{"id":14231,"date":"2020-02-01T19:05:00","date_gmt":"2020-02-01T18:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pocolit.uber.space\/?p=14231"},"modified":"2023-08-04T15:43:19","modified_gmt":"2023-08-04T13:43:19","slug":"the-black-madonna-by-noah-sow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/2020\/02\/01\/the-black-madonna-by-noah-sow\/","title":{"rendered":"The Black Madonna"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Noah Sow, who came into public view for various artistic activities and her book Deutschland Schwarz Wei\u00df: der allt\u00e4gliche Rassismus<\/em> (Bertelsmann, 2008) which translates to Germany in Black and White: Everyday Racism<\/em>, has now published her first crime novel. I say her first<\/em> crime novel, because the book Die Schwarze Madonna – Afrodeutscher Heimatkrimi<\/em> or – The Black Madonna: An Afro-German Crime Novel<\/em> – is probably only the beginning of Fatou Fall’s career as a private detective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Protagonist Fatou Fall is the product of traumatic childhood. After her white<\/em>, single mother abandoned her, Fatou went to live with two white <\/em>aunts in Neu\u00f6tting, Upper Bavaria, before she being moved to a foster family in Frankfurt. Fatou left her childhood behind her as quickly as possible and moved to Hamburg, where she found work as a department store detective. Now she has a daughter herself, eleven-year-old Yesim. Fatou decides that her daughter should develop a greater sense of home than her mother has, and that she needs to know about Fatou’s origins. So Yesim is to get to know Upper Bavaria during the summer holidays. What is planned as a relaxed mother-daughter holiday with the old aunt in Neu\u00f6tting quickly becomes an exciting search for criminals and a humorous, critical commentary on so-called German values.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fatou\nand Yesim visit the famous chapel of Alt\u00f6tting, to see its Black Madonna – a\nkind of patron saint to the Catholic village. During their visit, two masked\nmen deface the chapel with the words “ALLAH WAKBAR”. Police stream\ninto the church and immediately start speaking of a terrorist attack. Fatou and\nYesim seem to be the only ones who realize that there are spelling mistakes in\nthe graffiti and that the perpetrators were painted brown under their ski caps.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since\nthe police don\u2019t believe Fatou and Yesim’s statements, Yesim makes Fatou promise\nto solve the case herself. After all, she is a detective. Fatou\u2019s investigation\nreveals several suspicious characters: the priest Father Simone, SPD member\nKilian Niederweiser, a number of fraternity members, as well as Martin, the son\nof her former schoolmate Anita. At a local festival, Fatou meets Grace and gets\nto know the local Refugee Group, who express a wish to help with her\ninvestigation. Fatou begins to move in different milieus of the small Bavarian\ntown. Her insights not only help to clear up the case, but also uncover the local\npower games being played out. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Black Madonna<\/em> offers an enriching point of view for the German crime literature scene: narrated from the perspective of a Black woman, Black characters are not represented in racist stereotypes, and as such serve to counteract glibly typical, everyday racist situations. The fictional case also shows in an exemplary way how strucutral Islamophobia and racism cause police investigations to fail. With a good dose of humour, Noah Sow invites her readers to encounter Cultures of Colour with empathy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A relaxing mother-daughter holiday in Bavaria suddenly turns into an exciting investigation of criminal activity and a humorous critical commentary on so-called German values.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":14206,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[103],"tags":[114,29,68,113],"class_list":["post-14231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-crime-fiction","tag-die-schwarze-madonna","tag-noah-sow","tag-the-black-madonna"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14231"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14231\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14682,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14231\/revisions\/14682"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}