Public Intellectual on the Fringes. The Affordances of Being Authentic and Inauthentic in Rodaan Al Galidi’s Newspaper Columns

Public intellectuals who belong to a minority are often expected to present an authentic voice for their community. I discuss newspaper columns by Iraqi-born Dutch author Rodaan Al Galidi in which he addresses and thematizes tensions between this explicit expectation of authenticity, and the more implicit expectation that a refugee author should not be too critical of their country of arrival. In small, autobiographic stories, Al Galidi presents his ideas about Dutch society and the refugee condition with the authority of experience, narrating life as an irregular migrant in the Netherlands. Publicly working through his boundary experiences as an outsider in Dutch daily life, he consciously – and, at times provocatively – confronts a privileged audience with the experiences of the underprivileged. The resulting boundary narratives oscillate between two types of authorial ethos: On the one hand, he presents himself in accounts that playfully mix fact and fiction as a picaresque outsider, caring not for the world around him and cherishing the safe space that inauthenticity offers him. On the other hand, readers are to see him as an engaged mouthpiece for refugees and the disenfranchised in general, a public intellectual drawing on his authenticity to speak with authority, and critical of the country he ended up in. For some Dutch readers, these boundary narratives in themselves become a boundary experience.