On a damp Belgian evening, the smell of frites lingered in the mist as trams glided along wet rails. Down narrow cobblestone lanes, past the Vandeheuvel brasserie and its grey skywalk, a bicycle bell rang, soft and brief and familiar, piercing the steady drum of rain.
I was a young immigrant boy then, both at ease and confused, a paradox I did not yet have words for — later I would learn of Belgitude: not a homeland, not an identity, but a sensibility, a quiet resilience in a country forever negotiating itself.
Belgitude is not nationalism. It is improvised belonging: French and Flemish sharing a sidewalk; Catholic ritual beside secular habit; Muslim families moving toward Friday prayer under heavy snow; past colonial wounds rising beside improbable hope. A small nation almost split in two — stubbornly whole in its imperfections, its Byzantine politics a mystery even to the locals themselves.
My own Belgitude began in small details: the hiss of a winter tram; a cone of fries warming cold fingers; two, three, sometimes four languages colliding at a single corner; the familiar weight of a grey sky ready to fall but never falling. Belgitude followed me long after I left, a permanent past I could not release even if I wanted.
Endurance, longing, and the melody of becoming
Before I understood endurance, I knew the name Eddy Merckx, Belgium’s quiet champion, nicknamed The Cannibal, who dominated cycling in the 1960s and 1970s with a relentlessness bordering on myth. He embraced pain with the calm of someone who had made it a companion.
Cycling is pain in its purest form. Dutch polymath Tim Krabbé once wrote that the rider who wins is the one who can suffer most. Immigrants needed no reminder; our earliest citizenship was earned on climbs no government recognised. Work hard, ask little, stay unseen. You were a guest worker here. Yet no condition remains suspended forever. Even a bicycle chain eventually catches.
Merckx rode with a determination at once universal and distinctly Belgian, modest yet relentless. Yet endurance alone does not define a nation’s soul. Beside him stands Jacques Brel, whose chansons gave voice to longing, melancholy, and desire. Together they created a harmony: Merckx’s speed, Brel’s ache — expressing a Belgium still inventing itself, persisting through a mosaic of voices, old and new, a new Belgium always in the making.
If Merckx embodied endurance and Brel longing, Miriam Makeba arrived as the melody that carried both into exile and return. Known as “Mama Africa,” she was a South African singer and activist whose voice against apartheid travelled continents like a call to dignity.
In the early seventies, her image lit the grey walls of Molenbeek, a working-class district where Moroccan, Turkish, Congolese, and before segregation, native Belgian families lived side by side along the Chaussée de Gand. Makeba appeared like an African sun in a Flemish winter. Too young to hear her sing, I nonetheless felt her presence as recognition, a light cast toward those dwelling on the margins, present and not silent.
Exiled for speaking against apartheid, she received a discreet Belgian passport, a narrow lifeline for a voice the world had not yet learned to protect. After losing her daughter, she spent years in Brussels raising grandchildren. Her exile became a lived Négritude, the movement of Black pride and cultural affirmation, meeting Belgium’s quiet and complicated hospitality, uncertain of itself yet open in its shy way, the familiar Belgian pudeur.
Her voice drifted through cafés and concert halls, a current of resilience no ban could silence. When Nelson Mandela walked free, she returned home, yet Belgium kept a part of her. In Ghent, a square now bears her name, Miriam Makebaplein, a remembrance of a time far removed from today’s fevered pace, a time more reflective and more profound.
The stories of Merckx, Brel, and Makeba reveal Belgium’s contradictions. Pride in Belgium is never simple. Invisible borders of language, class, race, and history shift across its small territory with surprising force.
From the margins, a home
My Belgium was louder and hungrier: the scent of turmeric and grilled sardines drifting along a canal tinged with melancholy; wild Saturday football matches in Wambeek with L’Étoile Marocaine; old Tangier Sufi chants clinging to the air. This was Belgium at the margins, yet woven into the everyday.
It is part of the human experience to cross paths at random, to become threads of the same whole. I never chose to come to Belgium; I was a child. And so, we were no interlopers. Nothing truly belongs to us, and nothing in history is entirely new. We were all immigrants once. Through it all, Belgium became more than a country. It became my home, a place where youth, memory, and longing met — fragments of many worlds formed one, Unum.
Merckx’s silence allowed us to imagine ourselves inside the nation. Makeba’s voice opened a space where none had been offered. Belgium did not define her; she left a resonance in its air, and the country is better for it.
