He had been walking around with the idea for this novel for some time, Wieringa explains. “Twelve, thirteen years ago, I read an article in the paper. It was about a group of refugees who’d arrived in a town after months of wandering around the Ukrainian steppe. On the brink of starvation, worn out and filthy. They had carried the dead body of one of their party with them, wrapped in rags. That alone struck me as a great premise for a book. But there was more. The refugees reported that they had crossed a border somewhere before being released on the steppe. Someone had given them directions: ‘That’s where you need to go.’ And so they walked and walked and walked but never got anywhere. When they finally reached the town, it emerged that they had never crossed a border. Dodgy human traffickers had built a fictitious border crossing, complete with dogs and barriers and everything, and taken them across because it was easier that way. It struck me as so evil and yet so ingenious at the same time that I thought: wow, there’s a novel in there.”
Not that long ago, Wieringa retrieved the notes he made on that newspaper clipping. “It has taken all this time for the story to assume its ultimate form. It goes to show that the mills of an author grind slowly.” Nonetheless, Wieringa’s latest novel is extremely topical. In These Are the Names he paints a compelling picture of the despair that grips the refugees on their harrowing journey. All their dreams and ideals dissolve there on that barren land. “Once upon a time, they had looked towards the horizon with longing,” Wieringa writes, “towards the promised land beyond, but now their gaze wandered less and less, until it strayed no further than the ground in front of their feet.” They are stripped of their humanity. Their name, their past – none of it matters anymore. “They had become people without a history, forced to live in a constant present.”
Does this book have its roots in social engagement? Is Wieringa trying to make a political statement? “I don’t think the kinds of novels I write are all that topical. These Are the Names is about something much bigger. I’m interested in the theme of migration, which has shaped us from our earliest history, from our first steps. We started off on foot and we keep moving for reasons of scarcity, from summer pasture to winter shelter. I find that really fascinating.” His own family history is one of migration, Wieringa tells me. “My great-grandfather’s entire family, that’s to say all of his brothers and sisters except himself, left for the US in the nineteenth century. They were part of all the arrows on the big maps I used to marvel at in school, the ones pointing to the promised land. All those migrants fled pogroms and feudalism, destitution, lice and alcoholism. That’s true for my family. They fled the poverty of the day labourer’s dead-end existence in a small riverside village in the province of Groningen.”
“These days we’d call them fortune-seekers,” Wieringa says. “But wanting to seek your fortune no longer gives you the right to stay. In Europe we have Frontex, the border agency trying to keep unwanted visitors out with the help of satellites and infra-red cameras. But they keep coming. You could compare it to the migration of wild animals in the savannah. At some point they start moving. They have to cross the river. And there the alligators are lying in wait for them; they know all the crossing places. At first the wild animals are hesitant, but then the first one sets off and the rest follows. They will lose a few, but as a species they’ll make it across and survive.”
Magic powers
As the nameless refugees on Wieringa’s steppe fall like flies, the ‘survivors’ develop a perverse group dynamic. The law of the jungle applies now. Homo homini lupus. Man is a wolf to man. Compassion for the weaker among them is not tolerated, because “if the group were to start looking after its individual members it would weaken as a whole.” Wieringa: “They grow so desperate they start believing one of their number has magic powers, albeit negative ones. They believe that the black man who travels with them, the Ethiopian, is intrinsically evil. Isn’t it true that they’ve had bad luck since he joined them? He becomes the scapegoat, the outcast. In accordance with the group’s unspoken will, he is killed.”
“It’s fear of the other,” Wieringa explains. “It can be quite useful to be afraid of someone in the dark and to avoid him if you can. It’s an understandable survival strategy. But when the group starts calling the shots and there are no more checks and balances, it spells the end of civilisation. In the Netherlands there have been attacks on Polish hotels (accommodating Polish construction workers and seasonal labourers, IDG). That’s also a manifestation of fear of the other. It starts off as a minor scuffle and before you know it they won’t stop kicking when someone’s down on the floor. ‘You see, Your Honour, we were beside ourselves.’ Empathy is not something you can take for granted. It’s almost something that needs to be taught. I’m not saying anything new here, but it needs to be reiterated again and again – in schools, in literature – so we don’t lose sight of others.”
