8 August, 2004 Arteles, Finland
MD: This is Melissa DeLaney and it is Sunday, the 11th of August at 11:06 a.m. at Arteles Creative Center, in Finland. We are just about to start conversation number two. Would you please tell me your full name and where you're from?
Martine: Martine van Bijlert I live in Maastricht, in Holland.
MD: Thank you. Thank you so much for coming today and having this conversation. I have three questions and we will expand from the questions and become more conversational. The first question is,
Beyond your name and where you're from. Tell me who you are.
Martine: I'm Martina. I grew up thinking of myself as somebody that is not a boy, not a girl. I think that's the main course though. Otherwise I think of myself as a writer and an artist and a thinker and a researcher and a person among persons and a person in the world, and someone who observes and notices and reflects. I think that's about it.
MD: Wonderful. Thank you so much.
So do you still carry that self with you from your childhood as an adult person?
Martine: I carry it with me very much I do, but I do think as you become an adult and an older adult, you get layers that wrap themselves around it. And I think particularly as I got older, I'm still very much that person in my own world, my inside world. But there's an outside world which became more separate from me as I became a professional adult, and started working. So that's a continuous theme to how do the two interact and how do you hold on to this inner self also when I'm out in the more public world?
MD: That's very interesting.
Are you aware emotionally what you bring to that public self is a different emotional self to your private self?
Martine: It's more that it feels like that in my own world I'm free. And in the outside world there are rules or customs or habits. Part of it comes naturally. I mean, I was also trained as an anthropologist, so part of it is just being used to looking around and seeing where my place is and where I fit in. Part of it, I think, comes from having moved between cultures or having switched cultures at a young age. So I think, there's just a habit of trying to not fit in, but trying to find a slot in an outside world, and sometimes forgetting that you can bring your full self wherever you go. That you're not necessarily more of a guest than other people.
MD: This is really great because it gives us more insight into where you're from and your influences and also your uniqueness in terms of the broader systems of care.
What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of care?
Martine: I think of a sense of safety and a sense of freedom. I think both are needed. Or both are if I think of care as a pure, positive thing, I think of safety and freedom, belonging and a kind of shelter.
MD: Shelter is a great word. I was thinking on my walk this morning, around that idea of shelter.
Expanding on that first impression for you on the word care and expanding on that concept, I'd like to hear more about, again, that personal self and public self.
What is your personal practice of care, and how do you see your professional work and your public practice of care?
So there are two strands there.
Martine: Um, interestingly, I think care might be where personal and professional somehow are very close to each other. A lot of my work has been, in a way, trying to care for the world. Maybe even for people.
MD: Before we go on, I'd love to hear more about your work in the world, and the kind of work you've been doing over the few years in your career.
Martine: Initially, I wanted to study medicine. I wanted to become a doctor in a refugee camp. I think it might have been sparked when I must have been 13 because I think I remember in which house it was. And reading in the newspaper about the bombing of Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan by the Russians. And at that time it meant nothing to me as a place, but just the idea that a country could bomb a refugee camp in another country, and that there would be nobody who would stand up to defend them. So I think there was this idea that there are people that nobody is going to take care of. Nobody feels responsible for. It’s much more complex than that, obviously. But that hit a nerve. So I wanted to be a doctor in a refugee camp until at the very last moment, I realised I didn't. I had no interest in working in Dutch hospitals. It just seemed a waste to spend so much time learning something where I didn't actually want to do the core of the job. So then I did anthropology and social development sociology. And very soon, while I was studying, I decided that the ambitions of development work were mean, they were arrogant and they were just overly ambitious. So I moved into and got interested in humanitarian work, crisis work, and really with the idea that you stand with people in a difficult period in their life or in the life of their country, and then hope that they can kind of move on after that. That's also when I went to Pakistan and I worked in a dental clinic for Afghan refugees as a volunteer, and then I went back later to do my research there. This is going to be a long story. Sorry.
MD: I like stories.
Martine: It was in 1992 or 1993, just as the Communist government had fallen. I was looking at which refugees returned to their country and which didn't, and what determined that decision and who decided? And while I was there, the fighting started in Kabul. So you had the refugee streams going in two directions, some going back and some actually leaving. I was just interested in that. And, that's been a through line conversation through all my work. Which is, you kind don't just learn, you experience what has happened because you hear it through other people, but you also go through the emotion of the conversation. And, so I did that, went back, came back, and then I met my husband. I thought I would leave immediately after and I had actually no plans. I just thought, if I don't find a job, I'll go to Uzbekistan and teach English as a second language. But then I met my husband, and he was studying medicine and was not finished yet. I had to look for a job in Holland, and that was kind of difficult. And because I think that's when the outside world really came in, the fact that I had to do job interviews, that I had to look at my what I'd done and be able to present it to an outside world and to have it judged and found enough or not, that all those things had never even occurred to me.
