showing her colors: an afro-german writes the blues in black and white

Showing Her Colors: An Afro-German Writes the Blues in Black and WhiteAuthor(s): Karein K. GoertzSource: Callaloo, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Spring, 2003), pp. 306-319Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3300855 .

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SHOWING HER COLORS An Afro-German Writes the Blues in Black and White

by Karein K. Goertz

I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or a chisel to remind you of your me-ness as I discover you in myself.

-Audre Lorde

That bird is wise, look. Its beak, back turned, picks for the present what is best from ancient eyes, then steps forward, on ahead to meet the future, undeterred.

-Kayper-Mensah

Through her poetry, essays and political activism, May Ayim sought to dissolve the socially and politically constructed borders that continued to exist after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. To her, the post-unification "new German solidarity" with its nationalistic rhetoric of Heimat (homeland), Volk (the people) and Vaterland (father- land) signaled a redrawing of the line between those who were considered part of the German collective and those who were not; the previous ideological and geopolitical faultline between East and West was being replaced by a division along ethnic lines. Afro-Germans and other ethnic minorities living in Germany recognized that "the new 'We' in 'this our country' did and does not make room for everyone."' Rather than feeling summoned by this newly constructed collective identity, they understood it to be a place of confinement or delimitation and exclusion: "ein eingrenzender und ausgrenzender Ort" (Ayim, "Das Jahr" 214). Ayim's spatial description of the

pronoun signals that the repercussions of its limited parameters are real and practical, as well as psychological. Unable to identify with the new definition of the first-person possessive pronoun, she invariably finds herself cast into its second-person negative.

The title poem of Ayim's first poetry volume, Blues in Schwarz Weifi [Blues in Black and White], published in 1995, traces the process of marginalization along color lines, with German unification as one of its more recent manifestations. To explain the age- old dynamic between black and white, she references the African-American tradition of the blues: during the celebration of German unity, some rejoiced in white, while others mourned on its fringes in black-together they danced to the rhythm of the blues. The blues were born out of the experience of oppression, but, as Angela Davis

points out, blues also offers the key to transcending the racial and gender imbalance

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of power: "What gives the blues such fascinating possibilities ... is the way they often construct seemingly antagonistic relationships as non-contradictory oppositions" (xv). Excluded from the rejoicing in white, May Ayim turns towards her Ghanaian heritage and transforms the derogatory label of difference, as defined by Germans, into a rich source of meaning.2 Through her poetry, she creates a hybrid language, in which African and German are no longer antagonistic, mutually exclusive terms, but rather two interwoven strands of a "textured identity." Her poems confront the overt and covert forms of racial prejudice she witnessed in Germany in the years following unification, by exposing racism as "the pale-faced sickness that secretly and publicly eats us up" and by creating alternative signifying practices (Ayim, Blues 57).3

This essay examines how Ayim recovers her African identity as a source of agency, employing African tropes to insert difference into the German discourse and to thereby resignify it. Using metaphorical language to persuade, ridicule, parody or provoke her readers, Ayim references the double-voiced Signifying practices that are central to the African-American literary tradition. In Blues in Schwarz Weifi and Nachtgesang [Night Song, 1997], both African and African-American motifs provide the cultural context in which the German-language poems are embedded. These poetry volumes present a compelling model of intercultural dialogue between different modes of communication-verbal, visual, and musical-which together lay the groundwork for a broadened definition of German identity. By exploring the complex legacy of her Ghanaian heritage, as well as the richness of African culture in the diaspora, Ayim is able to convert the German construct of blackness or "mirage of blackness" into a source of empowerment and community (Gilman xii). Her poetry is inherently political in that it moves the Afro-German experience away from the unrecognized and isolated margins of German society into the midst of a global diasporic culture. She makes few concessions to explicate cultural references that may be unfamiliar to German readers-such as the role of the trickster figure in African mythology or the doubly coded, verbal-visual language of Adinkra symbols. Rather, she leaves it to the readers to decode their deeper meaning. By integrating these non- Western references into her German-language text, Ayim turns the tables on her German readers: she marginalizes them in the context of familiar language and confronts them with unfamiliar signifying practices. In addition to these defamiliar- izing techniques, Ayim uses verbal puns to resignify common German colloquialisms and, in so doing, refamiliarizes readers with the indifference and racism that lie embedded within.

