Finger in the Dike!
Welcome to Finger in the Dike! My blogroll where I will post regular updates on my work, including my current project Maritime Imagination: A Cultural Oceanography of Dutch Imperialism and its Aftermaths. Updates will consist of short essays, video footage and photographs, and perhaps I might even dip my toe in some poetry.
About me:
I grew up under the shorelines of the North Sea with stories about the ever-impending threat of the waters and the heroic tales of Dutch maritime ingenuity and overseas adventures. I grew up in a manmade landscape of manmade dikes, manmade dunes and manmade deltas. Living underneath the shoreline with the constant visual reminder from the perspective of the dike that the sea looms higher above the reclaimed land that I’m standing on.
The fear of watery catastrophes has always been a powerful element of Dutch culture. Without dikes, dams and dunes the country would vanish into the sea. Folktales warn about the water, about houses sinking and bodies disappearing into the wetlands.
At the same time, Dutch maritime ingenuity, so the story goes, can conquer this natural element by creating technologies that separate the land from the sea. The prowess of Dutch shipping and maritime technology is the envy of many.
This aspect of Dutch maritime imagination is very familiar to me and it comes up in conversations with people all over the globe when I mention I am working on The Netherlands, colonialism and the ocean.
What about the underside of this Dutch maritime imagination? What lies beneath the stories of heroism and technological prowess? What were the costs?
In their own eyes, the Dutch were terrorized by the waters at home, while abroad they spread terror at sea and in countries far removed from their wetlands. The Dutch used the skills developed at home in the service of colonial violence over and at sea, such as land reclamation, for building a network of plantation slavery, oceanic slave trade business and colonial settlements. The same heroes from tales of Dutch overseas adventure I heard in my youth, are the colonial and genocidal figures that haunt the present and who devised regimes of racial terror, colonization and domination at sea and on ships.
Currently, a global network of Dutch corporations exports its maritime technologies across the globe, particularly to sites of (plausible) environmental catastrophe in the Global South. —And always for a profit. Prime ministers fantasize about a return to the “VOC mentaliteit” or Dutch East India Company mentality.
How might we make sense of this more hidden side of Dutch maritime imagination? How might we situate the celebration and nostalgia surrounding Dutch maritime history? What does it mean to separate the land—colony and metropole—from the sea? What lies beneath the stories of heroism and the terror of rising sea levels?
These are some of the things I’m concerned with these days. I hope to use this blog to make sense of the simultaneous co-formation of the Dutch state and its colonial and imperial endeavors at and overseas.
About the title Finger in the Dike!
To put your finger in the dike is a quick fix.
It holds off impending floods only for a little while.
Eventually the structure won’t hold.
Waves of radical transformation will prevail
changing tides
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The Dutch proverb “to put your finger in the dike” means to delay impending disaster. It is based on a story of a boy who plugged a hole in the dike with his finger. He sat there all day and all night, knowing that if he would remove his finger the dike might burst.
To me, to put one’s finger in the dike is a story about the logic of a quick fix. A quick fix is also capitalism’s response to structural problems, which only deepens them. If water levels rise, build a dam! If activists call for decolonization, start a diversity committee! In the meantime, the water levels continue to rise. Coloniality as a structure still prevails. Perhaps it is time to unplug the dike and ride the waves of radical transformation.
Instead of addressing the foundational structures underlying environmental destruction – including global capitalism and colonialism – Dutch maritime technologies and maritime imagination, much like the boy’s finger, operate as another quick fix, or as an alibi for not creating the structural changes needed to transform the world.
With this blog, I want to create a platform for commentary on the finger-in-the-dike logic, especially regarding the intersections of Dutch models of capitalism with racial, sexual, colonial and environmental violence.
In this blog, the proverbial finger in the dike is also metaphor for the fact that the boy (or the white man’s hand) is unable to stop the rising tides of radical transformation. Soon the waves of anticolonial, anti-capitalist, queer, trans and feminist liberation will change the tide. Not dike, but Dyke power will unleash the storms that will crush the ships of capitalism.
With Finger in the Dike! I hope to share some of my thoughts and ideas in the form of this public scrapbook and find ways to talk about these topics that do not always adhere to the standards or language of academic publishing. I also welcome responses, ideas as well as contributions regarding these topics.