The duet between Matthijs and Griet

I don't know if the registration for the Sonja Barend Award has already closed. If not, I would like to nominate this conversation between Matthijs van Nieuwkerk and Griet Op de Beeck.

As so often, the art was also in the omission here. Matthijs didn't even ask that much. Sometimes he just pointed, while he opened his mouth to let a flowing question roll out, but that was enough for Griet to say what you wanted to know as a viewer. Griet's sentences were short poems, Matthijs's gaze was warm without losing the journalistic distance. He asked the question that no one else dared to ask, and everything came full circle at the bridge scene. If you have time, you should just watch. Then you come here to the fragment. If you're busy and on the go, I'll select the highlights.

How dark life was, Matthijs wanted to know. ‘Of a pitch-black kind of dark that was just bearable. It was just not bad enough to jump off a bridge.’

To the question of why she only realized her abuse so late, Griet answers: ‘My father had to die first (yes, that's Flemish) before I could form a new puzzle with all the pieces.’ Incest is like an oil stain that affects everything, Griet struggled with a low self-image and battled such a severe form of anorexia that she weighed only 38 kilos. Because when you're a minor victim of abuse, you're not verbal enough to store the memory, you push it away. A protective mechanism called repression.

Matthijs shows photos of little Griet. A beautiful girl with small curls. Then Matthijs wants the ‘after photo’. How Griet looked after the abuse. ‘Can we have that one, guys?’ ‘Can we have that one?’ You feel Matthijs's irritation. The technique must not slow down the conversation. Not now. Especially not now. There we see Griet. ‘I became a fat little boy.’ She has tears in her voice. The only weapon you have as a child. To make yourself as unattractive as possible.

Her abuse only came to light after she had gone through many ‘Kleenex therapists’. The therapists from the company ‘Oh, how terrible, tell me more’. Eventually, Griet ended up with a real therapist, and eventually, the incest came out. ‘Images of a disgusting peculiarity’ that you ‘don't want to hear at this time of day on TV.’ Matthijs did ask something, but nodded understandingly. We won't go further here. Just how it was, that moment of revelation. That was of an ‘overwhelming emotion’ where the therapist moved a meter further away. Things happened that you can't imagine. Griet made a list of 107 remarkable secondary pieces of evidence from which the incest was evident.

Then Matthijs asks the question that gnaws at him. The question that many would be too cowardly to ask. That there might be people who have reservations about this kind of analysis. That there are, sorry to say it this way, people who might say that you conclude something without evidence. It wouldn't have been a good interview if he hadn't asked this. It could have been so inappropriate if you had missed the nuance. But Matthijs did it just right and thus got the right answer. ‘It's these kinds of questions, and that's why I'm actually very glad you asked it, why victims remain silent. The fear of not being believed is scorching and terrible.’

How does Griet feel now that she has shared this with the world? There is relief. ‘It's so unfair to have to bear that terrible shame.’

‘How was it with men?’ Matthijs asks. ‘With m-e-n?’ Griet laughs. ‘Matthijs, I've had so many wrong men, you don't want to know.’ Griet sought men like her father. Men who had ‘save me’ written on their 'foreheads' and men who abused her.

Whether there is now a nice man in her life now that she knows where her bad choices came from. ‘That's a secret garden that I have a right to.’ ‘Certainly,’ says Matthijs. Certainly.

Griet's new novel is about incest. It will be a trilogy. A trilogy because Griet shudders at ‘giving something a place’. ‘You have to kill it. And that's terrible and awful and creepy and scary, but the reward is so great.’ Griet does this by biting into it. Whether she wants to read a passage. Griet reads about the main character who is standing on the bridge. Ready to jump off.

That she is so glad she didn't jump off that bridge. Matthijs is silent for a moment and hums. ‘Breathtaking book.’ Griet's chin tells how exciting she found this. It's over. The past and the revelation. I hope she will down that glass of white wine in one big gulp.