By David Swatling

Bart Koubaa (pictured below) is the literary pseudonym for Bart van den Bossche. Born in Eelko in 1968, he studied philosophy at the University of Ghent for a year before a move to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts to study film and photography. After living in Spain for a time, he returned to Ghent to study Arabic.
 
Koubaa's first novel Vuur ('Fire') explored the relationship between a boy and his tyrannical grandfather living in a gypsy camp. The book won the 2000 Flemish Debut Prize. When selected by the Flemish Minister of Culture for a project to encourage reading, 40,000 copies were distributed to the pubic free-of-charge.
 
Haiku and history
His second novel Lucht ('Air') spans the period in Japanese history from World War II to the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. The story revolves around a Japanese translator working for the FBI who makes a vital mistake that results in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
 
Upon returning to Japan the man resolves to represent the entire cosmos in the seventeen syllables of a haiku. In just 124 pages, Koubaa brings the life of an ordinary man into direct contact with historical events contrasting Eastern and Western philosophies of life.
 
His latest book takes the reader inside the mind of a professor suffering from aphasia after an accident. A neurologist advises him to write every day to aid his recovery. "Our brain is the battlefield of a constant Darwinian war," says Koubaa, "where everything is fighting, every word, every memory."
 
Guilty or innocent
Speaking at a literary panel discussion entitled 'Are Belgians better?' in 2007, Koubaa said, "I believe a good writer is someone who without compromise translates his inner world into his personal language. Some Belgians are better than some Dutch and vice versa... Each word is a net with which we seek to catch a culture or an individual, but there are holes in our nets."
 
Koubaa incorporated the last statement into his story for Radio Books. A man is on trial for a crime he may or may not have committed. But what crime - if any?

" ...and the discussion continued as I sat waiting for the judgment and attempted to reconstruct, over and over again, step by step, the day and the night and the minutes and the seconds which preceded the events which led me to the dock. But I would have to replay more than the sounds and images alone in order to understand anything about the whole affair... Nevertheless I was convinced of my innocence precisely because I hadn't done anything."

'The Final Judgment' by Bart Koubaa was translated by Michael O'Loughlin.
 
The series Radio Books is an initiative of the Flemish-Dutch Huis de Buren in Brussels, in association with the Flemish radio broadcaster Klara and Radio Netherlands Worldwide.