So that was hard. Anyway, I did refugee aid, and then I went to the other side and became an interviewer at the immigration service. So I had done both sides and then I went into humanitarian aid. I did a stint in Chechnya for three months, extended to six, while my husband was still in Holland. Then we went to Afghanistan together under the Taliban for a year. I spent some time in Holland again, and then I became a diplomat almost by accident. I just applied for a secondment and got it and then became a political advisor to the EU. I was a diplomat in Tehran, and then I became a political advisor to the EU special representative in Kabul. So by that time I'd moved really from aid into political analysis. But very much with the idea that if we understand things better, there will be better policies and very much conflict informed. So understanding where the conflict comes from so that you can either prevent it or transform it or lessen it.
And then we set up our own think tank. The interesting thing is, that in the end was the most difficult on one hand, the long time period takes its toll. Just basically following it for decades and seeing the succession of things that are supposed to get better, but they get worse. Like when the Communist government fell, the Civil war started. When the Civil war ended, the Taliban came. When the Taliban ended, the international intervention came with its own problems. And now the Taliban again. So every time it's when people thought it would get better, it also got worse in some ways. Also the most interesting thing is that when the Obama administration came, the US intervention changed in Afghanistan. Suddenly people started listening to us. And most people who have influence, always have this thing. If only people would have listened to us, it would have been better. But people started listening to us and over the years, actually what we've been saying the whole time. This is happening, and has become mainstream. And in becoming mainstream, it also became crude and it lost its nuance. Right. But yeah, basically it's getting what you wish for. And then seeing it still doesn't have the effect that you hope that it has.
MD: Why did Obama's presidency inform that?
Martine: Well, one thing that I only realised after a few months is that it's much easier to want to know what's going wrong. If it was someone else who'd done it up till then. And so part of that was this because there was this intervention. Of course, everything that they were doing was going right. Then if you change the administration, they want to know what went wrong. Suddenly there was an interest to hear what was going wrong. That was completely refreshing until you realise they want to know what the others had done wrong. And then very soon, they're going to be the ones who know everything and you know how it goes, right? Up until then, nobody wanted to know about corruption. Nobody wanted to know about human rights abuses, etc. And that then became part of the discourse. To their credit, the military really tried to deal with it, but very soon people then basically start dealing with it in ways that they are doing things that they know how to do, rather than what will really help. It became dysfunctional in whole new ways. But on the face of it, it doesn't feel like jobs that are centered around care, but it always did feel centered around care because it was always grounded in what people told me.
It was always grounded in listening. And I did feel like I was kind of a keeper of what people told me. Also, over time, I realised that mostly men, also women, but mostly that a lot of these men who came to talk politics, what they really did was they talked about their worries and they could talk about it to no one else. You know, not in their family, not with other men, not in their meetings. And so that was really interesting. A lot of them would at some point sit down and ask what's going to happen? You know, or what are the Americans planning? You must know or, whatever. But a lot of it was political analysis conversation, but it was actually really emotional. And it was like in this world, it was I think, a shelter. It was also, for a lot of these men, just a complete novelty to spend an hour alone in a room with a woman they were not related to because I could do my conversations without translators. So there was this interesting intimacy that they also couldn't place because there was no reference for it. Because I was a woman, but I wasn't, and I was a foreigner, but I also spoke in their own language, and I had this history in their country or in their history.
So there was something in those jobs where actually the inside and the outside felt very close. They didn't actually feel like I was out in public. It was just that at some point, when I started realising how the world looks at me, that's when things become different. And that was later on. I think I most felt it after I quit my job when I returned to the Netherlands. I just feel like when I leave my house I feel like I'm in an outside world. You know, because of this constant this kind of hum of awareness that, you know, how am I perceived or how do I not quite fit or how I also was not having a job, not having something I feel responsible for. Like when I was in Afghanistan, I felt almost responsible for the whole country, which is also silly, but it's kind of you're constantly thinking of what can we do? And so yeah, that's a gap. Not having that.
MD: Thank you.
And then the next strand, which is such a huge question as well. The experiences for you amidst all of that care for the country and multiple systems of care within your work as a diplomat, and your humanitarian work, and stemming from that, the more recent work.
