying. Tens of thousands of hikers participate, cheered on by hundreds of thousands along the route.

More than a week before the start of the trek, the chairs started appearing in the landscape.

They became more every day. Who put them there, and why?

People were ‘booking’ a seat in the audience.

There was something uncanny about these empty seats and stretches of tape. To me, a historian of the nineteenth century, they looked like a colonial gesture.

Before I go on I want to make it clear that of course the Four Days’s audiences are no actual colonists. They are:

1. here to enjoy themselves and to cheer people on, not to earn money;
2. not likely to kill anyone in the process;
3. leaving again after four days.

However, there are some striking similarities, too, between the claiming of these viewing spots and what Europeans did on other continents in the last five hundred years:

1. this land belongs to the municipality, to the commons, in other words: to everyone in Nijmegen. And yet small groups of people claim it as exclusively theirs;
2. they plant their flag and expect this to be enough to make a lawful claim on the land. If I were just to sit down on the grass within one of these marked areas, the people who had claimed it the week previous would no doubt be very angry and expect me to leave. It shows how big is this faith in flags and tape. It is not actual usage and work and daily interaction that makes you belong to a piece of land (sowing crops, building homes), but a superficial, symbolic intervention such as posting a notice on a tree and walking away again;
3. who gets to make these claims? People who have access to tape and chairs or even sofas and who are able to move these to the designated piece of land. These are people either with a big car and arms and legs capable of moving this stuff (their own arms and legs or those of people willing to help them), or who live in this upmarket part of Nijmegen so that they did not need to lug their sofas very far. In other words: you cannot make this claim if you ‘only’ get up early each day of the hike to be here in time for a good spot (the hike starts at 4am, although from a different location). Your own body isn’t enough. You need capital. Access to labour. A plan. You need to invest, in the capitalist sense of the word;
4. although people invest in a spot, that does not mean they pay in full for what they harvest. That is not what investment entails. The lawn was designed by the municipality. The trees were planted by the municipality. The grass is cut by the municipality. And after the party-goers are gone, it is the municipality who cleans up their Mars wraps and Aperol bottles. Who is the municipality in this case? For most of this work, it is gardeners and cleaners. Cheap labour provides some people with a seat in the first row.

Is there a connection between Dutch historical colonialism and Dutch people routinely claiming public space to watch a sporting event or sell their wares on King’s Day? How deeply is this ‘claiming logic’ embedded in Dutch normality? I have not seen this form of appropriation anywhere else so far, so there might be something in Dutch culture that normalises this way of thinking. Meanwhile, I have seen many other places where people get up early and go and queue in order to get what they need or want. Or perhaps that’s only those with little money. Perhaps we should see this present Dutch form of appropriating space as a relatively benign way of claiming something that the entitled otherwise claim by using violence?

But let us stop rummaging around in the Dutch soul for a moment, go to a piece of lawn or pavement bordering on the march*, and sit down, loiter, squat, politely request, stand in front of, or get up really early to enjoy a bit of the parade. And let us hope that it is actually the people staying at the hospital next to the road who get to sit or lie in the best parts of the reserved areas.

* The event is partly a military event.

All photos taken by the author, 2022.

Hats and whores: A nineteenth-century childhood

As promised, I have translated and edited my article that outlines some of the key forms of intersectionality in Neel Doff’s novel ‘Keetje Errand Girl’, about an Amsterdam working girl in the 1860s and 70s: here it is. A shorter version of this article appeared in Lover Magazine (in Dutch).

I have just published my Dutch translation of Neel Doff’s French novel Keetje trottin (Dutch title: Keetje op straat). This novel illustrates the complex idea of intersectionality in many ways, showing how feminism needs more than the dual concepts of man and woman in order to be effective. In this article, I explore four different meanings of the word ‘intersectional’, using examples from the book.

But first: a brief introduction of the novel. Keetje trottin is one of three autobiographical novels published by Neel Doff (1858–1942) between 1911 and 1921. They centre on her alter ego, Keetje Oldema. The book Keetje trottin is set in the slums of Amsterdam, where Keetje grows up, as well as in the homes of the (petits) bourgeois, the hatters and pharmacists for whom she runs errands. ‘Keetje Errand Girl’, in other words, or ‘Keetje trottin’ in French. French was the language Doff wrote her stories in, after she had herself become a member of the (haute) bourgeoisie, was no longer required to work for a living, and had settled down in Belgium in her own house with a garden. It made quite a difference from how she grew up.

