part of Issue 01

BLOODMEAL: Part 1

Lilian Anneloes

TW: sexism, sexual assault, violence

PROLOGUE

I have never been able to shake it off completely. The peat.¹ The coarse granules of peat soil were woven through me like the shrub roots encased in garden soil in the front yard of number one-sixty-six. It clung to me like a corrosive, dark muck. And every time I tried to wash it off, pieces of myself would come off with it, disappearing forever into the wastewater. An irreversible neurological trail that left stains, as if someone had forgotten to take off their dirty shoes.

It was the only constant. In every picture of myself from a year ago, a completely different person appeared. I couldn’t forgive others when they left, but in the meantime, I wrung myself out, and most of the girl I once was disappeared down a proverbial drain. I stripped myself of everything. I plucked the leaves off my branches, pulled the legs from my body, and shed my skin, only to adorn it later with camo pants, Habbo Hotel ‘furni’, and personality traits stolen from R.L. Stine books. As long as no one knew where my -peat cut through- roots lay, everything above ground was falsifiable.

When the early Dutch social media platform ‘Hyves’ asked me for my last name, I decided that using it would trivialize my everyday safety. And so, I became ‘Lil’ Monster,’ ‘Lilian Lastnameless,’ the quasi-literary Instagram handle ‘@Zwemt,’ and later simply my first and middle names: Lilian Anneloes. My artist’s name forever intertwined with a desperate escape from a birth village that collectively and not-so-peacefully spat me out. An artificial personality without a traceable origin.²

I have never felt connected to land again. I remade myself, almost factory-like, in every context: in every primary and secondary school, every college that followed. I was never truly born anywhere—an egg fallen from its nest. From this chameleon-like position, I learned that my origins were inherently uncomfortable. I saw my hometown light up blood-red on the opportunity map of the Netherlands,³ heard about funding money that should preferably go to urban artists, and noticed the shock in the eyes of exhibition visitors whenever I (perhaps accidentally) mentioned the backwater I had crawled from. At the same time, every interview, every short biography, and every artist’s statement expected a mention of my birthplace. I never truly acknowledged the facts but effortlessly pulled the accompanying trauma out of the closet whenever I needed inspiration. A double wall in my seemingly feminist-activist art practice.

Yet my partly feigned identity kept resurfacing, repeatedly and insistently, in my activism, my art-making, and my research. Especially the label ‘woman’ clung to me like a pesky, nagging child. Everything I did inevitably became a feminist expression. The notion of me being a ‘feminist artist’ became entirely inseparable from me after a publication in a renowned magazine in the summer of 2019. Not even when I actively used popular anti-feminist principles as the basis for a major project. Not even when I moved on to creating self-portraits (as close to myself as possible). My work was feminist because I was a woman. Thus, everything I did, everything I would create in the future, and my entire being became a misplaced feminist statement.

My rape was a feminist statement. My toxic ex was a feminist statement. Being catcalled and followed on the street was a feminist statement. For a long time, it made it easier to think of it that way: that everything traumatic could be given meaning in retrospect. Sometimes I think I am grateful to my abuser because he gave direction to my sense of justice, my art practice, and my activism, through which I was able to influence laws and regulations.⁴ But then I remember that I still cannot fully inhabit my own body, that I have infected my genetic makeup and others with the ripple effects of my trauma,⁵ and that my sense of justice fell out of my birth nest along with me.

The personal is the political is a slogan now some 50 years old, used repeatedly in identity politics, and one I still wrestle with to this day. It not only suggests that one identity is more ‘political’ than another, but that there are identities that, by simply existing, form a statement.⁶ But the interpretation of this identity is subject to the frame of reference of others: what others make of me is difficult to control. Thus, in someone else’s narrative, I quickly become straight when I find myself in a straight-passing relationship. Or an audience projects entire stories onto my visual work. I once overheard (about my own work): ‘the shapes she used to illustrate this chandelier symbolize male tears.’ What utter nonsense. Others cherrypick my personal to turn it into their political. My femininity, and the way others interpret my identity (subject to others’ perspectives and everything I don’t tell them) is twisted and distorted over and over, so that it ultimately becomes someone else’s statement. The personal is the political ideology of someone else looking at me.⁷

In an interview with the Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism from 2022, curator, artist, and author of Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism (2021), Louren Fournier, describes this notion better than I ever could, linking it to auto-ethnographic research⁸:

(...) These [writers of color, queer/trans writers, and women writers] are writers who have been historically overdetermined by limiting conceptions of the “personal,” as if their work is inherently subjective and embodied or “marked” while the work of white, cis men is “neutral” (which, of course, we know is not the case). It becomes all the more complicated, then, when these writers engage directly or explicitly with themselves in their work.⁹

Sometimes I think it would be ideal to completely sever my identity from my work. I fantasize about exhibition spaces without name cards and anonymous publications. But as an artist in a late-capitalist context, I am not merely an identity: this identity is my brand. What remains is only a discrepancy between my feigned identity (‘Lilian Anneloes’) and who I really am at the dinner table with my parents, when I’m home alone, or when I’m holding a baby. In reality, I’m more often dressed as ‘Lilian Anneloes’ in the supermarket than the less-curated, raw version of myself, out of fear that others might see her.

I am dual: a two-headed creature, the result of an irreversible split after leaving the peatlands. I am neither a city person nor a village person. I hate it and miss it. And I don’t know what is true. In my artistic research on transgenerational heritage in the peat colonies,¹⁰ I bring to light somatic memories,¹¹ oral histories, and (sometimes conflicting) archival information at the same time. Somewhere between my story, someone else’s story, and the archived story lies the real story. A more nuanced story about my place of origin that has yet to be told. And I wonder if it brings me closer to my roots or pushes me even further away from them.

