In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

107 Chapter 7 Allah is great! He ain’t for me eing discriminated against can sometimes be a godsend. If during a certain period of my life I had found work for even a short time, I would never have been entitled to a social flat when a fire broke out on my floor. How this how this came about does not really matter. Shit happens everywhere. I was entitled to social benefits and as such was what in Belgium is called a social case pure sang. Instead of pursuing these vain goals trying to make something out of myself, they probably wanted me to be this way from the beginning. The only time I found work during that period was for a short period of time in an insurance company and at another company called Reprobel, in both, as an administrative assistant. At the latter, I was supposed to be taken on indefinitely after this girl whom I had come to replace decided to come back. I had been in a state of total shock when the firemen woke me up early one morning to rescue me, as one could imagine, and quite affected through it all. It had broken out in the attic, then spread to the roof leaving big holes in it that could be seen from outside. The ceiling of my kitchen had broken down at some places, but it was above all my neighbour’s apartment that sustained most damage. For security reasons, we were not allowed to live there any longer. At the police station, a female cop tried to reassure me. “Everything is going to be all right,” she said. Since I had no place left to go, I was entitled to stay one week in a hotel for free, breakfasts included for the time being until they found a ‘solution.’ I was so move by their gentleness that I could barely hold back my tears and almost started to take at face value what they keep telling us: The police are your friend! Anyway, it is always nice to know but I had even more pressing matters at hand, which of course, they knew B 108 nothing about: I had an appointment at four o’clock in Leuven with a guy I met on Taxistop (hitchhiking service) to go to Prague with. I was hoping this was going to take my mind off things after such an ordeal. Poor me! A close friend told me that, now that I was basically homeless due to a fire, these were terrific points to put on application form to be entitled to a social flat. The procedures got speeded up thanks to someone my friend knew at the housing association called ‘Foyer Anderlechtois.’ Getting out of this area started to be an obsession. I had always hated living there but even in my wildest dreams I never thought that this was going to be possible thanks to a fire. Apparently, some fires can be life-changing. Bruno and one of his best mates had bought this apartment blocks on the ‘Rue van Lint” nearby the City Hall of Anderlecht. It is one of the most deprived, run-down, areas one can think of and a foretaste of what Brussels is heading to: its rampant islamization. Now for some reason from the moment a white person says that, he is immediately branded a racist and supposed to have links with right extremist groups. So I wonder where that puts me in as a black person saying this. Do I also fit the profile? The truth is that it bewilders just about everyone; whites as well as people from foreign backgrounds who are not Muslims. I never got used to neighbourhoods with veiled women and their lovely smiling faces, mosques on every corner of the street, satellite dishes on every house and everything else that characterizes such neighbourhoods. Most people who live there feel ashamed and trapped for being unable to find an apartment to rent for a decent price elsewhere. Ironically, even some Arabs I spoke with felt this way; maybe because they felt that the non-Muslims still left were waiting too long to embrace Islam. I sometimes wonder whether Arabs are aware of this entire mass movement taking place on their behalf and if they know that people used to describe the quality of a neighbourhood by its slight level of ‘arabization’ or not. That even foreigners, me included, would say during the summer...

Share