Queer Muslim Asylum Seekers in the Netherlands Sarah French Brennan
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Shifting Selves: Queer Muslim Asylum Seekers in the Netherlands Sarah French Brennan Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2020 ©2020 Sarah French Brennan All Rights Reserved Abstract Shifting Selves: Queer Muslim Asylum Seekers in the Netherlands Sarah French Brennan This dissertation explores the potential of the queer Muslim asylum seeker to confront the Dutch national imaginary. An archetype of homonationalism, the Netherlands faces rising tides of Islamophobia, waters which queer Muslims must learn to navigate. An asylum seeker’s success in the system depends on their “credibility”, hinging on the consistency of their self-representation which is constantly being reconstructed. These constant reconstructions, what Ewing (1990) refers to as “shifting selves”, are not conscious or noticed by the individual; yet, in the context of asylum claim-making, reconstitutions of the self may rise to the surface, asylum seekers then engaging in conscious strategizing. I analyze these contexts ethnographically through informal interviews and participant observation, at the height of the so-called “Refugee Crisis” of the mid-2010s in Europe. I find that as the figure of the queer Muslim asylum seeker confronts the Dutch national imaginary, it both confirms it—representing national commitments to human rights, to tolerance, and to protection of sexual minorities—and challenges it—embodying impossible identities, and evincing a failure of the nation to live up to its ideals: What is “tolerance” when it is weaponized against minority groups? What kind of queerness is being protected if deviation from a cultural norm is disqualifying? Whose human rights are being protected by a system that demands the subject of those rights conform to formulations inconsistent with lived experience? TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iv DEDICATION vi PREFACE 1 Ter Apel 1 1) QUEER MUSLIM ASYLUM SEEKERS IN THE NETHERLANDS 5 Challenges faced by LGBT and Queer Muslims in the Dutch asylum system 10 Impossible Identities 12 The Queer Muslim Asylum Seeker Confronts the Dutch National Imaginary 15 Methods, Positionality, and Ethical Challenges 17 The People and the Places 17 Positioning the Researcher 23 Complicities and Current Events 26 Issues of Language 28 “Constituency, Accountability, Solidarity” 32 Chapter Outlines 33 2) THE CHANGING LANDSCAPES OF POLITICS AND CULTURE IN THE NETHERLANDS: DUTCH HISTORY AND ITS ROLE IN A DUTCH NATIONAL IMAGINARY 35 The Dutch landscape: Recent social history of The Netherlands 35 The Netherlands at Mid-Century: Depillarization, Decolonization, and Secularization 35 The Century Begins to Turn: Immigration, and Rising anti-Muslim Sentiments 37 Mid-2000s to the present: The “Crisis” of Multiculturalism in the Netherlands 42 Naar Nederland: Codifying Dutchness 45 The Dutch Civic Integration Exam Abroad 45 Geert Wilders and “Fewer Moroccans” 52 Race and Reckoning 56 3) ORGANIZATIONS AND NETWORKS OF ASYLUM 60 Reception 61 The Birds 69 The NGO Landscape 72 The COC 73 Secret Garden 75 LGBT Asylum Support 76 Other networks of significance 76 Sharing Stories and Strategies at Secret Garden 78 i LGBT Asylum Support: A charismatic leader and allegations of abuse 85 4) TRANSIT NARRATIVES: SEXUALITY AND THE OTHER 94 “Management of the Intimate”: Sexuality, taxonomy, and “the West” 96 Representation and the Travel Narrative 100 From Travel Narratives to Escape Narratives 103 Mobility and Sexuality 107 Watching Kuchu with Ayesha 111 Conflict and Consistency: Narrative in context 116 5) THE CREDIBILITY TRAP: THE DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD OF ASYLUM STRATEGIES 123 Secret Garden Hosts UGOM 124 Dizzying logic 127 Aziz: Not gay enough to stay, not straight enough to deport 127 “So, what, just believe everybody?” 128 Lending Credibility? Letters of Support and Country Reports in Asylum Claims 130 Revealing Traces: Examining indexicals in the context of the interview 134 Letters, Reports, and Cumulative Effects 136 “Getting Word”: Scripts and Strategies 141 Akram and the Nail Polish Conundrum 141 Ayesha and her roommates 147 6) HIERARCHIES OF SUFFERING: UNDERSTANDINGS OF SUFFERING AND TRAUMA, AND PERCEPTIONS OF PREFERENCE WITHIN THE ASYLUM SYSTEM 151 Syrians in “Crisis” 151 A Secret Garden Gathering 151 Hierarchies of Suffering 156 Understandings of Trauma and Suffering: LaW, compassion and their brutal exclusions 158 “Selling Suffering” and Pathologizing Culture 165 Violence in Research: International efforts in Dunkirk, France 167 7) QUEERISTAN: ACTIVISM, ANTI-RACISM, AND QUEER INTERSECTIONALITY 177 A festival for “Fucking Cool Queers” 177 Troubling Ourselves 183 8) CONCLUSIONS: QUEER MUSLIM FUTURITY 187 The Groningen Gallery and its Displays 187 ii Militarizing the Future 189 Futurity and BackWardness 190 Ayesha’s Epilogue, in two parts 193 REFERENCES 197 