For a student of “Intercultural Studies” with hormone congestion, the blue-skinned, multi-armed goddess Kali is a perfect sex fantasy. Kali has a very long tongue and, thanks to her advantageous physiognomy, can satisfy several needs at the same time – for example, hugging and gagging, but Nivedita’s fantasies are not that kinky either – she is on top during sex with Shiva and enjoys being a Person of Color in the pantheon Hindu deities privileges that a German girl with an Indian father can only dream of. Kali’s image accompanied Nivedita through her youth in West Germany.
Mother Birgit has a soft spot for this ethnic kitsch, which perhaps her father Jagdish also belongs to. For Nivedita, however, Kali was more than just a wall curtain in the living room or a waving doll on the dashboard. “She is wild and angry and drinks the blood of her adversaries: inside,” she enthuses on her blog.
When the confusion of her cultural identity became more tangible as a self-declared (irony!) “Mixed race wonder”, for example during her studies in Düsseldorf, Kali has long since become Nivedita’s invisible combatant and keyword. “Whenever I and Kali talked, it was about race & sex. ”The fact that she blogs under the alias Identitti was due to a stupid misunderstanding, as Nivedita admits. But with that name you can at least make it to modest fame in the blogosphere.
Trained in post-colonialism and feminism
The title of Mithu Sanyal’s novel of the same name is also doing well on the local book market, for which numerous publications are pushing this spring that revolve around questions of identity as a person of color in potato country, white privileges, structural racism and cultural appropriation. Nivedita is vaguely modeled on the author, Sanyal grew up in Düsseldorf with a Polish mother and an Indian father.
But the biographical traces – of themselves and other persons of public interest – that they have over the 420 pages of “Identitti” (Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 2021. 22 €) are only fints that lead on side paths through an overheated theory course.
The cultural scientist Sanyal writes about postcolonialism and feminism, she did her doctorate on the cultural history of the vulva and published a remarkable book about the origins and power structures of sexualized violence. Measured against this, “Identitti” reads – as furious, programmatic, sharp-tongued, form-changing as the novel is written – more like a happy exorcism of all the topics on which Sanyal has written more serious texts in the past.
The Indian star professor is white!
Nivedita’s world collapses like a house of cards when the star professor Saraswati – bestselling author (“Decolonize your Soul”), mentor and incarnate Kali – turns out to be a fake. The supposed Indian Saraswati, who haughtily throws white students out of her seminars, was actually born as Sarah Vera Thielmann in Karlsruhe. You, however, claims to get by body modification to have reinvented as the first “transracial” person.
The tabloids are tearing up their mouths, the university is waiting for a statement, the people-of-color students are going on the barricades and the AfD is rubbing their hands.
Model student Nivedita, deeply injured by the deception of her idol, is carried away by the shitstorm (even Harry Potter fairy tale aunt JK Rowling cannot resist a tweet). Sanyal describes the pandemic disruptive forces of social media aptly: “After her sleepless night, Nivedita was so crumbly that she felt she was becoming porous at the edges, so that the world could penetrate her unhindered and the tweets felt like viruses that would still develop their destructive effect. ” The author herself experienced shit storms four years ago.
Volleys from the theory stronghold
“Identitti” plays in a parallel reality that Sanyal calls “Postsaraswati” and is somewhat reminiscent of Buñuel’s “The Strangler Angel”: Nivedita wants to confront her professor in her luxury loft (of course in a migrant residential area) and then fails for three weeks to leave the apartment again. And that, even though her intellectual superhero shows no signs of remorse and, in response to every reproach, fires self-gloriously and rhetorically brilliantly from her theoretical stronghold at her unsuspecting critics.
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The endless Twitter threads that are pounding on this academic shelter from the outside, along with Nivedita’s conversations with Kali and the verbal skirmishes in the sun-drenched loft, represent the third narrative thread in “Identitti”: a proseminar camouflaged as over-the-top satire, including a Saraswati reading list attached .
The author as the devil’s advocate
In Sanyal, even a small theoretical totalitarian seems to have been lost, as perfect as she in the role of devil’s Advocate slips in order to unravel supposed certainties of cultural identity – white people and people of color – and weigh them up against each other. Nivedita, who half her youth wanted to feel “white” and now feels deprived of the “privilege” of her Desi identity by the woman who first taught her to be proud of her origins, acts as a gateway into this intercultural discourse .
