Belgitude

At a poetry reading organised by Wales Arts International in Brussels. Patrick McGuinness, a half-Belgian, half-Irish writer living in Wales is reading his poems about Belgium - which take on new meaning given the current political crisis gripping the country.

In 'The Belgiad' he describes Belgium in terms that will be familiar to anyone who has experienced this country’s concrete coast and chaotic urban sprawl.

Caesarean state:
every roadsign a mirror
every town a suburb

Magritte’s Saturn: all rings and no planet

the ever-provisional
coastline dreaming of the sea

After a whistle-stop tour of Belgian cities, the poem ends with the memorable line:

All has that faint emphasis, as if the place were in italics, could look like elsewhere yet be nowhere else

‘Belgitude’ is equally ambiguous, but written with more affection as the poet attempts to discover what it means to be Belgian:

I spent autumn learning about autumn,
that its unmistakable confusion about what it was
was what made it what it was. So with Belgium.
it was the first post-national state; wars
came there to be fought, got tired and moved on.
surveys showed that most Belgians questioned

would have preferred to be from somewhere else:
truly this was home, I thought, all the more
so as home had been a drain on my awareness,
took a little more of me away from me each year.
I came to it side-on, as one climbs into a moving bus;
discovered the world was a small town, or

at any rate vice versa. Soon I learned
to keep my mouth shut in two languages;
I called home on lobster telephones
in a hail of bowler hats. Trains ran on time,
travelling micro-distances in decades.
after a while I fitted in, by looking out of place,

swept into a street-long tidal wave of curtain lace.

Listening to the poems with Flemings and fellow Welsh exiles, I felt a certain nostalgia for the country I’ve lived in for the past 15 years – even before I’ve left or the country splits up. If Belgium does collapse the state will not be missed, but the country – with all its absurdities, enigmas and peculiarities - will.