Poison penmanship: Sinterklaas

Recently, on a mailing list that I have been a member of for the better part of the decade, a fight broke out over a Dutch holiday tradition. And of course I got into the thick of it.


The Holiday in question, Sinterklaas avond (Saint Nicholas eve, December 5th.), revolves around a fictionalized Saint Nicholas, who according to the story, travels to Holland each year, and gives presents and candies to good children, coal to mediocre children, and drags the truly awful ones back to Spain with him when he leaves again. Though he was the bishop of Smyrna (formerly Greek, now Turkish), he apparently retired to Spain. Costa Del Sol or something, which is probably the European equivalent of Florida.


Sometimes, however, if you've been a particularly bad little brat, a fate just a little more disturbing awaits you.

A good whupping by six to eight black men.

You see, part of the story is that 'Sinterklaas' is accompanied by six to eight well built black men, wearing the type of costumes you've seen in Italian renaissance paintings.

A bad child, so the story goes, will get whacked by one or more of these gentlemen, with switches and canes, then dumped into a gunny-sack and dragged off to Spain, never to be seen again.


Now, the problem is those six to eight black men, and here is where I ran afoul of some of my correspondents.

Traditionally, the six to eight black men would be impersonated by one to three white people (often young ladies, to boot), with crudely applied black-facepaint, wearing whatever butch drag mediaeval costume they could scrounge up. They would utter strange foreign sounding boogabooga grunts and pidgin Dutch threats to scare the crap outta the little kids - especially the ones who hadn't spent the previous month acting all goody two shoes, kissing up, singing cutesy songs about how happy they were to await the coming of the Saint (and his six to eight black men), and dutifully putting out cookies for the Saint every night, and a carrot for his horse (but nothing for the six to eight black men).

There is, by the way, no problem with the horse. The animal rights people have not focused on the horse yet, the horse is, so far, not a big deal.


But that thing with the six to eight black men (or, one to three white folk in black-face) has irritated the crap out of some folks. Rightly so. It panders to stereotypes, and tells little kids that they should fear black people.
It is, in many ways, a racist side to the tradition.


Many Dutch people have not grasped this yet, as they remember the joy of the season that they felt as children, getting candies, toys, cake, marzipan, chocolate letters. And as adults, they want to recapture that joy, and pass it on to their kids.

But again, part of the tradition is a bunch of white folks in blackface.
You can probably imagine why black people in the Netherlands are, at best, ambivalent about this.

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Did I mention that the mailing list is for people interested in matters having to do with the former colony Dutch Guiana?

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Every year, the Zwarte Piet (Black Peter, or Bogey Man) issue gets brought up on the mailing list. This year, discussion on the list turned heated, and I made the mistake of asking some of the writers to please be more polite, don't call each other names, stop cussing.
Because whatever point they may have had was getting lost in the melee.


In all the smoke, it may not have been readily apparent what side I was on.
[I wasn't on any side - personally, I think part of the tradition needs changing, but change is neither easy nor fast. I believe face-painted football hooligans would be a better choice. Teach the little kids to be scared of drunken louts.]


So, off the list, I received a splendid example of hate mail. It is beautiful, vicious, venomous, and absolutely smoking! Too bad it is entirely in Dutch.

But, for your reading pleasure, some fragments with translation below (the other person's text is bold and italic; the regular typeface, within square brackets, is the translation.

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"Heb jij je wel eens afgevraagd uit welk ras de verfoeiende sodom en gamorra praktijken stammen?"
[Have you ever asked yourself from which race the damnable Sodom and Gomorrah practices came?]

"Omdat jullie een aangeboren drang hebben je lusten bot te vieren op alles wat beweegt......elke ziekte waar het gros van jullie sterft is bij jullie begonnen."
[Because you folks have a genetic urge to expend your lusts on everything that moves......every disease which kills the most of you people has its origin among you people.]

"Is het een wonder dat jij het enige medicijn daarvoor dat jullie ooit uitvonden, het christendom, veracht?"
[Is it any wonder that you despise the only medicine that you guys ever invented, Christianity?]



Now this next passage just baffles the heck out of me, I can't make heads or tales of what he is trying to wish me:

"Ik wens je de nabijheid van de eerstvolgende aanslag op de misplaatste grote smoel die je denk te kunnen opzetten in een wereld die jij nog je soortgenoten bezitten."
[I wish you the proximity of the next-following strike on the misplaced big mouth that you think you can open in a world that neither you nor your kind own.]


I think it's a holiday greeting - I may print it up on some greeting cards and send it out this year.



Some other background: before receiving this mail I wrote that the accusation of bigotry, in my case, was certainly not incorrect. After all, I've slammed Europeans, Arabs, Republicans, Christian Fundamentalists, French people, leftwing socially conscious Dutchmen, and I have voiced my dislike of their idiotic and loony ideas.

Exact phraseology: "De beschuldiging van bigot is deels zeker accuraat in mijn geval - gij herinnert u zeker wel dat ik bijzonder vaak Europa, de Arabische wereld, Republiekijnen, Christen-fundamentalisten, Fransozen, Links-sociaal bewogen Nederlanders, en nog vele anderen verdoemd en verkettert heb omwille hun idiote dan wel geschifte opvattingen."

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Getting stuff like this out in the open can have a purifying effect.

I certainly feel cleaner now.