Marilya Veteto-Conrad, Northern Arizona University
When Elias Canetti - polyglot, author, Spanish-speaking, Bulgarian-born Jew, and 1981 Nobel laureate - wrote his 1977 autobiographical novel The Tongue Set Freed, from which the title of this article is taken, he could have had no inkling that he would be recruited two decades later for the purpose of examining whether another German-speaking author (from halfway across the world) belonged to a genre that was not even known in 1977: German minority literature.
Indeed, as non-ethnic Germans were being presented by such publishing houses as Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag (four anthologies appeared between 1978 and 1980), no one thought to connect Cannetti with what has come to be variously known as guest-worker literature (Gastarbeiterliteratur) and foreigner literature (Ausländerliteratur), or minority literature. Bringing Canetti and minority literature together is primarily a useful Goethe-esque conceit, for it allows one to take a broader view of the genre, one that spans both East and West. However, for the purpose of this article, Canetti largely serves as a foil for the author on whom I wish to focus - the Indian-born poet Anant Kumar, a graduate and one-time employee of the New Delhi Goethe Institute, who now lives and writes in Kassel, Germany. Kumar and Canetti form the bookends of the genre not only in terms of their age (Canetti was born in 1905, Kumar in 1969), but also in terms of their positions relative to the maturation of the genre.
Canetti exhibits some qualities similar to those seen in minority literature before its arrival on the literary scene in the late seventies and early eighties. [1] Kumar represents the most recent developments in the genre. Some of the characteristics of Kumar's writings are so different from those we see before him in this genre that it may actually be an indication that the genre, as it is named, may be obsolete.
Canetti is a favorite author of another minority German poet, Zehra Çirak, the Istanbul-born daughter of a Gastarbeiter family. Chronologically, she is closest to Canetti - her first volume of poetry appeared barely ten years after The Tongue Set Free - but thematically Çirak is situated approximately two-thirds of the way between the two Canetti-Kumar bookends in Kumarís direction. Çirak was the recipient of the Hölderlin Advancement Award (which promotes a younger, less established author) in 1993, the same year that Hilde Domin was awarded the main Hölderlin Award. Çirak has long praised Canetti for his wit, his way with words, and his insights into multilingualism and multiculturalism back when the word "multiculturalism" was still a compliment and before it became jargon bandied about by politicians. [2] Çirak is known for her facility with German, for her limberness in walking the tightrope that biculturalism entails. This was what appealed to her in Canetti's autobiography. However, her aversion to her work being reduced to the label Gastarbeiterliteratur or, even worse, to victim literature (Betroffenheitsliteratur) places her closer to Kumar. Kumar was a nominee, and Çirak the recipient, of the 2001 Adelbert von Chamisso Prize awarded non-German authors.
Other relatively young minority writers on the German literary scene include several from what is known as the second generation of minority writers. Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Zafer Senocak, Renan Demirkan, and even Akif Pirincçi can be viewed as precursors to Anant Kumar in that all of them boldly and unapologetically claimed their right to German as a literary language before Kumar's arrival in Germany, but in different ways and with various success: Senocak focused on the sociopolitical and founded a publishing house; Demirkan moved from an acting career to writing semi-autobiographical prose and on to dealing with nonminority themes; and Pirincçi moved to screenwriting when Ufa turned his 1989 best-seller Felidae into an animated film. [3] Of all the minority writers, Pirincçi is the most unabashedly commercial and the one who distanced himself the farthest from the genre of minority literature when he stated that the problems of Turks meant nothing to him. [4]
Unlike Pirincçi, Kumar wants nothing other than to live the life of a poet. His entire existence revolves around his art, and he is proud that it is his sole livelihood. [5] He is the youngest member of the literary society of the federal state of Hesse and was in the final running for the first Adelbert von Chamisso Prize of the new millennium.
