
Raising the Spirit of Un-belonging
Set the scene in a whitewashed, 19th-century graveyard administration building. This particular graveyard is in the middle of Berlin, where the old Soviet Sector met the French. The city historical commission’s website dispassionately informs that “under a long lawn with an ivy-covered hill in the middle, there is a mass grave from 1945 with victims of the war.” In the 1960s, a fifty-meter-wide section of the northern part of the graveyard was taken to flank the Berlin wall. This part of the installation was known as the “death strip.”[1] It is likely that irony of the death strip’s location on an expropriated cemetery was not lost on Berliners. Today, this particular section of death strip is part of the main Berlin Wall Memorial, a tourist magnet. Since 2022, the building has been a culture café, Lisbeth. This is all par for the course in Berlin, a city trying desperately to selectively unremember its past, and forge a dignified present. But what do Berliners do with these spaces when they get a chance to use them? How do they inhabit these neighborhoods of ghosts?
September 2024 at The Barrio (Bairro) Berlin Festival— a week of mostly Latin American writers and artists showcased in events curated from within the community. Barrio is a multicultural and multilingual endeavor. It performs decoloniality through its actors’ output, which is impossible to put into one category and is highly self-reflexive. Barrio moves on many fronts— a magazine, a dance party, poetry workshops. As part of the festival, Hopscotch Reading Room, and poco.lit. co-program an evening at the cemetery café. Several dozen people squeeze into the building for a reading by Avrina Prabala-Joslin, a Tamil poet, and Maya Saravia, a Guatemalan artist. Both have been residing in Berlin for several years and have a complex relationship to living at the colonial “center,” while coming from the “periphery.”[2] The focus of the evening was Zugehörigkeit; belonging. In German, this word connotates a feeling, a kind of welcome. But the word also implies that this welcome can be forced. In English, a similar ambivalence is highlighted by the gerund. Belonging is a verb, one co-optive of its recipient. An open grave to nestle into. At the reading, both Saravia and Prabala-Joslin addressed the belonging snare in their contributions.
Saravia took an abstract tack, showing a short film that interspersed clips of backlit dancers moving to reggaeton, police crackdowns on protests in Guatemala, and US Native American ghost dances. The film, titled “Theory of a Ghost,” as well as Saravia’s comments, suggested the body and movement as a way to deal with state opression. In her remarks, she made it clear that it was important that the dancers she filmed for her video were also part of the protests. Saravia sees the ghost dance as a key: “Those who practiced it sought to open a passage and to make all their ancestors and descendants present, to make material that which was not present but which was not absent either.” This knife’s-edge between presence and absence seems to be at the core of the question of belonging, which in the light of Saravia’s film seems promising at first, only to be subsumed in state narratives. Saravia said “Belonging? I only belong to my rage.”
Prabala-Joslin also went about addressing the negatives of Zugehörigkeit quite directly: “Recently, I’ve been thinking about un-belonging. I am caught in the illusion of belonging and every time I come close to an identification, it unfurls. And though I’m at the verge of being co-opted, I turn around and run away. Everything I desired or aspired to belong to turned out to be a trap.”
Prabala-Joslin then negotiated this through language, presenting a trilingual poem that was predominantly in English, but also employed Tamil and German. They pointed out that “this specific combination of languages [are often spoken by] the Eelam-Tamil people who have had to seek refuge in German speaking countries in Europe, whilst fleeing genocide by the Sri Lankan government, a genocide which is also aided by the Indian government.”
In the Berlin context, the use of Tamil can be seen as an alienating and defamiliarizing gesture to most readers/listeners. The opacity of reading Tamil, a non-colonial language written in its own Brahmic script, which Prabala-Joslin employs prominently in their work, is somewhat alleviated when hearing her read out loud. Still, especially in Germany where immigrants who want to be “integrated” are expected to make a stab at learning German, and at least talk in English to make themselves understood, it is striking. Prabala-Joslin’s use of Tamil is a gesture of self-determination, and subversion of the Sartrian mauvaise foi imposed by English through British colonialism, and the German of Christian missionaries who were especially active in Prabala-Joslin’s region, Kanyakumari, which remains a stronghold of Christianity. Prabala-Joslin pointed out this complex history before their reading, noting their own ambivalent proximity to German: “This area, often known as the deep or the dark south, has a high concentration of Protestant Christians. In general, they are Indigenous people or people from so-called untouchable castes who were mass-converted [by German Missionaries] with a false promise of liberation from caste and poverty.”
Prabala-Joslin went on to explain that, growing up in a Christian household, their favorite songs were actually written by a German missionary (writing under a Tamil pseudonym). Finding this out brought on ambivalent feelings for Prabala-Joslin: “I don’t belong to my mother tongue in the way I thought I did. Or, there’s a mother tongue hidden underneath all this that is not the socio-political imagination of a white colonial Christian German man.”
As Jean-Paul Sartre lays out in Being and Nothingness (1943), and Frantz Fanon brings into the (post)colonial around ten years later in Black Skin, White Masks (1942),[3] we can understand identity as being foisted upon us by others, usually those in power. “The feeling of inferiority of the colonized is the correlative to the European’s feeling of superiority. Let us have the courage to say it outright: It is the racist who creates his inferior,” writes Fanon. This works its way down to the core of identity and belonging, with all of its shibboleths and dynamics of authenticity.
It is hard to break this spell, to overpower our own inertia and mauvaise foi, a kind of self-deception by way of which we collaborate in the trap of belonging. Prabala-Joslin’s presence, or more specifically the presence of Tamil within the sphere of the project of the Barrio Berlin Festival — a mostly Latin American, mostly Spanish-language entity — performed the deconstruction of fixed identity for the festival as a whole, complicating it, and building “South-to-South”[4] networks of decoloniality. By questioning their mother tongue in their performance, however, Prabala-Joslin broke the potential spell of mauvaise foi and feel-good diversity peddling that this could have implied. By taking up and reworking German in their poem as well, they inverted the colonial gaze of the German language in the contexts of both their region and Berlin. “Once I read this piece with a feeling of belonging, and today I’d like to read it with un-belonging,” they said. And, like the screening of Saravia’s “Theory of a Ghost” film, what better place than in a graveyard? These are, after all, dynamics that do not need to stay buried, but must be disenterred and dealt with.
[1] “unter einer lang gestreckten Rasenfläche mit einem mittigen Efeuhügel ein Massengrab mit Kriegsopfern aus dem Jahre 1945” https://denkmaldatenbank.berlin.de/daobj.php?obj_dok_nr=09010184
[2] Cf. Casanova, Pascale. 1999 [2004]. The World Republic of Letters. Translated by M. B. Debevoise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press on center and periphery in a world literature context.
[3] Fanon, Frantz. 1952. [2008]. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. London: Pluto Press (page 69).
[4] A concept developed in literary studies by Walter Mignolo and Achille Mbembe, among others.