These alternative signifying practices challenge German stereotypes directly. White Germans often assume that Afro-Germans are not really from Germany because, for them, having black skin is not compatible with being German. Thus, although Afro-Germans are native Germans by birth, language, socialization, and citizenship, they are treated as outsiders in a society that defines itself primarily as white. Afro-Germans, however, are usually only African to the extent that this label has been ascribed to them from the outside and that, as a result, they have adopted it as a shield against racism and marginalization. As Tina Campt points out, because most have had little, if any, direct contact with their African or African-American cultural heritage, "laying claim to or identifying with 'blackness' as constructed in

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German society (that is, as foreign) is neither a self-evident nor an unproblematic form of identification" (112). It is, in fact, an ironic paradox that Afro-Germans are identified as foreigners when all of their personal references and actual experiences are German. Unlike African diasporic communities that exist on the "recognized margin" of countries such as the United States or Britain, Afro-Germans have until

recently lacked the support of a viable collective identity to develop the "protective antibodies" necessary to cope with racial prejudice and insensitivity. Anne Adams notes, for example, how much more prepared or experienced she is, as an African- American, to deal with racist comments: "Whatever 'foreign encounters' might beset my life as a Black person sojourning in Germany, my sense of identity is a source of

psychological sustenance. The Afro-German, until very recently, lacking such a source of sustenance, has been living a life of 'otherness' on a margin that is not even recognized ... a limbo-life with no analog among Black populations in ex-colonial Europe or in North America" (236). This also distinguishes them from immigrant groups, such as Turkish Germans, who often maintain tangible, familial ties to their country of origin. "To which nation is the African German connected? This is at once an existential and a locational question for the the African German, encompassing being and physical place" (Asante 2). To answer this question and to overcome the debilitating effects of a "life between chairs," Ayim engages in historical research and uses poetry to invent an identity and to claim her voice. She assembles a reservoir of cultural references and summons a community of role models to develop the antibodies her younger self lacked. By placing tropes from both German and African cultures in a dialogical, mutually enhancing relationship to one another, she confronts the way Germans avoid seeing Afro-Germans as integral to German society (Nachtgesang 15).4

May Ayim was born in Hamburg in 1960 to a Ghanaian father and a German mother. When her father returned to Ghana, legally prohibited from taking his daughter with him, her mother, financially unable or unwilling to raise the child, put her up for adoption. Ayim was thus raised in a German foster family. During her childhood, her father visited her regularly; however, their relationship remained a distant and uncomfortable one. Many of Ayim's poems describe this unsuccessful search for familial roots and its role in her attempt to construct an identity. Her father belonged to the realm of childhood fantasy-a "Black Santa Claus" whom she feared (Scheub 12).5 As an adult, Ayim eventually traveled to Ghana to establish ties with her extended family and to recover a cultural heritage that would become integral to her self-definition as an Afro-German woman. Prior to this, her identity had been formed in response to feelings of lack, inferiority, and otherness. In her foster family, she felt pressured to fulfill an agenda; she was to be an exemplary Black child who would prove society's negative prejudices wrong: "I grew up with the feeling that my foster parents were committed to proving that a 'half-breed,' a 'Negro,' an 'orphan child' is an equal person. Besides that, there was scarcely any time or space left to discover who I really was" (Opitz 207).6 To discover or rather to construct and claim a viable, authentic identity, she had to actively confront labels imposed from the outside: "Having grown up in Germany, I am on my way away from being a skin color, a nationality, a religion, a party, big, small, intelligent, dumb, on my way to myself, on my way to you" (Nachtgesang 18).7 This statement reflects a self split between external

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and internal definitions. She recognizes within herself the dissociated "you" to be

slowly reclaimed. To symbolize her transition away from an imposed identity to a self-defined one, she changed her name from Brigitte Opitz to May Ayim. The name, an example of a phonetic palindrome, signals her propensity for word play that also characterizes her poetic voice and persona.8

In her mid-twenties, after moving to Berlin, Ayim finally met other Black women, among them the American poet Audre Lorde. Lorde had come to the Free University in Berlin during the summer of 1984 to teach a course on Black American women

poets, as well as a poetry workshop. Inspired by Lorde, a group of Black German women coined the term "Afro-German" to identify themselves as a group with a common history.9 Shortly thereafter, several women collaborated on the anthology Farbe bekennen: Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte (1986, translated as

Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women in Search of their History, 1992) which was to become a seminal text in the formation of solidarity groups such as Initiative Schwarze Deutsche [Initiative of Black Germans].10 Ayim's essays in this volume document the little-known history of Africans and Germans from the Middle Ages to the present. She traces the evolution of race as an ideological construct by focusing on the

historically specific language and imagery used to describe people of African descent.

