Ugliness and beauty, they are everywhere around us, inherent in the fabric that binds us all to the human condition. If you looked hard enough, you might find them locked endlessly in dialectical tensions in the best of us. And in the best of our ideas and inventions. Like social media, at once a connective technology and a dopamine-generating machine that assimilates its reward mechanism to the concealment of its profit capture from users that also yield themselves and their stories to both simulacrum and truth. Like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, undermined by its racist descriptions and stereotypic imagery, despite a most elegant modernist language organized in the service of its arguably anti-colonial resistance. Like beautiful Berlin, a former enclave of Nazi horror that is now home to not only one of the greenest places on the planet but also a diversity of voices and faces that constitute an internationalism inflected by the city’s subterranean racism, If American cities were not equally lovely spaces that concurrently witness the gains of individual freedoms and the morbid illogic of incidents like gun violence, I would wager that Berlin’s ambiguities are peculiar, but they are not! What I have seen of Berlin, starting from the summer of 2023, is this Janus-faced reality that shapes the collective human experience.
Consider an incident at an Edeka store in East Berlin; some would imagine Edeka as a fancy organic food store that caters mostly to seniors and relatively rich folks. As far as I was concerned, it was your regular Walmart with a bit of a glowing edge. In any case, when I lived in the city of Bochum, somewhere around the Rhine River, Edeka was the closest store to me, and is, therefore, the one store I would look out for in any German city. So when I found myself in Prenzlauer Berg that summer, the normal thing again was to look around for Edeka’s yellow-crested blue branding. Despite a REWE store beside me, I would walk past and go all the way to Schönhauser Allee which was some miles away from where I lived around the road to Pankow, about 10 mins drive what remains of the famed Berlin Wall. I had gone to this particular Edeka store a couple of times before this day which I now recollect with some mild irritation.
It probably helps to recall how the day itself started. For some odd reason, I had left the house that morning, thinking about the neo-Marxist French philosopher, Louis Althusser. I cannot recall if my mind was actually preparing me for Lauri Kubuitsile’s talk that afternoon at Humboltd University, but the phrase racial interpellation kept dancing around in my mind. Prescient perhaps, but for anyone wondering what Althusser meant by interpellation, he was mainly interested in processes of subject formation and subjectivity. He described interpellation as a form of hailing in social interactions that reinforce ideological systems; how we come to accept views and values that subject us to the workings of a repressive system. Of course, this is a very simplistic way of putting it, but to be interpellated racially, for example, is to be hailed in a manner in which your race is made the essentializing attribute of your identity.
As I walked towards the train station, I kept thinking about what this might mean in the immediacy of my encounters in the city: in the smiles and the kind of frozen stares strangers might get in East Berlin, but probably not in the West. Engrossed in my mobile adventure in high theory in heterotopic Berlin, I challenged myself to a game, wondering how I would translate Althusser for my daughter should the need ever arise. And then some light from the domains of popular aphorism appeared to shine on me: “Nobody makes you inferior without your consent.” Often attributed to a former occupant of the American White House. No, not any president; a First Lady, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt to be specific. And I reckon that her take on the place of personal responsibility and agency in the circumstances of life’s many turns and bends may have appealed to Althusser. The key word is consent. You are already a racially interpellated subject if you give your consent to the inferior values and racist attitudes a repressive ideological system assigns to you.
When I got to Humboldt University and, after she had read from sections of her historical novel, The Scattering, Kubuitsile saw to it that my thoughts remained on the subject of race. During one of the Q&As that interposed her readings, someone asked her, a white American who became a citizen of Botswana in the late 1980s, if it was in her place to write about the German genocide of the Hereros in Namibia, partly the subject of her brilliant novel. Not the exact phrasing of the question, but something like that. Let’s just say her response to this and other questions — like the politics of appropriation, the Caine Prize and poverty porn in contemporary African fiction, and even the orthographic politics of capitalizing Black but not White, would get her cancelled were she to have ventured them on Twitter. But I especially loved her answers, especially the insistence that we urgently need to eschew the now-dominant perspective that only people of a certain group are best positioned to write about them.
You can imagine how I felt when I got to Edeka later that day and the ideas of race and racism that had built a nest in my mind escaped into the real world to haunt me. It began at the baking aisle. Google Translate had given an incorrect word for flour that had left me exasperated. Kemi wanted to bake her first sets of Puff Puff in Berlin that evening and I had been saddled with the noble task of finding everything she needed. After admitting that Google was not going to save me in this case, I asked a store attendant for help. She was patient in guiding me to the right items — yeast, sugar, etc., but my not being able to speak Deutsch hindered much communication on our part. Hardly had I got all I needed and trudged wearily to check out when a more insidious monster showed up.
For some odd reason, the cashier, a bright-eyed and agile senior demanded I produce my ID card to prove my Capital One credit card was in fact mine. Again, language stood in our way, as I first thought she wanted me to perform the usual rite of signage that, I came to discover later, some European merchants still ask of buyers. I asked for a pen to sign the receipt and move along but she insisted I had to produce my passport. I think it was the mention of my passport that made it apparent that she did not trust my ownership of my credit card. I was contemplating producing it when it suddenly became crystal clear that I was the only one in a long queue of buyers being asked to prove my card was mine. I confess: Althusser did not race back to my mind at the moment, but I also found myself refusing to prove that I owned a card I had used without any qualms in the same store a couple of days earlier. I knew what was being done. She seemed to have concluded I was too poor or too immigrant-looking to own the card. Not when most people paid for their goods with cash.
