Daniel José Older on Diversity in Publishing

The American writer Daniel José Older has a depressing and inspiring piece at Buzzfeed about race, power and publishing in the U.S. Read it. He writes about the hurdles authors of colour have to jump to get published in America's white, middle-class dominated industry, about agents and editors who "can't relate" to characters who look different to them, about how an amorphous entity called The Market is blamed for the homogeneity of what gets into print. There are a lot of paragraphs that got my blood pumping (as did Older's great stories about working as a paramedic), but this is the one that made me think the most about the situation here in Germany:

We’re right to push for diversity, we have to, but it is only step one of a long journey. Lack of racial diversity is a symptom. The underlying illness is institutional racism. It walks hand in hand with sexism, cissexism, homophobia, and classism. To go beyond this same conversation we keep having, again and again, beyond tokens and quick fixes, requires us to look the illness in the face and destroy it. This is work for white people and people of color to do, sometimes together, sometimes apart. It’s work for writers, agents, editors, artists, fans, executives, interns, directors, and publicists. It’s work for reviewers, educators, administrators. It means taking courageous, real-world steps, not just changing mission statements or submissions guidelines.

So I'm thinking about diversity in German publishing, and remembering an article I wrote a few years ago about how the portrayal of "ethnic" characters in German literature is left up to writers with first-hand experience and whether that matters or not (I'm still not sure but I'd write that article differently now), and remembering a panel discussion on "the problem with homosexuality" and a recent publishing party, at which a couple of friends and I tried and failed to come up with a list of successful gay writers in German (it was towards the end of the evening – and define "successful" – but still). And of course I'm remembering the recent debate about the class backgrounds of Germany's creative writing students, which I felt hugely missed the point, possibly because Germans are not as willing to utter the word "class" as the British, for example.

I know too little about America but here's the thing about Germany: it is a country with extremely poor social mobility. The education system and the way the working world is structured mean that if you're born disadvantaged in some way, you're likely to stay that way. That's why it was a no-brainer for me that the kids who study creative writing at university level are from wealthier backgrounds. But here's the thing about publishing: you don't need a qualification to write a good book. Now I'm aware that publishing as an industry is more interested in making a profit than in making the world a better place. And individual publishing gatekeepers probably do unconsciously follow that behavioural pattern, at least some of the time, that keeps women out of positions of power: this person is like me, so I will support them; this person is not like me, so I will not actively support them. Call it human nature, call it the old boys' network, call it discrimination. However you refer to it, it makes the books that end up on shelves less diverse and, yes, to me, more boring – how many books in one season can be about aging white men lusting after younger women? A lot.

I was pleased when Hanser's new head Jo Lendle said he wants to publish more women, and I hope he and other gatekeepers, and you and I, can try harder to make publishing not only fairer but also more interesting. There is room for improvement.
  

The N-word: Preussler, Scheck and the New Yorker

I've been trying so, so hard to ignore this debate going on in Germany right now, but when the New Yorker reports it gets too much. Basically, as far as I've followed it, a concerned father of colour wrote to the German children's book publishers Thienemann and asked them to change some of the racist words used in Otfried Preussler's 1950s classic Die kleine Hexe. The publishers passed the letter on to the elderly author, who had apparently resisted making such changes in the past, but who now agreed to the alterations in the next edition.

Cue rather more excitement than I think this is worth. Censorship, some critics called it. And then one prominent critic whom I'd previously admired thought it would be a wheeze to comment on the issue on his TV show. In blackface. Words fail me.

The Germans are still arguing about whether blackfacing is an OK thing to do, after various stage productions embarrassed themselves last year. It's not my area of expertise but for what it's worth: in a globalised world you are going to offend people if you paint yourself black. It's also slightly ridiculous to argue that you're doing so because there aren't enough black actors in Germany. And if you're commenting on racism, it will obscure your argument if you paint yourself black to present it. You will knock yourself off your pedestal as love german books' second-favourite critic, Denis Scheck, if you use cheap and offensive provocation to try and add a note of - what, actually? - satire?

The linguistic aspect is a difficult issue. Many Germans seem far less sensitive to the offensive aspects of the N-word than English-speakers. There is only one word in German - Neger - which translates as both negro and that other thing. I've been having arguments about it for years, because people seem to confuse considerate use of language with that catch-all bad thing, "political correctness". And they seem to confuse freedom of speech with freedom to offend and upset. My least favourite argument is that "it was a perfectly normal term in the GDR and it wasn't offensive at all". That was twenty years ago, and the GDR was far from free from racism.