Martine: And very immediate. Like, I just knew I, I would say I had a kind of burnout in 2012. Um, that's when I decided I want to buy a house. I want to know where I'm living. And I am going to write fiction. And I need to do yoga. Those were three things. And, you know, I come from a Christian background where yoga is, you know, letting in the spirits or whatever. But it was just what I needed, that clarity. More recently in 2019, when I'd spent these years trying to revise my novel and had become this big boulder on my neck, I knew I'm going to return to poetry. And recently, I'm doing painting now. I mean, those are the things that I just suddenly know that this is what I need.
Otherwise what I think it was really, that self-care was difficult. I think we were all kind of looking out for each other a bit. We took holidays, but I often find holidays stressful and not necessarily resting. I think it's interesting when I talk about that time, I talk very much about us as if we were all doing the same thing. But, I was constantly kind of monitoring my moods. Like, is it still okay? Am I depressed or am I just tired? You make sure you eat, you sleep, you, practically, live in the office. We had a shared open plan office and at the time we worked from Sunday to Thursday. By the time Thursday morning came around, I was kind of exhausted. I think just the people as well. So after lunch, I would disappear and work upstairs in my room. It was things like that.
MD: And I think they're the really important things as well.
How you manage yourself as a resource to then go out there into the world and do that public work that you need to do, but also, managing yourself in a kind of practical way as well. That's really, really important. What is interesting is to shift people away from that idea that care is something like a massage or lighting a candle or something, but it's more than that. It's the practical things of how do you actually care for yourself every single day?
Martine: And at the moment you need it. Yeah, exactly.
MD: We're going to go be a bit future facing now.
How would you like to see more care enacted in your and slash the future? We'll start with your future. Again that's two strands, the personal and and the larger. So how would you like to see more care enacted in your future?
Martine: Towards myself or towards other people?
MD: Let's look at yourself.
Martine: The main thing I'm looking at is, I want to stop living somewhere where I don't feel at home. I think that's what I realised. I feel very much at home in my house. Um. And that's it. I think that's a huge one. That's actually the only one. Yeah. Yeah.
Also I would like to feel responsible for something again that I care about because I also think that I have this huge kind of muscle, of trying to feel responsible. And because it's not being used, I start feeling responsible for things like not being in people's way or it just somehow turns inward or it turns into not doing things wrong or not showing up somewhere or being just underdressed or it's just these complete things that I don't really care about. So I just need things again that can be something substantial.
MD: That's incredible. And leads on to how you would like to see more care and act in the future. So this could be your future as the public Martine. Or it could be the future, more broadly speaking, or both of those things.
Martine: I think, for myself I've been very much inward looking. Also just because I felt a lot of what we’re talking about in the world is empty. I think more importantly is just who am I talking to and who's supposed to listen and who's supposed to do anything. I would like to actually have platforms. I think I'm a thoughtful person. I think that it's useful if I speak out loud. I don't do it a lot anymore. And I think that's actually good. But I do think it would be really nice to have platforms. Because, I think being thoughtful, particularly now at this time, we really need a kind of slower conversation. We need thoughtful conversation. I've been avoiding it, but I very much want to go back to Afghanistan, and I've been avoiding it because I actually probably can't talk to the people. I know because it will probably endanger them. So that's also very much which was also complicated towards the end when I was there feeling I was actually possibly endangering people rather than helping them.
In general in the world. I just think we need to really collectively work on lowering the temperature. Everybody is being constantly hyped up to be angry about something or to be upset or to be activated or to speak up. That's how you show that you're a good person. And, which is really the opposite of care because you actually don't stop to look at what you're talking about or who you're talking to or what you're trying to achieve. I think care, the heart of care is attention. Just actually paying attention to what you want to care for and, and kind of absorbing that and first looking what's needed and, um, and how that fits with what you can actually maybe do. I would like to, with what I know now and what I'm doing now, also with some art, it's kind of time to find the place again. But to find a place that doesn't feel like I'm outside where I need to look. What are the rules? And am I not standing out or in someone's way, or being just with my full self, and just forgetting that that's outside?
MD: Yeah. And integration.
Martine: Yeah.
MD: Thank you so much. This has been incredible. There's some really incredible themes there that I'm going to contemplate as well. I love paying attention to what you care for and also that requirement of a deeper listening within the public conversations and dialogues that are going on, which is very noisy. There's a lot of social conditioning and engineering going on without people taking time out to actually think more deeply.
Martine: I think it's intentional.
MD: I do as well. I really value your time and your thoughts and sharing that with me today. Is there anything else before we close off that you'd like to add?
Martine: I don't think so. I mean, there's so much that we can go deeper into. Yeah, but no, this is a really interesting conversation.
MD: Thank you so much.
Martine: Well done.