THE AMSTERDAM DISPATCH
By Cecile Somers-Lee
“My best friend’s mother, who’s a psychotherapist, says: “You’re what we call a Daueranrufer, someone who calls the helpline every week. Every time I see you we talk about your mother, why is that?” Perhaps I’m trying to write her out of my life but can’t? “A person is only forgotten when his or her name is forgotten,” the artist Demnig says. Should I stop writing about my mother then, and expel her from the (not even hidden) space she occupies in my mental attic? Or should I, au contraire, milk her for what she’s worth and commit all the horrendous things she’s said and done to paper?”
My name is Tourist, I Don’t Live Here.
Yesterday, my name was Indonesische Rijsttafel.
Tomorrow, my name will be Broke.
My mother thinks my name is Oh You and Your Writing.
In reality, my name is Random Thought Generator, Baroness von Wishy Washy.
Why is it I feel the need to access the writing space through a certain door, up a special staircase so I can ease into it, minimise the pain of starting? I want everything light and painless. Hence here. Amsterdam. A welcoming bar, women writers, a warm-hearted workshop.
When not attending the class, the plan is to walk around the city without a plan and follow Ariel Gore’s admonition on the cover of The Wayward Writer and not only take back my story but liberate myself from capitalism at the same time. Sadly, I’ve already spent a sizeable sum of money on books and bags, booze and trinkets, so maybe I’ll have to deal with capitalism later.
Post coffee and morning pages, I stroll through Amsterdam’s Oud-West neighborhood. Stately, early 1900s streets and houses, sunlit leafy trees, bikes and pigeon shit, coexisting happily.
Paintings of poets grace the red brick façades, their names vaguely familiar from my Dutch literature classes at school. Nicolaas Beets, Jakob van Lennep, Constantijn Huijgens. Stern faces with side burns above a few lines of their poetry, some touching, some cheesy. I rejoice in the fact that I know how to pronounce these writers’ names, and I briefly feel Dutch, which I seldom do. At the same time I reject the claim to belonging and implied superiority that might come with it; the world is a globe, and we are all from a-round here. In trains, on planes and bicycles, we circle this one planet of ours looking for names, genes, jeans, the antidote to capitalism and stuff to write about.
On the morning of the second day, I wake up with a line rolling around my head, like a mantra I didn’t order: “Mistakes were made, but not by us.”
But that’s a lie, because we definitely made mistakes, and I’m the one who came up with the idea of “Us”.
Part of the reason for this trip is to get away from Us, and instead find writer Me and listen to what she wants.
At 60 and no longer tied to a job or an office, my time is both endless and limited, but however much is left to me I long to spend writing.
In the afternoon, on the Leidseplein in the bar of the Hotel Americain, where a Dutch writer famously liked to have reception page his name (“Telefoontje voor Meneer Mulisch!”), I order a Chardonnay. Flippantly, I let it rhyme with “Adonai.”
Sipping the straw-coloured wine, I think of writing and why we do it. Storytelling? Attention grabbing? A desire to be seen—on shelves and walls and paper?
I think of Anne Frank, who looked like my mother, and of Kitty, the imaginary friend to whom Anne wrote in her diary. Turns out she didn’t invent Kitty herself, but based her on a character from a popular series by writer Cissy van Marxveldt, changing Kitty’s name from Francken to Franken, to resemble her own. What’s that quote? “It doesn’t matter where you take it from; what matters is where you take it to.”
I settle my bill in the American Bar and leave to continue my aimless walk, past the Van Gogh Museum, down the Hobbemakade, to the Merwedeplein where I chance upon the Frank family’s Stolpersteine. A German artist started these ‘stumbling stones’, small brass pavement plaques which in some 1000 cities commemorate Jewish victims of the Holocaust: their names, where they lived, how they died. There are four of them outside number 37: for Otto, Edith, Margot and Anne Frank.
I close my eyes and imagine the Frank family as in a film, with leather suitcases and coats and proper film costumes, shoes and hats and bobby socks. The sense of an ending. They were all arrested on August 4th, 1944, but only Anne’s father, Otto Frank, returned. He helped her become the famous writer she wanted to be.
Maybe I am my own stumbling block and this thing about struggling with writing is starting to become boring?
My best friend’s mother, who’s a psychotherapist, says: “You’re what we call a Daueranrufer, someone who calls the helpline every week. Every time I see you we talk about your mother, why is that?”
Perhaps I’m trying to write her out of my life but can’t?
