Derk Wiersum’s old buddy conquers his friend back from the public domain

With the murder of lawyer Derk Wiersum in September 2019, poet Lucas Hirsch lost his bosom friend, while just about the rest of the Netherlands gained a well-known Dutchman. A dead Well-known Dutchman, but still, suddenly everyone knew that Derk Wiersum had existed. And as it happens in a modern society, from that moment on people liked everything about him. Because those voices reached the media, because profiles of Wiersum appeared in the newspapers, Hirsch could not escape the impression that Wiersum was slowly but surely slipping through his fingers. Now his friend was already dead, he was also stuffed with meaningless words.

You should have just appeared Shotgun Wedding can be seen as a personal in memoriam, a portrait that Hirsch built up not from labels such as ‘hero of free speech’ or the like, but from his own observations and memories, almost all of which came from the informal atmosphere. Hirsch wanted to reclaim Wiersum with the book, you could say, from the public domain. You can already see that in the photos on the front and back of the book, with two laughing teenagers (who knows as high as a Flemish parrot), who have squeezed themselves into such a photo booth for the occasion that you used to spend a lot of time in shopping malls. The snapshots immediately make Wiersum, who is wearing a baseball cap from the then very successful Toronto Blue Jays, a completely different person.

Also read: the article about the criminal case verdict against the suspects of the murder of Wiersum

They used to be rascals, Hirsch and Wiersum. From the neat Gooi indeed, but still, rascals. Blowing, drinking, being smart, but doing a bit of school on the side. In fact, Wiersum was such a difficult portrait that he was expelled from school several times. The intensive contact briefly came to an end when Wiersum went to study in Groningen and Hirsch left for Amsterdam. In a beautiful scene the two clash, it must have been somewhere in the middle of the still cell phone-restricted nineties, during a lashing, pushing and pulling duel between two student associations from both cities; Hirsch is in one group, Wiersum in the other. “Hey, buddy!” they shout as they discover each other in the melee.

What was always there was literature. Hirsch really took to it as a poet (and occasionally prose writer), but Wiersum had been unable to keep up as a reader from childhood, tipping off all the lawsuits by writers and very young poets from the most unimaginable countries. The tone in Shotgun Wedding is intense and delving, almost as if Hirsch gave himself only one chance to talk about Wiersum. Usually that works, also because you become convinced that those two really were two hands on one stomach, even when sober. When it turned out that they had both slept with a woman who was the other’s sweetheart shortly before, the friendship could continue.

Sometimes Hirsch is a bit too generous with his pen and, for example, he mentions the ‘thousand meters of snow on my heart’ to describe the loss. On the other hand, what kind of friend would you be if you got yourself back under control so quickly?

Sebastian Short