culture, subculture and counterculture - Facultatea de Litere

CARMEN ANDREI, IOANA MOHOR-IVAN
located in the province of Walloon Brabant, reminds one less of victory than of
his final defeat.
In his Wallonnie aux couleurs du coq, Jean-Pierre Otte leaves in search of
privileged places and moments of nowadays’ rural Walloonia, stopping in the
archaic villages where ancestral gestures are still reiterated. Accompanied by the
cock, a bird which hoards the unusual, J-P Otte looks for sacred places, altars,
holocausts of the Walloon identity that smell of mistletoe. The cock, as a symbol
of the region, defines them metaphorically: “The cock [is] an instrument of
Passion, of our Passion, standing for the thirst and the discontent that are our
common denominators. Both landmark and receptacle of a divine influx, the
cock represents the certainty that allows us to orient and check ourselves, in
order to impose a pattern on events and avoid those acts that are foreign to our
nature. Nothing is lost unless we make a clear distinction between reality and
dream, the visible and the invisible, the profane time and the time of our origins
(Otte 1978: 35, our translation.) The landscape merges with its visitors and
leaves its traces in the same way in which insects leave theirs on the bark of
trees. Certain villages are haunted by René, a ghost and a name used to invoke a
deceased brother. Liège is famous for the dance of the devil’s maid, a kind of
witch called Macrale. At Grammont, on the last Sunday in February, small
loaves of bread are thrown to the crowd, and the officials of the town are faced
with a difficult trial, i.e. to swallow live fish in one gulp. In the painting entitled
The Peasants’ Dance (1568), Peter Brueghel depicts the traditional kermises
where some dance frenetically, while the drinkers rest to get new forces for
another round. Many cultural stereotypes related to the Belgians originate with
Brueghel’s paintings: abundance and gluttony, on the one hand, fasting and
frugality, on the other.
The Walloons recover the time of their origins and harmonise it with the
inexhaustible mystery of existence. Their thirst of the sacred, the epic and the
folk experience manifests itself in profane representations.
At Stevelot one encounters the masks and the kipper. The mask ensures a
conversion, a profound metamorphosis, a change of meanings and a
transformation of desire into gift. With its discreet slots and a sheath-like form,
the mask manages to capture an obscure energy, a fluid which pre-dates the
Creation. Hid by the mask, one becomes for everyone else a shadow – accessory
and carnal. The sins are forgiven. The carnivals are lay processions, quasidiabolical
ones according to the Rhenish framework. At Stevelot an important
event is the carnival of the ghosts, euphemistically called “those dressed in
white” (“les Blancs Moussîs” in Walloon.) This carnival turns into a racy
spectacle: with carrots instead of phallic noses, the masks challenge the audience
“nose to nose” and change their voices to tell the crowd unpalatable truths
(concerning intrigues, blackmails and adulteries.)
The carnival of Binche has crossed the Belgian borders. Though carnivals
of the same type – involving men dressed in white and wearing masks, who are
called Gilles – occur throughout the central part of Belgium, the carnival of
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