The story of a non-religious ark-seeker
By Walter Lotens
Uitpers.be
February 1, 2008
Frank Westerman, ARARAT (Amsterdam: Atlas), ??¬ 19,90, 284 pp.,
ISBN 978 90 450 1299 5
With ARARAT, Frank Westerman continues to expand his non-fictional literary
oeuvre. Since 1992, the journalist Westerman (1964) has revealed himself as
a full-time, award-winning, lauded author. In his latest book, he travels to
mount Ararat. He meets not only ark-seekers, but also himself: the young
Dutch Protestant who has lost his faith and as a "reversed Job puts his own
staunchness as a non-believer to the test."
In 1994, Westerman, then a young correspondent for de Volkskrant in
Belgrade, made his first appearance with THE BRIDGE OVER THE TARA, an
account of his journey along the frontlines of former Yugoslavia. As a
reporter for NRC Handelsblad, he later visited different international
hotbeds. Together with his colleague journalist Bart Rijs, he knew how to
penetrate into Srebenica as the only journalist at the time of the fall in
1995. They wrote a book together, THE BLACKEST SCENARIO, for which they used
confidential UN documents and interviews with eye-witnesses in order to
reconstruct the war years of Srebrenica. Between 1997 and 2002, Westerman
was a correspondent for NRC Handelsblad in Moscow. During his time in
Moscow, he completed his third non-fiction book, THE GRAIN REPUBLIC, which
was published in 1999. THE GRAIN REPUBLIC depicts how the Dutch landscape
has changed over the last one hundred years and what the consequences have
been for humans and nature. In particular, Westerman follows the life
history of Sicco Mansholt, a descendent of rich gentleman farmers, who
allowed his large-scale agricultural politics to penetrate deep into
Europe–until he himself began to question his beliefs and decided to
propagate ecological agriculture. After four years as a correspondent in
Moscow, Westerman wrote ENGINEERS OF THE SOUL, a book about Joseph Stalin’s
megalomaniacal hydraulic projects and the socialist-realist novels that were
written about it. It is with this book, which was repeatedly awarded, that
the journalist-writer established his name. His big breakthrough came with
EL NEGRO AND ME (2004), a fascinating travelogue about race, culture and
identity, for which he practically traveled the entire globe. The latter was
crowned with the Golden Owl Literary Award 2005, short-list nominee AKO
Literary Prize 2005, and was nominated for the Bob den Uyl Prize 2005.
ARARAT too has been nominated for the AKO Literary Prize.
Religion and Science
In the meantime, Frank Westerman has become a notorious representative of
what his publisher, Atlas, calls literary non-fiction in the Dutch language.
The method of work is known: you think of a theme (and possibly some
subthemes), you work your way into the subject, then you take off, you
travel, around the world if you must, then you include yourself in the
story, and all of that with the necessary literary sharpness. Westerman too
applies this procedure–and does so successfully–in his latest work. ARARAT
is a book about believing and knowing, religion and science, centered around
mount Ararat.
Raised a Protestant, but fallen from his religion, Westerman wanted to put
his own staunchness as a non-believer to the test through a pilgrimage to
the Biblical home where Noah’s Ark is said to have floated. "I wanted to
climb this holy mountain with an eye on both the myth and the reality" (p.
52). In Etchmiadzin, Westerman visits an Armenian Apostolic Church and is
astonished by the devotion of black-clad monks with pointy hats. He does not
mince his words: "In my opinion, there was already something wrong with the
word ‘religion’; it presupposes a god, and as soon as you recognize it, what
apparently follows inevitably is to serve him. Slithering like snakes, they
shuffled kneeling around the altar, with faces strained in pain" (p. 125).
Knowing in words
The ascent of mount Ararat in Eastern Turkey is described in the final
chapter. To help describe his preparation (the difficulty in acquiring a
visa, the procurement of hiking material, his physical training together
with his wife by walking across the shallows, his deep dive into literature
about the Flood, Biblical ark-seekers, and Ararat, the Armenian genocide,
geological studies, literature, among which Orhan Pamuk’s SNOW, and so on
and so forth), he needs over 250 pages. His own past is also elaborately
described: not only his Protestant background, but also his schooling. He
still has sharp and good memories of his mathematics teacher "Knol" and of
his exact subjects in general. "Biology, physics, and chemistry relieved the
world of many secrets. The knowledge that I absorbed gave me solid footing
and confidence, which contributed to my praying less and less convincingly"
(p. 103). The literature-oriented journalist also reveals that he is an
agricultural engineering graduate, having studied geology in Delft under
Professor Salomon Kroonenberg, a scientist who has, in the meantime, become
famous for a broad audience with THE HUMAN MEASURE, THE EARTH IN TEN
THOUSAND YEARS. Yet, it is the word that fascinates the author especially.
In the course of the story, it becomes apparent that Westerman’s religion is
one of language. "Since I dedicated myself to writing, I have gained great
respect for the word. In every sentence I searched for words with the right
weight and sound. I tasted them on my tongue, sucked on them until they had
the right color and strung them together into a chain of beads. Although I
chose and ordered them myself, the words never did exactly as I wanted.
Embedded in a sentence, they sometimes suddenly changed their radiance or
meaning. That was the miraculous part" (p. 210). The manner in which he
describes mount Ararat is certainly worth the effort: "With her swollen
body, she resembled a fortune-teller who had nestled herself on the plain
and had assumed an inaccessible pose. Around her waist, she donned a shabby
pleated skirt with erosion grooves." (p. 219).
Non-fiction literature
When he finally stands on top of mount Ararat at the end of the book, he
realizes that he has freed himself from his past, because "at the snow
frontier of Ararat, there were no angels with shining swords" or a piece of
ark wood to stumble over. ARARAT is a rich book. A great number of
geological classifications, geographical explanations, historical stories,
myths and references to recent political developments and to world
literature sometimes leaves the impression that a few tipped-over
bookshelves and random experiences are thrust upon the reader. Yet, it does
not give the impression of a walking encyclopedia. Nor did it become a
summary of random experiences with no purpose. Walking in the shallows in a
story about mount Ararat? It’s possible. With a very good style and aptitude
for building stories, Frank Westerman can pull it off. Similar to great
names like V.S. Naipaul and Ryszard Kapuscinki, he outstandingly excercises
that difficult genre of non-fiction literature. It is in that in-between
genre in which journalism, travelogue, and literature seamlessly cross over
into each other that Westerman is at his best.