Doll for rich children (or rich grown-ups), such as the ones Keetje encounters at her employers’. 1860/1890, owned by Museum Rotterdam, no. 33275-1.A-B. CC-BY-SA-3.0.

It is those socioeconomic and cultural differences that the book is all about. This results in some marvellous insights into the life of a working-class girl in the second half of the nineteenth century: a group who had little opportunity to make themselves heard except indirectly, in a book like this, written years later. Keetje’s work experiences, her hunger, her responsibilities as an elder daughter in a big family; but equally her aesthetic pleasures, her love of hats and her creativity; her explorations of her physical relations to both men and women; her experiences as a reader, a flâneur, painter’s model, sex worker, mistress and protester… they are all there in the books, and most likely, they all somehow relate to Doff’s own experiences.

Parts of the trilogy have been translated into various languages. In 1930, an English translation appeared of the volume Keetje, for instance. A few years ago, the same volume was translated into Vietnamese. And this year, I published a Dutch translation of Keetje trottin: fitting, since this book is set in the Netherlands. Yet despite this interest, very little has as yet been written about the book, and for many it remains a hidden gem.

Back to intersectionality. For those new to the word: you experience intersectionality if you are at the crossroads – the ‘intersection’ – of multiple social categories. For example, if you are both a migrant and deaf. What counts as a ‘category’ is of course contested, but there’s plenty of room for such contestation with an intersectional lens. Evidently, too, everyone has an intersectional identity: your identity always consists of multiple layers, multiple components. The word intersectionality is often used, however, to highlight how several of these components can each put you in a disadvantaged position: many societies treat both migrants and deaf people with less care than they do others. What the intersectional lens does next, is look at these components in combination: because they do not act on the individual separately, but always in interaction with each other. What that entails is what I want to explore here.

In doing so, I build on the work of those feminist thinkers who articulated and developed such intersectional approaches in the 1970s and 80s: in the first place African-American lesbians and other women, such as Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith and Akasha Hull.

1) Double disadvantage

Keetje is both a woman and a worker. In the Netherlands of around 1870, this means she is doubly disadvantaged. In each capacity, she gets less chance of going to school, she earns less money, and has less power than other people. Their subordinate status moreover puts her and her colleagues at risk of forced sex. Keetje sees with her own eyes how the live-in cook threatens to lose her job if she does not condone the comings-on of their boss, the hatter. This is only a foreshadowing of the violence Keetje herself is to suffer at his hands.

2) No real home

Bernice Johnson Reagon, among others, has shown how people on an intersection are also judged by members of the very same oppressed groups that they form part of. Reagon herself recounts, for instance, the racism she met at a feminist conference (see her ‘Coalition Politics’ in Home Girls).

Keetje, in turn, not only has to deal with her bourgeois employers but also with people of her own economic milieu. You might suppose there to be some form of class solidarity, but this is far from always the case in Doff’s books.

For instance, some of Keetje’s colleagues live with their bosses, while Keetje returns home to her parents in the evenings. Keetje is ‘not part of the house’. Her colleagues take it for granted that therefore she receives less food during the breaks. While the others eat bread and cheese, Keetje gets ‘bread and naught’. And no coffee, either.

Keetje is also something of a nerd. This fact is not generally appreciated. Especially her elder sister, her parents and some of her colleagues complain that she is always stuck with her heads in the books or doing some interior decoration or other, or fashion design, in her spare time. Instead, she should focus on those things that befit her class and her role as a growing woman:

If I were your mother, I would teach you some different ideas: […] if I saw you touch even one book, I would make sure you’d soon regret it.

Similarly, when Keetje asks her parents to explain the meaning of a word she picked up, she has her ears boxed. Expressing their lack of interest, but possibly also their feelings of inferiority, her family and colleagues call her a ‘childish creature’. In short, it isn’t all solidarity that she can expect from her own class and sex.

Yet Keetje, in turn, also belongs to a group of poor Christians who harbour stark prejudices against poor Jews, which is yet another example of this lack of solidarity. Still, over the course of the novel, she starts to question her own anti-Semitism, for instance when she finds employment with a Jewish family.

