Amsterdam is alive and kicking even if I have been in hibernation. A combination of winter fatigue and an overwhelming sense of isolation ensured that I spent the whole of February questioning both my move and the reason behind the move: the job. Exploring the city took a back seat. However, this being March, the spring is upon Amsterdam and the city is bathing in glorious sunlight and I am also rejuvenated by the drizzle of sunshine on my face.
I was out with some friends whose curiosity about my perceptions of Amsterdam is incessant. It is an excellent experiment however, since we all know that the observer and the observed affect each other indelibly and undoubtedly, my viewpoints were affected by my desire to avoid immediately destroying the first fragile strands of my Dutch social web. The strongest statement that I made, over coffee and apple pie, was that I have noticed the tension between the image of liberal values and Amsterdam tolerance on one hand, and the insularity and conservatism of the inhabitants themselves on the other. It is as if this fabled tolerance has been imposed on the city in pragmatic instances rather than it having grown into the warp and weft of people's mindsets. When I suggest this to my friends, there was a sense of shock, a sense that the city that I have been inhabiting cannot be the same that they see in their quotidian routines. This is not unlike the tussle between the psychological and physiological that goes on in our heads when perceiving colour. If I stand in a room suffused with pink light, and then wander into a room of pale green or even white, the pale green will appear intensely verdant. We shift our maximum sensitivity to a certain wavelength depending on how our eyes have been previously conditioned, so even if the absolute wavelength of the light is identical, our brains fool us into perceiving a different higher wavelength light. It is an evolutionary trick and one that is equally applicable when defending our societies from other, sometime hostile viewpoints. Therefore my sample of Amsterdammer friends perceive themselves as more tolerant, worldly and engaged than they actually are; their views are predicated by the lengthy immersion in their inviolable Amsterdam space. They cannot believe that any other Amsterdam could exist or that they might have been static whilst the wavelength of thinking elsewhere has moved on. Sometimes this insularity is palpable and sometimes it is just a sentiment wafting in the ganga infused air but it is easy to get a flavour.
There is a physical isolation, with the majority of poor people living far away from the centre and this is why the majority of cyclists one sees on the streets are white. Yet speaking to some students, their first assumption was that the immigrants were lazy. Equally, there was no comprehension that it is not so easy to learn how to ride a bike at any age greater than 10. The microcosm that the people I encountered inhabit might be no different in London, but it would surely be less likely. The counter arguments are too visible for such glib assessments.
I began to speak to these students since I had got into an argument with one of them regarding the infamous caricatures of Islam. This too seemed to be an area where opinion was surprisingly homogenous, exceptionally narrow and uncomprehending of a value system outside their own. The idea that multiple values can live harmoniously, or at least companionably, seemed to be utterly alien. The cartoons provided a strong counterpoint to the notion of tolerance, since there was more than one occasion when my opinion led to rapidly curtailed conversations. It was fascinating that I was being judged not my status as a law abiding economically valuable citizen (which is the most generous moral assessment that Britain's neo-liberal model of immigration deigns to hand out) but by the moral values that I held. I had turned from good conversationalist to another member of the brown skinned 5th column in Europe since it was surely an impossibility to be European without finding the violence and demonstrations an abomination of an irrational and fundamentally alien people. Edward Said's discussions of orientalist perception in the imperial world can be very easily applied here.