Ayim argues that contemporary race relations in Germany cannot be understood without reviewing the history of 19th-century colonialism in Africa. The ideology of a racial (and gender) hierarchy that justified the practice of economic, social, political, and psychological exploitation laid the foundations for a colonizer/colonized men-

tality that still manifests itself today. Ayim cites popular songs and fairy tales in which Blacks are portrayed negatively as contemporary examples of racist stereotyping. On the other end of the spectrum, Africans were seen as exotic sensations and emblems of a freer, more natural and wholesome world. Two Afro-German women describe, for example, how their Cameroonian father, invited to study in Germany during the 1890s, found himself sitting in a shoe repair shop's window display, drawing crowds of spectators and customers. As Ayim observes, exotic and sexualized images of Africans are still prevalent in advertising and tourism today. Regrettably, exoticism sells well.

After Germany's defeat in the First World War, overtly racist discourse persisted in the form of a national campaign against the "humiliation" of being occupied by people of a "lower race" and "lower origin." The North and West African soldiers

among the French troops in the Rhineland were seen as a "Black scourge" and

potential threat to Germany's racial purity (Opitz, Showing 40-44). After the Second World War, when African-American soldiers were among the American troops stationed in Southern Germany, similar concerns about potential fraternization were voiced. In a more recent collection of essays, Entfernte Verbindungen: Rassismus, Antisemitismus, Klassenunterdruickung [1993, Distant Connections: Racism, Antisemit- ism, Class Oppression], co-edited by Ayim, she addresses the issue of race relations in contemporary Germany, particularly in light of German unification. The dissolu- tion of borders between East and West has, in her view, reinforced the borders between North (the European fortress) and South (Africa and the Middle East). In

early 1996, Ayim was hospitalized with psychotic symptoms. Released six months

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later, still suffering psychotic episodes and also diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, she committed suicide on August 9. In the years before her untimely death, she worked as a college lecturer, speech therapist and student advisor in Berlin. Her last research and writing focused on the treatment of immigrants and Blacks in the field of psychiatry. Since Ayim's death, her publisher, the Orlanda Frauenverlag in Berlin, has assembled political and biographical essays, interviews, and photos by and about her in an anthology entitled Grenzenlos und unverschimt [1997, Borderless and Bra- zen]. Maria Binder directed a short documentary film, Hoffnung im Herz [1997, Hope in My Heart], that traces her life and work.

Most of Ayim's poems are autobiographical-poems about unhappy love, hypocrisy and racism, parental absence, and childhood memories. Others commemorate individuals who struggled against oppression and who were too often its tragic victims. Many address current socio-political issues, such as the rise in racially motivated violence against asylum seekers and immigrants in Germany or the war in Bosnia Herzegovina. The common thread that links the personal and the political is the experience of being an outcast. Ayim's search for her own identity is intimately connected to the search for her place in Germany. As will be shown, this involves transcending national boundaries, exploring the points of intersection between her Ghanaian and German backgrounds, and forging a truly diasporic identity.

The West African trickster goddess, Afrekete, serves as a central metaphor for

Ayim's poetic project to resignify the German language with African and African- American tropes. Afrekete is known as the guardian of the crossroads who mediates between the worlds of the sacred and the profane.' She is also described as a roguish linguist who speaks all languages and interprets the divine alphabet to humans. Folklore often depicts her with two mouths to represent her double-voiced discourse.

Ambiguous and indeterminate, Afrekete is said to embody what seem to be mutually exclusive qualities, such as disruption and reconciliation, betrayal and loyalty. In the

poem entitled "Afrekete," Ayim presents the goddess as simultaneously standing still and moving, in the present and dreaming herself into another place. She occupies the liminal space between two worlds which the poet herself seeks to claim. Ayim has

aptly chosen this playfully transgressive figure as one who undermines rigid, exclusive, and hierarchical notions of identity that are implied in terms like Volk, Heimat, and Vaterland. Henry Louis Gates points to the mythological figure of Afrekete as one of the key signifiers of the African diaspora. She survived over three centuries in the Western Hemisphere and functions as a "sign of the disrupted wholeness of an African system of meaning and belief." Afrekete thrives despite dislocation and

fragmentation-even in Germany.12 When Ayim evokes this figure, she places herself within a long oral tradition of a disrupted wholeness that has remained alive beyond the borders of Africa. Like Afrekete, Ayim's poetic persona stands at the crossroads between two worlds and between oral and written forms of discourse.

