31 minute read
JUNGE AKADEMIE
WE HAVE TO KEEP TALKING AND WRITING
BECAUSE WE HAVE NO OTHER MEANS.
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The writer Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, Literature fellow of the JUNGE AKADEMIE and winner of the Prix Goncourt 2021, in conversation with Kathrin Röggla
KATHRIN RÖGGLA Mohamed, you live in Beauvais, you studied in Paris, but you started your life in Senegal, where your family lives. I know that you write in French, have you written in any other language, and would you like to? MOHAMED MBOUGAR SARR I have tried to write in Serer, my mother tongue, and in Wolof too, the most spoken language in Senegal, but it is now difficult for me because in Senegal you don’t learn to write in Serer or in Wolof at school, you study in French, which is why I write in French. Everything that concerns the brain, the activity of the brain, the intellect, comes to me in French. But deeper there is Wolof, and there is especially Serer. I have tried, but for now I’m not ready, but one day I will because it’s important for me personally, politically, and symbolically. KR Would you say that literature is a work of translation? MMS Writing is always a matter of translating, or at least there is always a way to find the balance between the different languages that I must speak... As the famous philosopher Édouard Glissant said: “I always wrote in the presence of all languages, even if I wrote in French.” So, at the same time, I also wrote in Serer, in Pulaar, and so on. There are all languages present. Every writer has his or her own language, and this language goes far beyond the technical language French or English or German, it is his or her personal language as a writer. KR How is the situation as an author living in Paris with his origins in Senegal? You know there is this term “world literature”? Here in Germany it would be understood as a marginalising term. MMS There’s a situation of marginality, that’s clear, a kind of inheritance from colonisation, because in French literature I am not always considered as a French writer. I don’t like it when people talk about “world literature”, I always have the feeling that it is a way, even if it is not expressed clearly, to say: I am the centre, and here is this periphery – satellites which surround me – and that’s world literature. In France, I can be recognised as an African, Senegalese writer. When I write in French, I am considered as a francophone writer, someone who only writes in French, but this French does not belong to France, it comes from an ancient colony, from Senegal, Kongo, Haiti... That’s a very ambivalent situation. KR You recently published a new novel... MMS I am doing a very exhausting reading tour now, because my novel is shortlisted for many important literary prizes: Prix Goncourt,1 Académie française, and so on. These last few days I made several meetings in libraries and bookstores with young students. KR What’s the title of your new novel? MMS La plus secret memoire des hommes – the title comes from Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, he is a writer I really admire. All the questions we have been discussing just now are in his book: What is it to be an African writer in the French literature scene? It is also a trap for French journalists, or for the literary field, because the book shows them their own images in the mirror of colonisation. KR Your most celebrated novel, Brotherhood, from 2015 – which just this year has been translated into English – tells us a story of rebellion against an Islamist terror regime in a fictional city called Kaleb. I suspect there were probably many paths leading to this novel? MMS I started to think about writing the book in 2012, because large parts of Mali had been assaulted by Islamist militia that year. It made me very sad. I really love Mali, because the Malian culture is absolutely beautiful and ancient – poetic and meaningful for the African continent and history. Seeing the culture literally being destroyed really shocked me, and I decided to start writing a novel to show what could happen in a city dominated by terrorists. That really simply was the main idea of that novel, to just show what can happen in any ordinary city. KR In your novel it is not only the militia against the army, it is especially the ordinary citizens, who revolt… MMS It is important to show that the ordinary citizen can resist, as they are in the front line of this kind of situation. Resistance is a beautiful idea, but it is also a very challenging one. It was important for me to show ordinary people in ordinary situations showing resistance, to show cowardness too, and to show how people resist, because every citizen, every person, has his or her own reasons to do or not to do something. Not everyone resists, because it is risky. The possible diversity of reactions in ordinary people interested me. KR You also raised the question of the moment: When do the people start their resistance? At