Cardboard hatbox, like the one chafing Keetje’s hip when doing her rounds. 1870/1900, owned by Museum Rotterdam, no. 20586-B-C. CC-BY-SA-3.0.

3) Hidden trouble

As said, Keetje is only a child in this book. That does not just mean that she has even less power, education and money than most people around her. It also illustrates yet another consequence of intersectionality. The term ‘intersectionality’ itself has been in use ever since lawyer and philosopher Kimberlé Crenshaw invented it in 1989 (see ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex’ in the University of Chicago Legal Forum). She emphasised that many of the problems of people at an intersection are simply not seen by others. This is connected to the fact that intersectionally disadvantaged people themselves are often not seen by others.

Take for instance nineteenth-century working girls. Children may not get much of a voice, but at least they can play. And older female servants, though they always have to work hard, at least are the mistresses (simply put) of their own domain, the kitchen and other servants’ quarters. We tend to forget that there is a large group of people who are both child and servant. Keetje starts work from age eight, at the latest. This group has neither time nor a place for themselves. How does this pan out for Keetje?

Keetje likes to watch bourgeois women, and models her aspirations after their lives. In their position, at least, she would have a home of her own. Here follows a brief excerpt from Keetje trottin. Keetje has just been reading the novel Woutertje Pieterse by Multatuli – a novel much like Doff’s own, in many ways. Keetje fantasises what it would be like if Wouter were her friend:

Why would two very young people like we, Wouter, not be able to marry? I know quite well how to boil potatoes, cut sandwiches, clean the room and make the beds. God, how wonderful that would be! I would come and pick you up from the office at the Kopperliths and we would go for a walk along the canals. On Saturday nights we would bathe in the tub using warm water and on Sundays we would dress nicely… For I would be the wife of a gentleman who works ‘at the office’…

[…]

We would go out by the Gate of Muiden, to the Roomtuintjes, or by the Gate of Weesp, to drink tea in one of those gardens. And when the water in the tea stove next to us boils, I make the tea and we eat buttered biscuits, sprinkled with sugar. That is how I see the respectable people do it on Sundays, as I look on from the path, when they drink tea in the gardens and eat biscuits from a ‘presentation tin’. That’s right, isn’t it? Oh! My God! What pleasure! We won’t tell we are married… the people would laugh at us… And when we get back home, I make us hot sage milk and we crack nuts…

But Wouter is not actually her boyfriend, Keetje does not have the money and, most people around her argue, it wouldn’t suit her anyhow as a worker to long for this lifestyle.

On the other hand, she loves horsing around in the fields just as well, and physical contact with boys:

on those Sundays when the sun does not shine, we do not dress nicely. Instead, we go to the meadows, to leap over ditches – I leap, you know – and chase each other: you have to be fast to catch me… Yes… But first we have to get married: or we could not live together…

Then again, she cannot go around being chased by boys. After all, she is female and it would damage her reputation. The dangers of sex and the vulnerability of her honour are instilled in Keetje from a very young age, which leads to some serious clashes with her desire for physical contact. Keetje is six years old here:

I was playing in the street on my own when Tom, the neighbours’ dog, came walking towards me […].

‘Tom, you love me, don’t you,’ I said, ‘you take me in your paws, Tom… I love you too, because you are always nice to me.’ I lay down on the step in front of our door. Tom came to me again and this time embraced me completely. I had put my arms around his big head and pressed him against my chest. Suddenly, he got up, yowling: my father had lashed at him with the whip. To the woman who had chased Tom away, he said: The little one is always playing with our bitch, who is on heat; naturally, the rascal can smell it…’ And they burst out laughing. […]

Now I ask you! Father does not want Tom to take me in his arms again and lick me! He does not want him to snuggle up against me! And why not? He and mother have no time to hug me. Never do they take me into their arms.

And so, Keetje is not just triply disadvantaged, but cannot even enjoy the (limited) advantages, such as romping about, that come with belonging to any of the individual groups she belongs to.

Fashionable ladies’ hat, of the kind that Keetje makes and delivers. 1870-1880, owned by the Amsterdam Museum, no. KA 1238. Public domain.