As a metaphor for Ayim's poetic endeavor to infuse the German language with new images and meanings, Afrekete, the translator, is quite fitting. To complement her German-language poems, Ayim weaves traditional Ghanaian ideograms into her text as section dividers on otherwise blank pages. In the epilogue, we are told that these visual motifs, known as Adinkra symbols, are not merely aesthetically pleasing;

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they represent a language of "abstract proverbial expressions that are meant to warn, encourage and counsel the living" (Glover 4). For example, an abstract image of two superimposed crocodiles with two heads, two tails, but one stomach refers to the proverb: "Sharing one stomach, yet they fight over food" (45). It prioritizes communal over individual interests; members of a family should cooperate rather than compete for something that will ultimately benefit the whole (Cole and Ross 10).

The proverbial message to which each Adinkra symbol alludes "may be expressed philosophically, satirically or allegorically, to depict religious, social or political concerns as well as reflections on issues pertaining to beauty, morality or other higher values. Almost every Adinkra symbol is a literary and nonverbal illustration of a proverb, a parable or a maxim with profound interpretations" (Kwami 10). Of the approximately 150 Adinkra motifs, some are obvious visual representations of an object, natural or man-made, others are abstract geometric motifs. Traditionally, Adinkra symbols were stamped onto a darkly dyed cloth that was worn during the period of mourning. Today, Adinkra cloths have gained new significance as a national heirloom; they are worn on many different occasions and figure prominently in

contemporary Ghanaian art (76). Ayim introduces the visual language of Adinkra symbols as a parallel text along-

side and on equal footing with the German language text, recalling Afrekete's dual- voiced discourse. The book cover, for example, shows two stylized images of a hen's foot, symbolic of mercy and protectiveness.

The proverb associated with the image says: "The mother hen may tread on her chicks, but she does not kill them" (Kwami 48). Unlike the German mother, who, in so many of Ayim's poems, rejects her Afro-German child, this mother protects and nurtures her children. The proverb could also be understood as a sign of survival in the face of

adversity. Although the child suffers many hard blows from the mother hen-from her biological and foster mothers, as well as from her motherland, Germany-she is not defeated. Ayim draws on proverbial wisdom as rich and powerful resource to combat feelings of alienation and displacement.

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The "verbal-visual nexus" of Adinkra symbols is a unique and central feature of Asante art. Ayim refrains, however, from translating these ideograms, thereby invit-

ing her readers to decode the verbal messages themselves (Cole and Ross 9). As we research their meaning, we become more active participants in the interpretive process and are initiated into a new form of communication that draws on both verbal and visual signs. Since proverbs and their related symbolism are culturally specific, rarely translatable verbatim from one language into another, the act of interpreting forces us to think cross-culturally. By incorporating visual motifs into her text, Ayim forges a link between German words and African ideograms. Although they speak in

seemingly unrelated codes, the written and the visual texts are, in fact, thematically interwined. The Asante proverbs associated with the Adinkra images are responses to the German-language poems, offering advice and encouragement. What happens to the image and proverb when they are taken out of their original cultural context and

placed into another? Is this other language, not directly translated into German, accessible and meaningful to a German audience? An examination of the significance of these Ghanaian references to Ayim as she articulates her own hybrid identity will address these questions. Adopting the persona of trickster and mediator, Ayim inscribes new meaning into these motifs as she translates them from one cultural context to another.

By using visually encoded proverbs, Ayim infuses her text with an oral tradition that is vital to both everyday and formal communication throughout West Africa. Proverbs are, as the Yoruban people from Nigeria say, "the horse of conversation ... when the conversation lags, a proverb will revive it" (Leslau and Leslau 1). When they are used skillfully and in the appropriate context, proverbs can engage the listener's attention and convey the speaker's good upbringing and education. In her poetry, Ayim replicates the verbal wit, striking rhythm and humor that are considered the hallmarks of a successful African proverb. She takes pleasure in verbal puns to

foreground hidden meanings within and between words. Word play is usually used for comic effect, but also serves as a valuable device to reveal irony, ambiguity and the inherent instability of language and, by extension, identity. In the poem "Berlin," Ayim suggests how mutable and unstable the concept of (moral) leadership actually is. By adding different prefixes and syllables to the morpheme "Haupt" [main, head], she is able to create the compound "Hauptstadt" [capital city] with ironic effect. In three succint words, she describes the transformation of Berlin from the once contro- versial to the now celebrated capital of united Germany: "enthauptet behauptet hauptstadt" [decapitated declared capital] (Blues 88). In the poem "grenzenlos und unverschimt" [borderless and brazen], she inserts a consonant sound to transform "Einheit" [unity] into the neologism "Scheinheit" [something phony or feigned]. The

hushed-up truth (sh!), she wryly suggests, is that German unity is an illusion (61). The

poem "bewiltigung" [coping] elaborates on this theme of false appearances and

reality, using chiasmic syntax and tongue twisting to ridicule the hypocrisy of those who think they know better: "What is better? The hypocritical friendliness of those who know better or the friendly hypocrisy of the know-it-alls?" (Ayim, Nachtgesang 75).13 These poems find their echo in the Adinkra symbol and proverb that warn

against such hypocrisy: "We cannot tell the good from the bad because of pretense and

hypocrisy" (Kwami 26).