the beginning of your novel there is a public execution of a young couple, and nobody showed any resistance. But one day when the wife of Ndey Joor Camara, who is one of the main characters, was publicly beaten, they reacted. MMS Violence has something fascinating about it. When you are fascinated you have two reactions: You can stay silent, be very impressed, or not be able to do anything, but sometimes the violence moves you so deeply that you must do something. Especially when that violence implies an act of barbarism, an act of killing, it produces some tragic reaction in humanity. This is what I tried to compare in the novel. KR Did you have a model of some kind for this type of resistance? MMS I read a lot of novels like Albert Camus’ La Peste, or Joseph Kessel’s L’Armée des ombres about the French resistance during the occupation. Even a novel like Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada has something to do with this idea of a city where many characters have different reactions in the face of the same situation. KR Literature has its own role in this fight. When the famous library of Bantika in your book is burnt down, the international community responds. But you also quoted Heinrich Heine: “Where they have burned books, they will end up burning people.” MMS It is ambivalent. Sometimes we do love books more than people. As all the dimensions of our humanity pass through symbols it is not so surprising that we are moved when one of the symbols is destroyed, because we feel that there is something in ourselves, our humanity, which is destroyed too. I started to write when I saw the destruction of the library of Timbuktu, the cemetery, the saints of Timbuktu... but I try to remember, that before symbols there are living people, men, women, children, who die from that situation too. In a perfect world we should be moved by the fate of people more than by the fate of symbols, but that is very complex.
KR The symbols are important, but there is this futility of language mentioned by your characters as well. MMS Every writer knows that language is a very powerful tool, maybe the only weapon he or she has, but, on the other hand, every writer can see very quickly how language is not touching the true depth of things. We try to reach something beyond – the truth – we try to find something essential with language. In the situation of violence there are many things you can do, many things to denounce, describe, and criticise to do with the situation. But on the other hand, you can say: These are only words, what can they do? Nevertheless, we have to go on talking and writing because we don’t have anything else – we are powerful, but also poor. KR The question of language is also connected to the concept of justice you address. There is the Islamist leader shown in his ambivalence between arbitrariness – he likes the people pledging for their lives and to see them die, he likes to play God – and has the urge to instil the law of God. He is arguing, working with words as well: Is this why you give him so much space in the novel? MMS Language and Justice are connected. Both are searching for a kind of truth. When justice is enacted it is to discover or to reveal or to find a kind of truth. Both are in a way united in that character of Abdel Karim. It might be very tempting to reduce him to a kind of beast, an incarnation of evil. But I thought it was more interesting to adopt his point of view. To describe him in his complexity as a human being. He is leading people who are very different from him, but he believes deeply in what he is doing. He has to punish his own men because he thinks they are acting in the absence of a sense of justice.
KR Why do you think that the people of Kaleb follow the Brotherhood? MMS They are afraid and also versatile. Evil can lead them to change. Do they have something to die for? Do they have something to lose? Do they follow the Brotherhood by conviction or do they follow by fear? Sometimes it is a grey space between those two possibilities. KR Was your novel discussed in Senegal, in Mali? MMS Yes, in Senegal, in Mali, in Burkina Faso, in Niger, in many countries where Islamist terrorism is present. I feel this is because people found some of their own questions in the novel. Of course, I was really happy and surprised. A playwright from Burkina Faso recently adapted it for a theatre play which was very popular with the Burkina people. He told me that the people went to the scene, testified, and cried out: “That’s what we are living. We see in that adaptation something of us.” KR You have quoted Victor Hugo, Apollinaire, Heinrich Heine... but no African authors... MMS That was something I regretted after the book was published. There were many African authors who wrote about the situation I could have mentioned: the Algerian author Yasmina Khadra, the great Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah… KR You wrote four novels, but during your fellowship at the Akademie der Künste