Antoon Van den Braembussche 5/22/13 13:35 a5/p5 The Silence of Belgium: Taboo and Trauma in Belgian Memory. Belgium and Ambiguity “I am born in Belgium, I am a Belgian./ But Belgium was not born in me,” so the Flemish poet Leonard Nolens writes. 1 There is surely some kind of uneasiness in being Belgian. And what if Belgium simply did not exist? It would still be a memory. Or, maybe one should say, a loss of memory, a loss of identity, an absence, a silence. A slip of the tongue? The uneasiness of being Belgian stems from two long enduring problems. An inherent problem is the image of Belgium as an artificial construction, a nation made up of at least two different people and always on the edge of falling apart into its linguistic communities. The long-standing linguistic conflict between the Dutch-speaking Flemish and the French-speaking Walloon communities has indeed divided the country ever since its creation in 1830. This conflict has always been and still is an ongoing destabilizing factor in Belgian politics. An endemic problem, not unrelated with the previous one, is the image of Belgium as a corrupt country, exemplifying a precarious policy-making, an obscure and arbitrary administration, in which crude party politics and vested interests predominate as a rule. When the “Dutroux affair” became widely known, the