As she insisted, so did I. It was a moment of ugliness that affected me in no small way, but as is often the case with ambiguities, there was also a place for beauty and grace in the space, for another Berliner — furiously shouting expletives at the woman from the back of the line — would not keep quiet in the face of what she thought was racial profiling. I agreed with her; even if that cashier did not understand a word of my English or chose not to, the woman who spoke up in my support made sure she got my interlocutor to get the gist of her prejudice. Not that it changed things, though. Finally, when neither of us would budge, I decided my little act of resistance did not need to become a spectacle. Right then, it was time to unbag all the goods and return them to the conveyor belt. I simply walked away to another store, not minding I had already paid for the items. The goal was to shun the victimization of another person’s ignorance while removing myself from the locale of their racial nervousness. What was most irking, though, was the feeling that the labor to produce Puff Puff might yield nothing.
As I walked away, alone but unashamed and unbowed, two teenagers ran to me, with a deviant sense of solidarity and broken English on their heels. It was as if they wanted, if they could, to press charges on my behalf, telling me what the woman had done was not good and that I should consider talking to the police. Listening to them made my teary eyes a bit moister than they needed to be and offering a Danke at that moment would have been nice. From them and the woman who spoke up at Edeka, I realized that people, bad people, may break us, but people, good people, also make us and cover our weaknesses with their garments of care and love. People don’t have to speak the same language or be in the same age group or from the same country to be ethical. In Berlin that day, the contraries, and ambivalences of human experiences were visible to the naked eye.
What happened in Berlin reminded me of a similar occurrence some years earlier in Kansas. This time around, we are in the American mid-west, and a poet is about to deconstruct an epiphanic moment of racial self-realization. The Nigerian poet Rasaq Malik and I were out one sunny afternoon as summer reached its climax in 2019, the week before Jayhawkers returned to the University of Kansas (KU) campus. No, it was not that part of the Free State where you might expect two Black men to offer a smile of atonement to signal their lack of threat to anyone they encountered. You may be familiar with that ritual of safety among Black men who have been taught to perform their lack of aggression by centuries of racial violence and an unabating fate of police power and carceral discipline. It was in Lawrence, the birthplace of the famous African American poet Langston Hugues, a typical American college town on top of Mount of Oread.
I do not recall what gave us away as potential shoplifters but our animated discussions about poetry and the Nigerian homeland must have blinded us to the realities of an assailing shop attendant. But you will hardly blame both of us for getting carried away by discussions of Nigerian poetry and its recent extroverted march into the heart of other locations in middle America, what one might call a certain Iowaization of Nigerian literature. But the contentious politics of the homeland, a usual staple in diasporic discourses, played some role in this other attempt to become racially interpellated. If you asked me, though, it probably came down to Rasaq’s choice of outfit that day. For some reason, the Iseyin-born writer who had arrived at KU as a Fulbright fellow in Yorùbá language had donned an òfì, the top of the handwoven loomed fabric, aṣọ òkè. You need to understand the symbolism of the aṣọ òkè to appreciate what a foremost Yorùbá poetry performer had intended it to accomplish as part of his sartorial politics in the Midwest. In its heydays, the Aṣọ òkè was a dress of royalty and was often found among the elite class. It was the kind of clothes you would wear if you had a special occasion involving the celebration of life’s major feats. In more contemporary times, it has become a symbol of Yorùbá pride, a way of signalling your appreciation and veneration of culture. Rasaq’s new role at the KU involved teaching both language and culture, so I am guessing he had put on this regalia to mark his enthusiastic anticipation of a classroom filled with American undergraduates eager to learn Yorùbá.
The moment we entered the shop, some woman took notice of us it seemed, and began to follow us about. From aisle to aisle and to the ends of the earth, she was determined to stop us from carting away every one-Dollar item, for it was a dollar store. I had lived in Saskatoon and saw this several times when some white guy would follow a First Nations youth around. So, as soon as I saw this woman in a third aisle, pretending to dust off a perfectly clean shelf, I pointed Rasaq, who had been completely oblivious to what was happening, in her direction and assured him she would join us in the next aisle. Of course, she did, surveilling our every step and waiting to pounce should the anxieties she had become a reality. Again, here were two individuals being profiled in a college town that is often regarded as the most progressive county in Kansas.
From Germany to the US and to elsewhere, you will find good people and bad people, ugliness and beauty, and a constant tension between both. Rasaq and I may have laughed about our experience that day, but we also went away knowing the struggle never to surrender to racial interpellations is always ongoing. Whether it is a dollar store in Kansas or the Edeka in Berlin — where I later got an apology and an assurance from the store manager that he will be retraining some of his employees — the ugliness of a few and the beauty of many others remain very much intimately entangled. The challenge for all of us is to abjure single stories of the cities we visit.
James Yékú 