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20/10/2008Was Jacques Brel the last true Belgian?

Belgium is marking the 30th anniversary of the death of Jacques Brel with an intense search into the identity of its national hero.

Belgium is marking the 30th anniversary since the death of Jacques Brel with an intense search into the identity of its national hero, asking whether he was the last true Belgian. A new documentary film, released this week, exposes the singer-songwriter's love-hate relationship towards the plat pays (flat country) and his countrymen, who he often ridiculed and savaged in his lyrics. 
 
Photo: Jacques Brel Foundation
On 25 March 1965, Jacques Brel performed in the Kurhaus in Scheveningen, the Netherlands
Photo right: Jacques Brel Foundation
"I don't know what it means to be Belgian," shrugged a twenty-something Brel, puffing on a cigarette. "But I know that it is a burden." As the new film J'aime les Belges shows, Brel continued to pose the same question up until his death, aged 49, long after he had escaped to Paris, his adopted home. "We have been conquered by everyone and we don't have our own language."
 
"A country with two languages is not a country. We have French but we speak a 'patois' (dialect). We speak Flemish, which is not actually a language; it's a variant of Dutch and we have a million dialects. A tree should be a 'boom', but in Antwerp it's a 'bien', in Brussels it's a 'bun', so in the end no one understands what's going on!"
 
The death of one of the most popular singers in French has triggered a flurry of tributes and events, with new biographies and an exhibition in Brussels. In Paris, Sotheby's this week auctioned 94 objects which once belonged to Brel, including the manuscript of one of his best-known songs, Amsterdam, which fetched more 


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