In identity, the thrilling, original debut novel by the German journalist and cultural scientist Mithu Sanyal, the young protagonist Nivedita struggles with her place in the German order of things. Nivedita has a Polish mother, an Indian father, and gets questions about where she comes from and who she is. She can sometimes feel jealous of her cool niece Pritti from Birmingham, who is much darker, much more “authentic” than she is, or of her white roommate Charlotte, who seems to have access to all sorts of clubs Nivedita doesn’t belong to.
But when Nivedita starts taking the postcolonial theory course, she suddenly experiences that long-cherished feeling of being at home. And it’s all thanks to her teacher, the controversial professor Saraswati who goes through life with only one first name. This Saraswati does something in her first class that would horrify critics of ‘woke culture’ in the university: she asks all white students to scratch their heads; her profession is purely intended for students of color.
Saraswati introduces thinkers of color like Audre Lorde and Stuart Hall to her classes, and teaches about the influence of colonial oppression on just about everything. Take gender: that strict distinction between men and women is a typical Western idea: India hosts the oldest trans festival in the world, in the village of Koovagam. And it wasn’t until Arab countries were colonized that anti-gay laws were introduced. Who is considered ‘black’ is constantly changing, Saraswati says. Race is a construct. But make no mistake: racism is a reality.
power of interpretation
Nivedita is flourishing thanks to Saraswati’s teachings. It organizes ‘radical cuddling’ sessions for its students. She affectionately calls her female students ‘third world diva girls’ – after a quote from American feminist professor and activist Bell Hooks (bell hooks). Under the auspices of Saraswati, being non-white becomes cool, her students are given the space to define themselves. After all, Saraswati teaches: the struggle of feminists and anti-racists is about interpretative power: the right to determine for yourself who you are.
But then it turns out that the professor lied about her origin. She has no Indian roots, she is in reality the daughter of two snow-white Germans from Karlsruhe. A social media storm erupts, Saraswati is put on hold and Nivedita decides to talk to her mentor. But she refuses to apologize in the long and sharp conversations that guide identity† Because why shouldn’t she decide to be black?
identity hit Germany like a bomb, the novel was shortlisted for the Deutsche Buchpreis, and was awarded the Ruhr Literature Prize and the Ernst-Bloch Prize 2021. ‘I mainly wanted to write a book about identity and mixed race‘, says Mithu Sanyal (50) in the courtyard of the Faculty of Humanities at Utrecht University – she is a guest there for the promotion of her book and is staying on a houseboat on the Vecht. There has also been no real debate about racism in the mass media for a long time, if Germans feel uncomfortable using the term race at all. And the colonial past of Germany has also been neglected for a long time; talking about it would divert attention from the atrocities of the Nazis. With my book I wanted to make room in the German discourse for all questions about identity.’
It larger than lifeSaraswati’s character bears many similarities to Rachel Dolezal, the American civil rights activist who pretended to be an African-American woman but was exposed as white by her own parents. Is Saraswati based on her?
“It all started with Rachel Dolezal, when that scandal broke out in 2015, I was immediately fascinated. All the questions that I have been dealing with as a bicultural person all my life came up: who are you? No, who are you really? Can you prove who you are? And the accusations against Dolezal were reproaches that I have also felt, which I have made to myself. Am I authentic, am I not pretending to be different? That’s when the idea of this novel came into being, in which I use Saraswati as a mirror. While Saraswati has no qualms about adopting a black identity, Nivedita doesn’t know who she is and doesn’t dare to take up that space.’
Rachel Dolezal was undeniably canceled; she lost her job, she couldn’t walk the streets anymore. What made people so mad at her?
“People really resented her, and you have to see that in the context of an America where laws and subsidy schemes have been set up to get more people of color into certain positions. The feeling is then that white people like Dolezal benefit from this form of positive discrimination. I delved into the cancel culture for my book and discovered that the process often runs along the same lines. The social media storm usually lasts about three weeks, then the attention fades. Often the ‘cancelled’ people have their jobs back after a while, or they have gotten a better job because of all the attention. But Rachel Dolezal not, she is a tragic figure. I saw that she made face masks in different skin colors during the pandemic and sold them online.’
