Meena Kandasamy is an Indian poet, fiction writer, translator and activist based in London.
LONDON — Many Germans will, no doubt, bristle at the idea that, as Ai Weiwei put it in a recent interview with the Guardian, “Nazism perfectly exists in German life today.”
But while some will find his accusations absurd, as a poet and novelist of color who has spent time in Berlin and lived in London and New York, much of what he diagnosed as problematic aspects of German society struck a chord with me.
I’ve had more books published in German than in Tamil, my own mother tongue, and am incredibly grateful for the artistic reception and acceptance that I found in Germany. I’ve taken part in literary festivals in Heidelberg, Frankfurt, Bremen. I’ve had the chance to perform at the Haus der Kunst in Munich to celebrate 100 years of the Russian Revolution. I’ve spent a month as a writer-in-residence at the prestigious Literarisches Colloquium Berlin in 2016 — and I’ve never experienced a warmer, kinder and more loving place in which to make your home for a short while.
Long before I had solo events in the Anglophone literary world, I had such platforms in Germany. Next month, one of my English novels is coming out as the lead title of a German publisher. It’s hard to overstate how significant it’s been to receive such overwhelming kindness and acceptance from within the literary sphere.
Police conduct a ‘stop and search’ operation on the main Parade day of the Notting Hill Carnival | Tolga Akmen/AFP via Getty Images
But the dissonance between such a welcoming atmosphere in the artistic realm and what you can experience in the streets of Berlin as a “foreigner” is alarming. It is impossible to reconcile what is happening to me as a writer within the country’s literary circles and what happens to me as a brown woman in public.
At the Berlin Hauptbahnhof, I once picked up a sandwich in a store and walked to another part of the store to pick up a bottle of Coke because I was battling morning sickness. And even before I reached the soft drinks shelves, the guy at the billing counter was shouting at me — he thought I was trying to get away without paying. This was not the first time something like this has happened to me in Berlin. To enter its shops means to know that you will be watched with an extra pair of eyes. Inside the metro, I found that white people would sit the farthest possible away from me.
For Ai, this type of behavior was jarring enough to compel him to move his family to the U.K. Germans, he said, harbored a deep dislike of foreigners and were “very rude in daily situations.”
Of course, you can’t divorce this everyday behavior from the way in which the state and systems of authority treat people of color. These two things go hand in hand. When the state regards you with suspicion, that attitude trickles down to the people around you.
I’m acutely aware of the need to address the kind of deep-rooted mistrust and racism that Ai diagnosed as poisoning his time in Germany.
On a train journey between one German city and another, I was asked to show my papers to one set of federal policemen when I arrived. Just outside the station, another group wanted to check my papers at the taxi stand. This time they were not even wearing their uniforms; they were wearing stylish leather jackets. I initially imagined that someone was coming to talk to me, or chat me up, and then they flashed their police identity badges. In my limited time in Germany, I’ve never seen a white person being asked to show their papers in the same manner.
In Britain, you will not be asked to show your papers, because the law does not mandate you to carry them with you at all times. Because these things are not state policy, written into the law, the ability to abuse them does not exist.
Even if there have been instances when I encounter white people’s discomfort or a sense of hostility toward me as a brown person in the U.K. — someone deliberately slowing down when they speak English to you, making offensive remarks, that sort of thing — it is not institutionalized targeting.
This is a big difference. I can move around anywhere in the U.K., and never be asked to identify myself. Unfortunately, all that might change some day. Already, Boris Johnson’s right-wing government has introduced stop-and-search practices. They say it is to stop knife crime, but there are reasons to believe that only young black and brown men will be unfairly targeted.
Some of these relative differences could be explained by the fact that Britain has a far greater percentage of immigrants in its population than Germany. The South Asian diaspora here are sometimes third or fourth-generation, and the respect and tolerance we see today is a result of the long and arduous struggle that they waged to be treated equally over the last few decades.
Of course, all of this is filtered through the prism of personal experience — I have no doubt that Britain doesn’t feel the same way to another immigrant from another part of the world, or even another citizen who might be wearing a hijab, or is black.
Writing this from a Brexit Britain, where we are facing so much alienation, xenophobia and suspicion of the other, I’m acutely aware of the need to address the kind of deep-rooted mistrust and racism that Ai diagnosed as poisoning his time in Germany. Just because Britain feels polite and free by comparison at the moment does not mean it will stay that way.
Britain is not immune to these same subtle, and not so subtle, forms of discrimination. We have to call them out whenever and wherever we see them.