you worked with sound poetry – are you performing as well? MMS I am not a performer in the strict sense, but a friend, the Chilean composer Francisco Alvarado and I often discuss the relationship between literature and music, we talk about both as a particular artistic and poetic language. We decided to do something around my fifth novel: my main idea relates to the notion of prophecy as a poetic language in literature and in music. KR Prophecy in a religious or in a strictly poetic sense? MMS In a very personal interpretation, because my next novel could be a work around the figure of my grandfather. He was considered a kind of prophet locally. He’d say some things that would happen years and years later. Every time I went back to Senegal, I’d see aunts and uncles and other family members and people of my village who would always say to me, you should write about your grandfather. So, I decided to see to that. He prophesied that one of his grandsons would become a writer… KR So, it’s a circle? MMS Maybe I come from that the prophecy. I will see how I can deal with this idea of prophecy in a literary, poetic way. KR Did you meet your grandfather? MMS No, he died some years before my birth. There are many legends, myths, stories people tell me about him, which no one can verify, but they describe an exceptional man, someone really strange, really joyful, but also really scary. I will try to describe him in the book. But this is also about questioning the act of writing... one of the topics is memory, the timeline. Literature is always a type of time architecture. KR Your work is often on the topic of memory… MMS Writing is always an attempt to go deeply into our memory, a way of giving structure or – on the contrary – to deconstruct time. I deeply believe that what interests us human beings the most is not the future, but the past. We are going toward our future, we are progressing... but what preoccupies us the most is not what is coming, but what has happened. In that way, literature is an investigation of time. KR For the project Arbeit am Gedächtnis – Transforming Archives at the Academy, you participated in the discussion “Rewriting Memories”. There, you were talking about a language game called ñaangooj… MMS Learning about the genealogy of our ancestors has always been done through that kind of play, as a way to teach young children their family history and how he or she is related to that family. And it’s also used as a way to stimulate young minds. I had this as a child with my mother, my grandmother, and many aunts. It is used as a way to teach the child to tell very simple stories and tales and to play with language. KR Is it a female tradition? MMS Most of time it is a tradition held by women. Indeed, I come from a culture in which mainly the women recount history, memory. So maybe it’s not the prophecy of my grandfather, but it is the tales, the narratives told by women that taught me how to tell stories. KR What would you say are your expectations for literature? MMS My expectations for literature are very high and also very humble. I expect everything from literature: the truth and revelation, I also expect to learn something deep and secret about our human condition. But at the same time, I know it is a game, it is not serious. I must not expect too much from literature, because if you expect too much from literature, it gives you not that much... I am in between: High expectations and no expectations. And this might be a definition of literature.
1 Mohamed Mbougar Sarr received the Prix Goncourt award a few days after this interview.
MOHAMED MBOUGAR SARR, born in Senegal, attended the high school and college of a military institute there, and studied literature and philosophy in Paris. So far, he has published three novels in French in which he questions the complex layers of reality in various places: terrorism in West Africa, the hospitality – or not – shown towards immigrants in Sicily, and homosexuality in Senegal. Currently, his attention is focused on literature itself: its power, its possibilities, its failures, its secrets. At the opening of the JUNGE AKADEMIE work presentations on 12 March 2022, he will present a poetry sound performance.
KATHRIN RÖGGLA, a writer, is the vice president of the Akademie der Künste.
RESONATING STRUGGLES
Paul Robeson sings at the Neues Deutschland press festival, 19 June 1960
PAUL AND ESLANDA ROBESON IN EAST BERLIN
In 1965, the Akademie der Künste in East Berlin founded an archive in honour of their corresponding member, the world-famous African American singer, actor, author, and lawyer Paul Robeson (1898–1965). It also contains part of the estate of his wife and business manager, the anthropologist and author Eslanda “Essie” Cardozo Goode Robeson (1895–1965), whose 1946 book, African Journey, was the first published volume about the African continent written by a Black woman. Therefore, the Paul Robeson Archive could more accurately be called the Paul and Eslanda Robeson Archive.
