The Human Library

almelo — I had heard about a library on the eastern edge of the Netherlands where members could check out human books. So one morning, I took a train from Amsterdam to the town of Almelo to borrow a gay Muslim.

My train arrived early, so I headed over to Bibliotheek Almelo, a smooth, zigzagging neomodern building across the street from town hall. I ordered an iced tea from the library’s café and sat down to wait. Almeloërs drifted in and out, some stopping to chat with a Middle Eastern family at the table behind me. Their conversations had a nervous quality, which I didn’t yet understand.

Suddenly, a man wearing Nikes and a stylish silver suit entered. His skin was fair, his hair dark and spiked with gel. He scanned the library as one would a discotheque. Goose bumps sprouted on my arms and for the next three-quarters of an hour, I forgot about the family. The “book” I’d come here to check out — Sahin Balci by name — was early.

Almeloërs were tentative about withdrawing people during the first few months of the program, and it turned out I was the first person to borrow Balci. Because of this, our meeting was supervised by Jan Krol, the director of Bibliotheek Almelo. Every librarian in the world — including my mom, who was a school librarian — is driven, to varying degrees, to match readers with life-changing books, but Krol also wants his patrons to experience life-changing events. “We want a living library,” he told me. “A vivid one. Grunge concerts, hip hop, poetry slams.”

Last year, Krol came across a reference to a human-lending project in Mälmo, Sweden, itself based on one at the 2000 Roskilde Festival near Copenhagen. The idea was to bring people into close contact with minority groups. “It was impossible to forget,” said Krol, who is the head of a local gay society. “I wanted to set that up here in this library with the same philosophies. To reduce prejudice.” On March 21, 2006, the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, his “catalogue” went online. Patrons of the Living Library could check out a recover-ing addict, a soldier, a devout Christian, an hiv-positive man, a physically handicapped woman, various asylum-seekers and artists, and, of course, a gay Muslim.

When you have a human on loan for forty-five minutes and are encouraged to ask him anything, your mind immedi-ately goes blank. I eventually asked Balci, who was born in Izmir, Turkey, and moved to Utrecht with his family at seven, why he became a human book. “It’s good for me to tell my story and say it’s not true that all Islamic people don’t like gays. It’s just not true,” he replied.

“I had a bad time after what happened in New York, then with Theo van Gogh,” he added, referring first to 9/11 and then to the Dutch filmmaker and outspoken critic of fundamentalist Islam who was sensationally murdered by a Muslim in November 2004. After 9/11, he says, he consumed news voraciously, becoming increasingly depressed about the negative stories and “about being a Muslim, a Turkish man, a gay.”

Balci’s parents supported him after he came out to them, though they cautioned him not to talk about it. Those he chose to tell were unexpectedly accepting. “I really never have had a negative word from Turkish people about my homosexuality,” he said. (Krol later told me this kind of response was unusual for Almelo’s Turkish community.)

When I asked Balci if he had ever been given a book that changed his life, he replied, “No, I haven’t,” then paused before adding, “but there are people around me who changed my life. Not books. People. People can change people.” He told me a story about his work at the town’s registry, where he had encountered problems as one of some six thousand Turks (including Azra Akin, winner of the Miss World pageant in 2002) who live in the town of seventy-two thousand people. Some Almeloërs, he said, refused to be assisted by a Turk. His colleagues, in turn, refused to serve those Almeloërs.

As my allotted forty-five minutes wound down, I became disappointed that my book was so idealistic, lacking the dramatic tension of a good yarn. I asked Balci if he had any questions for me, a heterosexual agnostic Can-adian journalist. He asked about North American Indians, and seemed equally disappointed when I told him that their lives were quite different from the romanticized version depicted in Karl May books, which are still popular in western Europe.

So we found our attention drawn to a more dramatic story. The family at the table behind us was now speaking to reporters. It turned out that they were refugees from Afghanistan, scheduled to be deported in four weeks, and were about to become the showpiece of a local socialist politician’s press conference. The family’s teenaged children all fiddled with mobile phones, except for the youngest daughter, who was in a wheelchair. Her handicap, coupled with her big brown Amélie eyes and Shirley Temple smile, would be a trump card, played to shame Rita Verdonk, the Netherlands’ Minister for Immigration and Integration and the face of Europe’s tightening immigration policies.

At 6:30 p.m., the family crossed the street to the square in front of town hall. I walked over with Krol, who guessed that only a few protesters would join in. But word had spread that afternoon, and more than a hundred people were now assembled in the cold. As we stood, waiting to see the family paraded before us, I couldn’t shake the question: what lesson did the human book teach its borrower?

Perhaps one isn’t meant to look to humans for the carefully crafted lessons that books provide. Or perhaps there were lessons to be found not in the human book I’d checked out, but in the library itself — in the sum of hopeful components gathered together to change the way their society worked. I slipped away from the still-assembling crowd, walking the perimeter of the square on the way to catch my train. Eight months after the family’s deportation deadline had elapsed, I inquired into their whereabouts. They were still in Almelo.