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These examples of verbal wit display Ayim's solid command of and virtuosity with the German language, as well as her sense of how to enrich that language with parallel signifying practices in African cultures. Likewise, many African proverbs are exam-

ples of homophonic puns, playing with similar-sounding names of dissimilar objects and recurring phonological sequences.14

Ayim's challenges to German attitudes towards racial difference expose the op- pressive tactics that characterize their political praxis. The context of conflict and the

reality of being rendered silent are the backdrop to most of her poems. In "deutschland im herbst" [germany in autumn], Ayim paints a menacing image; united

Germany is a place where houses and then people are burned with people secretly staring or even clapping.15 The lack of response to a fatal neo-Nazi attack on an

Angolan man in November 1990 elicits bitterness and despair: "The police were so late that it was too late and the newspapers were so sparing in their words that it resembled silence" (Ayim, Blues 69).16 Recalling another November night, Kristallnacht, exactly fifty-two years earlier she asks whether history is repeating itself-"schon wieder" [yet again]? The prefix "wieder" [again] appears numerous times throughout the poem, drawing a connection between German unification (Wiedervereinigung) and the resurgence of violence. A homophonic pun on the words "wahr" [true] and "war" [was] disrupts the glib and empty rhetoric of those who ought to be outraged and protecting the defenseless. The persecution of outsiders is not, as some would insist, an anomalous and closed chapter in the past. Ayim's insistence on revealing this truth [wahrheit] phonetically resonates with the past tense form of the verb "to be" [es war]:

es ist nicht wahr daf es nicht wahr ist so war es erst zuerst dann wieder. (Ayim, Blues 68)17

The double negative and chiasmic structure of this refrain parody the logic of

language and rationalizations that confound clear thinking about the present reality of violence.

Another cynical poem entitled "gegen leberwurstgrau-fiir die bunte republik" [against liverwurst grey, for a colorful republic] with the subtitle "talk talk show for the bla bla struggle" reveals how the demands of the disenfranchised have been commodified, neutralized, and ultimately ignored by the media and political main- stream. Around election time, the so-called "lieben auslandischen mitbuirgerlnnen" [the dear foreign co-citizens] are invited to sit in on the charade of talk shows and academic conferences (Ayim, Blues 62). Their contributions, however, are ultimately

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converted into useless paperwork: "The demands (for more civic rights) are neatly cataloged and then reliably passed on to the truly responsible people ... and then- what then, the show is over" (Ayim, Blues 63).18 Offstage, the politically correct labels are cast aside and the token co-citizens return home again as "Kanacken" (dagos) and "Neger" (negroes). The same process whereby standard protocol transforms politically incendiary material into neutral and bland information is evident on television news broadcasts. In the poem "tagesthemen" [themes of the day], the newscaster's voice remains the same, whether he is announcing a recent arson attack on a Turkish travel agency or the weather forecast: "The sound of his voice is no different than yesterday-sober, impartial, objective" (Ayim, Nachtgesang 38).19 This professional neutrality is actually harmful, Ayim suggests, because it levels meaning, extinguishes affect and thereby disengages its audience. The television viewers yawn apathetically and passively accept what should be unacceptable. In response to these examples of fruitless communication within the conventional media, Ayim creates for herself a new forum composed of visual metaphors that contribute to her poetic expression without being appropriated or emptied of meaning. Her tone is deliberately incendiary and emotional-it is meant to Signify.

