Blog: Bram van den Reijen
"k zin n'en Zeeuw!"
"k zin n'en Zeeuw!" I shout to drown out the music.
"Sorry? What?" she asks.
I'm standing on a boat with a bunch of twenty-five-year-olds, none of whom I know. This King's Day, I had planned to avoid the crowds, together with my cousin who doesn't like crowds. But his girlfriend asked if we could just drop by for a bit, for fun. Of course, anything for love.
"I'm originally from Zeeland."
"Wow. That's far away. How long does it take to drive there? An hour and a half or two?"
"No, two and a half hours. I'm actually from Zeeuws-Vlaanderen. And you?"
"Oh, I was born in Amsterdam and now live near the Vijzelgracht. We're about to sail past my house. I live there with my roommate."
The conversation comes to a natural end. The looks in our eyes betray that we don't have much more interesting to tell each other, and in my mind I go back to the Zeeland dialect I let slip when I revealed the nature of my identity: "k zin n'en Zeeuw."
That's how I feel. Now. I feel like a Zeeuw. And the strange thing is, I didn't feel like a Zeeuw when I still lived in Zeeland. My parents are, as they say, "import," and at home we never spoke Zeelandic. Well, Brabantish. My father always talked about "hullie" and "zullie." And my mother spoke Brabantish when she was on the phone with family, otherwise always Standard Dutch.
"You must be one of the van den Reijens, right?" people would sometimes ask my brothers, my sister, and me. As if we came from abroad. We lived just two kilometers outside the village, but it felt like the distance to the people in the village, the Kauter, was much greater. Just as people outside Zeeuws-Vlaanderen sometimes refer to us as reserve-Belgians, I felt like a reserve-reserve-Belgian. Where was my place in the world? Not in the polder of Nieuw-Namen, that much I knew for sure.
During the Christmas holidays, I regularly visited my cousin in Amsterdam. I don't know exactly when the tradition started, but I must have been around seven. I found the big city magical. It was exactly the opposite of Schelpstraat 1. In Amsterdam, something happened every day and I never had a moment to be bored.
By now, I've lived half my life in the capital, but in recent years the call of Zeeland has started to beckon again. Hosternokke! I mean: I'm not about to move to Zeeland anytime soon, because my soon-to-be Polish wife isn't keen on that. And I get it, Zeeuws-Vlaanderen has a lot to offer, but it lacks a large international community. There's also some fear on my part: the weekends I spend at my parents' are wonderfully relaxing, but what about real life?
I can't answer that, and probably won't be able to for a long time. For now, I remain a diasporic Zeeuw, but one who secretly sometimes looks for a possible vacation home somewhere in the municipality of Hulst. My wallet doesn't allow it, but hey, sometimes it's nice to dream a little about Zeeland here in this bustling city.