How big is this phenomenon of skin color appropriation? Are there more people who measure themselves a different skin color?
“In the United States, there’s a whole genre of books on this subject, but mostly they’re about people of color pretending to be white, to survive, to get a better job. I learned from writing this book that there are all Rachel Dolezals. Thanks to the Netflix documentary The Rachel Divide I also tracked down Ronnie Gladden, an American professor who coined the term transracial mint – the g stands for gender. Ronnie describes himself as a black man who sees himself as a white woman, people get completely off the leg of that identification. Ronnie is brilliant, understands all the contradictions around this theme, and keeps people thinking. He defended Rachel Dolezal, envisioning a reality in which people can choose their own ethnicity and their own gender.’
But can you be something like transracial, the term Saraswati uses to characterize her identity?
‘Oh yes, but only when racism has been fought and the wounds healed. First society has to change, but what Saraswati does is change her body, she takes the shortest turn. She appropriates an identity without experiencing the pain of exclusion. Moreover, she lied to Nivedita, for whom it was so important to have a role model.’
The passages in which the young Nivedita addresses the Hindu goddess Kali are moving and funny. She doesn’t seem to be able to really talk to anyone except with this voice in her head. Is Nivedita based on your own experiences?
‘There are elements of me in Nivedita’s descriptions. Like me, she is of both Indian and Polish descent. There is a scene from my own life, when Nivedita meets a friend’s therapist. He lets out a cry of ecstasy: you are Indian! Indian people can breathe so naturally. At that moment, Nivedita can no longer breathe. Those kinds of experiences have been taken from my life.’
Rolling Stone Magazine wrote about identity: ‘This is for all the people who are constantly asked: where are you from?’ What makes that question so burdensome sometimes?
“The question is difficult because it seems to imply, you’re not from here, you’re an Auslander. People often do not want to know where you come from, they want to know why you are brown. In migration countries such as the United States or Canada, the question is much less fraught: everyone eventually comes from somewhere else. I’ve thought long and hard about that question. Perhaps it is better to ask: what is your ethnic heritage, and what does it mean to you? But then again, that’s a mouthful right away.’
It sounds in identity also criticized the term ‘white people’.
“Actually, that term is insulting, because it refers to the idea of white supremacy. That idea arose during the transatlantic slave trade, as a legitimization of the inhumane treatment of the enslaved. Before that, Europeans identified themselves based on where they lived, or what language they spoke, no one saw themselves as ‘white’. Due to a long struggle for emancipation, black is now associated with revolt and revolution. While white is negative, a restrictive description, moreover, because it now does not do justice to the people who are counted on it. I also struggle with the idea of individual responsibility. Should white people give up and feel guilty about their privileges? Above all, I want everyone to have the privilege of being treated as a human being.’
Nivedita also struggles with her place in the world, because she has no examples, no people to compare herself to. Did you want to change that with your book?
‘Yes, there is a huge lack of it in German literature, so as a girl I had to figure it all out myself. I remember so well when I first The Buddha of the Suburb by Hanif Kureishi. Although it was about the life of a Pakistani-English boy in South London, I just thought: this is me. This is about me. I wanted to show in my book that mixed ancestry can be confusing and lonely, but identity is also something to play with, that it can be funny and fun to freely find out who you are and what you belong to. The theme fascinates me enormously. I recently found out that the famous German writer Thomas Mann was also of mixed descent, his mother was Brazilian, who had to be ‘civilized’ on arrival in Germany. A new book of mine will be published in October, in which I Wuthering Heights reread: the character Heathcliff is identified as ‘black’, it was written by Emily Brontë, a woman whose parents are Irish and Cornish, both colonies of England at the time. That gives the book a very interesting perspective.’
What point about cultural appropriation did you want to make in identity†
‘I think it’s great that we’re talking about cultural appropriation talk, but we’re asking the wrong questions. It’s not about whether a white actor can play Othello, or whether a white translator can translate the work of a black author. Of course you can. The real questions we need to address are: why is the world of literature and academia so white, how can we provide more access for people of color? And why do white actors have the privilege to play everyone, why are they ascribed a certain universalism, while black actors are often typecast? How can we change this system?’
identity was recently published in Dutch by Cossee publishers.
