I’m going to New York. To Brooklyn, to be exact. Why? Because except for Tupac, all my heroes come from there. Biggie, Jay-Z, Chris Rock, Spike Lee, Basquiat, Barbra Streisand. Tupac was born in New York by the way, so come full circle.
But I also go to Brooklyn for another reason. Namely to do research into gentrification (rinse your mouth with soap).
The phenomenon whereby old working-class neighborhoods, where no one ever wanted to be found dead, are transformed into hip new neighborhoods where the old residents are systematically bullied away by housing associations and their dubious attempts to rent/sell old dilapidated houses for a big profit to artists and yuppies. Does this sound familiar? Right.
Brooklyn is in fact the Amsterdam-North of New York. I should have started this column with this statement, but it’s too late for that now. I’m not going to substantiate it. It is what it is. I do advise everyone to watch Spike Lee’s series She’s Gotta Have It on Netflix and everything will become clear.
Recently I posted a video on Instagram of an overcrowded ferry (never say ‘ferry’ again or I’ll slap you) that docked in Noord with the text: ‘NO STAY ON THE OTHER SIDE NEPPE NORDERLINGEN’. Any chance I get to tease new Northerners, I will gleefully take it.
But Massih, when are you a new Northerner? And when are you an old one? I got these questions in DM. And I’ll be happy to answer them for you.
If you came to live in Noord after 2008, you are a new one. If after a few months (or at all) you think you have enough knowledge to make generalizing remarks about Noord, usually sentences that start with, “You know what it is about Noord…,” then you’re not just a new, but also a fake one.
These kinds of statements generally come from the same people who prefer to chill alone on the banks, looking wistfully across the IJ at houses that were unfortunately too expensive, but maybe once. I hope so.
Look closely, listen carefully and please keep your lips tight.
“You know what it is with North…”
“…that you can live relatively cheaply a few hundred meters from the center and that you can appropriate all the diversity here, while in fact you only go to the local greengrocer and then be able to say within your homogeneous group of friends how committed you are to your multicultural neighborhood, but you never greet the boys in the square, because you are afraid and that you do not respect our authenticity as such, but make it something exotic?”
“Uh…”
Of the twenty years that I have lived in the Netherlands, I have lived in Noord for almost twenty years. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about this place, which I call home, and about these people, who I consider family, it’s that you can never generalize about it.
And that’s why I’m going to Brooklyn, haha.
To be continued.
Rapper and writer Massih Hutak (25) writes a column for Het Parool every weekend. React? [email protected]
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