Canetti serves as a useful foil for Kumar in other ways, too. The biographical similarities between them are numerous: similar to Canetti, who spoke several languages, Kumar is a polyglot who feels at home in both the Occident and the Orient. Also, like Canetti, Kumar was born into an affluent family, raised in a non-Christian environment, resides in a country other than his homeland, and has chosen to write in German.
Beyond the question of nationality and cultural allegiance, however, is the attitude toward the reader that Canetti takes implicitly in The Tongue Set Free and that Kumar has stated overtly - that when he writes, he always considers that he is making a claim on the time of his reader. Similarly, Canetti's autobiography is no literary self-indulgence either; rather, he wishes to reward his reader's investment of time and interest with insights via the author's own experience, much in the manner of a Bildungsroman. This intent gives The Tongue Set Free a liberating and redemptive feature aside from its other merits; another take on its title, perhaps? The author's tongue or language has been saved or set free, but the reader profits, too, from the insights the author offers on culture and language.
Canetti has demonstrated a childlike disdain for the limitations of nationality. In The Tongue Set Free, he describes several episodes in his childhood when he preferred to focus on Europe collectively rather than on one country of allegiance. Similarly, Kumar points out in Organ für Social Beat, Punk & Weltrevolution [6] that people are merely people, regardless of what nationality is inscribed in their passports. He also demonstrates a sense of the universal. In Fremde Frau, fremder Mann (Foreign Woman, Foreign Man, 1998), he says poetry knows no borders. The best example, he says, is he himself, an Indian, who feels at home in German literature and language. And he notes that good literature lives up to humanity. Both Kumar and Canetti possess an eye for the minutiae of human existence; paradoxically, this is one way each chooses to point to the globalities they emphasize. Canetti's detailed prose descriptions are similar to what Die Brücke's literary critic Anna Narojek has called Kumar's "countless minute observations" in her review of Kasseler Texte. [7]
Canetti's descriptions of minutiae in The Tongue Set Free - descriptions of people, interiors, moods, weather, and clothing - direct a literary gaze onto daily events, just as the poems in Kumar's Fremde Frau, fremder Mann do. In her review of Fremde Frau, fremder Mann, Narojek praises Kumar for making routine events lyrical, saying that they illustrate the poetry of daily life that otherwise remains concealed to us. [8] This is evident in passages such as the following from the poem "Autumn 96": "today even more leaves were on the sidewalk/on them trampled the locals with shopping bags/and the foreigners too" ("Herbst 96": "Heute waren noch mehr Blätter auf dem Gehweg. / Drauf trampelten die Einheimischen mit Einkaufstüten. / Und auch die Fremden.") [9]
Like Canetti, Kumar straddles at least three cultures and languages, observing them all, yet embracing none completely. And in their literature, each is hard to categorize culturally, or, as Kumar himself puts it in Christina Hein's article from Hessisch-Niedersächsische Allgemeine in May 1998, he represents a facet of German literature that is not commonplace. [10] He aligns himself with poet Heinrich Heine in a text from Fremde Frau, fremder Mann in which he presents himself as a foreigner who is presumptuous enough to take the reader's language for his own. He also boldly accepts - in popular psychotherapy jargon, owns - what might otherwise be considered hindrances or sources of shame: his unpronounceable and exotic Indian name, and the fact that some in his homeland practice ritual immolation of widows while others devote themselves to the intricate sexual positions from the Kama Sutra. He quickly dismisses these facts and gets to the point: he prefers German, despite the countless admonitions of how hard German is, how it is easier said than done to adopt another language for one's poetry. He admits to a bursting head, but also to a state of peace and contentment following each success. Wittily, he suggests that the readers take the plunge, the risk, and devote a few of their precious Einkaufsminuten - shopping minutes - to the uniqueness of his thoughts and to the unknown rhythms of his verse. He concedes that they will not only assure his further existence, but also make a further contribution to the integration of the foreign into their community. [11]
This passage makes clear why I refer to Kumar as possessing gespitzte Zunge, a pointed tongue, for he is indeed caustic and critical. Kumar's bold, sometimes sarcastic, but overall accepting embrace of his otherness is apparent in his spoken language before one experiences his literary voice: he steadfastly refuses to attempt a native German accent. Though tired of the superficial and even thoughtless questions of why he writes and whether he thinks in German, he responds with humor rather than rancor. He also writes wittily about encounters involving German in daily life in the poem "Astonishment," which appeared in Kasseler Texte: [12]
ERSTAUNEN
An der Haltestelle gestern
kam ein Junge auf mich zu
und gragte mich:
Entsculdigen Sie
Wie früh haben wir es jetzt?