4) Never ‘just’ a child

One final way to approach intersectionality in the Keetje trilogy is by observing that we can only really understand one component of someone’s identity once we see it in the light of those other components. In other words: a social position, such as that of woman, only gets its meaning in its interplay with other social parameters.

As mentioned before, Keetje is bullied a lot in her capacity of a child. And yet, her gender and class at the same time deny her the possibility of really being a child. Although she does like to play with dolls, for example, her environment expects her to deliver the work of a grown-up, and to take part in a society in which sexual work is often a woman’s only means to an income: as a whore, but, as described above, also as a servant or as a wife, which in many ways was also a form of sex work, as eighteenth-century feminist critics already argued.

Keetje is perceived as a child, therefore, but at the same time also as a woman and a worker, which influences what it means for her to be a child. It goes to show that often, our own conceptions, too, may be limited: what we consider to be typical child’s behaviour, may in fact only be the lifestyle of children with affluent parents.

To be a child means something different in every economic milieu, in every place in the world and for every gender. Do read one of the Keetje books, and find out what being a child means for Keetje. Or, better: what it means for her to be a child, worker and woman at the same time, in nineteenth-century Amsterdam.

The English quotes in this article are my own, rough and ready, translations.

You can read a short interview about my Dutch translation on Radboud Recharge.

Hoeden en hoeren – Hats and whores

This article outlines some of the key forms of intersectionality in Neel Doff’s novel ‘Keetje Errand Girl’, about an Amsterdam working girl in the 1860s and 70s. I translated this novel to Dutch. A shorter version of this article about intersectionality appeared with Lover Magazine. I may also publish an English translation [> this has now appeared here]. You can read a more general English-language interview about my translation on Radboud Recharge.

Zojuist is Keetje op straat uitgekomen, mijn vertaling van Neel Doffs roman Keetje trottin. Het is een intersectionele roman van heb ik jou daar. In dit artikel laat ik aan de hand van vier voorbeelden uit de roman zien wat intersectionaliteit allemaal kan betekenen.

Maar eerst wat achtergrond. Keetje trottin is een van de drie autobiografische romans die Neel Doff (1858–1942) tussen 1911 en 1921 publiceerde. Hoofdpersoon is haar alter ego Keetje Oldema. Keetje trottin speelt zich af in de sloppen van Amsterdam, waar Keetje opgroeit, én in de huizen van de middenstand en opklimmende burgerij (hoedenmakers, apothekers) waar ze werkt als loopmeisje. Keetje het loopmeisje dus: ‘Keetje trottin’ in het Frans. Doff schreef de romans namelijk in het Frans, toen ze op latere leeftijd zelf opgeklommen was tot de gezeten burgerij, niet meer hoefde te werken, en in België was neergestreken in een villa met tuin. Een dramatischer contrast met haar vroegere leven was nauwelijks denkbaar.

Pop voor rijke kinderen (of volwassenen, natuurlijk), zoals Keetje tegenkomt bij haar werkgevers (1860/1890) uit de collecties van Museum Rotterdam, nr. 33275-1.A-B. CC-BY-SA-3.0.

Over die contrasten gaan de boeken dan ook. Dat levert een prachtige reeks inzichten op in het leven van een arbeidersmeisje in de tweede helft van de negentiende eeuw: een bevolkingsgroep die weinig kans kreeg om haar stem te laten horen. Keetjes ervaringen als werkneemster, als hongerlijdster, als verantwoordelijke oudere dochter in een arm gezin; maar ook als estheet, als liefhebber en maker van hoeden; als iemand die haar lichamelijke relaties met mannen en vrouwen onderzoekt; als lezer, stadswandelaar, schildersmodel, sekswerker, minnares en demonstrant… ze passeren allemaal de revue, en ze zullen allemaal ten dele voortbouwen op de ervaringen die Doff zelf heeft gehad. Dit maakt de romans historisch interessant. Maar ze zijn ook literair interessant: Keetje trottin is bijvoorbeeld een van de eerste romans die de wereld écht proberen te zien door de ogen van een kind. Multatuli (Woutertje Pieterse, 1862-1877) en Frederik van Eeden (De kleine Johannes, 1887) waren Doff in Nederland voorgegaan; Carry van Bruggen (Het huisje aan de sloot, 1921), Theo Thijssen (Kees de jongen, 1923) en vele anderen volgden haar. En dan is de hoofdpersoon dus ook nog eens geen jongen of het kind van onderwijzers of schrijvers, maar een arbeidersmeisje.

