Category: Society

As promised, here’s my impressions of the 12th annual Canal Parade, held last Saturday in Amsterdam. For the first time I can recall, the weather was perfect. Most years that I’ve been present, we’ve had occasional showers, but this year there was not a cloud in the sky. That may have helped with the record-breaking turnout as well, there were 400,000 spectators lining the canals, according to police estimates. And there were 70 boats in the parade, the highest number ever.

A number of the boats had a serious message. There appears to be an increasing number of anti-gay incidents occurring in Amsterdam and the rest of the Netherlands. Last weekend, for example, a 34-year old Irishman had his jaw and nose broken, an American gay couple were sprayed with pepper-spray or teargas and then beaten, and another couple were spat upon by a pair on motor scooters. So the unofficial motto of the Canal Parade could be said to be that emblazoned on the side of the Mr. B boat: "So you’re intolerant? – Piss off!!"

The figurehead of the boat also rather impressively underscored the message:

The rise in anti-gay violence was the theme of the Trut dance club boat, which was decorated with newspaper reports on the rise:

Then there was the "Pink Police" boat, with its motto: "to serve and protect Gay Amsterdam":

There was even a Hetero Boat, entered in the Parade to show solidarity, with the motto: "Samen anders, samen één" (different together, one together):

There were a couple of notable firsts in this year’s Parade. There was "Danny’s Boat" – a boat of LGBT children and their parents. This was the initiative of 14-year old Danny Hoekzema. When he first mooted the idea, the Mayor of Amsterdam, Job Cohen, rejected it, expressing doubts about involving "that vulnerable group" in the procession. He later relented, and gave his permission. In the event, you have to wonder what all the fuss was about. It was great to see the boat:

The other first was a boat sponsored by the care organisation Cordaan. It carried gay people who happened to also be mentally handicapped:

As I wrote last week, Shell didn’t have a boat in the parade this year, but there were a number of other multinationals represented, among them TNT, ING Bank and the ABN-AMRO bank:

This guy in the centre of the ING picture was giving it all that he had. Clearly a thwarted thespian who seized the chance to belt out a song and dance routine:

And of course, being a gay parade, we had the usual assortment of drag queens and muscle marys. Gawd bless ’em all:

The other 617(!) photos that I took that day can be seen in the complete photoset up on Flickr.

"In individualising their experiences via lengthy narratives, these women contributed to the annihilation of that individuality.

 

These accounts emerged in a discursive space already fraught with the polemics of generalisations. The veracity of the individual narratives may not be in dispute but the problematic of their deployment and the danger inherent in their exclusionary mechanisms is.  

 

Thus "truths" about Islam, like any other truths, are produced by a paradigm of inclusion and exclusion, constraints and circulation. This is quite unique to these biographies.  

 

The brown/black woman of the erstwhile colonial discourse may have spoken. But the din of the few voices that have been heard produce a totalising, essentialist mythology about Islam. They are heard as a symphony rather than solo concertos."  

I have a latex allergy. What are the buttons on your chip and PIN terminals made of?  

At the side of a quiet country lane not far from where we live is this war memorial. I stopped there yesterday and read the rather poignant story behind it. It commemorates the execution, by firing squad, of 46 Dutch political prisoners by the Germans on the 2nd March 1945. They were executed in retaliation for the killing of four German soldiers by a local resistance group.

The execution of the political prisoners took place in the field where the memorial now stands. Although the bodies were taken away that day and buried in the graveyard at nearby Varsseveld, their lifeblood soaked the ground. It is said that the corn grew higher that year on the spot where the execution occurred. The locals harvested that grain separately from the rest of the field. At the base of the memorial is a glass belljar. In it can be seen the grain that was harvested.  

The inscription above reads:

Warm bloed doordrenkt onze velden,
en rijker rijpte hier ‘t graan.
O, mocht uit het offer dier helden
zulk een oogst van vrijheid ontstaan!

Which, with excuses for my poor translation, says: Warm blood soaked our fields and richer ripened here the grain. Oh, might from this heroic sacrifice such a harvest of freedom arise!