Ayim foregrounds her hybrid, diasporic identity in yet another way by inserting an African-American trope of blues music. The birth of this musical form coincided with the emergence of a new Black, post-slavery consciousness in the United States and, as such, presents a fitting model for the nascent Afro-German identity. As Daphne Duval Harrison and Angela Davis point out, the blues also played a particularly critical role for Black women as a venue for articulating their needs, desires and experiences. Blues singers like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith helped redefine what being Black and a woman could mean: "Female figures evoked in women's blues are independent women free of the domestic orthodoxy of the prevailing representations of womanhood through which female subjects of the era were constructed" (Davis 13). Both structurally and thematically, the blues provide a compelling model for the lyrical, empowering, and communal expression of both grief and anger. Like Ayim's poems, they embody the duality of distress and its transcendence. Ralph Ellison once defined blues music as "an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically ... Its attraction lies in this, that it at once expresses both the agony of life and the possibility of conquering it through sheer toughness of spirit" (94). This dynamic is expressed in the tension between content and form, for as Houston Baker, Jr., notes, while the blues speak of "a paralyzing absence and ineradicable desire, their instrumental rhythms suggest change, movement, as well as unlimited and unending possibility" (8). Blues in Schwarz Weifi conveys this duality of distress and transcendence in its juxtaposition of German text and African ideogram. A poem called "zehntausendmal" [ten thousand times], composed exclusively of parental repri- mands, prohibitions, and accusations, for example, is preceded by an Adinkra symbol and proverb that signify the imperishability of the self: "Although others will try to burn you, you do not burn" (Kwami 31).

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In the poem "entfernte verbindungen" (distant connections), the German text finds its visual echo in the image of a chain.

This Adinkra symbol symbolizes unity, responsibility, and interdependence and is associated with a proverb that says: "We are linked in both life and death. Those who share common, blood relations never break apart" (Kwami 27). The poem, in sharp contrast to the proverb, describes the broken links between the black father, the white mother, and their child who is consumed by grey feelings of guilt. In its place, Ayim forges a linguistic link to repair the broken familial chain. The expression "entfernte Verbindungen verbundene Entfernungen" [distant connections, connected distanc- es] reveals how Ayim is able to link words of opposite meaning-distance [Entfer- nung] and connection [Verbindung] (Blues 29). Geographical, social, political, and personal psychological space can be inferred here. The combined rhetorical strategies of polyptoton (Greek: many inflections) and epanalepsis (Greek: echo sound, slow return, resumption) beautifully parallel the idea of both these oppositional terms returning in an inflected form of each other. Semantically and linguistically, Ayim affirms connectedness and interdependence as it is envisioned in the Asante proverb-each person is an important link in the human chain. Her intertwining of a common cliche (distant connections) thereby resignifies the relationship as expressed in the German usage.

The Sankofa symbol is a central Adinkra motif symbolizing the search for a lost cultural identity. It appears both at the beginning and the end of Blues in Schwarz Weifi and is the only visual symbol translated for the reader in the epilogue. The Sankofa symbol can thus be read as a key signal for readers to follow its invitation to retrieve the hidden meanings of the other symbols. It represents an abstract image of a bird turning its head back and means: "Return and fetch it! It is no taboo to return and fetch what you have forgotten. Learn from your past" (Kwami 47).20

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Sankofa invites the individual or group to retrieve a lost heritage and to integrate it into the present in anticipation of the future-without knowing one's past, it claims, one cannot move into the future. Sankofa philosophy, born from the desire to reclaim an empowering and continuous cultural heritage, has manifested itself worldwide. In Berlin and Karlsruhe, Black parents have organized Sankofa daycare centers that teach children positive African values and work towards improving the future of Black children in Germany. For Ayim, whose personal files were destroyed once she reached adulthood, the search for a lost heritage involves looking towards a larger global community of people of color. Sankofa presupposes a loss of cultural identity, but as the word "Sankofa" implies, it is never too late to reclaim the past, to allow it to guide the present. For Ayim, this past is not confined to national boundaries- Ghana or Germany-rather, it lies in the global struggle against racism. At the end of the volume, she includes a list of names with brief biographies of the members of her chosen surrogate family who together present an alternative to the German history- among them are Steven Biko, Sojourner Truth, Rigoberta Menchu, and Mahatma Gandhi. Ayim hereby affirms that a "community previously denied to Afro-Germans can be found in the politics of internationality and solidarity with other oppressed groups" (Obermeier 175).

