I call myself

I call myself: Hanna

I call myself: Hanna

I call myself: broom in the plural

I call myself: yellow

I call myself: bush with buds

Between which the wind strikes

towards you

I call myself: flowers in a bunch

I am: Hanna Brems

My name is Hanna Brems. Hanna without an H at the end because my mother wanted to keep me from becoming a spoon word. Brems like the shrub of the buttercup family, but with an s added. The shrub, by the way, planted in the back of our garden because three of the four family members have surnames similar to it. Planted and grown there, so that every time we pass the shrub we can say, “Still a clean shrub huh,” meaning mostly that it’s so-so funny that that plant is called broom, and we brooms, with the three of us forming the plural.

Plus s. Brem and Brems. One brem and three brems.

So much for my name.

About my age, I cannot make such a pun. Twenty-two. I saw the light of life, probably in the form of a bright white hospital lamp at UZ Leuven, on November 12, 1999. It was a dry autumn day then, my father always tells me when talking about my birth. As if that were an important anecdote, something that defined my personality. That dry autumn day child. And yes, when it gets really philosophical: the moon was in the first quarter at night. Another anecdote.

Why do I cite that of the moon? According to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the position of the moon and the visibility of the planets would determine your character.

Hard to say, but who knows, maybe I would have become a very different person if it had been dog weather on that dry autumn day, November 12, 1999. The milky sunshine and the sweetly swirling tree leaves must have caused me to grow up as to kind and good child.

Still, a planet must have been wrong, or a rainstorm must have fallen somewhere that day, because I could also be a little pus full of mischief.

Pen

Günther Grass convinced me to start writing myself. Peter has given me that opportunity. From now on I will regularly pop up on this website. Floating like a rubber duck among the gigantic amount of information that Peter – alias Dirk – has already put down (or typed down). To quote theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, “Every time I catch the meaning of life, they come up with something new.”

You are finishing your master’s degree in language and literature, thinking about what to do next, and then Peter shows up with a forty-year-old head full of ideas and experience, full of young plans, and he asks you if you can help with further writing on his website, if you want to join him in thinking about all sorts of things.

I dive into an ocean of wonderful writing and concoctions, wondering where I will begin, what will bubble up in my head over the next few weeks and end up here.

A piece by Peter, a piece by Dirk, and a piece by me to go with it, and then let the writing fly like a pigeon from my hands into the air of the rarefied, infinitely vast Internet. Always findable, apparently, a hundred years from now. Becoming a bit of a fossil.

H.B.

The poem refers to “I call you flowers etc.” by Jan Hanlo – Hanlo, J., Collected Poems, Amsterdam, Van Oorschot, 1970.

 

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