Decolonizing Flanders fields: Flemish Great War commemoration and the agency of literature

Abstract

This article analyzes the commemoration of the centenary of the Great War in Flanders to show how the Flemish case complicates customary accounts of the relation between human rights, the duty to remember, and World War. While customary accounts see the commemoration’s focus on victims, on minor perspectives, and on the futility of war as an extension of Holocaust memory, the article shows how in the Flemish context, the Great War functions as a “screen memory” for politically divisive memories of the Second World War, of colonialism, and of labor migration. The article analyses the contribution of Flemish literature, and especially the novel Tell Someone by Rachida Lamrabet, to the commemoration of the centenary to argue that literature is a viable tool for making visible Flanders’ “colonial aphasia,” even if the power of literature to effect mnemonic change is compromised precisely by this colonial aphasia.