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arts, literature

Naomi van Kleef: Give Me Your Teeth, Dear

By Naomi van Kleef, translated by Laura Vroomen
27 January 2025 2 min. reading time The Alternative

Eighteen young Flemish and Dutch authors drew inspiration from the collection held by the Mauritshuis in The Hague. They looked at seventeenth-century paintings through the lens of an alternative history which they then brought to life in short but powerful texts. The teeth that painter Albert Eckhout invented for the tortoises in his Study of Two Brazilian Tortoises from 1640 were the inspiration for this poem by Naomi van Kleef. ‘A tooth fairy I am, of tall tales’

Give Me Your Teeth, Dear

Sometimes I rub my teeth till sentences appear. The words start flowing, complex phrases, beautiful complete sentences. A tooth fairy I am, of tall tales.

You see yourself as natural, as whole. As genuine. Every time you brush your teeth, you try to show the world that you can shine. Your teeth harness strength, your mouth forms the language that constructs your thoughts. With each sentence you speak, you add something. Let’s face it, history is composed orally.

I look at two tortoises that were given teeth. Next to me, people mutter something, about history and progress and that was then but this is now. It’s too shiny.

You see someone who simply utters a word. I see badly fitted facings, I see marble rock formations. I see their words pour out from behind their prosthetics, flaunting them as if they never had a cavity. I’m tired, you know. All I hear is everybody’s chattering from carefully polished status symbols. Dark holes hidden behind newly discovered animals in a golden frame.

They’re not the first with tall tales. Charles Darwin was keen to taste everything he discovered, from a tiny beetle to the tender meat of a tortoise. His teeth didn’t start to wobble until late in life. When I extracted his molars, I saw the hole that held the darkness, the extension of his smooth palate like a gate through which the world seeps in.

I knocked away the façade of his confidence, shattered it. He broke open and bled, after which a soft groan escaped him.

He groaned: plead for me!

I just thought: a plate for me!

His lips folded in over his empty jaws. Without framing he looked rather stupid! He muttered differently, higher, he drooled a bit – stammered, attempted to swallow his saliva.

He tried to produce a sound with his tongue, but it pressed against the emptiness.

Then I heard nothing.

I look around. For a split second all I see are the little tortoise teeth light up.

Tortoises with fake teeth
A plate for me!

An institution with carefully edited labels
history brushed away
A plate for me!

Slavery as little more
than a story to recount
A plate for me!

I turn to the person standing next to me. It is time.

How are you, my dear? It is time to shed. One by one I extract all that’s fake from your mouth. I pull everything, down to the very last tooth, the molars and even the wisdom teeth hidden beneath the gums. 32 dull bits of calcium. Now the real you emerges, my dear. A head that cannot hide beneath its shell. An organism that realises that its defence mechanism has been removed.

I feel the chattering slowly ebb away. Maybe the world will be less shiny, quieter, I’ll be a fairy of a toothless society.

Naomi van Kleef

Naomi van Kleef (1999) is a writer, performer, image maker and social-cultural researcher. She researches women’s voices in personal diaries and community theatre. She’s taking part in the FOTODOK Lighthouse project and is an editor at Simulacrum magazine. With the Buitenplaats Brienenoord collective, she rehearses the future on a city island.

photo by Marianne Hommerson

 

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