“A caveman in a canal house”:The rejection of transnationalist biography in Hafid Bouazza’s A Bear in Fur Coat

Around the turn of the Millennium, the work of minority authors in the Netherlands was often expected to be an authentic expression of his or her culture and was often interpreted by literary critics as aiming to unmask Dutch racism towards that culture. Thus, authenticity and emancipation were expected to be cornerstones of the life work of such authors. Arguably, Hafid Bouazza, a popular Dutch author and public intellectual of Moroccan descent, has instead made the subversion of such expectiations the cornerstone of his life work. For this, the image of the barbarian is frequently evoked in his literary work and life writing. Western stereotypes of Muslims as “barbarians” and “cavemen” appear abundantly in his plays, short stories and novels published shortly before and after the turn of the Millennium. Through his ironic literary language and intertextual references to texts such as Robinson Crusoe, The Tempest and the Bible, these stereotypes are both reified and subverted. Adding to the ambiguity is a similar use of the same stereotypes by the author in his life writing and contributions to literary and public debates on the position of Muslims in Europe. Confusingly, the barbarian in Bouazza’s literary work and life writing is, often at the same time, a genuine threat to Western civilisation and a grotesque that can help us to put into question the conventional way in which the West and the Netherlands in particular has been constructed as civilised. Contrary to interpretations among critics and his readers, Bouazza is neither trying to stand up for the rights of Muslims by ironically using Western stereotypes to show the racism of Western discourses on Islam, nor trying to ‘befoul his own’. Rather, the use of the image of the barbarian is part of the author’s romantic irony and his attempt to aestheticise Eastern and Western stereotypes. Thus, Bouazza’s life work seems to be a Wildean life of “masks and lies”, rather than the genuine unmasking often expected from so called ‘migrant authors