Een serie interessante boeken kortom. Ze zijn ook in allerlei talen vertaald – een paar jaar geleden het tweede deel, Keetje, nog in het Vietnamees – maar tot nu toe is noch Keetje, noch Keetje trottin helemaal in het Nederlands verschenen. In de Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren kan je wel een vertaling vinden van deel één, Dagen van honger en ellende door Anna van Gogh-Kaulbach, en een compilatie van deel twee en drie gemaakt door Wim Zaal, maar niet de hele Keetje of Keetje trottin. Dat was reden om in ieder geval die laatste roman te vertalen. (Dan hier meteen een oproep: wie vertaalt het overgebleven deel, Keetje?)

Terug naar intersectionaliteit. Wat was dat ook alweer? Intersectionaliteit ondervind je als je op het kruispunt van meerdere sociale categorieën staat. Als je bijvoorbeeld migrant bent en doof. (Wat als een ‘categorie’ geldt, hangt natuurlijk af van wie je het vraagt.) Niet voor niets wordt het ook wel ‘kruispuntdenken’ genoemd. In zekere zin heeft iedereen een intersectionele identiteit: je identiteit bestaat altijd uit een hele serie verschillende componenten. Vaak worden deze componenten echter los van elkaar bekeken. Een intersectioneel perspectief heeft oog voor het samenspel tussen die componenten. Het woord wordt bovendien vooral gebruikt als elk van die componenten je in een maatschappelijk benadeelde positie brengt. Feministisch gedachtegoed met aandacht voor intersectionaliteit is vooral bekend gemaakt door het werk van Afrikaans-Amerikaanse lesbiënnes en andere vrouwen in de jaren zeventig en tachtig: mensen zoals Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith en Akasha Hull. Ook Keetjes leven is op allerlei manieren intersectioneel. Ik zal er hier vier noemen.

1) Dubbel nadeel

Keetje is vrouw én arbeider. In het Nederland van rond 1870 is ze daardoor dubbel benadeeld. In allebei de hoedanigheden heeft ze minder macht dan anderen, krijgt ze minder kans om naar school te gaan, en verdient ze minder geld. Haar ondergeschikte status maakt haar en haar collega’s bovendien kwetsbaar voor gedwongen seks. Keetje ziet hoe de inwonende kok dreigt haar baan te verliezen als ze niet ingaat op de avances van hun baas, de hoedenmaker. Dat is nog maar de opmaat tot het geweld dat Keetje zelf van hem te verduren krijgt.

2) Nergens helemaal thuis

In het werk van bijvoorbeeld Bernice Johnson Reagon wordt aangetoond hoe intersectionele groepen ook last hebben van de oordelen van groepen die zelf ook vaak veroordeeld worden (zie bijvoorbeeld haar ‘Coalition Politics’ in Home Girls). Bevind je je bijvoorbeeld, zoals Reagon, op een feministische conferentie, dan zul je net zien dat je daar last krijgt met racisme.

Keetje heeft niet alleen te maken met middenstanders zoals de hoedenmaker, maar natuurlijk ook met mensen van haar eigen economische milieu. Nu zou je kunnen denken dat daar solidariteit heerst, maar dat is dus lang niet altijd het geval. Sommige van Keetjes collega’s wonen in bij hun bazen, terwijl Keetje ‘s avonds weer naar haar ouders gaat. Keetje is ‘niet van het huis’. Haar collega’s vinden het heel gewoon dat ze daarom minder te eten krijgt: terwijl de anderen brood met kaas eten, krijgt Keetje ‘brood met niks’. En geen koffie. Keetje is ook nog eens een beetje een nerd. Dat wordt lang niet door iedereen gewaardeerd. Vooral haar oudere zus, haar ouders en sommige collega’s beklagen zich dat ze altijd met haar neus in de boeken zit of iets moois probeert te knutselen, in plaats van zich bezig te houden met zaken die passen bij haar stand en haar rol als opgroeiende vrouw:

Als ik je moeder was, zou ik je wel andere ideeën bijbrengen: […] als ik je ook maar één boek zag aanraken, zou ik zorgen dat je de lust snel verging.