While Ayim's poems depict particular experiences from the private and public spheres of life in Germany, the proverbs speak metaphorically of the power of resistance, community, and knowledge that may combat the many assaults and disappointments described in the poems. Some critics have argued that proverbs, taken out of their situational context and given literal translations, lose their nuance, interactional elegance, and complexity.21 One might argue that the same thing happens when Ayim takes the handful of Adinkra symbols out of their original oral context to artificially fix them into a written text. What seems relevant in this case, however, is less what the Adinkra symbols mean in their traditional context than why they were chosen and what they are made to mean in this new context for an Afro- German of Ghanaian descent, as well as for German readers. First, they reference concepts and codes of behavior that Ayim misses and strives for in her own life-a sense of tradition and belonging, mutual understanding and respect, wisdom, and the power to persevere. Ayim thereby overturns the traditionally negative connotations of Africa in Germany to make it a source of positive identification and pride for an

emerging community. She also particularizes the broad, overgeneralizing label of "African" to focus on the specific contributions of a Ghanaian oral and visual tradition. Secondly, the Adinkra symbols point to a form of communication, other than writing, to supplement otherwise failing or coopted words. In the blues, for

example, there may be tension, even contradiction, between the lyrics, melody, and rhythm. So, too, Ayim counterpoints her written text with visual motifs and proverbs that together create a textured web of meaning and introduce new signifying practices into the German context. Finally, Ayim's use of untranslated visual symbols challenges readers to look beyond the surface, to transcend their own cultural borders, and to thereby discover other forms of communication and communal values. Ayim, like Afrekete, moves between languages, creating verbal and visual links that speak to alterity-a revised concept of what the concept "German" can imply.

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The German literary critic Sigrid Weigel urges Germans to "begin to question their own cultural norms, behavioral patterns, and judgments. Above all, they should

develop an interest in deciphering and understanding the signs of other cultures.

They must also learn to ask what their own signs might mean in the context of another culture" (187). Ayim calls upon readers to engage in this both introspective and extroverted exploration. While deciphering the links between the Adinkra symbols, the proverbs, and the poems, readers will hopefully begin to look upon the German

language in a new way, as it has now been infused with metaphors, imagery, and values that are inclusive, not exclusive. It is only when readers join in the collective

project of resignifying the concept of Germanness that steps towards real cultural, economic, and political equality in an increasingly multicultural country may be attained. Ayim's poems are an invitation to do so.

NOTES

I would like to thank the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin for allowing me to replicate the Adinkra symbols from their exhibition catalogue Adinkra. Symbolsprache der Ashanti. Ausstellung- skatalog, 1993.

1. "Das neue 'Wir' in, wie es Kanzler Kohl zu formulieren beliebt, 'diesem unseren Lande' hatte und hat keinen Platz fur alle." See May Ayim's "Das Jahr 1990: Heimat und Einheit aus afro- deutscher Perspektive." Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.

2. The rise of xenophobic violence in the early 1990s recalls the hostile anti-immigrant climate in the 1970s during the energy crisis. In his essay "Inventing Self: Parallels in the African-German and African-American Experience," Leroy Hopkins argues that there was a direct causal relationship between this earlier period of violence and the emergence of an Afro-German consciousness.

3. "Rassismus bleibt bleiches gesicht einer krankheit die uns heimlich und 6ffentlich auffrigt." 4. "Meine Heimat ist das Leben zwischen den Stiihlen." 5. "Ein schwarzer Nikolaus, vor dem ich Angst hatte." 6. "Ich wuchs in dem Gefiihl auf, daf in ihnen [meinen Pflegeeltern] steckte: beweisen zu miissen,

dai ein 'Mischling,' 'Neger,' ein 'Heimkind,' ein vollwertiger Mensch ist. Daneben blieb kaum Zeit und Raum, mein 'Ich' zu entdecken." See May Opitz (Ayim)'s "Aufbruch" in Farbe bekennen: Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte.

7. "In deutschland grotigeworden, bin ich unterwegs weg vom: hautfarbesein, nationalitatsein, religionsein, parteisein, grotsein, kleinsein, intelligentsein, dummsein, auf den weg zu mir, auf den weg zu dir."

8. Although writers often adopt a pen name, there is another explanation for her choice of a particularly African-sounding name. In the African-American community, taking on a new name is often part of asserting a new social status and self-image. It marks the end of a rite of passage from one stage to the next. Numerous African Americans have changed their names to express a new identity. Black Muslims, such as Malcolm X, for example, often use Xs in place of their surnames to symbolize their status as ex-slaves until their leaders confer on them a new Islamic name. For more on the African-American tradition of adopting new meaningful names, see Sheila Walker's "What's in a Name?" As to the construction of May Ayim's name, it follows the same phonetic principle as verlan, the coded slang of Parisian youth that became popular in the 1980s. In verlan, words are created by reversing phonetic syllables (e.g. l'envers [in

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reverse]-verlan, cafe (coffee)-feca,femme (woman)-meuf). Thus, May (phonetically: em + ay) becomes Ayim. For further discussion of verlan as a "discourse of difference" that shifts conventional codes, see Michel Laronde's Autour du roman beur: immigration et identite.

