Integrate or Else!
This is in English, because the writer is an American
“Avoid getting angry or tense,” the doctor says to the man who has come into his office with a combination of stress related complaints. The man nods his head and goes his merry way. “Don’t make me angry or tense,” he tells others.
You might as well tell an ostrich to fly. How the hell does someone avoid getting tense or angry? Especially someone prone to getting angry and tense: it’s a ridiculous prescription.
In the Netherlands, everyone is speaking about integration as if integrating was something you could order people to do. Integrate! Is that an order? Like Attention? Or At Ease?
“You think it’s any different here? You think there isn’t a lot of griping?”
“It’s different,” I tell my Dad. “The Netherlands is small. The complaints have more of an effect here. In America, you can just disappear into all that space.”
“She’s right Bill,” my mom chimes in.
“In the Netherlands you’d be, I don’t know, Polish, and mom you’d be Lithuanian. Or maybe you’d be Romanian, Dad, and Mom you would be Russian.”
“In Romania, I’d be Polish and in Poland I’d be Romanian.”
Both of my parents were born in the US. Have they integrated? My great Aunt had two dishwashers: one for milk dishes and the other for meat dishes, but my grandmother, her sister, ate bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches. Yes traif ! She ate food that was not kosher. My grandfather’s sister shaved her head and wore a wig and prayed three times a day like a good observant Jew while her daughter ate cheeseburgers. Were they integrated? Does eating a cheeseburger signify anything at all? How about bacon?
Those of you who have never been forced to emigrate will never know just how incredibly thankful migrants can be to their new homelands. You will never know what a gift safety and freedom can be. My great-Aunt called Springfield, Illinois the Garden of Eden. My husband loves the Netherlands with a fervor that only a migrant can feel. One friend told me about the Netherlands, “You can not imagine how happy I am here. Just don’t let anyone tell me you must be happy.”
Yet, over and over these people hear: Integrate, already! What’s taking so fucking long?
The last time I flew to Tehran, I sat next to an Iraqi family on their way from the Netherlands to see their parents who had taken refuge in Tehran. The woman was in full hejab, much fuller than most Iranian women wear, and her husband was bearded. They spoke Dutch to their three-year old child and when she acted up a bit said “Doe maar gewoon:” Just be normal. They told me how happy they were in the Netherlands. They felt safe and comfortable there. Are they integrated? What about the orthodox Christians in their black tights and with their prohibitions against music? Are they integrated? Is a man like my husband Kamran integrated, who appreciates Dutch culture to an extent that frankly baffles me? Even when he was turned down for a job for being a foreigner he made no complaint against his adopted homeland. What about the immigrants who have written masters theses in Dutch but are barred from advancing at work because “Your Dutch is not good enough:” are they integrated?
I could whine about the Dutch for years, refuse to learn even the basics of the culture, and boo every time I heard an Andre Hazes song and no one in the Netherlands would care other than my husband. Why not? I’m not from a Muslim country or dark skinned. I don’t need to integrate: I’m a light-skinned American. We are beyond integration. We don’t need the refuge that the Netherlands provides.
It’s easy to hear only the malcontents and the extremists on both sides of the immigration debate. It’s easier to form a complaint and to make an extreme argument than it is to describe the endless gray area that makes up the true story of integration in the Netherlands. I say, Moderates of the world unite! Let’s revel in our contradictions and hypocrisies and compromises. That’s the way of the world baby. It’s one big grey area.
The fact is, however, that those who operate in the black and white zones are always trying to pull the rest of us in. People who send hate mail to this site might as well work as recruiters for Islamic extremists. “You see, you see what people really think of you?” That’s the line the recruiters could use. “It does not matter how moderate you are or how much you love your adopted home, you will always be a stranger here. And a hated stranger at that.” Islamic extremists are recruiters for those who hate Muslims as well. Every car burnt over a cartoon and every person attacked for blasphemy is a powerful recruiting tool. For those of us caught in the grey area where things are nuanced and compromises are rampant, it becomes harder and harder to claim our deserved space. Why do we find it so hard to fight for nuance, compromise, and negotiation? It really isn’t as powerful a call to action as those who live in the black and white world can claim, is it? It needs to be though. It needs to be. The alternative, I fear, is civil war.
-Tori Egherman, Grey and Proud.
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