In a recent article published in The Guardian, Iceland’s former prime minister and current up-and-coming Icelandic-language crime novelist Katrín Jakobsdóttir deplored the potential disappearance of her country’s official language. The menace behind this decline: artificial intelligence and the ubiquity of English. More specifically, internet English, that peculiar register of American vernacular now encountered in a globally dominant and emotionally vacuous popular culture. Whether in social media posts, digitally available music, or streamable television series, this artificial yet viral syncretism of minority expressions and digital colloquialisms has crept out from our devices and into our mouths—and not only the mouths of us in the Anglophone world. With more than half of all websites being in English and some 70 percent of the world having internet access, understanding English is no longer impressive but necessary for basic prestige in the digital age.
Throughout my time in Western Europe, English à la américaine has been omnipresent. Whether in Brussels, communicating between an Iranian coastal engineer from Oman and a Russian leaving Latvia in dodgy circumstances, whether on rural trains, providing an innocuous alternative in linguistically fraught and divided countries, whether in French classrooms, where American research is presented in the original English, whether upon passing a student bar in Ghent, where a garage band spoke to each other in a fascinating Dutch-English argot, “the American language” is a colorless throughcurrent that most would prefer not to use, yet cannot live without. European attitudes toward America lie somewhere between reverence, horror, and indifference. It is thus rather surprising to encounter American language and culture treated as something substantial, even honorable.
One such surprising situation befell me out in the provinces in the Netherlands, in the railroad town of Amersfoort. As I had seen on a train advertisement the night before, the municipal art museum was putting on a major exhibition of Jacob Lawrence, the great illustrator of midcentury African-American life. How this museum, seemingly without a permanent collection and even national recognition, managed to assemble two and a half hours’ worth of Lawrence’s material, I do not know. But in their vast exhibition hall, surrounded by elderly Dutch women, I found myself astounded not only at the scope and scale of Lawrence’s work but at how richly and carefully presented it was, as if a product of vernacular America, unlike its bastard siblings stalking me on the metro and peeking out of store windows, could be a work of art. Along with his famous scenes of Great Migration life, the exhibition featured experimental compositions, raucous urban scenes, self-portraits, still lives, didactic images from black history, and most stunningly, print series of epic proportions. Prints about Hiroshima, black sermons on Genesis, the lives of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, John Brown, Toussaint L’Ouverture, and the founding of America, came together with his depictions of ordinary Americans and American life to form a great shout of assertion that America, too, is a real and vital country. In John Brown, Lawrence finds an American Beowulf; in Harriet Tubman, a triumphant Saint Joan; in all his subjects, an intense statement of personhood, gathered together by the exhibition into a declaration reminiscent of Whitman or Hughes, of a screaming, crying, laughing, sighing America that, whomever and wherever you are, is just as alive and real as you.
American art, utterly absent from European galleries, finds its vindication here, written up in sedate and kindly Dutch in a shopping plaza museum in the fifteenth-largest town in the Netherlands. It’s a staggeringly glorious respite from the otherwise empty exports of Americanism swirling around in the modern digital sphere. America here appears a valuable, liveable, workable, something, with all its history and people attached. Jacob Lawrence: African American Modernist, is on view at the Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort, until January 4.
Patriotically,
Brady Santoro
Image: Jacob Lawrence, Negroes were leaving by the hundreds to go north and enter northern industry, casein tempera on hardboard, 1940-1941, (The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle).