Maschio nero

‘Te gustan los negros?’ Non so più quante volte ho sentito questa domanda. L’ho sentita in varie lingue e varie salse, e non smette mai di provocarmi un sentimento di stizza. Chiedere se a una piacciano o meno gli uomini neri non è esattamente come chiedere se un uomo ti piaccia bruno, biondo o rosso, cicciotto o stecchino, con gli occhi chiari o scuri, col naso in su o col pene storto... No, si tratta di tutt’altro tipo di domanda. E che una sia da anni felicemente accompagnata da un viso pallido non fa giungere nessuno alla conclusione che le piacciano i bianchi. Poiché infatti non è questo il punto. Non ho mai sentito nessuno chiedere a una donna (di qualsiasi colore) se le piacciano i bianchi. In primo luogo perché si dà per scontato che i bianchi, in senso generale, piacciono a tutti, per forza. È uno dei principi del razzismo: non si mette in discussione che il bianco (che in realtà è grigio, rosa, beige) possa non piacere. In secondo luogo perché, mentre il bianco è a tutti gli effetti un uomo, il nero non è altro che un maschio. Il bianco, dunque, è da sposare; il nero, invece, da scopare. Un po’ come la storia della vergine e la puttana, la donna angelo e la strega (maschilismo e razzismo del resto seguono le stesse logiche perverse). Nella domanda posta in spagnolo tutte queste implicazioni sembrano più esplicite che in altre lingue (forse è per questo che la trovo particolarmente offensiva). In spagnolo per altro ‘tirarse a un negro’ è un’espressione molto frequente, anche se di fatto statisticamente il fenomeno non è altrettanto frequente. È il mito del buon selvaggio in versione erotica, la vecchia fantasia coloniale del corpo nero ipersessuato. È il corpo africano visto come bene di consumo per un occidente assetato di primitivismo. Ve la ricordate quell’orribile canzone di Vasco sull’occasione persa perché la ‘troia’ se n’era andata a casa con il ‘N.’? Diceva: “L’ho vista uscire mano nella mano con quell’africano che non parla neanche bene l’italiano ma si vede che si fa capire bene quando vuole...” Ma di certo non si sentono razziste le giovani donne radical chic quando ti chiedono con la malizia di chi confonde l’emancipazione femminile col sessismo ribaltato: “¿Te gustan los negros?” Dovresti rispondere di sì per mostrare che non sei razzista? E se poi ti capita di far l’amore con un uomo nero bassino e rachitico che non corrisponde alla quintessenza della virilità selvatica che hanno in mente loro, va bene lo stesso?

22M: shadows

On a sunny day

I walk         with my shadow

Moving at a steady pace

my shadow                  does not reveal

any sign of distress

My shadow could even be

SMILING

as if untouched

by recent events

My shadow seems not to know

of a coup

the coup that might mean

the end of my dream

Walking with my shadow

on a sunny day

I see my dream fading

         my hope diluting

BUT MY SHADOW is the sign

Of my RESILIENCE

It was an outrageously sunny day in Frankfurt one year ago, when I received the news of the military coup in Mali. I had shortly been back from Bamako, where I had spent a pleasant week with old friends, and I thought I would be going there again soon. Needless to say, I haven’t been back since. It was the first time that an historical event had such a disruptive impact on my life and future plans. It was also the first time that I realised what it means to be in love with a country and suddenly lose access to it, the first time I had a remote sense of the tragedy of exile and a very sharp sense of the extent of my privilege as a voluntary expat. I might go back one day, maybe soon, yet it will never be the same as back then. Only shadows stay the same.

One year later, Mali is still at war. Struggling for peace, waiting for happiness.

Heremakono.

Starting off blind

In 1995 I graduated in English literature with a dissertation on a novel by Joseph Conrad. The novel carries an infamous title and the story revolves around the responses of a (white) crew to the illness a black sailor on board the ship Narcissus. The issue of race is so central in this narrative that only a blind can fail to see it. Well, I must have been blind then, and so must have been the professor who supervised my work and the whole committee that awarded me a summa cum laude. In fact, the highly racialised depiction of the protagonist, the use of racist terminology and the process of construction of whiteness through the use of the black character featured only marginally in my dissertation, as if the racial imagery were a footnote to much more important issues. It was, in short, a dissertation that assumed racism somehow as a normal (maybe even acceptable) feature of human interaction, a dissertation that was based on a racist understanding of language and culture, a dissertation that, by not recognising racism, ensured its reproduction. Not a single voice in the committee raised the question and I was left with the certitude of having produced a perfectly valuable piece of work. This, however, was not merely proof of the deep-seated indifference towards racial matters of an itself marginal academic context. It was, more significantly, a sign of the racial blindness of literary studies, since none of the sources I had consulted in the library had awakened my concern in this respect.

The eye-opener came a few months later, when I finally came across Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark. This little and dense book provided a much needed initiation into Whiteness Studies. As a matter of fact, even if I had long been reading Black authors from the Americas and had grown passionate about the many stories of emancipation and self-determination, I had still not paused to reflect upon “the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it” and I was therefore not ripe for that shift in perspective that can only occur once you give up the assumption of whiteness as the norm and start coming to grips with the privilege conferred by that normativity. Interrogating the role of the “invention and development of whiteness” in the construction of (American) identity, Morrison challenges the “silence and evasion” of literary criticism with regard to race matters and observes that “the habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture.” For me, overcoming that habit and breaking the silence has implied a fresh start: a new understanding of literary criticism as well as a more accurate self-positioning as a reader. Okay, better late than never, but shouldn’t my teachers have pointed out that fault?

Don’t feed the children

Color My World, an autobiography by Donald Vaughn, documents the life’s journey of an African-American from Detroit to Frankfurt am Main and covers a span of more than half a century across two continents. It is an open window into a piece of history and definitely, for a relatively new Frankfurt dweller like me, a valuable reading to get a sense of how much has changed and how much has stayed the same in this city of many nations.

A scene from the book, in particular, strikes for ringing bitterly familiar. Here, Mr Vaughn describes his children playing in the front garden:

Sitting in their sandbox, the children were also an attraction for passersby. People would stop and observe them like something exotic in a zoo. The children were certainly not undernourished but people would give them ice cream or candy from the kiosk across the street, and I wanted to put a sign on the fence: “Please do not feed the children.”

Referring back to several decades ago, this episode is not especially surprising as much as it is, obviously, disturbing. Curiosity and intrusiveness often go together, but if black children in such an international city as Frankfurt are not any longer regarded as ‘exotic’, they are often still object of unwanted attention from impertinent strangers. In my personal statistics (informal data collection based on various testimonials) of intrusive behaviours towards black children from offenders who pretend to be well intentioned, ‘being fed’ comes second only to ‘hair touching’ (the latter, however, involves even adults). “A white lady was eating an apple and, on seeing my child, gave her the bitten apple, without even acknowledging my presence.” The mother who reported this episode added that, when she protested, the woman had the nerve of showing outrage at such a reaction to her generosity!

As someone who grew up being obsessively told by all family members to never accept any food from strangers, I cannot disentangle the offering of food from the purpose of deceit and I therefore tend to become over alarmed when witnessing unrequested food offerings to minors. Here, however, there is something more at stake and this something has all to do with the racial imaginary assimilated by white people, which makes them associate black children with need and hunger. This kind of imaginary is so deeply rooted that it seems to come into play regardless of the context and regardless of the situation of the particular child, so deeply rooted that even in such an international city as Frankfurt episodes of the kind described by Mr Vaughn are still common occurrences. I witnessed one personally not so long ago in a clothes shop downtown. A mother was looking at clothes, her child in the buggy behind her. A white woman approached, eating a sandwich, and gave a piece to the child. I must have opened my mouth and eyes so wide in disbelief that the mother immediately turned back and realised what was going on, grabbed the piece of sandwich from the child’s mouth and walked away.

One might wonder whether in such cases one should say something to the offender, but in general I believe that walking away is the most appropriate response. Why would you want to lecture strangers in the street? Anyone with a little common sense would understand that offering food to children without asking parents or caretakers is not appropriate, and if it’s chewed food they are offering, they must be nuts!

More info on Donald Vaughn's book at: www.colormyworld.de

Fragerei

Ich sitze in der S-Bahn. Hinter mir unterhält sich eine weiße Frau mit zwei schwarzen Kindern (Junge und Mädchen, ungefähr sechs bis sieben Jahre alt). Sie fragt, freundlich, aber beharrlich, alles Mögliche. Besonders interessiert ist sie an der Herkunft der Kinder. Während die Kinder miteinander über irgendein seltsames Tier sprechen, unterbricht die Dame mehrmals mit ihren Fragen: Und wo kommt ihr her? Kommt ihr aus Afrika? Da die beiden Kinder perfekt Deutsch sprechen, scheint mir die Neugier erst recht unangemessen zu sein. Die Kinder erzählen aber dann gerne, dass sie in den USA geboren sind. Das scheint trotzdem nicht zu genügen, und die Dame fragt nach der Herkunft ihrer Eltern weiter. Sie seien Afrikaner, sagen die Kleinen. Ach so, ruft die Frau aus, als hätte sie endlich ein wichtiges Ziel erreicht, und woher in Afrika? Die Kinder scheinen nun ratlos. Afrika-Afrika, erklären sie. Ja klar, aber woher genau? Kenia? Namibia? Äthiopien? Die Kinder überlegen ein paar Sekunden, dann sagt das Mädchen entschlossen: Ja, meine Mutter kommt aus Äthiopien! Die Reaktion lässt nicht auf sich warten. Ach, Äthiopien ist ein sehr armes Land, seufzt die Dame voller Mitgefühl.

Mir wird es jetzt zu viel. Ich stehe auf, möchte der Frau mitteilen, dass Äthiopien mehr als nur ein sehr armes Land sei und dass sie am besten aufhören solle, die zwei Kinder mit ihrer blöden Fragerei zu belästigen. Dann bleibe ich aber stumm. Die Kinder sind nicht allein. Die Mutter ist auch dabei und sieht gar nicht verärgert aus. Ich frage mich erstaunt, wie sie das alles nur aushalten kann. Beim Aussteigen scheint die Familie dennoch so amüsiert, dass ich mich überzeuge, sie sind an solche Ereignisse so gewöhnt, dass sie die vielleicht als nicht so störend erleben; oder doch, aber sie haben vielleicht die ganze Herkunftsgeschichte extra erfunden, um aus der Belästigung einen Spaß zu machen. Und die Kinder wissen bestimmt selbst schon bescheid, dass Äthiopien viel mehr als nur ein sehr armes Land ist.

ETHNIC PORNOGRAPHY

(on being sick and tired of seeing charity posters picturing hungry black children)

it is not a picture from old times

not a picture from colonial times

it is a picture from today

XXI century in the prosperous world

the missionaries are among us

the missionaries are always white

their victims always black

black, brown, shades of orange

but never ever ever white

save the world

give us your money

purge your guilt

and sleep sweet dreams

plan international

brot für die welt

unicef

hilfe für afrika

give us your money

we’ll take care about the rest

children

children smiling a sad smile

children and women

women powerless

children, more children

all black

sometimes brown, shades of orange

but never ever ever white

million children

that one child

black

all over the place

smiling a sad smile

looking hungry

looking powerless

in her mother’s arms

mother powerless

smiling a sad smile

at the bus stop

in my mailbox

wherever I go

that one child

million children

black

while the white guy

dignified

shameless

stands in a corner

plan international

brot für die welt

unicef

hilfe für afrika

give us your money

relieve the world

children

black

sometimes brown, shades of orange

all over the place

exposed

Can the foreigner speak?

Some of the most vexing moments of my life in Germany are the situations which plainly reveal how much the fact of being a non-German affects the interaction with natives and the treatment one gets from some of them. Typically, the native interlocutor (sure, not all, but many) starts off on the wrong foot, i.e. a set of assumptions about who you are and what you want from them (no matter the legitimacy of the request, foreigners are generally treated as if they were trying to obtain something they are likely not to be entitled to). With such a beginning, productive interaction is often irremediably hampered. Even more so if the interlocutor is not prepared nor willing to revise their assumptions, which would merely require on their part the willingness to listen.

This morning I accompanied my husband to an orthopedical clinic. He had made an appointment and was there to see the doctor. The secretary at the desk asked for his insurance card and on seeing it blatantly declared this was no insurance card and he would have to pay cash on the spot. He tried to explain that his card was from a private insurance company operating internationally, but the lady did not let him speak, waved the card in the air, repeatedly saying this was no card, and insisted on cash. Since I am more fluent in German than my husband is, I tried to intervene on his behalf, but, again, the lady would not listen nor was she willing to check for further information. We left angry and dismayed and headed off to another doctor.