In my work, I've come across this issue a couple of times. Some German writers use the N-word, presumably innocently, in a way I feel will simply shock when rendered in English. So yes, I have "censored" one of my translations to remove the N-word. The idea being that I want to recreate the original reading experience as closely as possible, and that won't include a big fat unmotivated insult in the middle of the page. Even if it is in a character's voice, even if that character is not likeable or has his or her own reasons to use the word in German. Part of the translator's work is easing a book's path into another culture, and this is one instance of where I've intervened with the original to do that. Obviously, though, we have to look at each instance in its own right, and in historical contexts or when expressly intended as an insult it may well be legitimate to retain the N-word in translation.

So, who has taken up Scheck's crown as love german books' second-favourite critic? Ijoma Mangold, of course, who according to Sally McGrane in the New Yorker and other sources has been calm and rational and cool all the way through. For a view from the other side of the trenches - if you read German - you could also read Noa Ha's response (to the pre-Scheck debate) from the forthcoming Freitext magazine.

Just to Reassure You

Dear readers,

Please rest assured that I am not a middle-aged man posing as a woman. That photo on the left is really of me; I did not steal it from someone I don't know. The opinions I state on this blog are my own, as is the name I write under. The few details I have revealed about myself are true. Except maybe that thing about going on tour with the Beastie Boys in 1992.

I've been following the unravelling of lesbian blogger identities behind the "gay girl in Damascus" and now "Paula Brooks". And I have to say I find the phenomenon fascinating. Feminists predicted some years ago that the internet would dissolve gender identities, but it didn't actually appear to be doing so. One reason was that social media sites insisted on profiles being either male or female, and of course many people use them to display their gendered sexual identities, particularly via photos. So while we have more opportunities than ever to state our opinions anonymously, we tend to do so in a gendered way. Don't believe me? Go to any online article dealing with feminism and see what people say in the comments.

What's interesting here though is that two heterosexual men have been posing as lesbian women, in one case of a different ethnicity too. It's obviously cooler to be a lesbian activist than to be a heterosexual man, in certain circles. And you know, there are days when I wake up in the morning and am really grateful to be a woman. Why, only today I rejoiced in my lack of hair loss. But these two men have taken on identities as members of, let's say, doubly and triply oppressed minorities - because they say people wouldn't have taken them seriously otherwise.

Leaving aside questions of boundaries between fact and fiction and whether anyone's taking them seriously now, I have to say this is the most patronising thing I've heard in a long time. These men assumed false identities because they felt their opinions on female sexuality were equally if not more relevant than those of actual lesbians. In the case of "Amina", we also have an element of western paternalism, with an American assuming a Syrian identity to "combat liberal Orientalism". From priveleged positions, they both attempted to fight other people's battles for them. Good intentions perhaps, but so condescending.

There's a tendency to do this in German books too. Think of the crime writer Jakob Arjouni, whose detective Kemal Kayankaya and colourful assumed surname made critics think he was Turkish to begin with. He's exonerated himself in my mind though by writing well about all manner of things. And let's not forget Günter Wallraff, who still blacks up in this day and age to "highlight racism", as if black people were incapable of doing so themselves.

It is possible, however, for white people to write about ethnic minorities, for heterosexual men to write about lesbians, without pretending to be them. The German examples that immediately spring to mind are the work of Raul Zelik (particularly Bastard, which centres on a German-Korean woman), Christoph Peters' Mitsoukos Restaurant, and Thorsten Becker's Sieger nach Punkten. All fiction, which is allowed. I can't actually think of any examples of male writers playing with female sexuality though.

Interestingly, the man who pretended to be Amina has written that he originally wanted to write fiction. Perhaps he should have done so, under his own name.

Dancing the Sarrazin

My head's still humming from last night's huge launch for the anthology Manifest der Vielen. I don't know about you, but typically I expect a book launch to be about twenty people sipping at white wine in a bookshop while a writer sits at the front and reads a bit. Instead, last night every last seat in the Maxim Gorki Theater was occupied, eight people read, three people were interviewed, there was a dancer and a slide show and live electronic music and a music video (which I'll come back to in a moment). There followed copious drinking and - yes! - actual dancing.

The book, which I've been bigging up for a while now, is a collection of pieces written by - as it says in this fascinating interview with the editor Hilal Sezgin - thirty German intellectuals with international backgrounds, in response to Thilo Sarrazin's mega-selling book Deutschland schafft sich ab. Its subtitle is "Germany reinvents itself". I haven't actually got a copy yet because of cashflow issues last night, but judging by the readings it covers a lot of ground. From Deniz Utlu's fiction to an interview with the actress Pegah Ferydoni to straight personal essays, the writers share their views on multicultural Germany, being a Muslim or not being a Muslim in the country, and just generally how they live their lives.

