Читать книгу In Audre’s Footsteps - Heidi R. Lewis - Страница 12

DR. HEIDI R. LEWIS

Fun fact. I’m a Black American woman with a German name.

My maternal grandmother unknowingly foreshadowed this text and the work preceding it when she asked my parents to name me Heidi, because Heidi, the 1937 film featuring Shirley Temple in the title role, was one of her childhood favorites. Another fun fact. The Swiss-authored, German-language book on which the film is based was published in 1881, 100 years before I was born.

You might be able to imagine the challenges that posed for me when I started sending messages to Black people and people of color in Berlin asking to connect due to my interest in creating a study abroad program focused on transnational solidarity and intersectionality. If not, let me help you. In 2014, the first year I taught my course, Ria Cheatom and I stood outside smoking, and I asked, “Why didn’t you ever email me back when I wrote asking to meet you last year?” She took a puff, chuckled, and said, “I thought you were a white woman, and I said, ‘Who is this white woman from the United States trying to find out things about us? What does she want?’” She and I laugh about that to this day. Still, it is critical to recognize the seriousness of that concern, a concern shared by many Black Germans and Germans of color that stems from the ways their experiences and their work has often been exploited, ignored, and erased.

Another fun fact. Ria and I also laugh because I hardly speak any German, unlike my colleague Dr. Tiffany N. Florvil, who, according to Ria, “speaks perfect German.” Tiffany and I joke about that now, too.

Unlike Tiffany, I didn’t begin building relationships and doing work in Berlin until just under a decade ago. In fact, I didn’t get my first passport until I was in my early 20s, married, and a mother of two. When I was in college, I never attended study abroad information sessions, because I couldn’t afford it. I also never considered seeking financial assistance, because traveling abroad seemed frivolous in relation to my academic interests, even though I knew many Black intellectuals I was learning about had traveled and even lived outside the U.S.

It wasn’t until I began studying Black feminism more intentionally in graduate school that I discovered how much time Black lesbian, mother, warrior, poet Audre Lorde spent in Berlin – every summer from 1984 until she died in 1992, when I was just 11 years old. After learning about Audre and Berlin, I honestly didn’t think much more about it other than remembering my father and other Black men in or close to my family spent time in Germany during their U.S. military service. Still, I hadn’t reached a point where I could see what was to come, and years passed before I would think about Audre and Berlin again.

Fast forward to when I found myself employed at Colorado College in 2010. After securing a tenure-track position there two years later, I started settling in and thinking about how I might contribute to the overwhelmingly white study abroad curriculum at this very well-resourced institution where most students study abroad at least once regardless of economic circumstance. Thankfully, my colleague Claire Garcia had courageously paved the way for me by teaching her “Black Writers in Paris, 1900-1960” study abroad course long before I arrived. Because of that and so much more, I received funding to begin the process of thinking, studying, and planning what would eventually become “Hidden Spaces, Hidden Narratives: Intersectionality Studies in Berlin.”

Unfortunately, I hadn’t been able to seriously study a second language, something that’s especially difficult when you’re educated in impoverished, public schools in the U.S. So, I knew I had to teach in a country where a great deal of people speak fluent English.

That’s when I remembered, “Audre!” and got busy reading, thinking, studying.

I read Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out (1992), the English translation of Farbe bekennen: Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte (1986), the first collection of writing and visual art published by Black women in Germany edited by Katharina Oguntoye, May Ayim, and Dagmar Schultz.

I read Blues in Black and White (2003), the English translation of May Ayim’s Blues in Schwarz Weiß (1995).

I read Invisible Woman: Growing Up Black in Germany (2001), the English translation of Ika Hügel-Marshall’s Daheim unterwegs: Ein deutsches Leben (1998).

I read critical texts by Dr. Marion Kraft, Jasmin Eding, Prof. Dr. Maisha Auma, Dr. Tina Campt, Dr. Cassandra Ellerbe-Dück, and so many others who had written carefully, thoughtfully, and lovingly about Black people and communities in Germany.

Finally, I discovered the Witnessed Series and read The Little Book of Big Visions: How to Be an Artist and Revolutionize the World (2012) edited by Sandrine Micossé-Aikins and Series Editor Sharon Dodua Otoo. I read Olumide Popoola’s Also by Mail (2013). I read Nzitu Mawakha’s Daima (2013).

I knew. Berlin was the place. I had to go.

When I first started articulating my interest in Berlin, some people weren’t exactly curious about it. They were puzzled. “Berlin? What’s in Berlin?” with their ill-informed expectation being I would be more interested in Paris, London, or Rome. But that didn’t concern me. As with most things in my life, I knew it would make sense to them eventually. Or it wouldn’t. And that would be okay, too. Because it made (and still makes) sense to me.

But when some Black intellectuals in the U.S., including Black feminists, started asking the same question (“Why Berlin?”), I realized my work might be more important than I was (and still sometimes am) willing to admit. I make that point because their questions were mostly genuine. They were asking to better understand me and my work. But many of them just didn’t know, like I once didn’t, that W. E. B. Du Bois studied at Humboldt University from 1892-1894. They didn’t know about Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. preaching a sermon on both sides of the Berlin Wall in 1964. They didn’t know East Germans sent boxes of letters to Dr. Angela Y. Davis while she awaited trial or that she was greeted by an estimated 50,000 supporters in East Germany when she visited after her acquittal in 1972. Last, but certainly not least, they didn’t know about Audre.

Again, I knew. Berlin was the place. I had to go.