Behind them labored those who built Belgium in sweat: Moroccan mechanics, Congolese nurses, Turkish grocers, Italian miners. Their work seeped into the soil. My mother rests within that Belgian earth, as does my father’s closest friend and roommate from the early days of Moroccan immigration, the wise Si Mohamed.
My father, whose intelligence outpaced his opportunities, insisted a bicycle was frivolous, too costly, as if hope carried a price he could not pay. Yet what I wanted was not the bicycle but the horizon it promised. For the child of immigrants, longing can feel dangerous; ambition can disturb the family’s fragile balance.
One day he relented. A small, rusted bicycle appeared, imperfect and miraculous. It felt like a humble buraq, capable of flight. I kept a wrench in my pocket and learned to repair what constantly broke.
Small acts, lasting roads
That bicycle delivered freedom. I flew down Place de la Duchesse, legs burning in the summer wind.
On weekends, we rode from Molenbeek to Zemst, threading through fields and cobblestones.
Sometimes we stopped at Jeff’s frites stand. His jokes were as generous as his portions. “Hungry, manneke? My frites will make you strong.” Above his counter, a small sign read: Tomorrow free fries. It was always the same sign. Tomorrow never arrived. Jeff would shrug, smile, and hand everyone the same warmth, no matter where they came from.
He was a humble working-class man who understood something the elite, with all their education, still struggle with: belonging can be simple if one chooses to make it so. That was Jeff’s Belgitude.
Legends cast their own shadows. Merckx faced scrutiny; Makeba endured exile and grief. Greatness is movement through imperfection, not escape from it.
To mythologise is to risk losing the person beneath the light. Yet both created spaces wide enough for others to recognise themselves. Belgitude survives in that willingness to hold contradiction without demanding purity. Think of Jeff.
Endurance is not always noble. Often, it is survival arranged into something that resembles poetry. My rusted bicycle was not only a rocket. It was a compromise turned into motion. My father’s silence was protection; his endurance allowed me to imagine movement. And in the end, without many words, he still brought me the bike.
Every July, I still watch the Tour de France. I remember the year the race swept past my father’s café on Boulevard Lemonnier, where Arabic, French, and Dutch mingled in the heat. The riders flew by like colourful salukis. Merckx had long retired, yet I searched for him in the blur of the peloton. Another year, the Tour came through Molenbeek. Children chased candy tossed from caravans. For an hour, our neighbourhood felt important, as if the centre of the world.
The chorus that holds a country together
Now, on our porch in Cape Cod, on Wampanoag land, my wife Robin and I play Makeba and Brel as the Atlantic breathes nearby. It is Tuesday, babysitting day; our grandsons are by our side. For a moment, we pause to remember a summer decades ago, when we first met in Brussels. We were twenty-one, standing at the threshold of our young lives. It was during the city’s thousandth anniversary that the Grand Place unfurled its carpet of flowers.
Brussels will always remain for us not the “whited sepulchre” Joseph Conrad once named in Heart of Darkness, accurate only in its colonial context, but rather a home of the heart. This summer, the cicadas have returned to Cape Cod after seventeen silent years, their entrancing sound echoing tram rails in rain.
Distance sharpens memory. Far from Belgium’s fog and canals, I see what it placed within me: a compass built from sensory memory, the smell of wet pavement, the soft click of a newly repaired chain. Freedom learned. Belgitude travels well; belonging moves.
What holds Belgium together is not an anthem. It is a chorus: the hiss of trams in fog; Jeff’s laughter at the frites stand; Merckx climbing a mountain; Makeba’s voice drifting through a Brussels café; the Walloon miner’s face, eerily and permanently darkened by coal; a rusted bicycle beneath an immigrant child; the Tunisian grocer arranging bright tomatoes with care; the hopeful Flemish teacher shaping vowels; the Congolese student practicing the soft g of Ghent. Together they form the polyphony by which Belgium may recognise itself. Without them, the country is unfinished.
Belgitude is a mosaic: assembled, lived, repaired, remembered, carried. Contradiction becomes music. Endurance becomes belonging. It persists even when the road tilts upward.
Distance and time do not matter in the affairs of the spirit. If I listen closely, I can still hear the distant sound of Belgitude — steady, familiar — the echo of a small country holding itself together, with the faint aroma of Jeff’s humble yet extraordinary cornet de frites.