En als Keetje haar ouders de betekenis van een nieuw woord vraagt dat ze heeft opgepikt, krijgt ze een draai om haar oren. Om uitdrukking te geven aan hun onbegrip, en wellicht ook aan gevoelens van minderwaardigheid, noemen haar familie en collega’s haar een ‘kinderachtig schepsel’. Van haar eigen klasse en sekse kan Keetje dus niet altijd solidariteit verwachten.

Omgekeerd behoort Keetje zelf ook tot een groep arme christenen die harde vooroordelen koestert jegens arme Joden. In de loop van het verhaal begint ze echter vraagtekens te zetten bij die antisemitische ideeën, bijvoorbeeld doordat ze zelf werknemer wordt bij een Joods gezin.

Kartonnen hoedendoos, zoals die tegen Keetjes heupen schuurt op haar bezorgrondes (1870/1900), uit de collecties van Museum Rotterdam, nr. 20586-B-C. CC-BY-SA-3.0.

3) Verborgen problemen

Zoals gezegd is Keetje in dit boek nog maar een kind. Dat betekent niet alleen dat ze nóg minder macht, onderwijs en geld heeft dan de meeste mensen om haar heen. Het illustreert ook een ander gevolg van intersectionaliteit. De term ‘intersectionaliteit’ zelf is in gebruik sinds jurist Kimberlé Crenshaw die in 1989 bedacht (zie ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex’ in het University of Chicago Legal Forum). Zij benadrukte dat de problemen die mensen op een ‘kruispunt’ hebben, vaak niet gezien worden door anderen. Dit hangt ermee samen dat intersectioneel benadeelde groepen zelf überhaupt vaak niet gezien worden.

Negentiende-eeuwse arbeidersmeisjes bijvoorbeeld. Kinderen hebben misschien niet veel te zeggen, maar ze kunnen wel spelen. En vrouwelijke dienstbodes moeten dan wel altijd werken, maar ze zijn – kort door de bocht – tenminste baas over hun eigen domein, de keuken. Dat er een grote groep mensen bestaat die zowel kind als dienstbode is, wordt dan vergeten. Deze groep heeft noch tijd, een plek voor zichzelf.

Keetje kijkt graag naar vrouwen uit de burgerij als haar voorbeeld. In hun positie zou ze tenminste een eigen huis hebben. Hier volgt een kort fragment uit Keetje trottin. Keetje is net Woutertje Pieterse van Multatuli aan het lezen. Ze fantaseert dat Wouter haar vriend is:

Waarom zouden twee hele jonge mensen zoals wij, Wouter, niet kunnen trouwen? Ik weet heel goed hoe je aardappelen moet koken, boterhammen snijden, de kamer schoonmaken en de bedden opmaken. God, wat zou dat heerlijk zijn! Ik zou je komen opzoeken op je kantoor bij de Kopperliths en we zouden een ommetje maken over de grachten. ’s Zaterdagsavonds zouden we ons in de tobbe wassen met warm water en op zondag zouden we ons goeie goed aandoen… Want ik zou de vrouw zijn van een meneer die ‘op kantoor’ werkt…

[…]

Dan gaan we de Muiderpoort uit, naar de Roomtuintjes, of de Weesperpoort uit, theedrinken in zo’n tuin. En wanneer het water naast ons dan kookt in de theestoof, zet ik de thee en eten we beboterde beschuitjes, met suiker bestrooid. Zo zie ik het vanaf het pad de nette mensen doen op zondag, wanneer ze in de tuinen theedrinken en beschuitjes eten uit een ‘presenteertrommeltje’. Dat klopt toch, hè? Oh! Mijn God! Wat een genot! We zeggen niet dat we getrouwd zijn… de mensen zouden ons uitlachen… En als we dan thuiskomen dan maak ik warme saliemelk en we kraken noten…

Maar Wouter is niet echt haar vriendje, Keetje heeft het geld niet en, zo vinden de meeste mensen in haar omgeving, het past haar ook niet als arbeider om naar zo’n levensstijl te verlangen.