- "Fünf vor halb!" -
Der Junge dankte
Und ging weiter,
Seinen Basketball dribblelnd.
In der Wilhelm-Busch-Strasse heute,
Hielt neben mir ein Wagen an,
Und ein nervöses Gesicht fragte mich:
"Hallo! Du! Deutsch Verstehen?
Ich blieb stehen und staunte
Mein Saunen war zu vielleicht zu lang.
Und seine Zeit vielleicth zu knapp.
Daher zischte der BMW-Fahrer ein
"Ach!"
Und fuhr weiter.
Ich stand noch da
Und staunte weiter.ASTONISHMENT
At the bus stop yesterday
a boy came up to me
and asked me:
Excuse me
What time is it now?
- "Twenty-five past!" -
The boy said Thanks
And went on,
Dribbling his basketball.
On Wilhelm-Busch Street today,
A car stopped next to me,
And a nervous face asked me,
"Hey! You! Understand German?"
I stood there in astonishment.
My astonishment was perhaps too long.
And his time perhaps too dear.
So the BMW driver hissed an
"Ach!"
And drove on.
I kept standing there
Still astonished.
Canetti, too, rises above the pettiness of nationalism, and can see primarily the benefits of his mulitcultural upbringing, though he resented his parents for not sharing their secret language of Viennese German, when he writes that the most intense among many desires of his childhood was to understand their secret language. While not holding this agains his father, he did hold a grudge against his mother that dissipated only years later when she finally began teaching her sone German. [13]
Kumar, whose "texts move between the Indian and the German world without playing one against the other," [14] also dismisses questions about his allegiance as irrelevant. [15] Proof of this is found in his texts that combine homesickness for India with praise for his circumstances in Kassel, as noted by Hessisch-Niedersächsische Allgemeine journalist Alexandra Koch in her article "Heimweh nach zwei Ländern" (Yearning for two countries). [16]
In this sense - though enlisted for the purpose of making a pleasant alliteration and forming a chronological bookend to the time and genre mentioned - neither Canetti nor Kumar fits in readily with the other writers, and certainly not with the beginnings of what has varyingly been called Gastarbeiterliteratur, Ausländerliteratur, Migrantenliteratur, Gastliteratur, or Immigrantenliteratur, [17] and thankfully so. Thankfully because, at least on the part of Kumar, this genre has finally stepped out of its limited and narrow array of topics, which, according to well-known author and theorist Franco Biondi, always included one of the following themes: initial confrontation with immigrant experience, immigrant existence, family events, or existential questions related to life in a new culture. [18] Although some of these themes are evident in both Canetti and Kumar, they are not the driving force behind their work. Instead, both are intrigued with the universal - that which aligns people, not that which distinguishes one group from another. Their focus is all about humanity ("alles über Menschen") rather than all about the other ("alles über die Fremden"), [19] which is show I would sum up Biondi's categories of foreigner literature.
Canetti's persona in The Tongue Set Free demonstrates the urge to know everything, to comprehensively analyze his world as a matter of course; children growing up are constantly absorbing, synthesizing, hypothesizing about the world, especially about the motivations of the adults around them. But the novel has significance beyond the development of one young boy; its readers find themselves rediscovering and reevaluating relationships, society, mores, culture, and language, as the young Canetti moves from one country to another, learning another language and set of behaviors. Anant Kumar has experienced a similar uprooting, albeit at a later age and with a different literary outcome, but the reader can discern similarities in both men's cosmopolitan perspectives, regardless of the catalyst. And both writers choose a register with a purpose. Whether it is Anant's determined retention of his Indian accent or his sometimes overtly self-conscious poetic style, Kumar almost seems to be attracting the reader's attention in the manner of Russian formalists who "considered writing to be poetic only when it drew the reader's attention to ... itself and prevented them from getting through the text too quickly." [20] Kumar often purposely plays with syntax, but it is indicative of the reception of non-German authors that he always states in a footnote that his digression from grammatical norm is based on poetic license and not ignorance.