“A person is only forgotten when his or her name is forgotten,” the German artist (whose name is Gunther Demnig) said. Should I stop writing about my mother then, and expel her from the (not even hidden) space she occupies in my mental attic? Or should I, au contraire, milk her for what she’s worth and commit all the horrendous things she’s said and done to paper?
“What is space, and what is erasure?” Ariel asks during that afternoon’s workshop, and I write it down in my notebook.
Is it because I am what Clarissa Pinkola Estés calls “unmothered?” Which explains why I cannot resist self-help books and recently bought a lanyard that says “Raised by books”?
“If you want to reduce the grip your mother has on you,” my friend’s mother says, “don’t share your life with her; don’t tell her any more than you need to.”
For weeks I manage to tell her nothing. The last time my mother went to Amsterdam was 1813, and I don’t want her to dump her memories and suggestions onto my as yet unborn ones. The Sunday before I leave I stupidly – unthinkingly – answer her question “Waar ga je nu weer naar toe?” (“Where are you off to now?”)
“Amsterdam?!” my mother warbles, instantly claiming the place, the word, the name and everything it stands for. She shuffles off to her bedroom and returns with a framed picture of a wood-panelled tour boat with its rounded see-through roof and windows. Taken by a photographer affiliated with the tour-boat company, everything in the picture oozes the Sixties. My mother with a beehive, white-rimmed sunglasses and tailored coat; my tall, handsome father, alive and gorgeous in Raybans, sports jacket and carefree smile. My parents were from the southern part of the Netherlands, so even though Amsterdam was the capital of their native country, it was a foreign city.
“It’s the Venice of the North!” my mother says, her finger poking the air, and I cannot unhear the “Did you know that? Write it down!” subtext. Both she and my father were teachers, but unlike him she lovelessly rammed facts and knowledge down her students’ and children’s throats.
She prides herself on having given us a fan-TAS-tic! life. “I showed you the world!” (Hearing her boast about it, you’d think she made the world, but maybe that’s mean.)
In the photograph, my father carries little me on his arm, and I look slightly anxious about getting on board this boat. I can’t be more than three years old in my checkered coat, little white socks and Mary Janes.
I hand the picture frame back to my mother with a wan smile.
What is space and what is erasure indeed.
“Perhaps work some architectural metaphors into your piece,” Ariel suggests. But all I see are architectural ways to annihilate my mother: tall and narrow canal houses with pulleys and suspension points, bridges across murky canals and cycle paths with kamikaze cyclists. My mother wouldn’t survive my Amsterdam, which is unfair, because the one thing she did do was show me freedom and independence, and how to claim time for yourself and go off to do whatever you feel like doing.
She notoriously went off to France for a month to take French classes, leaving my father with three young children: I remember glorious summer days filled with strawberries and barbecues, all of us rejoicing in Her Not Being There.
So why and how, at age 91, does she still possess that Dementors’ skill to superimpose her experiences and diminish mine? Or is it all just my imagination?
I buy a postcard with a picture of Amsterdam’s façades. “Having a fab time writing and walking through Amsterdam. Hope to take a boat trip tomorrow”, I lie on it in flamboyant handwriting, then add my favourite Tennessee Williams quote: “Make voyages. Attempt them. There’s nothing else.”
But wherever you go, you’ll take yourself. And if you’re unlucky, like me, you’ll also take your mother.
My name is Write Without Reason.
Yesterday my name was Moan A Lisa.
Tomorrow my name will be Anyone’s Guess.
Perhaps from today on, my mother no longer gets to name me; I am a new character in an unmothered story.
Cecile Somers-Lee is a writer and voice artist best known for telling people “The person you are trying to call, is not available right now.” She was born in the Netherlands in 1963, but grew up in Luxembourg. Her first Dutch children’s book is Vijf citroenen en een varkentje (De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam). She is an IMDB-listed scriptwriter for her work on the animated films The Golden Horse (2014) and Thelma’s Perfect Birthday (2024). An active member of Luxembourg’s Neuman Park Writers Group, her poetry was published by Black Fountain Press (in Fresh From The Fountain and High Five). Cornflakes for the Underworld, a coming-of-age-meets-Hamlet tale told by a slew of narrators on a laptop chained to a desk inside a supermarket, comes out in 2024. It was an underground cult novel for years because many people had heard about the book but very few had actually read it (on account of it not being finished). All that is about to change . . .
art by dorothea tanning
