If a city and its people can be described by a subway station, the one for Brussels is the Maelbeek station: the one whose French name is just different enough in Flemish (Maalbeek) to warrant its own spelling; the one whose location is just on the line between the city's European Union quarter and the Brussels of les bruxellois; the one whose artwork is as unassuming as its people.
The one where a train was ripped apart by a terrorist’s bomb during rush hour Tuesday morning.
The simple portraits of average folks on Maelbeek's walls — nothing but sophisticated (sort of) smiley faces, really — befit an understated people, for whom self-deprecation is a pastime-going-on-pandemic. Before my wife and I moved back to Atlanta after living in Brussels for four and a half years, we bought a couple of T-shirts, one for me and one for our then-infant son. His features a dog in a downpour, holding an unopened umbrella in its mouth, with the slogan, "Belgium: Where rain is typical." Mine has a picture of a cone of pommes frites and the explanation, "About Belgium: This is a Belgian invention, therefore we call it French fries!"
This is not to say Belgians, whom I found to be almost universally kind and good-natured once I got to know them, are not without pride. They just don’t all place their pride in the same thing, and few, of those I knew, placed their pride in the artificial thing known as “Belgium,” which Charles de Gaulle supposedly called “a country invented by the British to annoy the French.” The country has long been riven by its stark linguistic divide — the one that gave Maelbeek/Maalbeek, and virtually everything else in Brussels, its dual names. The detente struck between these factions in the capital Brussels, combined with its internationalization as the home to the EU and NATO, has increasingly made it an English-speaking city.
In the parts of town, that is, that aren’t Arabic- or Turkish-speaking.
The other development in Belgium over the past decade-plus is the rising number of immigrants from Turkey and North Africa who mostly have not assimilated, mostly — as near as I could gather in my time there — by choice. They instead live a largely ghettoized existence, making Brussels at least as segregated as any city I’ve seen in the U.S. South. This has only exacerbated the existing divide between Belgium’s northern, Flemish region, which is more industrialized and tends to receive more immigrants, and its francophones in the south. Flemish separatists embraced those who just don’t like the newcomers as well as those who feel the mainstream political parties have brushed off even legitimate complaints, a trend we’ve seen elsewhere in Europe and, lately, in the United States. The sad, new reality is that this tension allowed terror cells, including the one responsible for the Paris attacks last November, to fester and thrive.
Until recently, none of this was enough to tarnish Brussels’ reputation as an eminently comfortable place to live, especially compared with pricier, better-known cities elsewhere in Europe, if not as much of a tourist destination as its flashier rivals. Even among those Americans I know who have visited Belgium, many have skipped Brussels in favor of Bruges. But Brussels has its hidden gems, and its restaurants and cafe culture take a backseat to no city’s. (The Starbucks near one of the explosions Tuesday at Brussels’ international airport was the city’s first, a reflection of the prevailing view that coffee is meant to be enjoyed slowly rather than gulped down like a Red Bull.) It’s a city where many a person has arrived on a two-year work assignment and stayed for two decades. It is, in those respects, not unlike Atlanta.
Now, unfortunately, it is nevertheless a place in need of our attention, our support and our prayers.
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