Not all of it was new - people have been saying for years now that the never-ending calls for integration are offensive and unreasonable, that they are essentially a demand for a homogenous society - but it's good to say it again. Several of the authors talked about how the debate has forced them to think about their own position in German society, how they define themselves. And in fact the event made me start thinking along the same lines, something I hope to come back to here.

But what was most unexpected about the event was that it was genuinely funny. A number of the writers have contributed humorous pieces, laughing rather than crying over what is often a ridiculous situation. And it was all held together by a really funny guy called Ali Aslan. I had to check that because he didn't introduce himself on stage and when I asked someone later she said, "Oh, you mean Ali?" Which was of limited use. Anyway, speaking of unexpected things, the guy is apparently known as the George Clooney of the German interior ministry. I couldn't see the resemblance, but then I was a very long way from the stage and when I saw him close-up later I was far from sober. Anyway, Aslan managed to get a lot of laughs out of some pretty serious subject matter, including the fact that one of the authors - the academic Naika Foroutan from the Heymat project - has received death threats for her part in revealing Sarrazin's misinterpretation of the statistics.

So, thus heartened, we all retired to the bar. Or in fact the canteen, where there was wine and beer and pretzels and rice pudding. And DJ Imran Ayata in the corner, who was having technical problems. But still, the beautiful people danced and danced - my favourite was a version of Oh Carolina in some unrecognisable language. And there were lots of sort of famous people there and I said hello to two of them and one of them even recognised me back.

And here's the most amazing thing I noticed. On one point, Sarrazin is right. A survey by the Süddeutsche Zeitung found out all sorts of interesting things about his readers. My favourite one: they responded negatively to the idea of "enjoying life to the full". Also, they're mainly men and the over-60s are overproportionately represented. So in fact, Sarrazin readers probably are having fewer babies than Manifest der Vielen readers. Because Manifest der Vielen readers are all very, very attractive and enjoy life to the full. Manifest der Vielen readers will reinvent Germany, populating it with attractive, intelligent, fun-loving little brown babies.

To finish off, a link to the video, a song by Volkan T. that plays on a text by Selim Özdogan.

Sarrazin, Broder and British Debating Culture

I have never been a great fan of the British university debating club. The one at my university attempted to invite Enoch Powell to speak to students, back in the early 90s. As I recall, it was a small group of ex-public school pupils with pretensions to the Conservative back-benches. I see they are still going strong, in fact, with a debate tabled for March with the title "This house believes that it is time to close the borders to economic migrants." The idea is that two people say very contentious things to each other in a witty manner, while students watch for cheap entertainment. A centuries-old tradition, free speech, fostering public speaking skills, bla bla bla. Not to my taste at all, as there are things that I consider too important to reduce them to their mere intellectual entertainment value. But at the very least, there are some kind of rules of balance that are intended to ensure a fair debate.

So students at London's LSE were not only dismayed to see that the German Society had invited everybody's favourite German racist Thilo Sarrazin to an event. They had also failed to find anyone to stand up to him on equal terms. Alongside Sarrazin on the platform was Henryk M. Broder, not a man known for airing his views on Islam in particular in an unprovocative manner. The students felt that the "contra" side was too weak, with the critic Hellmuth Karasek and Ali Kizilkaya, Chairman of the German Islamic Council, who "may very well speak for his religious community but cannot be expected to represent the great diversity of German immigrants and their children." They wrote an open letter to the German Society from which this quote is taken. Their campaign was picked up by the press and anti-racism activists, whereupon the event was moved from the LSE itself to a nearby hotel.

There have been some amusing accounts of the ensuing events in the German press, the best of which is in the Tagesspiegel (although they seem confused about the demands of the open letter). As it turns out, not even Karasek argued against the anti-Islam front. The event was topped off by an exchange in which Broder called a student who mounted the stage an
unmoderate double huge arsehole. And Der Freitag has a few words from one of the organisers of the open letter (my translation):

As a former colonial power, Britain has a much longer and more intensive history of integration. The majority of the guests at the Hilton had therefore noticed that "there was something very dodgy about Sarrazin." Compared to the quality of the British discussion, the London audience will have seen Sarrazin and Broder and presumably also Karasek as provincials at best. Sarrazin, says Fathollah-Nejad, "hardly got any applause anyway."

