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.
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
than 108,000 euros.
'Un Flamand Français'
The film, made up of newly-released archive interviews, is a poignant portrait of a man who was both obsessed by exposing the small-mindedness and the 'nothingness' of Belgians, while also embracing their quirkiness.
Born in French-speaking Brussels but raised by Flemish-speaking parents, Brel belonged to both languages communities, yet never fully-felt at home in either one - a sentiment increasingly echoed by many Belgians who get sucked into an ongoing political crisis that could yet end up with the divorce of the two language communities.
"We Belgians have nowhere to go so we travel within ourselves, we escape into dreams, into the fantastical. Our country, in fact, triggers this flight into the fantastic and that's we have great surrealists, like Magritte or Bruegel and writers," Brel said in an interview in the 1970s.
From hero to outcast
His daughter, France, who put the film together, recalls:
"I remember my father saying how, as a child, he would mix up grey and brown and that's no coincidence (if you live here). He suffered from all this darkness, when he'd walk into a room he'd switch on all the lights and that's why he was so intense in everything he did."
She adds: "In that sense, he was very Belgian: we all express ourselves with force and passion, we meet and talk in smoke-infested bistros just to escape the foul weather outside."
Jacques Brel with Bobbejaan Schoepen in 1955
Mad and excessive
Brel could move his audience to tears with his heart-rending ode to the melancholy landscape and low-skies of Belgium, with songs such as Mon plat pays (My flat country), while being booed off-stage and banned from the airways for his caricatures of Belgians,especially the Flemish.
France Brel, referring to a song that depicts Flemish women as immodest, coarse and full-figured, says: "He went from hero to outcast for a while after he released 'Les Flamandes'. He wanted to be funny but he spent his life having to justify himself."
Jacques Brel's daughter France Photo: Jacques Brel Foundation
Despite spending most of his adult life in France, Brel returned often to Belgium, both drawn and repelled by its low skies, dark towns and sweeping beaches. He said:
"It's a land of madness and excess and I am probably both mad and excessive so I feel at home here."
The life and death of Jacques Brel
1929 : Jacques Brel born in Brussels.
1953 : Arrives in Paris with his guitar and his first songs.
1959 : Major breakthrough with La valse à mille temps and Ne me quitte pas.
1967 : The musical Jacques Brel is alive and well and living in Paris is created in New York.
1974 : Leaves Europe on his sailing yacht L'Askoy.
1975: Crosses the Pacific Ocean to Polynesia and settles in the Marquesas Islands archipelago.
1977 : Returns to Paris to record his last LP.
1978 : Dies on October 9 of lung cancer in Paris. He is buried in the Marquesas Islands.
Vanessa Mock
Radio Netherlands
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Belgium is marking the 30th anniversary of the death of Jacques Brel with an intense search into the identity of its national hero.
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