Ook ravotten vind ze echter heerlijk, en fysiek contact met jongens:

Maar op de zondagen dat de zon niet schijnt, kleden we ons niet netjes aan. Dan gaan we de velden in, slootje springen – ik spring, moet je weten – en achter elkaar aanrennen: je moet hard rennen om me te kunnen pakken… Ja… Maar eerst moeten we trouwen: anders kunnen we niet samenwonen…

Maar pakkertje spelen mag dan weer niet omdat ze een vrouw is. Of ze daar nu zelf voor kiest of niet, als meisje zou ze in haar eer worden aangetast. Dit gevaar wordt Keetje van jongs af aan ingeprent, zelfs voordat ze enig idee heeft waar mensen zo’n heisa om maken. Het limiteert haar wens tot fysiek contact behoorlijk. Keetje is zes jaar oud hier:

Ik was in mijn eentje op straat aan het spelen toen Tom, de hond van de buren, op me afkwam […].
‘Tom, jíj houdt van me hè,’ zei ik, ‘jíj neemt me in je poten, Tom… Ik hou ook van jou, want jij bent altijd aardig tegen me.’
En ik drukte mijn gezicht tegen het zijne. Hij likte me en klemde zich hoe langer hoe dichter tegen me aan. Een vrouw gaf Tom een trap en hij liet me los… Waarom doet ze nou zoiets? Tom houdt van me. Tom is altijd blij als hij me ziet, en ik ook…
Ik ging liggen op ons stoepje. Tom kwam opnieuw naar me toe en sloeg zijn poten nu helemaal om me heen. Ik had mijn armen om zijn grote kop geslagen en hield hem tegen mijn borst geklemd. Plotseling ging hij er jankend vandoor: mijn vader had hem een klap met de zweep gegeven. Tegen de vrouw die Tom had weggejaagd zei hij:
‘De kleine speelt altijd met onze teef die loops is; dat ruikt de schavuit natuurlijk…’
En ze barstten in lachen uit. Mijn vader liet me vóór hem naar boven gaan.
Nou ja zeg! Vader wil niet meer dat Tom me in zijn armen neemt en me likt! Hij wil niet meer dat hij zich tegen mij aan vlijt! En waarom dan níet? Hij en moeder hebben geen tijd om me te omhelzen. Nooit nemen ze me in hun armen. Dus niemand mag van me houden? Niemand mag me knuffelen? Ik zou zo graag de hele dag op schoot bij vader of moeder zitten, maar moeder heeft altijd de baby in haar armen, en vader valt in slaap zodra hij thuiskomt, en nooit omhelst iemand mij…

Keetje is dus niet alleen driedubbel benadeeld door haar intersectionele positie, maar kan niet eens genieten van de (beperkte) specifieke mogelijkheden die andere benadeelden dan nog hebben.

Modieuze dameshoed, zoals Keetje ze maakt en rondbrengt (1870-1880), uit de collecties van het Amsterdam Museum, nr. KA 1238. Publiek domein.

4) Nooit alleen maar kind

Nog één laatste manier waarop we intersectionaliteit in de Keetjeboeken kunnen benaderen: door te constateren dat we één component van iemands identiteit pas echt snappen als we die zien in de context van de andere componenten. Oftewel: dat een sociale positie, bijvoorbeeld die van vrouw, pas inhoud krijgt in samenspel met andere sociale parameters. Als kind wordt Keetje zoals gezegd veel op haar kop gezeten. Tegelijkertijd kan ze door haar sekse en klasse eigenlijk ook weer geen kind zijn. Ze speelt graag met poppen, maar haar omgeving verwacht dat ze volwassen werk aflevert, en deelneemt in een samenleving waarin seksueel werk voor vrouwen vaak de enige manier is om aan geld te komen: als hoer, maar zoals hierboven beschreven ook als dienstbode, of als huisvrouw en echtgenote (ook een vorm van sekswerk, werd door sommigen al in de achttiende eeuw betoogd).

Keetje wordt dus wel als kind gezien, maar tegelijk ook als vrouw en arbeider, wat de betekenis van haar kindzijn sterk beïnvloedt. Een kind te zijn is in elk economisch milieu, op elke plek in de wereld en voor elk gender weer iets anders. Lees de rest van de Keetjeboeken, en kom erachter wat kindzijn betekent voor Keetje!