This is the age of the bastard

‘I am a bastard. A half-breed. A mongrel.
Mostly a jack-of-all-trades, more often a good-for-nothing.

My X chromosome comes from the clay of the Flemish Kempen,
my Y chromosome from the loose sand of the Atlas Mountains. I shouldn’t even exist.’

These are the opening lines of the monologue of De Bastaard, the performance I created some five years ago at Het Zuidelijk Toneel to come to terms with my own bicultural identity. I took up the spade of language and dug into my soul. I travelled to Morocco for the first time, visited my father’s grave in the south of France, and went on tour through Belgium and the Netherlands to share what I had unearthed from my heart.

The first definition of ‘bastard’ according to the Van Dale dictionary is ‘a child not born of a legitimate marriage’, but a second and third definition refer to ‘animals born of cross-breeding between related breeds’ and, in older editions, also ‘mongrels’. Language and history have not been kind to people born of cross-fertilisation.

In literature, theatre and film, too, bastards are hardly enviable figures. They wear masks, speak with a forked tongue and wander lost between ‘them’ and ‘us’.

I was raised in the Dutch language, but also spat out by it. I’ve been cherished and beaten in it. I am trapped within it. And I have tried to hone it, this language, I have tried to melt it down until it was nothing but ink, which I could shape on the anvil of the imagination and then let congeal on my tongue.

‘I was born in the space in between. The space where hatred arises,
love brews and the axis tilts. I am a bastard.’

Whether I’ve succeeded in that, I shall leave open. But sometimes meaning arises in the act of expression. I had to dig. I had to speak. I had to, I had to, I had to… so that I might finally ‘be allowed’. Be allowed to exist in the space in between. The space that is always equally ‘here’ and ‘there’. The space between stage and audience. That is where our shared story arises.

Your gaze is tinted. In sepia, black and white. Who chose the colour filter?

Who is Rashif El Kaoui?

Rashif El Kaoui is an actor, rapper, podcaster and writer. He studied spoken word at the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp. In 2016, his prose was awarded the El Hizjra Literature Prize. The publishing house Das Mag also showcased his work. As an actor, El Kaoui has appeared at ’t Arsenaal, Het Paleis, fABULEUS, de Monty and KVS. He starred in productions such as Malcolm X, Odysseus: een zwerver komt thuis, Drarrie in de Nacht and JR (FC Bergman/ Toneelhuis/ NTGent/ KVS) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. In 2021, he created the theatre production/documentary De Bastaard for Het Zuidelijk Toneel, a personal story centred on his Moroccan-Flemish identity. In recent years, he has often worked at Het Nieuwstedelijk (including in Mooie Jaren, Kellyanne Conway The Musical, Orde van de dag). Rashif El Kaoui wrote this reflection on the annual theme À la flamande at our invitation.

Pamphlet of a Bastard

Ask yourself: do I question myself?

How firmly do you question yourself?

Turn your head towards the past; there lies your future.

Walk with us along the trail of tears.

And count the vertebrae of the broken, upon whose backs

your prosperity is built.

Do not feel guilty. And do not feel pity. But look. Look around you.

Cut open your veins with the scalpel of self-analysis.

Cut open your veins with this knife. Make the cut vertical. Not horizontal like a cry for help, quickly staunched with a cloth to stop the bleeding.

Make the cut vertical.

So that the bile may flow out. Beyond the point of no return. Really look around you.

Your gaze is tinted. In sepia, black and white. Who chose the colour filter?

Above all, do not feel guilty. That leads only to white tears. And white tears are not milk. Tears are too salty to nurse children.

This is the age of the bastard. A fluid age of mixing, blurring and merging. An age when affluence proves too meagre. An age of doubt.

Listen. Listen. To the unheard voices. The voices stifled before they were heard, stifled in the womb, an unfortunate by-product of our ‘malleable’ society.

We are bastards. Not half- or double-blooded. We are children of Horus. Children of the moon. Children of Kal-El. We bleed in silence. Drop by drop. It is precisely that one drop that matters.

Look beyond the phenotypes and realise that there is only one human race. With many tribes. Race is a social construct. Tribal is trivial.

But why does that sound so hard to believe?

Lies are stories with power. Lies are stories plus power.

That is why lies sound more plausible than the truth.

Who benefits from the lie?

Who perpetuates it?

That is why we offer you coded words. Coded language. So that you might listen. So that we might not hurt you. Or worse still: that you might feel guilty. We’ll bear the guilt for you. Spank us on the backside and we’ll gallop off into the desert. We won’t be sulky about it.

We’re taking a journey to the end of night. Towards Helter Skelter. The wormwood star stands high in the clear sky.

We’re mixed-up, but don’t get it twisted.

We are hybrid exotics. Alluring. Forbidden fruits plucked with goodwill. Just not dangerous enough to bite, but still… Little fetishes to indulge your lusts to the full.

Go on, stroke us. Go on, grab us.

You may be woke-washed, but in your mind, hands are being chopped off.

Later, when we’re grown up, everyone will be beige. And that’s not a goal, but it’s not a problem either. Bastards are the children of tomorrow. And we don’t ask for much. But what we do ask for is quite a lot.

Just that you question yourself. Dare to ask. Ask so that we may exist.

We’re all still so small.