el holandaman i i Our parents came to the Netherlands for a while, we thought we were there permanently. No longer migrants or refugees, no longer on the move. They were called asylum-seekers, guest workers or non-Western immigrants. Our generation was given a different name, the new Dutch. We thought we were integrated. We understood less and less of our parents’ native culture, and were no longer fluent in their language. We spoke and dreamt in Dutch. But there was more expected of us, always more. I don’t know any more when it began, when we started being called them. It initially looked as if reasonable solutions had been found in the Netherlands, solutions people could not or would not find elsewhere. Of course we were a bit different, and lived accordingly. But we had adjusted, you might say, we were well-educated and successful, winners. For years we even thought they saw us as good people. They let us organize our dance groups, build mosques, have our own taste in food. But after September 11, the Netherlands also fell prey to the spectre of xenophobia. It turned out they didn’t trust us, hated us and thought Islam was a backward religion. The integration was a fiasco, they kept saying more and more often. So was I suddenly a failure too? Less than a year later, an excessively righteous man decided to slaughter Dutch populism, releasing something that had not been expressed before. The minister told people to say what they thought, we had all been such hypocrites up until then. The little differences that had been so charming were now magnified to dramatic dimensions. There were suddenly real Dutch people and they were in a state of panic. And me, I was once again the foreigner. i i i el holandaman