Meetings with the otherness: Varkensroze ansichten from an ethical perspective

Abstract

The poetry of a Dutch migrant author Mustafa Stitou has been identified as socially relevant and critical by Joosten and Vaessens. This article explores another facet of engaged literature, the ethical one. Attention is paid to the way that poems represent meetings between two cultures or two individuals. Said’s theory of Orientalism identifies the ways in which a discourse with the power to represent whole cultures creates preconceptions and prejudices reflected in individual interactions. In these interactions subjects in Stitou’s poems are approached with certain terms of reference and react to this both on the level of interaction and on the level of representation.