Back in January, it was another venerable British institution that first gave Sarrazin a platform in the English-speaking world. As Spiegel Online reported, he was invited onto the "discussion programme" World Have Your Say on the BBC World Service. Here's what they said:

For 50 minutes, Sarrazin -- whose book has been at the top of Germany's bestseller lists for weeks -- held forth on his opinions about Muslims. He discussed his book with callers from Great Britain, Germany, the United States and elsewhere in the world -- and didn't seem concerned that his ideas sound even crasser in English than they do in German.

Again, the format was part of the problem here. While most of the callers were apparently critical of his ideas, Sarrazin was in the studio as the main guest and therefore automatically in a privileged position to state his views. Sarrazin was presented as the expert while the people
countering (or indeed supporting) his arguments were presented as laymen. He also had more airtime than any other individual. Hardly a triumph of fair debate, no matter how crudely he came across.

Now just to get my position clear, I would rather nobody offered Sarrazin a public platform for his unscientific and plainly racist views. However, for a country that is so proud of its tradition of fair debate, these two events are an absolute embarrassment.

I'm looking forward to Thursday's launch of the Manifest der Vielen in Berlin - a collection of pieces by the very people Sarrazin dumps on in his mega-selling book. Because when the other side doesn't play fair, why should we bother? Dance the Sarrazin!

Update: my friend Karen Margolis sent me a link to an FAZ article by two of the signatories. Maria Exner and Max Neufeind are rightly annoyed at the German press coverage claiming they wanted to have the event banned, and the way Broder is treated as a harmless clown.

Pardon My Schadenfreude

With the news that Germany's biggest-selling non-fiction title in 2010 was Thilo Sarrazin's bigoted diatribe against Muslim immigrants, people obviously started wondering whether any other nations would like to read it. And the Financial Times Deutschland ran a piece that I've only just come across, Does Germany Abolish Itself? In it, we get the gratifying information that the German publishers DVA are a bit sheepish about it all. Top boss Thomas Rathnow apparently told Der Spiegel he's not proud of the book's success. And foreign rights head Gesche Wendenbourg mentions enquiries from dodgy organisations and individuals that "hadn't read the book but wanted to put translated extracts on the websites." They said no.

My favourite part of the item: there's been no interest in buying translation rights from the English-speaking world. After all, we already have The Bell Curve. Lucky us.

Günter Wallraff Blacks Up

The German investigative reporter Günter Wallraff is known beyond national borders, predominantly for his groundbreaking 1985 book and film Lowest of the Low, for which he disguised himself as a Turkish "guest worker". And now he's been out and about exposing injustice in Germany again for a new book, Aus der schönen neuen Welt - and a film by the name of Schwarz auf Weiß (black on white). And yes, the film does what it says on the tin: Wallraff blacks up, dons an afro wig and travels around Germany as a Somalian, predictably enough encountering shocking examples of racism, near-violence and unfairness.

So far, so good. That's what Wallraff does - he disguises himself as a homeless man, a call centre agent, an alcoholic, and exposes the grimy sides of life in Germany. But it seems it's not just me who finds the guy's gone a step too far in this day and age by creating Kwami Ogonno. As Der Spiegel points out in its photo gallery:

Black Germans are on the fence about the film. "We find the mindset behind Mr. Wallraff's film very problematic," says Tahir Della, a spokeswoman from the Initiative of Black People in Germany (ISD). "As is so often the case, someone is speaking for rather than with us."

Della's being rather diplomatic there. The blog Black NRW puts it more directly:

Just what we needed: an almost 70-year-old white man, "camouflaged as black" using carnival face-paint, hops and skips around Germany and then, his make up off and white again, makes a sensational announcement via book, film, tour and talk show, naturally only for money: "Yes, it's really true, racism exists. Believe me, I'm white. You should behave in a friendly and humane manner towards all black people – they could be me."

The blogger goes on to recommend that people read a book written by a genuine black author, such as Noah Sow's Deutschland Schwarz Weiß (which I found revealing if irritatingly written). And the woman herself has given a stonking-good angry interview to the news programme Tagesspiegel, pointing out that it seems to take a white man to make the Germans sit up and listen to what she and many others have been saying for decades. Asked to list common prejudices against black people, she replies:

If you're interested try reading a good book on the subject. There are plenty of them. It's not okay or "normal" to have such a huge blind spot on a subject as important as this, that's present everywhere and affects us all. And otherwise I'd like to turn that ethnological gaze around: racism isn't a black tradition, it's a white tradition.

