Neverending Stories

Book talk show by ROSE Stories: in conversation about Neske Beks' essay collection 'Echo'.

Information

Date and time Friday 17 June 2022 21:15 tot 22:35 uur
Location Paard Kleine Zaal
Price 29,50
15,- (CJP, Students, Ooievaarspas)

Book-focused talk show by ROSE Stories with Neske Beks, Sayonara Stutgard and Zawdie Sandvliet. Host: Rachida Lamrabet

In this episode of the book-focused feminist talk show, Neverending Stories, Rachida Lamrabet talked with Neske Beks, Sayonara Stutgard and Zawdie Sandvliet about racism in Dutch society.

We discussed how certain groups are systematically excluded, about the colonial past, and about what must change urgently. The starting point was writer Neske Beks' Echo, a collection of essays, letters and speeches that show how systematic the failure to see and hear is.

Writer Sayonara Stutgard and historian Zawdie Sandvliet also joined the fray. Together they delved into the Echo volume and built bridges between black and white, talked about the importance of Toni Morrison's work, and let the black female voice sound loudly and clearly.

Neverending Stories is the barrier-breaking, inclusive talk show by ROSE Stories. It's a show for a new, culturally diverse public, not just from the Netherlands but also Belgium and the Dutch Antilles. The show discusses recently published books that bring fresh perspectives to themes relevant to a super-diverse society. It focuses on the stories of bicultural writers and female writers in particular, as an answer to the very topical social-ethnic and societal need for authentic stories told from the inside that contribute to a better representation of society.

Neverending Stories was an initiative of ROSE Stories in collaboration with deBuren, Writers Unlimited and Watershed, and was made possible with the help of Literature Flanders, the Prins Bernhard Culture Fund, 21 Fund and the Dutch Literary Fund.

Dutch spoken.

Line-up

Neske Beks

(Belgium, 1972) is a writer, transdisciplinary artist and a film and theatre maker. She debuted with De Kleenex Kronieken (The Kleenex Chronicles, 2014), a family and village chronicle featuring Priscilla, the daughter of a Flemish father and a Senegalese mother. She published the children's book Sala & Monk in 2020. In Echo - essays, speeches en brieven (Echo - essays, speeches and letters, 2021), named after the poem Echoes by Audre Lorde, she places her finger on a sore spot. Not only is the white gaze still dominant in our society, Black women are doubly disadvantaged: they aren't white and they aren't men. Beks shows how systematic is not to be seen or heard. Her essay De kleine Morrison: een wegwijzer in het lezen van haar werk vanuit Zwart perspectief (The Little Morrison: A Signpost to Reading Her Work from a Black Perspective, 2023) offers readers of Toni Morrison, the most famous female black writer and Nobel Prize for Literature winner who died in 2019, insight into her life and work. Beks shows that in everything she does, Morrison invites self-critical reflection on language, structure, power, gender, race, law and injustice, blackness, the white gaze and the meaning of oral and written narratives.
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Rachida Lamrabet

(Morocco, 1970) is a fiction and theatre author, lawyer and teacher. She won the 2008 Flemish debut prize for her novel Vrouwland (Women's Country; 2007) about migrant youths dreaming of a better life. In 2006, her story Mercedes 207 was awarded the Kif Kif Literature Prize. Her short story collection Een kind van God (A Child of God) was published in 2008, followed by the novel De man die niet begraven wilde worden (The Man Who Didn't Want to be Buried), awarded with the Ultima, the Flemish state prize for culture. As in her debut, issues such as identity, religion, migration and the position of minorities play an important role. Her novel Vertel het iemand (Tell Somebody, 2018) deals with the life of a Berber boy and the deliberately concealed role played by Moroccan soldiers in the First World War. Lamrabet is a member of the writers' collective Fixdit, which aims to raise awareness of gender inequality in literature. She is a practice assistant in discrimination law at the Legal Clinic of the Law Faculty of the Ghent University and also teaches at the Odisee College in Brussels.
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Sayonara Stutgard

(Netherlands, 1988) writes poetry and short stories. She studied Dutch language and literature and lives, as she herself says, mostly in her own library, although she also regularly works in the Utrecht Library. "There is an acute shortage of topical literature that does justice to the diversity of the Netherlands. To ensure that all readers can recognize themselves, the book trade must seek out a balance of stories," she wrote in a Dutch newspaper column. She co-founded the intersectional, feminist publishing house Chaos, which strives to bring more diversity to the Dutch literary scene. She also works as an editor and completed her first translation of a picture book (De binnenkant van mij - original title Skin Again - by bell hooks, published by ROSE stories). Stutgard's work has appeared on Cipher Magazine and Samplekanon, in the magazine nY and, of course, with Chaos publishers.
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Zawdie Sandvliet

is a social studies lecturer at the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences. He also teaches Afro-Dutch studies at the University of Amsterdam and at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. In search of knowledge about the history of Dutch involvement in the system of slavery and trade in enslaved Africans, Sandvliet began studying African American Studies at Boston University with a Fulbright Scholarship. Upon returning to the Netherlands, he took the initiative to set up an Afro-Dutch studies course within the University of Amsterdam. This course is decolonial, interdisciplinary, and focuses on the history and contemporary reality of Afro-Dutch people. As a trainer of teachers and through these Afro-Dutch Studies, Zawdie tries to realize educational equality within class, race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality and gender. In his free time, Zawdie enjoys reading, longboarding, sports and vegan cooking.

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