Neither Kumar nor Canetti can be tagged with Barabara Fennell's description of early immigrant literature as "generally more remarkable for its content than its form" [21] because they, unlike the writers Fennell describes in her 1997 study Language, Literature, and the Negotiation of Identity, have a full grasp of the language. This feature is part of the reason why neither writer chooses to self-segregate himself from German society or the German literary mainstream. Fennell's thesis is that self-segregation of minority groups and writers within the minority groups is a step toward establishment of an identity [22] - one of the first stages is delineating one's place vis-à-vis the majority group. But Fennell's precept is based on research that focuses largely on minorities newly arrived in a country with which they have had no experience, much less any affinity. Canetti's childhood exposure to German and Kumar's extensive linguistic and cultural training at the New Delhi Goethe Institute both serve to exclude the two from Fennell's focus group. They both profited from a high level of education in German before ever embarking on their literary careers. And neither "represents an underprivileged group which is voicing its Betroffenheit" [23]: Kumar's works do not make up what is, metaphorically speaking, a literary class action suit, which is typical, especially of early minority writers, in the Federal Republic. Nor does The Tongue Set Free fall into that category of Betroffenheitsliteratur, or victim literature. In fact, as Fennell very rightly points out, the category itself is in such flux that to speak of it at all is to utilize an anachronism: "There is no monolithic entity ... the field has moved on, just as society has moved on in Germany." [24] Canetti and Kumar very nicely illustrate the point that Fennell wishes to make: Canetti was too early to fit into minority literature. Kumar is not too early, but his literature demonstrates that the label Ausländerliteratur is merely an ethnic, not a literary, one. Though literary scholars may lament the passing of a convenient label, the authors can breathe a sigh of relief. And Kumar can join the voice of Fritz Raddatz, literary critic and chief of the feuilleton of the German weekly Die Zeit, in asking how presumptuous we are when we call something ìforeigners' literatureî when it is actually an integral part of our own poetry, prose, or satire. [25]
Raddatz should be taken to task for even setting up in his question a dichotomy between "those" authors and the "us" group in which he includes himself; it is likely, however, that he would use different language to address this topic now, six years later. When can we finally see the "us" as all-encompassing? Perhaps with Kumar. [26] His work certainly lends itself to it, for his credo stated in Fremde Frau, fremder Mann as "Dichten und Dichtung: mein Lebenssaft" (Poetry: My life's blood) [27] is nothing if not universalizing. He often includes the quote from Roland Barthes that forms the epilogue to Kasseler Texte, saying that to write is to disrupt the meaning of the world, to state an indirect question. In attempting to answer this query, authors fail in one final indecisiveness, but each of us brings an answer in his or her own history, language, freedom. Yet as these three are ever-changing, the answer is infinite. One never stops answering the question that is written beyond all answers. [28]
In addition, Kumar's view of the "otherness" in society, while not disregarding the occasional encounter with prejudice, is revealed in his statement made during conversations with the author of this article, namely that "otherness" is not a phenomenon of nationality. [29] This is the reverse of the attitude behind Betroffenheitsliteratur, which focuses on the writer as the other for reasons of nationality and culture. Kumar permits, claims, and indeed owns Fremdheit, and sees it as an integral part of any culture. He does not see outsider status as a trial by fire, one that naturally and obligatorily precedes acceptance into the insider or majority group. And it is only appropriate that literary scholars do not make writers outsiders by their treatment of them.