The (auto-)ethnographic approach of this research partly serves as a method to reclaim the personal, but is primarily employed because archived information about (family) histories in the geographical area being researched proves to be rarely personal and is subject to external influences that often generalize the lives of people at the bottom of a class society.¹² There is a significant lack of written histories, which I aim to address in my research. By recognizing both narrative edges in my investigation and creating (visual) documentation of them, I hope to contribute to a field where a one-sided story is often presented as reality.

The Drenthe and Groningen peat colonies are regions historically characterized by poverty, social exclusion, economic exploitation, and oppression. Although research has been done on transgenerational poverty and the (mental) issues associated with it, little attention has been paid to the cultural and emotional implications of this heritage on the youngest generations.¹³ Through ongoing artistic and (auto-)ethnographic research that documents the stories of the peat colonies, I want to illustrate how these experiences pass from generation to generation. By creating somatic images, I bring overlooked stories and experiences (which reside in the non-verbal part of the brain¹⁴) concerning this region to light, adding to a one-sided archive.

Currently, I am working on a collection of oral histories from myself and others with a peat-colonial background, gathering written histories about the area. What follows in this part of my research is a somatic recollection of memories, inherently tied to the same soil that scarred my parents, my grandparents, and their ancestors for life. With poverty, with corresponding beliefs about themselves, with betrayal, and with a variety of different fears. I can smell it on everyone who comes from here. It’s almost as if it’s seeped into the earth. Blood meal.¹⁵

*

BLOOD MEAL I.

(…) If I were to slice the ground like a layered cake,

I would find imprints of my childhood shoes in the top layer above the peat.

They say the presence or absence of people is visible in a soil profile.

We bury them beneath their own traces.¹⁶

My parents speak to each other in dialect, but not to us. Sometimes, I fear that when they’re gone, no one will ever speak to me in that mixture of Gronings and Drents again. The language was suppressed so thoroughly from a young age that I carefully removed any traces of the dialect from my own way of speaking. A stoetje became a sandwich, a motblik became a dustpan, and moi was simply ‘hello’. I purged the peat from my language the way the peat purged us.

There was never any sentimentality about childhood photos. We never looked through albums together, and there aren’t any pictures of me on a swing or a little bike in the backyard displayed in the living room. Besides a single school photo with a stereotypical blue background and a picture of me in a swimsuit on a scraped beach, all documentation of my youth ended up in a fireproof safe (and later, at my request, scanned onto my own hard drive). I think we prefer not to think about it. We’d rather put up photos from the period after the peat village, as if nothing ever happened.

I never consciously said goodbye to that house. One day, at ten years old, I got into the car, and without really knowing it, I never returned. My baby blue room with Winnie the Pooh wallpaper, the view over the schoolyard, and the closet where I’d hide in my sleeping bag were stripped and repainted. As if I’d never existed. Years later, when the house appeared on a real estate website, there was nothing left of home. Grandma’s guest room became a bathroom, the shed where we built little wooden carts was gone, and the grand arch that led from the kitchen to the dining nook became a square, gaping hole. The house removed us - just as the village had.

It branded my mind. The belief that people are never entirely trustworthy and that the world is an inherently evil place became an indelible part of my personality and how I structured my life. I became afraid of belonging and tore myself away from everything.¹⁷ There was safety in isolation. No wonder. In the years that were supposed to form me emotionally, cognitively, and socially, I stayed behind a closed garden gate, afraid of being shouted at or harassed by the village boys in the front yard or on the street.¹⁸

But the gate wasn’t enough. When we weren’t home, they climbed over the wooden fence with their Airmaxes and beer bottles and vandalized the backyard. Only when they started sneaking around the house at night, and a webcam had to serve as a security camera, did I understand something was seriously wrong. My childhood became a string of looking at the bellies and legs of community members and the neighbourhood cop, who never spoke to me but always to my father.

I remember a dull thud and the muffled shouting beyond the living room window. How my father got up. How we concluded that someone had just fired fireworks at the window behind which we sat. That the hatred had grown so great that even my childish innocence had become irrelevant. It went on for years. The small community passed their ideology onto their children, and they spread it across the entire schoolyard. In the middle of my childhood, I learned how my identity made me inherently alone.¹⁹ When it became clear that what should have remained verbal had turned physical and that even the bike route to school was no longer safe, we moved in a hurry. A bandage on a gaping wound. The thing about trauma is that it moves with you. I’ve never been anywhere without knowing, in my body, what others are capable of.

Not even a week after we left the house by the canal, the village had seized the opportunity to destroy our garden, throw plants onto our roof, smear the windows with manure and compost, pelt our chicken coop with rocks, and trample the fences. In a drunken rage, they must have celebrated our departure that night.

Yet I still have a deep-seated homesickness whenever I think back to how the sun would slip thinly behind the vast fields, to the kite field with its hidden thistles, the farm where my father got meat, the dried frogs between the straw, the smell of canal water, and the swallow nests under the bridges. It pulls at me like the tides, while I anxiously anchor myself in cities.

I cannot hate her. The land had always warned us: the wasp nests by the shore, from which a whole swarm nearly stung the neighbour girl to death, the manure wagons, the countless chicken deaths. The inherent cruelty of the countryside lies in the fact that what you love today could be on your plate tomorrow. In a soil, so rich and full, that it’s always being picked clean by others.²⁰

*

NEXT CHAPTERS: A SOIL, A HOME, A BODY AND VARIOUS ORAL HISTORIES WILL BE FULLY PUBLISHED AT ZANDBANK LATER ON.