Its formation resulted from a very particular historical constellation. Between 1950 and 1958, Paul Robeson was neither allowed to perform in the US nor to leave the country because of his “Un-American”1 political view. In Manchester, England, the “Let Paul Robeson Sing” Committee advocated for Robeson’s freedom to work and travel; similar initiatives followed in several other countries, including in the GDR. Although the Robesons only visited the country a few times, they became household names in East Germany. As staunch communists and prominent activists in the US Civil Rights Movement, the Robesons seemed to fit perfectly the narrative of the internationalist, anti-racist socialism promoted by the GDR. Even after their passports had been returned to them, the work of the “Paul Robeson Committee” in the GDR proceeded: it maintained connections to supporters all over the world, promoted Paul Robeson’s celebrity status, organised his first visit to East Berlin in 1960 and, eventually, initiated the Paul Robeson Archive. When the archive was taken over as a completed collection after the reunification of the East and West Academies, the material – much like the lives of Paul and Eslanda Robeson themselves – was forgotten for many years. Today, however, its reverberation could not be louder. The archive and its history poignantly demonstrate the historical ties between the American Civil Rights Movement and the postcolonial struggles for liberation, the internationalism of socialist countries, and the power politics of the Cold War. At the same time, it is precisely the recent rediscovery of the Robesons that underlines how incomplete both their struggle and today’s memory work are when it comes to the commitment to anti-racism and gender equality.
For the group exhibition Arbeit am Gedächtnis – Transforming Archives, which was on view at the Akademie der Künste from June to September 2021, composer and artist Matana Roberts engaged with the Paul Robeson Archive to create a sound installation about its Resonance, as the work is titled. The conversation between Matana Roberts, curator and theorist Doreen Mende, and historian Kira Thurman, moderated by composer and music professor George E. Lewis and printed on the following pages, is an excerpt from a panel discussion held at the Academy in June 2021.
LINA BRION is Assistant to the Director of Programming at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.
NORA WEINELT is research fellow at the Institute for Comparative Literature / European Literatures at Augsburg University.
Eslanda Robeson (centre) at the opening of the trial of Hans Globke at the First Criminal Senate of the Supreme Court of the GDR, 8 July 1963, next to Greta Kuckhoff (right), communist Resistance member in Nazi Germany, from 1964 vice president of the Peace Council of the GDR.
Paul Robeson and Walter Ulbricht at the award ceremony of the Großer Stern der Völkerfreundschaft (Great Star of Friendship between Nations), 5 October 1960
MATANA ROBERTS My focus is on what it meant for Paul and Eslanda Robeson to be from the United States yet not to be accepted as citizens in their country. It has a lot to do with the power of memory and the power of history that Paul and Eslanda Robeson pulled on in order to stay committed to a very futurist vision that they had for themselves, while at the same time living very visionary lives. I was stunned, time and time again, by how they could continue to get back up, day after day, while being knocked down over and over again by their own birth country and also, in a sense, kind of paraded around as propaganda. I took great inspiration from the ways in which they inserted themselves into different cultures and into different communities, the ways in which they broadened their reach and understanding of what it means to be a global citizen at a time when I’m not sure Americans, let alone African Americans, were being given a chance to think about that. DOREEN MENDE I first came across Eslanda Robeson in Barbara Ransby’s biography Eslanda. 2 In the Paul Robeson Archive of the Akademie der Künste, I found a few boxes about her. I chose to work with Eslanda Robeson as a kind of a transgenerational voice and as a point of entry to study and engage in the trajectories of a Black, often intersectional feminism, of an anti-colonialism, an internationalism that had been crossing the geography of the East. But I chose to work with Eslanda Robeson as an interlocutor also, to think about a world-making after internationalism. Eslanda Robeson was a prolific writer, speaker, and traveller. Her reports are fantastic, for example “140,000,000 Women Can’t Be Wrong”, which she published in 1954. My approach to the archive is very much informed by acknowledging the struggles that both Eslanda and Paul Robeson were experiencing, not only during their lifetimes, but throughout the archive in process. So how do we engage with an archival substance – or maybe we could call this an antiphonal substance, a substance that is speaking back and resonating, vibrating in the present – while considering the violence of erasure and the violence of exclusion in the 1970s, 1980s, but specifically also in 1989, 1992, when the global world order rearranged itself? KIRA THURMAN As a historian and musicologist, I want to talk about the context in East Germany for understanding Paul and Eslanda Robeson’s visit there in 1960. And that’s to show, I think in the same way as perhaps Matana and Doreen, how extraordinary Paul and Eslanda Robeson were – but also that they were part of the greater context of African Americans coming to East Germany in the 1950s and 1960s. It was a sort of mutual, symbiotic relationship: East Germany held up African Americans as political symbols and used them as a legitimating tool, and rightly so in a lot of ways. They pointed out that they stood in solidarity with African American civil rights, that they understood and were supportive of anti-colonialist struggles and anti-capitalist struggles, and recognised the problems of racism. East Germany positioned itself as a land and as a space that was welcoming to African American political activists. Angela Davis came to visit, Martin Luther King Jr. came to visit, Paul Robeson as well. There is a fascinating, long history of African American entanglements with East Germany; for example, African American soldiers stationed in Germany occasionally left the military to live in the GDR. But it also went both ways; it was also really useful for African Americans to travel to East Germany. They could use it as a form of international pressure in communicating back in the United States, “Look at all of the support we have from around the world.”