If such occurrences were sporadic and with little consequence on our life, we would not pay too much attention and would simply be annoyed at the absurdity of the situation. Unfortunately, however, it happens all too often to foreigners to be arrogantly dismissed without being given the chance to speak. And, all too often, this does have consequences beyond mere annoyance.

When, some months ago, I called the Jugendamt (youth welfare office) of a neighbouring city to inquire about the possibility of taking a child in foster care, I certainly did not expect that not being native German speakers would be decisive for my husband and I to be rejected a priori. I had decided to call this particular office because they were massively advertising their search for loving and responsible families with whom to place children from various backgrounds (including children from non-German families). The social worker I talked to had a reputation of being especially friendly and open-minded (this I knew from friends who were going through the accreditation process to become a foster family), but, with me, this proved not to be the case. The call was short and, for me, very frustrating, because the lady made a decision without even asking who I was, what I did for a living or what my motivation for fostering was. All the conversation revolved around was fluency in German. Of course, in spite of my southern-European accent, the fact that I speak German quite well was obvious, but I made the mistake of openly declaring that my husband is not very fluent. That alone was enough for the lady to put an end to our talk. She politely informed me that they were not interested in families where German was not spoken fluently. When I tried to protest on the ground that we speak six other languages and that our international experience and personal involvement in intercultural matters might be an advantage to children from non-German families (I was not given the chance, however, to explain the details of our social commitment), she interrupted me, told me not to take this personally and added that they wanted children to be placed in a German context (Umfeld was the word she used) because foster children already were in a difficult enough situation for a start. Then, she briskly wished me a nice day and hung up.

Three simple and absurd assumptions lie at the basis of such arguments. Assumption number 1: Not speaking fluent German translates into not being able to provide a loving and supporting family context for children growing up in Germany. Assumption number 2: Foreigners who reside in Germany do not live in a German context. Assumption number 3: Non-German parents are an added problem for children (with or without difficult situations). Of course, as the lady said, I should not take this ‘personally’, and in fact I don’t. This is no personal matter, rather an institutional one, and one which should require me to file a complaint for institutional discrimination. The reason why I did not have the nerve to do it back then is beyond the scope of this reflection. Personal circumstances make it sometime far too difficult to fight back institutionally, as ‘fighting back’ already absorbs much of one’s energy at a personal level, and, after all, one is not here to fight a war on an everyday basis.

The disturbing truth is that many natives (not only in Germany, I assume) tend to dismiss foreigners without making the effort to listen to what they have to say. Therefore I ask: Can the foreigner speak? But maybe we should rather ask: Can the native listen?

Mister Spielberg, che Storia è mai questa?

Difficile guardare l’ultimo film di Spielberg e resistere all’impulso di lasciare la sala. Che storia è mai questa? La storia del presidente Lincoln che si batte per far passare l’emendamento sull’abolizione della schiavitù, daccordo. Ma la storia manca compleatamente di contesto. Per essere più precisi, mancano i personaggi che hanno reso possibile questo evento storico, manca la storia della resistenza afroamericana. Dato che il percorso dell’emancipazione afroamericana è ormai da decenni documentatissimo, il silenzio di Spielberg a riguardo è oltraggioso. Il film non fa alcun riferimento all’opera dei grandi personaggi neri che hanno dedicato la loro vita a questo obiettivo. Nessun riferimento a Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass (eppure quest’ultimo ha avuto su Lincoln un’influenza cruciale). E oltre al silenzio, che di fatto si traduce menzogna, lo scherno: i pochi personaggi neri presenti nel film ricordano quelli delle vecchie narrative bianche come La capanna dello zio Tom e Via col vento: soggiogati, accondiscendenti, passivi e per giunta assurdamente riconoscenti verso il generoso padrone bianco. Una rappresentazione poco dignitosa e decisamente offensiva. Alla Storia questo film fa più danno che altro. Forse Mister Spielberg farebbe meglio a tornare ad occuparsi di extraterrestri e dinosauri.

Which beasts? And how wild?

I must admit that Beasts of the Southern Wild is not a bad film. It is not a bad film in the same way as Heart of Darkness was not a bad novel. And yet.