I also challenge this particular notion of tolerance being an absolute good, as it so often seems to be portrayed here. The cultural and artistic vibrancy of a city in this post-modern era grows not only from patronage but also from the presence of fragmentation. It comes from the creation of an uncomfortable space where perceptions need to be challenged and modes of representation need to be reassessed. London does this because it has undergone the cycle of destruction and recreation over the last 20 years. One legacy of the Thatcher years was the reshaping of Britain's economy and the fragmentation of social identity: London magnified those changes by virtue of being the driver of the new economy. The mix of housing, the relative social mobility and the growing imprint of other communities enabled the fragmented society to bind itself in new configurations. It was this type of development that led to the phenomenal success of the YBAs for example, artworks beyond the sensational as well as the regeneration and reintegration of areas such as Wembley and Brick Lane. I am searching for that kind of vibrancy in Amsterdam and I don't feel it yet. Each generation is meant to build on the previous generation's achievements yet here it seems that what has been achieved by one or two generations of immigrants in Britain's urban centres over the last 30 years is just beginning. Being here, in this environment where no immigrant community has made the same imprint as in Britain, the disparity in health, wealth and discourse is noticeable and it feels as if the dialogues haven't begun, that the channels themselves haven't even been created.
I am now a part of the asian underground movement here; I play at one of the hip clubs called the sugar factory, but my glib assumptions of cultural globalisation were blown apart on the first night I played there.
The music performed here is the kind of culture-vulture mentality that drains the life out of any idea trying to find a fertile ground in a new land. The success of any idea is dependent on the environment in which it finds itself and here, the absence of a noticeable Asian crowd means that the music which began as a vocal reaction against broken identities and hostile surroundings as well as a celebration of our hidden, untold stories, is simply a series of sounds with no root.
Lost in the squabbles of the global lowest common denominator, there can be no innovation since the music that shouts the loudest is seldom the music that breaks new ground. The Asians I have met here carry none of the self confidence of the increasingly educated and affluent London asian youth, nor the strength of community that many east african asians or working class Asians have. Despite the same problems of racism, scepticism and ignorance faced by the previous generation here, there was no apparent reaction, little grassroots activity and even less dialogue. Perhaps the famous tolerance, better described as laissez faire, is indeed the cause of the paucity of a hybrid culture and the non creation of a genuine node in this globalised world of migration, of people and culture.
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The great but perhaps underemphasised advantage of the flat world we now inhabit is the speed at which culture travels. We live in tribes, centred around city-states, great ports and now more and more on nodes online. For example, the exponential rise in the popularity of Gilles Peterson on Radio 1 is ascribed not only to his phenomenal ability to join the dots and play great music, but his early-adopter attitude to technology. Myspace, Japan-Mumbai-Frankfurt podcasts and the use of bulletin boards linked him with a network of like-minded people, and the momentum of such a sound simply rockets. The velocity of musical ideas--from practisoner to disseminator to audience--and the mass of these ideas both become so much larger when the nodes, in the concrete and virtual worlds are fully functional.
A community isn't created, but formed from the common environment its constituents find themselves. The desire to maintain links with the home culture was encouraged by the overt hostility from some aspects of the host culture and the clear colonial and intellectual links between others. The British-Subcontinental links would always carry a greater resonance than other migratory connections and those links have evolved and continue to do so because of the gyroscopic drive of the british-asian communities and also by the shifting interaction with the British people. These kinds of interaction change most effectively through living, working and playing together and the most successful british towns have not ghettoised its poor or immigrant communities
What is the relevance of this to Amsterdam? Amsterdam, although perhaps more Rotterdam these days, is seen as one of these nodes, a veritable port city with a tolerant outlook conducive to creating and then supporting challenging new pieces of work. The reality, it seems to me is somewhat different.
The great confidence of the people I have come across must be caused by the great security in which they live, something that has been lost in the post-thatcher era in Britain. Whilst I can only marvel at such self assurance it has also meant that issues that are being brought up by the BBC daily, such as climate change, science and morality and Iraq are not on the radar in the same way, if at all. It is a space where I have heard a female lawyer say the greatest thing about Amsterdam is its anything is possible attitude when it comes to prostitution and weed and say in the same breath that if you are from the right family to live in the des res post codes then this city has it all. And that is fine by her. But what of the rest? Perhaps London grinds a greater number of people to skin and bone, with a far higher threshold of income required to have a comfortable life, so fewer people are able to make such statements. I cannot tell yet.