In These Are the Names we never find out who murdered the black man. “It was the group,” says Wieringa. “They’ve appointed one person, the executioner. The executioner is the hand which the community is afraid to raise and who has been absolved from blame. I wanted to know when a community allows itself to use such violence. And how, after that violence, the rituals linked to the veneration of the dead man solidify into a structure.” This brings us back to the newspaper article Wieringa read years ago. He wondered why the refugees carried the dead body with them. It was a burden and diminished their chances of survival. According to Wieringa, it shows us “a religion’s sacred moment of inception, and I was keen to capture it in fiction. It’s despair finding expression in a dance around the golden calf. It’s the sense of deliverance, the rapturous thought of being chosen.”
In These Are the Names the refugees start venerating ‘the Negro’ after his death as a new Messiah who shows them the way out of the steppe. They cut off his head and carry it with them for the remainder of their journey. And suddenly they believe they have been chosen rather than cursed. “Our faith is centred on objects, on relics and symbols,” Wieringa explains. “And in that respect my novel is quite topical. The world’s greatest conflict continues to deploy the ancient religious symbols. ‘I live in the light of being chosen by Allah or Jesus Christ or Yahweh’ – I didn’t think people would still define themselves in these terms at the start of the twenty-first century. But you even see it in Dutch school yards. It’s the thing with the crescent moon versus the cross versus the yarmulke.”
In These Are the Names Tommy Wieringa interweaves the refugees’ arduous journey quite ingeniously with the story of Pontus Beg. He is a 53-year-old police commissioner in a sleepy provincial town somewhere in Eastern Europe who discovers that he may be Jewish. He suddenly remembers a Yiddish love song his mother used to sing to him and this triggers his memory like a Proustian madeleine. “The man is a bachelor. He tries to maintain some degree of order in his flat. He eats dinner every night, does the dishes and never drinks more than four glasses of vodka, because he is afraid of sliding into the abyss. He is all alone in the world. His longing for love, for comfort and community, is growing ever stronger. When this is presented to him more or less on a plate by the recovered childhood memories, he jumps at the chance.” Pontus Beg is not even all that religious, but he embraces his Jewish identity because it offers him a past and a future. He had been like the refugees on the steppe, struggling through life. But with the discovery of his roots a new perspective unfolds. Wieringa: “It’s quite special when that warm light of being chosen envelops you, when you can see yourself as part of something much bigger than yourself. It existed before you came along and will continue after you’re gone. It explains the shiver of bliss going through him.”
Nomadic existence
Wieringa is not religious himself, but he is familiar with the longing for a (shared) past. After his relatives’ departure for America, his branch is all that is left of the family tree in the Netherlands. “We have no past, because my family doesn’t tell stories. Unless I write it down, it won’t exist. Some people don’t care about the past. But the thought that the past can’t be retrieved, that it won’t survive, fills me with horror. Yet for a long time I wanted to vanish and be untraceable. As a young man I would often disappear for six months at a time. Every now and then I’d send a postcard home. The idea of a nomadic existence fascinated me. It filled me with happiness.”
The past and memories provide you with a solid foundation, as does the confrontation with yourself, Wieringa now realises. "If I were to forget my memories, I could live under the illusion that I’m a good person. For instance today I helped someone open a door on the train. I disposed of my rubbish in the bin. I fed and dressed my children and took them to day-care. In a word: I’m a good citizen. But if I keep my memories, I know I’m just as despicable as everybody else. I know what I’m capable of. And it’s not always pretty. In These Are the Names I put it like this: ‘Once in his life a man will cry because he fully understands himself. And once in his life he will cry because he knows he cannot be saved.’ That’s the essence of my book.”
This article first published on DeMorgen. Reproduced with the permission of the author.