When I think about Paul Robeson’s tour in 1960 and him getting the Peace Medal from the GDR, it very much fits that model and that mould, and the ways in which they chose to celebrate him reflected that. I’m going to be the most critical of how Paul Robeson was often received in East Germany. He fit the mould so well of what the East German state and a lot of East Germans were looking for: a sort of African American hero. But what I also look at in my research is that there are other African Americans who, when they did not fit that model, were not treated so well. The initiative to bring Paul and Eslanda Robeson to East Germany was a powerful moment of international solidarity in the wake of Paul Robeson finally getting his passport back. But nonetheless, I am suspicious of how people understood (American) Blackness.
Paul Robeson and Aubrey Pankey, American baritone and Lieder singer, who emigrated to the GDR in 1956, 5 October 1960
Paul Robeson and Helene Weigel, 5 October 1960
GEORGE E. LEWIS What I’m thinking most about at the moment is Shana L. Redmond’s extraordinary hermeneutic treatment of Paul Robeson in her recent book, Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson, which takes its title from an Eslanda Robeson quote. She writes: “Everything, everybody, asked him to be everywhere.”3 It’s kind of funny, I’m an African American academic at a big-time institution, and that really is still the case. The few Black academics are called upon to be a part of diversity committees in order to hide the lack of diversity in these institutions. Now, a recurring theme in Redmond’s book is the primary role of voice as productive of social status, cultural image. Sound becomes a prime site for struggles over representation as a resource. Her chapter on vibration connects the sensory aspect of personal listening to Robeson, and that folds
out into an account of how his voice could move audiences to reassemble themselves as political and social actors. I think both Matana Roberts and Kira Thurman address the consequences of this issue in their works.
But I’d like to turn towards Doreen. I was researching your important concept of archival metabolism, which considers the archival system as a transformative one with the possibility to initiate what is not yet there. With that, you also suggest a performativity of the archive. You write: “What if the archive whispers dissonantly in various voices and operates within transgenerational time and misunderstandings, deracinating the mechanisms of linear narratives?”4 Here, I thought that a discussion of the relation between archive and performance could be helpful. I was thinking of performance theorist Diana Taylor’s 2003 book, The Archive and The Repertoire, 5 which is a wide-ranging and strongly politically inflected analysis that rightly identifies the fiction of the internally unchanging, stable, unmediated archive. Extending Taylor, I take archival metabolism as the sense in which an archive actually enacts a repertoire. So, you get an apparently disembodied memory that nonetheless produces gestures, orality, dance, and movement. And in the case of Paul Robeson: voice. How does that feel to you? DM That’s really an amazing observation, thank you. And one that has become extremely important, specifically while working on archival substances departing from political geographies of anti-imperialist politics, of solidarities, political friendships, of forms of internationalism that have infrastructurally and institutionally pretty much disappeared after 1989 and 1990. Or rather, they have been violently erased or repressed. Archival metabolism is an attempt to look to these historic moments as transhistorical, transgenerational moments while considering the extreme tension between these macropolitical infrastructures of state socialisms. Yet we do not only have the macrostructure of a socialist kind of entity, which sits in the global Cold War, but also the microsocial potencies that come across in the form of practices of the undocumented, of what is whispered, of what is slipping through. In an interview with Radio East Berlin in 1963, the interviewer continuously misnames Eslanda as Esmalda, but also says the N-word, which is so disturbing, until Eslanda very loudly says, “ES-LAN-DA is my name.” It’s about these elements that would usually slip through a more classical historical observation but that matter for a contemporary approach to the archive, let’s say from a more curatorial/politics perspective – which I think is necessary, specifically for the kind of narratives and archival substances that speak of independence, liberation, or a Black internationalism. You can’t just copy and paste these ideas into the present condition. They need processing. And this is what
Eslanda Robeson speaks at the mass rally to mark the International Day of Remembrance for Victims of Fascist Terror, 13 September 1959
