A few days ago I watched Sarafina with my friend. She is
black, I am not. I am also from Germany
and have had my people’s Nazi history on my conscience ever since I heard and
naively retold at our dinner table my first” Jewish joke”. At the age of eight I did not understand why
this joke was so condemnable but the ringing in my ears from the clap that
swiftly followed is to this day connected in my mind to indistinct feelings of
guilt and shame like disturbing background-music to an otherwise harmless movie
scene.
We never spoke about the Nazis at home, about the
concentration camps, the violence, the killings. As the child of a refugee
mother from “The East” and a father, whose father had been a POW in Russia for
most of his childhood, I was once removed from perpetrator guilt.
The fact that my grandfather was a Holocaust denialist and
still had “Mein Kampf” on his bookshelf when I was old enough to read was at
best an uncomfortable family joke, but not ever a topic for discussion. Later, when I asked questions, the standard
answer “Opa couldn’t hurt a fly” was reassurance enough for me to step away
from the cesspit of collective guilt. Much later still, travelling the world to
the familiar sound ringing in my ears whenever my German-ness came up, I often
lied that I was French to avoid looks or questions or real or imagined
judgments.
I am used to feeling ashamed and guilty for something that
my people did to other people.
But when I watched Sarafina, I discovered a new dimension of
guilt and shame, an airless space bordering on terror.
Maybe because of this suppressed guilt-thing, I have never
been able to watch historical movies about Nazis or other oppressors; I sat my
way through “Schindlers List” behind a pillow with the sound turned down. In my
history books I had seen the pictures of survivors with hollow eyes like death
masks, the mass graves, and the mundane look of a murderer in uniform. I thought
I didn’t have to witness the detailed mechanics of violence in order to
understand its impact.
But with my friend next to me, looking away was no longer an
option. The horror sliced into me swiftly and unexpectedly. I found myself gagging and gasping for air while
my insides knotted into tight strands of terror.
Meanwhile she was casually scrolling on her phone with the
calmness of somebody who has seen it all before and has no more outrage or
despair to spill. I felt weak and pathetic in comparison.
So I sat through the entire movie with my breath held,
barely managing to keep my white tears at bay. At least that’s how I thought of them. Unable to drain, they settled in my body
instead.
Days after, my
dis-ease became the burning in my
throat and the throbbing behind my eyes. I felt weighed down with unspeakable grief.
I couldn’t eat and was constantly on the verge of tears.
But still I didn’t speak to my friend.
I tried to distract myself with social media.
Where I read about a black journalist being racially abused
in Amsterdam; about a black boy being
shot in the back by an American police officer; about school girls being humiliated and shamed
for how their hair grows out of their heads not far from where I live.
I felt nothing but despair.
Which turned into fear.
I traced my fear all the way through my body, until I sat
with it in the pit of my stomach and recognised the terror of a mother watching
helplessly as her children get humiliated, abused and murdered.
I realised then, that my fears were no longer confined to my
whiteness. They had surpassed the mob of
school children bearing torches and stones and anger and grief in Sarafina; they had grown beyond the righteous hatred
towards my white skin or the shame of “this white woman looking the other way
could have been me”.
My fears were no longer just white fears. They had melted into the fears of a black
mother for her child.
By becoming a mother to black children, vital parts of me
were no longer white.
But on the outside I still was and would remain forever so,
an emotional imposter to those who didn’t know me. I had managed to position myself once again as
the other: an outcast to whiteness and an outsider to blackness. In my mind the
solidarity of black mothers became the one thing that could save me and which I
could never attain.
Until my friend woke me up to the fact that I already had it
(pun intended).
I had it in her, as she sat with me through Sarafina not
knowing what if anything at all was happening to me, because I felt I had no
right to share my feelings with her. I realised how I had aptly outmanoeuvred
myself with my white guilt , retreating onto familiar territory of the outsider
instead of taking the leap into the unknown where my grief and terror loomed
big, trusting that she herself could make the decision if and when to be there
with me.
Instead I had opted for my safe space. By intellectualising and repackaging my
terror into something more palatable and politically correct along the lines
of: I recognise my white tears have no business in your space and heroically
manage to hold them back to prove my worthiness of your friendship.
Until she swiftly unveiled my cringingly stereotypical
picture of “the black mother bond” and the fact that I already had all around
me what I thought I still needed to earn by hiding my human tears.
After all these years of being in each other most intimate
thoughts, after becoming mothers and fighting wars for our children together, I
still managed to allow our skin tones to separate us into some weird idea of
what we need to represent to each other.
This, I hear her say, is a fucked up hot mess.
But – I reply with a grin on my face – one fucked up hot
mess that we are in together.
And so the journey continues.....
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