Heart of Darkness was, in my view, an impressive novel indeed, but my view is that of a white person, who can (unforgivably) still allow herself to gloss over a more than questionable depiction of Black characters. Because if, on the one hand, HoD staged a harsh critique of the European colonial system, it did so by resorting to the very core of racialist thinking typical of its age (and yet, even then, there were people who were able to think outside the box and condemn racism for what it was: "The Horror! The Horror!") and failed to recognize that colonialism and racism go hand in hand. HoD is definitely racist, as Chinua Achebe has largely demonstrated, and yet many of us readers still find it impressive (I would find it hard, however, to describe it as beautiful). So, can a racist narrative still be appreciated? Should the answer be no, we would have to discard most white narratives on earth as unreadable, unseeable, unbearable. And maybe we should. But surely it would be more helpful to make the effort to understand (discern) the dynamics of racialist thinking as expressed in past narratives in order not have them reproduced all over again in a world that some fancy to be post-ethnic and colorblind (alas, some do buy into that fantasy).

Now to the point. Even if I was somehow suspicious of its title, I went to see Beasts of the Southern Wild with great expectations, genuinely convinced I would like it. I did indeed enjoy most of it, but at the same time I found it highly disturbing and left the cinema with a growing sense of discomfort: had I been ‘enjoying’ a racist narrative? Don’t get me wrong, but, if you are white, you must ask yourself that kind of question, because this is the only way to start being actively anti-racist. Anti-racism must start from inside, by scrutinizing the structures of power and pleasure which have made their way into our unconscious. I, a white spectator among an exclusively white crowd, had found the little angry girl sweet and pleasurable, and her alcoholic and violent father equally charming. Would I have experienced the same delight, had these two characters been white? Definitely not. Had the two protagonists been white, I would have freaked out at the abuse the child is subjected to by her instinct-driven father. I would have found the animal-like representation of the two characters outrageous. And probably I would not have found the two of them utterly breath-taking in their beauty. But BotSW is fantasy, one might argue. Sure, and so was HoD. And yet.

Why should a fantasy film resort to that kind of primitivism that we tried so hard to get rid of when we realized that the ‘noble savage’ was an invention of racialist thinking? Why do the same old stereotypes of angry Black femininity, violent Black masculinity and the association of Black bodies with nature reemerge one more time and still strike a chord? Why is it still fine for us (whites) that bestiality and wilderness should have a Black face?

If racialist thinking were, as many pretend, a thing of the past, I suspect we wouldn’t find such a film particularly enjoyable.

“Race does not exist. But it does kill people.”

Partiamo da qui, dalle parole incisive di Colette Guillomin: la razza non esiste, eppure uccide.

La razza non è una realtà biologica. Che scientificamente parlare di razze umane non ha alcun senso lo sappiamo già da tempo. Tuttavia, le teorie razziali, che per secoli hanno dominato il pensiero occidentale, continuano a determinare la nostra percezione del mondo e il razzismo continua a fare vittime. Riconoscere l’esistenza del razzismo è cruciale e cruciale è soprattutto riconoscere la persistenza delle teorie razziali nelle narrative dominanti, nell’interazione sociale, nel linguaggio, nelle creazioni artistiche e nel discorso politico, in breve in ogni aspetto dell’attività umana. 

Il razzismo riguarda tutti e tutto e quindi tutti dobbiamo occuparcene e dobbiamo farlo fermandoci a riflettere su ogni suo aspetto e manifestazione. Sorvolare (soprattutto per chi, come bianco, si trova in una situazione di privilegio), cioè rifiutare di riconoscere le manifestazioni del razzismo in quanto tali e non prenderne sul serio le implicazioni, significa partecipare attivamente alla riproduzione del razzismo. Color blindeness (la negazione delle implicazioni del retaggio razzista sul posizionamento sociale degli individui) è un’attitudine oggi molto diffusa tra i liberali, in maggioranza bianchi. Questa attitudine, che produce la comoda illusione che il razzismo sia per lo più cosa del passato, in realtà non fa altro che sollevarci dalla responsabilità di agire in conseguenza di fronte ad un problema etico e permetterci di andare avanti ed usufruire dei nostri privilegi come se la cosa non ci riguardasse. In alternativa, la consapevolezza (racial consciousness, bias awareness, critical whiteness) offre l’unico percorso possibile di riflessione ed azione per il superamento delle disuguaglianze, non solo quelle prodotte dal razzismo.