APPENDIX: LETTER OF SUPPORT 218 iii Acknowledgments I would like to sincerely thank Professor Katherine Ewing for offering your great insight, knowledge, and expertise, and for lighting a fire under me when I needed it most. I am deeply grateful for Professors Herve Varenne and Keith McNeal for your guidance and support, and Professors Nicholas Limerick and Oren Pizmony-Levy for your thoughtful feedback. Additionally, I want to acknowledge Professor Charles Harrington, and the late Professors Lambros Comitas and George Clement Bond for their foundational work, along with Professor Varenne, in developing the Applied Anthropology and Anthropology and Education Programs at Columbia’s Teachers College, and the ways they have shaped my views on the practice, teaching, and deep responsibilities of Anthropology. Professor Brett Williams at American University will always have my profound appreciation for your generosity and exuberant support. I model my own teaching on the joyous, challenging memories of your classes and our discussions. I am so thankful for my brilliant cohort in the Anthropology programs at Columbia’s Teachers College, without whom I could not have made it past week one. Some Thursday night in Morningside Heights, I hope we’ll split another pitcher of a dive bar’s cheapest (and warmest) beer and chat, unwind, and laugh again. iv Thank you to my parents, Johanna French Brennan and Dr. John Nicholas Brennan, for their support during this long process (and by that, I mean my entire life to-date, as well as my PhD program). I could write another dissertation on the ways you have made this possible (but please don’t ask me to right now). Thank you to my spouse, Pasha Dashtgard, who supports me in every possible way, and who never doubted me even when I was in the depths of doubting myself. Thank you to my big, beautiful family, both biological and chosen, and in particularly Aditi Fruitwala and Kyle Taylor for your feedback on ideas and sections, and for your enthusiastic support. My work has been funded by the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship Program, the Middle East Institute at Columbia University, the Society for Anthropology of Europe, and the Council for European Studies. v Dedication I would like to dedicate this dissertation to “Ayesha”. Your strength and bravery will always astound and inspire me. Thank you for your story. I also dedicate this to Derek, my life-long interlocutor, who left too many stories untold. And to Sophia, my Nazi-fighting Oma (who, like so many of her generation, rarely told the stories); Sophia, my aunt, whose cafe was a place where stories of Holland were shared over koffie and pannenkoeken; and Sophia, my niece, whose stories I am so excited to watch unfold. vi Preface Black tulips in my heart, flames on my lips: from which forest did you come to me? all you crosses of anger? I have recognized my griefs and embraced wandering and hunger. Anger lives in my hands, anger lives in my mouth and in the blood of my arteries swims anger. O reader, don’t expect whispers from me, and borrowed branches from the trunks of straight trees. I will, then, take pride in this wound of the city, the canvas of lightening in our sad nights. Though the street frowns in my face it protects me from the shadows and malign glances, and so I sing for joy behind fearful eyelids. When the storm struck in my country, It promised me wine, and rainbows. -Mahmoud Darwish (Translated from Arabic by John Mikhail Asfour and Abdullah al-Udhari) Ter Apel It had been raining most of the day-- common enough in the Netherlands-- and by the time we arrived in Ter Apel in the early afternoon, the shoulders of the small road leading up to the asylum reception center were sunken with mud. The road was so narrow 1 I worried we’d accidentally driven up a bike lane, and as we got closer, the width of our car forced the increasing number of people, mostly brown and black, walking there, to either hug the edge of road or slog through the mud. A loose queue of maybe three dozen people waited outside the gates—they sat on the strips of grass, on their bags, on the concrete. More continued to arrive via the lane we’d driven up. Some were in small clusters, others appeared to be on their own. There were groups of young men, families with small children, and a half dozen older women who’d collected their belongings in a pile and then seated themselves in a circle around it. There was no seating provided, and no cover from the rain or sun. The security guard approached the driver’s side window and asked if I worked there. I responded in English that no, I had brought my friend, Ayesha, who wished to claim asylum. Even after I told him she was fluent in English, he continued to address his questions and instructions to me. My partner, who is American of Middle Eastern heritage, got out of the car to help Ayesha with her bags, and the guard approached him with his clipboard and began getting his information as well.