Wie ein Fremder behandelt - Kumar's definition of what makes someone a foreigner - is one reason why Kumar enjoys popularity; Migrantenliteratur does enjoy some exoticism and public interest (hence the often superficial and even embarassing titles of the articles quoted here), but according to Fennell, non-German writers producing German literature no longer present a "restricted form of communication, limited in scope, themes, and form," but rather enjoy a "status as a variety of literature that is knocking on the door of mainstream German literature and that deserves to be measured by current standard criteria, rather than being treated as a separate (non-German, exotic, or inferior) genre." [30] Fennell cites Raddatz and Raitz when she points to the progression of this genre from the Klammer-und Klagephase - the stage that I have been calling Betroffenheit, which is characterized by poetry, everyday content, simple syntax, straightforward messages, oversimplification, and a reaching back into the folklore of the home country - to the at-home-in-a-foreign-place (Daheim in der Fremde) phase, to a consolidation phase. [31] We see nothing of the first two phases in Canetti's The Tongue Set Free, of course, and very little in any of Kumar's work. The coming-of-age to which Fennell alludes in her study [32] has several very telling aspects: intellectualism and translation into English and publication abroad. Both Canetti and Kumar have made that rite of passage.
The third phase Fennell sees as incomplete, that is, as still in progress. What may be a factor in bringing the third phase to completion is a step Leslie Adelson called for in her seminal 1990 article, "Migrant's Literature or German Literature?" [33] Her appeal was for a reconceptualization of "our understanding of an identifiably German core of contemporary literature." [34] She calls for immigrant literature to be included and thus freed from what she calls the Gastarbeiterexotik. I would claim that writers such as Kumar will be instrumental in this phase. He expresses optimism in the text with a famous literary allusion to Kafka in his poem from Kasseler Texte titled "Ausweg" (Exit):
Eine Maus
Verirrt sich
Im ausweglosen
Labyrinth.
Wie viele Menschen
Sucht sie
Vergeblich
Den Weg.
Vielleicht
Bleibt ihr
Doch nichts
Übrig.
Wenn,
Dann die Hoffnung.A mouse
Is lost
In an exitless
Labyrinth.
Like many humans
She seeks
In vain
For the path.
Perhaps
Nothing else
Is left
To her.
If anything,
then hope. (33)
I would like to close with a brief analysis of an unpublished poem Kumar wrote during his 1998 tour of the U.S. Southwest, whose topic illustrates the universality of his intent. The reader will note the switches in perspective that occur when opposites are featured. The shift in perspective is not egocentric; it does not privilege one or any other. Identity within a group is intentionally not established by describing the persona who represents a New Mexico city as a redhead with freckles rather than as a Hispanic or Native American person. The woman speaks about herself, yet discloses little. Self is the centering force, not the viewer's perception, and scant attempt is made to prejudice the reader one way or another. Marked passages here are the aspects that can embody two or more extremes at once - ice/heat, tourist town/Indian town. These apparent contradictions underscore the value Kumar places on the ability to see reality from more than one perspective, much as he views otherness relative to the situation instead of relative to a static state of being. His poem is narrated by the woman of the title, a woman of supreme self-confidence despite the discrepancy between her appearance and her surroundings. She embodies a happy medium that she herself determines - "according to [her] mood" [35] - and she knows that her town is more than just a tourist trap. The analogy to Kumar and his position in German belle lettres is clear: Kumar is not an Ausländerliterat like those of the first generation, but is much closer to the second, bolder generation. He benefits from the acceptance of this genre in Germany just as the woman of the poem benefits from living in the long-established town of Santa Fe, where she can decide her own mood. Kumar sees beyond the faÁade of minority literature just as the narrator sees beyond the black-and-white dichotomy of tourist town/Indian town.