this concept tries to do. I would like to see it as a methodology for decolonising socialism, decolonising internationalism, which has not always only been anti-imperialist and anti-fascist. GEL Kira Thurman, you just published this amazing book, Singing like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. You recount the experiences of Afrodiasporic Bach performers in Germany, stretching back more than a century, and situate the struggles and triumphs of African American Lieder singers there. Now, in your essay about Paul Robeson’s 1960 performances in the GDR, you write: “Robeson’s tour created the opportunity for East Germans to redress or reaffirm their own beliefs about Blacks and musical aesthetics. East Germans also reinforced their own constructs of race and African American identity, praising him for evoking a particular kind of Black authenticity they admired.”6 And I was reminded that, often enough, the archive, especially perhaps this one, comes bundled with a kind of anxiety. I’m thinking here about James A. Snead’s well-known essay “On Repetition in Black Culture”.7 He saw the use of repetition in ways that encourage the self-bounded cultural entity to maintain a sense of continuity about itself. So, does the reception of Paul Robeson in the GDR reflect not only German constructions of race and African American identity, but also Germany’s own constructions of its own identity? KT I think the answer, at least in an East German context, is yes. One of the reasons why I think Paul Robeson is held up is because he is so comfortably un-German as well, so in a way they can celebrate him without necessarily having to wrestle with East German anti-Black racism. And that’s maybe the thing that’s missing and the context that I’m trying to bring with my book. It is taking seriously what those German anti-Black racisms look like and how we can put it in conversation with this very long history of African American musicians going to Germany and Austria. How can we think more seriously and more critically about Black German expressions and Black German activism? In fact, I was wondering if the Paul Robeson Archive is the only “official” archive in Germany dedicated to a Black person – to an African American, not to a Black German. I say that also because in Berlin there is a Black German centre called Each One Teach One (EOTO); it’s a makeshift archive that has been forming in the last ten to twenty years. And there are some materials about May Ayim at the Freie Universität, but they have never really been processed. It’s important to think about decolonisation efforts, and it’s worth asking whose voices we do and do not hear in the archives. GEL You’re making me think about the non-official archives, which are thus placing pressure on the mainstream regimes, such as the SAVVY Contemporary here in Berlin and their work on Anton Wilhelm Amo, the 18th-century Black German philosopher.
Eslanda Robeson receives the Deutsche Friedensmedaille (German Peace Medal), 8 July 1963
Now, what I got in your paper, and this takes me back to repetition, is this ongoing repeated effort to deploy the Robeson story as an epistemological other. You quote all this press reception. He was a Black giant, a Black prophet, a Black Jesus, a Black Saint Francis, their Black brother, et cetera. Oh, yeah, and did I mention he was Black? Was this kind of dynamic limited to the GDR and its interpretation of socialism, or do we find similar resonances today? KT There are similar resonances. One way in which societies try to limit Black people is through musical reception and the expectations that we place on Black bodies. Sonic and visual expectations of Black people and what they should look and sound like and that need to somehow confirm or conform with people’s ideals. So many conversations about Paul Robeson’s voice are just tied into these longstanding stereotypes of Black voices as dark, smoky. I see this across the board for any Black
and movement. George E. Lewis
musician; you can be a soprano, and somebody is still going to say, oh, dark, smoky. GEL Matana, you wrote in your essay about resonance: “There have been times in my own life when I have looked to history to cope with my experiences of just being a Black body in a vast world.”8 And to me, that points to a kind of empathy in your encounter with the Robeson Archive. Later you write: “The term resonance can be defined as ‘the quality in a sound of being deep, full, and reverberating’ or, when thinking about resonance as applied to an image, it brings to mind ideas of clarity, of depending upon your own associated memories and experiences.” Now, for me, empathy is also a form of resonance. You made a piece in dialogue with the Robeson Archive. What is that piece about? MR I have always looked to history as a sense of coping with a certain sort of layers and layers upon filters that I have to deal with as a Black body in the world, as a Black artist whose work has to constantly be filtered through a white gaze in order to garner support or criticality. Rarely do I get to intercept with the Black gaze first, other than my own. Looking in the archive made me think a lot about how the lives of Black artists through generations are essentially theme and variations. I’m not certain that I would have been able to handle the things that Paul and Eslanda Robeson have been through. But still, because of the perniciousness of systematic racism and the way in which it still sits within the root work in most institutions, looking at their work I recognise a reminder to stay in the fight. And I got from the archive just massive inspiration to remain a Black body in the world, to remain a Black artist in the world, to continue to push through and hold my head as high as I can to create the world that I wish to see.