What amazes me is that Wallraff hasn't learned his lesson. As Tom Cheesman writes in his Novels of Turkish German Settlement, there were very mixed reactions to Lowest of the Low within the Turkish community. The book is often experienced as "unwittingly condescending" and playing on a stereotype of Turks as ignorant, unskilled, pitiful - and male, and has been subject to a fair amount of literary parody. Cheesman quotes Petra Fachinger, who relates an episode from the 1980s when the Turkish feminist novelist Aysel Özakin came to Germany:

Özakin "wanted to leave the Federal Republic when she first saw Ganz unten displayed in a bookstore window." The "sullen, despondent dirty face" of Wallraff as Ali "drove her into an identity crisis," as it seemed to force her into a position of ethnic identification "with each and every Turk she saw in the street."

So now we have Wallraff championing black people in Germany – not black Germans, but once again a hapless and pitiable foreigner, as if nothing had changed since 1985. The unwitting message? Black people are victims - and it takes a blacked-up Günter Wallraff in a ridiculous shirt to attract any attention to racism.

Update: See Noah Sow's blog for photos of her dressed up as a white male journalist for Halloween. Apparently she's also willing to spill the beans on her sociological experiences during the evening - for a large sum of money.

Black/White Germany

I've been reading the book Deutschland Schwarz Weiss by Noah Sow. It has an extensive English-language website here, in a slightly faltering translation, unfortunately. You can read a couple of extracts online - but the translator is not credited. The book is subtitled "everyday racism" and really does touch on a hell of a lot of sore points in Germany. Some of the examples the author presents are absolutely hair-raising, from strangers grabbing her hair to white mothers calling their black babies "little monkeys" (strangely, my white German mother-in-law calls her very blond son that too).

So, what do I think? First up, I found the style and structure incredibly irritating. The author works in radio and has written the book in a style I find just too conversational for comfortable reading. There are lists, interviews, suggestions, imaginary questions and answers, asides, photos with ironic captions, and I was almost expecting smilies to crop up at any moment. And while it's perfectly legitimate to quote from blogs and online forums to reflect public opinion, one or two of the sources for the factual material are too informal for my liking. Nevertheless, the book does seem well researched and more than just a compilation of "racism I have experienced". There are plentiful footnotes, an index and suggestions for further reading. Perhaps Sow is trying to straddle the divide between academic writing and actually reaching a broad audience. Being a minor celebrity (although I'd never heard of her), she might be the right person to do so.

Of course, it's not intended as a comfortable reading experience. The first couple of chapters are an out-and-out accusation hurled at the feet of the white readers the book expressly targets - which I felt might be better off placed further in, rather than scaring people off in the first few pages. But, subsequently humbled by rethinking one's own unconscious prejudices, the reader may then be all the more open to what Noah Sow has to say.

And that is plenty. At times I was reminded of 70s Britain - only this is Germany in the year 2008. The book made me realise how little I know about black Germans, a generally neglected subject. For example I was unaware that there have been black people here since French colonial troops occupied the Rhineland after WWI - most Afro-Germans I've known have one "non-German" parent. It also raised an issue I was aware of, but in a different context - the country's racist determination of nationality, based on "German blood". And it pays a lot of attention to language and the media - which is miles behind even Britain when it comes to showing black people and ethnic minorities in any other context than as criminals or victims. Or, of course, athletes and entertainers. The English Wikipedia entry on Afro-Germans is a case in point, carefully detailing the history and current situation, then listing almost exclusively musicians, sportspeople and filmmakers under "modern Germany". (Oh, and Naddel - a woman previously famous for being cheated on by an 80s pop star, but now, I see, topping the pops herself in Austria, in a fetching pink dirndl. Not sure if that's post-modern irony or just plain B-list celebrity survival strategy.)

So I have to say the book has worked on me. It's got under my skin, making me look differently at people and their behaviour - as well as myself and my behaviour. And it reminded me of the very talented Afro-German poet May Ayim, whose collection Blues in Black and White is available in English translation (by Anne Adams). Get Amazon UK's last copy here, quick!

Germany has a long way to go on the racism front, and this book is a moving testimony to that fact. On the book's website, the author writes:

I would like to see my book translated in order to start a new and widespread discussion in as many societies and countries as possible about whether we’re actually still making progress or if we ceased somewhere along the way at the level of miniature concession of the majorities.

I certainly wish her luck with that. Whether it's a landmark piece of writing that will stand the test of time, I doubt. But it just might be the straw that breaks the camel's back, opening enough people's eyes to provoke debate in Germany - and actual change.