Kumar's perspective is important. He points the way out of the old fixed view of minority literature and toward his own future as an integral, rather than integrated, part of German literature, when he responds with a thematically similar poem, "Die heitere Fremde" (The Jolly Stranger), in Fremde Frau, fremder Mann. In this poem, the speaker laments the too-frequent question put to the foreign poet by audience members of why he writes in German. But, like the woman in Santa Fe, he chooses his own mood and thus decides not to dwell on the absurdity of the question. Instead, he triumphantly exploits the absurdity of the world to gloat that this very characteristic is what allows his life's blood - poetry - to become a best-seller. [36]
To borrow one final time from Canetti, Kumar's seems to be The Tongue Set Free that speaks of promise for writers of German literature, regardless of their origins - a tongue whose mouth is less important than the words it utters.
Notes
[1]
It should be noted that the Italian government's promotion of Italian - born migrant writers allowed some Italian authors to be
published before what is considered the official arrival of minority literature, but this paper does not feature that phenomenon.
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[2]
Marilya Veteto-Conrad, Interview with Çirak, 9 January 1987.
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[3]
Felidae, dir. Michael Schaak. Ufa, 1995.
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[4]
Irmgard Ackermann, "In der Fremde hat man eine dünne Haut," Zeitschrift für Kulturaustausch 35 (1985): 32 - 35.
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[5]
Veteto - Conrad, Interview with Anant Kumar, 21 March 1988.
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[6]
"Etwas nicht Alltägliches," Organ für Social Beat, Punk & Weltrevolution 22 (1998): 50.
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[7]
Anna Narojek, "Review of Anant Kumar's Kasseler Texte," Die Brüke 3 (May/June 1998): 94.
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[8]
Anna Narojek, "Review of Anant Kumar's Fremde Frau, fremder Mann," Die Brüke 1 (Jan./Feb. 1999): 93.
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[9]
Anant Kumar, "Herbst 96," Die Brüke 3 (May/June 1998): 64.
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[10]
Christina Hein, "Verliebt in die deutsche Sprache," Hessisch - Niedersächsische Allgemeine (May 1998): 14.
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[11]
Anant Kumar, Fremde Frau, fremder Mann (Schweinfurt: Wiesenburg Verlag, 1998) 61.
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[12]
Anant Kumar, Kasseler Texte (Schweinfurt: Wiesenburg Verlag, 1998). All translations are my own and are intended primarily for
the purpose of conveying the content rather than the structure, meter, or rhyme of the original.
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[13]
Elias Canetti, Die gerettete Zunge (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1977) 33.
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[14]
Professor René Kegelmann of the Tupaia - Literaturkreis in a 1998 letter to Kumar. "Ihre Texte
bewegen sich zwischen der indischen und der deutschen Welt, ohne die eine gegen die andere auszupspielen."
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[15]
Veteto - Conrad, Interview with Kumar, 7 January 1998.
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[16]
Alexander Koch, "Heimweh nach zwei Ländern," Hessisch - Niedersächsische Allgemeine (2 October
1998): 24.
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[17]
Barbara Fennell, Language, Literature and the Negotiation of Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997) 94.
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[18]
Fennell 102.
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[19]
Koch 24.
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[20]
Fennell 104.
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[21]
Fennell 104.
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[22]
Fennell 132-34.
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[23]
Fennell 107.
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[24]
Fennell 107.
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[25]
Fritz J. Raddatz, "In mir zwei welten," Die Zeit 25, 1 July 1994, 13.
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[26]
Kumar's publisher can be reached online at www.wiesenburg-verlag.de,
or by e-mail at wiesenburg@t-online.de
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[27]
Kumar, Fremde Frau 49.
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[28]
Kumar, Kasseler Texte 65.
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[29]
Veteto-Conrad, Interview with Kumar, 28 April 1998.
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[30]
Fennell 131.
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[31]
Fennell 125-26.
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[32]
Fennell 132.
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[33]
Leslie Adelson, "Migrants' Literature or German Literature? TORKAN's Tufan: Brief an einen islamischen Bruder," German Quarterly
63.3/4 (1990): 382-89.
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[34]
Adelson 382.
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[35]
Used with permission of the author.
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[36]
Kumar, Fremde Frau 47.
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