#149: Febrile City

Or, Brussels on the verge of a nervous breakdown

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This week, I’m wondering, is everyone doing okay?

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It was just before 11 on Sunday night when I heard the first barrage of fireworks. All evening you could hear the odd irregular pop and bag of isolated explosions from over the other side of Parc Elisabeth. But it was only really when Morocco’s defeat to Senegal was confirmed and I was tucked up in bed with the covers drawn, that the proper action started.

It was no great surprise; the boys of Molenbeek and Koekelberg that were just then being disgorged from cramped apartments and neighbourhood tea shops had paid for their roman candles and their firecrackers and win or lose were determined to make good use of them. Nevermind the fact that, while it is legal to sell and possess fireworks in Brussels, it is illegal to set them off. It is also against the law to fire them in the direction of police, emergency services workers, parked cars, metro station entrances and the facades of local businesses. But they were determined to do that, too. And so their pops and crackles and whizzbangs and rat-tat-tatting of their ordnance echoed up from downtown Molenbeek to our quiet somnolent road.

Within a quarter of an hour it seemed as if they had burned through their supplies and their enthusiasm, the protracted intervals between the distant explosions becoming progressively longer. After an interlude of several minutes’ quiet, the police sirens began.

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Brussels’ citizens have a reputation for apathy, a resigned je-m’en-foutisme. To me, an outsider, this resigned attitude to living in Brussels goes some way to explaining the state of the place. Only, I don’t think the stereotype quite applies anymore. I worry it’s been supplanted in the psyche of many Bruxellois by an altogether more hysterical instinct. Brussels is not on the verge of a nervous breakdown, both because that’s a trite way of explaining the shared pathology of a city of one million individuals, and because we’ve already long since tipped over the verge into a mild collective psychosis.

Sunday’s ructions and the commotions that followed each of Morocco’s AFCON matches - one even featuring a Kalashnikov-toting youth on a moped - are just the latest manifestation of Brussels’ heightened state of febrility, with the area around the Zwarte Vijvers junction appropriated by peacocking young men enacting the rehearsed choreography of fireworks, property damage, and an inevitable confrontation with the police. Before that, in the same neighbourhood, were the now-annual New Year’s Eve riots - which, though less violent and destructive than previous years, still resulted in burnt-out cars, arrests, smashed windows and riot police.

It’s not just young hot heads; everywhere you look it feels as if the city is unravelling. Most major protests now conclude with a traditional pitched battle, whether the subject is Palestine, road deaths, or labour reforms. And that’s before mentioning the impact of outside agitators choosing Brussels as the host city for their own particular pitched battles. Local council meetings have become shouting matches between residents and elected councillors, with sufficient instances of angry crowds shutting down meetings and intimidating participants, verbal or physical aggression, and the occasional death threats that live recordings have been nixed and limits have been put on the number of people allowed into city halls across the city.

We’re only a couple of years removed from images of local politicians themselves parading down Schaarbeek streets with vandalised street signs in their hands and wide grins on their faces as they posed with angry locals. More recently, the fervour whipped up against local mobility plans has returned, with a cadre of frazzled Anderlecht residents vandalising municipal machinery and dumping construction materials in the canal because they just couldn’t stomach changes to the road layout in their neighbourhood. Just today I have read stories about a man who bludgeoned his grandmother to death with a hammer, a fracas outside the skating rink in Woluwe, several stabbing incidents, and multiple armed robberies in the north-west of the city.

People across Brussels appear to have achieved an emotional pitch of Michael Bolton proportions. Every tree felled, every parking space scrapped, every restaurant closure or business bankruptcy, appears cause for increasingly hysterical expressions of dissatisfaction. I see this at the individual level too - in traffic, on the sidelines of children’ s football matches, in fractious interactions in shops and on the city’s streets. I’m as guilty as anyone in this, and my children have become skilled at recognising when I am about to lose it on the morning tram to school over someone scrolling through their social media with the phone on loudspeaker.

We seem incapable of talking ourselves back down into a less febrile register. You’ll read, in the coverage of Brussels’ failure to negotiate a governing coalition almost two years after regional elections were held, that Bruxellois are phlegmatic about the consequences of this political crisis and are - as per the stereotype - muddling through. I don’t believe that’s true. We might not be marching down the Wetstraat every week demanding a government capable of resolving the city’s manifest problems.What’s happening instead, I think, is that whatever anger and frustration people are feeling at the current crisis is manifesting as, or at least contributing to, a heightened citywide hysteria.

This sublimated anxiety is then ladled on top of a decade of frayed nerves. The bombings in March 2016 brought armed soldiers to our streets, armoured personnel vehicles at our metro entrances, and a nerve-shredding protracted citywide manhunt. We are still metabolising the psychic distress of the Covid lockdowns years, which rolled through into the subsequent cost of living crisis and more recently the outbreak of gang-related gun violence. Add to that the increasingly visible consequences of worsening drug-use, housing and homelessness crises, the degradation of underfunded public spaces, and the aforementioned political turbulence and it’s a wonder not that we’re exhibiting signs of mental distress but that we have managed as a city to keep it together for as long as we have.

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By the time I passed through Zwarte Vijvers on Monday morning, there wasn’t much evidence of the ructions of the previous night. Across the Gentsesteenweg orange netting hung loose from one bus shelter missing its panes of glass and someone had taped a perfunctory X of candystriped security tape to another. On the Zwarte Vijvers esplanade several damp empty cardboard boxes for Roman candles were discarded on the ground by the metro station entrance. By the corner of Rue Schmitz in front of the discount clothes shop someone had left behind an empty bottle of Tripel Karmeliet, beside which was a lumpy splash of yellow vomit.

The day’s early news reports suggested that while there was damage caused by rioters it was perhaps not as severe as feared. Most of the clean-up here had already been accomplished, and people on their way to work and school filed past the scorch marks and vomit stains and the shattered glass.

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