Prior to my first trip with my husband in late 2013, I sent several messages to people asking to meet and discuss my interests. This book wouldn’t be possible without many of them, some who are featured or honored in this book. While some were as skeptical of me as Ria was at first, they have all been so generous, caring, thoughtful, and loving. They’ve taken time every year to share their knowledge and experiences with me and my students, who we affectionately refer to as the #FemGeniusesinBerlin. They supported me professionally when I was pursuing tenure and when I’ve experienced racist sexism at work. They comforted me when I was disappointed in students. They loved on me when I thought my personal life was falling apart. They held me accountable when I made mistakes and caused harm to people I love and who love me.

I knew I would make many connections in Berlin. I even knew the course would be successful in ways I and my employer would define that, albeit distinctly. But I didn’t anticipate how my relationships with the women in this book, relationships that started out professionally, would come to mean so much more to me on a personal level. I knew I would find comrades. I didn’t know I would find friends, sisters.

Then came this project.

On May 30, 2016, just a few days before I left to teach my course for the third time, my sistafriend Aishah Shahidah Simmons, who served as my Course Associate the previous year, texted me, “Wish I could have a livestream of you in Berlin. I would want the behind the scenes footage.” Soon after, I decided to create a project featuring my sisters in Berlin and our relationships. Despite Aishah’s suggestion, my first thought was to publish an edited collection in which each of us would write an essay or other kinds of pieces communicating the significance of the worlds we’ve been co-creating. But while I was in Berlin, I couldn’t stop thinking about Aishah’s text and decided to create a multimedia project that would allow audiences to read our words, see our faces, hear our voices, and feel our energies.

When I learned Mae Eskenazi, a member of my 2016 #FemGeniusesinBerlin, would be returning to Berlin in 2018, we discussed how to bring the project to life with their support as an audiovisual engineer. That summer, Mae collected thoughtful and beautiful photographs and audiovisual recordings of seven conversations between me, Dana, and our sisters in Berlin guided by the following prompts written by me and distributed to them:

1. First, I think there’s a great deal of love, respect, and admiration in this room, and – as “cheesy” as this may be – I just want to spend some time honoring and talking about that – why we love, respect, and admire one another.

2. In the “Foreword” to Showing Our Colors, Audre Lorde writes, “The first steps in examining these connections are to identify ourselves, to recognize each other, and to listen carefully to each other’s stories.” I want to share some stories about how we came to know and understand ourselves at various points in our lives. How did we learn how we were understood in our various worlds? How did we learn how to develop a self on our own terms as much as possible? I think we can go all the way back to childhood and/or talk about our lives as recently as yesterday.

3. Additionally, in the “Foreword,” Lorde asks, “Where do our paths intersect as women of color? And where do our paths diverge? Most important, what can we learn from our connected differences that will be useful to us both?” What do we think about that last question – what might be possible for us to learn from our connected differences that would be critical for women of color in Germany, in the U.S., and possibly throughout the world?

4. In the “Preface” to Showing Our Colors, Katharina Oguntoye and May Ayim discuss “the need to broaden one’s own horizons and to work more intensively at recognizing and defining our differences and commonalities.” Shortly after, they make the case that this will, in part, “initiate processes of liberation from which people of color and also white Europeans will profit.” What do we think about that? And if this resonates with us, I’d like us to discuss how our own work contributes to various kinds of liberation. I also want to talk about how our collaborative work together can continue growing in honor of this tradition.

Transcripts from those conversations were edited by me and Dana and developed by Jazlyn Tate Andrews, a member of my 2015 #FemGeniusesinBerlin, into the prose that has now become this book, In Audre’s Footsteps: Transnational Kitchen Table Talk.

While I have never intended for my work to mimic Audre’s, the first part of the title acknowledges the ways I am indebted to and aim to honor her legacy. The second part was inspired by Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, which started with a 1980 phone call between Audre and Black lesbian feminist writer and activist Barbara Smith. During the call, Audre said, “We really need to do something about publishing.”¹ Kitchen Table was created and given its name “because the kitchen is the center of the home, the place where women in particular work and communicate with each other.”² Further, the founders, which also included Cherríe Moraga, Hattie Gossett, Leota Lone Dog, and others, wanted to situate themselves as a “grassroots operation, begun and kept alive by women who cannot rely on inheritances or other benefits of class privilege to do the work”³ they believed they needed to do. This is evident by their description of the press, revised in 1984 to note, “Our work is both cultural and political, connected to the struggles for freedom of all our peoples. We hope to serve as a communication network for women of color in the U.S. and around the world.”⁴

Similarly, most of the conversations here happened at kitchen tables or over meals to reflect the true nature of our friendships and honor the traditions set forth by the elders and ancestors who continue to make our cultural, political, and personal work possible. With In Audre’s Footsteps, we offer ourselves as another “communication network” in service to “the struggles for freedom of all our peoples.” In doing so, we grapple with the contours of solidarity, friendship, processes of radicalization, critical pedagogy, the challenges of building and resisting simultaneously, romantic partnership, motherhood, knowledge production and dissemination, and so very much more. We do this not to provide answers or solutions. We do this not in pursuit of sameness. We do this to generate ideas and questions. We do this to nurture the kind of dialogue that has sustained us. We do this, because as Audre points out in Showing Our Colors, “To successfully battle the many faces of institutionalized racial oppression, we must share the strengths of each other’s vision as well as the weaponries born of particular experience. First, we must recognize each other.”⁵