9. Afro-Germans are individuals of African descent born in Germany. There are no official demographic statistics as to the size of the present Afro-German population, but estimates from the 1990s ranged from 30,000 to 300,000.

10. May Ayim was one of the founding members of ISD, the first national organization of Black Germans. Another group that has been active in Berlin, Bremen, Frankfurt and Munich since 1985 is Adefra (Afro-Deutsche Frauen/Schwarze Frauen in Deutschland). The group organizes seminars and discussion groups on the history and culture of Afro- and Black Germans.

11. According to Henry Louis Gates, the trickster figure is a central theme or topos in Black culture: "This trickster topos not only seems to have survived the bumpy passage to the New World, but it appears even today in Nigeria, Benin, Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, and the United States [. .] its particular configurations in Western black cultures testify to the fragmented unity of these black cultures in the Western Hemisphere" (4). Maya Deren describes the importance of the trickster in the Afro-Haitian Voodoo rituals as "the link between the visible, mortal world and the invisible, immortal realms. He is the means and avenue of communication between them, the vertical axis of the universe ... Since he is god of the poles of the axis, of the axis itself, he is God of the Cross-roads, of the vital intersection between the two worlds" (97). The crossroads, also referenced in the blues (e.g. Robert Johnson's 'Crossroads'), represent the point of intersection between the physical and metaphysical worlds. It is at the crossroads that the individual can hope to gain temporary access to another realm of knowledge (Ayim, Blues 40).

12. "This topos functions as a sign of the disrupted wholeness of an African system of meaning and belief that black slaves recreated from memory, preserved by oral narration, improvised upon in ritual-especially in the rituals of the repeated oral narration-and willed to their subsequent generations, as hermetically sealed and encoded charts of cultural descent" (Gates 5).

13. "Was ist besser? die geheuchelte freundlichkeit derer, die es besser wissen, oder die freundli- che heuchlerei der besserwisser?"

14. For more about verbal puns in African proverbs, see L. Boadi's "The Language of the Proverb in Akan."

15. The title of the poem references a film collectively produced by Alexander Kluge, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Volker Schlondorff, Heinrich Boll and others. The film describes the tense political situation in Germany in Fall 1977, from the kidnapping and murder of an industrialist to the prison suicide of three members of the Baader-Meinhof group. During this time, the German government passed strict laws against left-wing sympathizers and took repressive measures in their fight against terrorism.

16. "Und die polizei war so spat da, dag es zu spat war, und die zeitungen waren mit ihren worten so sparsam, daiS es schweigen gleichkam."

17. "It isn't true that true it isn't, so it was, so it is." 18. "Die forderungen werden sauber aufgelistet, die listen werden sauber aufgeheftet, und

sicherlich und zuverlassig an die entsprechenden stellen mit den wirklich zustindigen leuten weitergeleitet ... und dann-was dann, die show ist aus."

19. "Seine stimme hat den klang von gestern-niichtern unbefangen sachlich." 20. Sankofa was the guiding principle of many Ghanaian artists during the cultural revival of the

1960s and 1970s: "The idea is that Ghanaians, after almost a century of British colonial rule, which persisted in stamping local culture as inferior and primitive, and the subsequent Western influence which dominated post-independence years, should acknowledge their own rich cultural heritage and allow the past to guide the present" (Kwami 76).

21. The early collections of African proverbs (by Richard Burton, for example) are a case in point: "In most such studies ... only the proverb's intrinsic merits can be attested. Missing are its interactional elegance, the multiple meaning relations it contracts with the surrounding discourse, and the skills embodied in its spontaneous deployment" (Yankah 328).

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Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte. Ed. May Opitz, Katharina Oguntoye, and Dagmar Schultz. Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1986. Rpt. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1992.

Asante, Molefi Kete. "African Germans and the Problems of Cultural Location." The African-German Experience. Ed. Carol Aisha Blackshire-Belay. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996.

Ayim, May. Blues in Schwarz Weii3. Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1995. . "Das Jahr 1990: Heimat and Einheit aus afro-deutscher Perspektive." Entfernte Verbindungen:

Rassismus, Antisemitismus, Klassenunterdruckung. Ed. I. Hugel, C. Lange, M. Ayim, I. Brubeck, G. Aktas, and D. Schultz. Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1993. 208-14. .Nachtgesang. Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1997.

Baker, Houston A., Jr. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Boadi, L. "The Language of the Proverb in Akan." African Folklore. Ed. Richard Dorson. New York: Anchor Books, 1972.

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