This excerpt has been edited by Nora Weinelt. The video recording of the entire conversation can be found on www.adk.de
Paul Robeson in front of Humboldt University in Berlin after being awarded the Großer Stern der Völkerfreundschaft (Great Star of Friendship between Nations) by the GDR government, the Deutsche Friedensmedaille (German Peace Medal) by the Peace Council of the GDR, and the honorary doctor’s degree of Humboldt University, 5 October 1960. 1 In 1956, Paul Robeson was subpoenaed to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. 2 See Barbara Ransby, Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Eslanda Robeson (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2014). 3 See Shana L. Redmond, Everything Man: The Form and
Function of Paul Robeson (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2020), p. 14. 4 Doreen Mende, “The Undutiful Daughter’s Concept of
Archival Metabolism”, e-flux, no. 93 (September 2018), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/93/215339/theundutiful-daughter-s-concept-of-archival-metabolism/ 5 See Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire:
Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 6 Kira Thurman, “Ol’ Man River in the Promised Land: Paul
Robeson in East Germany”, in L. Brion, ed., Arbeit am
Gedächtnis – Transforming Archives, exh. cat. (Berlin:
Akademie der Künste, 2021), pp. 90–92, here p. 90. 7 James A. Snead, “On Repetition in Black Culture”, Black
American Literature Forum, vol. 15, no. 4 (1981), pp. 146–54. 8 Matana Roberts, “Resonance”, in L. Brion, ed., Arbeit am
Gedächtnis — Transforming Archives, pp. 32–33.
DOREEN MENDE, a curator, theorist, and educator, has been head of the research department at the Staatliche Kunstsammlung Dresden (SKD) since 2021. Since 2015, she has been professor of curatorial/politics and director of the Critical Curatorial Cybernetic Research Practices Master and PhD Forum at the Visual Arts Department of HEAD Genève (Geneva). Moreover, she is Principal Investigator of the research project “Decolonizing Socialism: Entangled Internationalism” (2019–24), and is a founding member of the Harun Farocki Institute in Berlin. MATANA ROBERTS is a composer, band leader, saxophonist, sound experimentalist, and mixed-media practitioner. Best known for the acclaimed Coin Coin project, the aims of which are to expose the mystical roots and channel the traditions of American creative expression, Roberts has dealt intensively with narrative, historical, social, and political forms of expression within improvisatory musical structures. In 2019, Roberts was a fellow in the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program.
KIRA THURMAN is a historian and Assistant Professor of History and Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan with a focus on the relationship between music, German national identity, and Central Europe’s historical and contemporary relationship with the Black diaspora. Together with colleagues across the United States and Europe, and supported by the German Historical Institute Washington, DC, she runs the public history website blackcentraleurope.com.
GEORGE E. LEWIS is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University in New York City. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy as well as being a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and, since November 2021, a member of the Akademie der Künste Music Section. He is widely regarded to be a pioneer of interactive computer music, creating programs that improvise in concert with human musicians.
