Morgan Jerkins, Fotograf John Midgley
Erika Mann Lecture 2025 mit Morgan Jerkins
Die renommierte US-Autorin Morgan Jerkins hat am 26. Juni die diesjährige Erika Mann Lecture in der Großen Aula der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München gehalten.
Morgan Jerkins ist Autorin, Journalistin, Editorin, Filmemacherin und Dozentin. Sie veröffentlicht sowohl Romane als auch Sachbücher. Ihr aktuelles Werk „Zeal“ (Harper, 2025) wurde u.a. von Time und Publishers Weekly als „Most Anticipated“ gelistet. Zweifach mit dem National Magazine Award ausgezeichnet und Teil der Forbes 30 Under 30, feierte sie mit ihrem Kurzfilm „Black Madonna“ Festivalerfolge in New York, Los Angeles und beim Pan African Film & Arts Festival. Aktuell lehrt sie Kreatives Schreiben an der Princeton University.
Zusätzlich hat die Schauspielerin Wiebke Puls ausgewählte Textpassagen aus Erika Manns umfangreichem Werk vorgetragen und den Zuhörer*innen Einblicke in das faszinierende Schaffen der Autorin geben.
In Vorbereitung auf die Erika Mann Lecture hat die Kulturredakteurin Anna Steinbauer für die SZ mit der US-Bestsellerautorin über ihr Verhältnis zu Erika Manns Wirken gesprochen.
Fotograf Gandalf Hammerbacher
Art as a Romantic Outsider
Erika Mann Lecture,
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität,
26. Juni 2025
In 1698, there was a man who was born in the Ethiopian empire, or modern day Cameroon. His lineage would change the contours of world literature forever. This man might’ve been considered in his motherland to have a noble title because his father reportedly had quite a bit of livestock, several wives, and nineteen children. But one day, while this man’s father was defending his property and people from being conquered by soldiers of the Ottoman Empire, this proud family fell apart. This man was kidnapped and brought to Constantinople where he served in Sultan Ahmed III’s household for about a year. And then around 1704, a Russian ambassador was looking for a few African slaves to take to the Tsar’s Palace in Moscow and our main character landed in Russia. Impressed by this enslaved man’s intelligence and military service, this man was brought into Peter The Great’s household, baptized in a Russian Orthodox church, and given the name Abram Gannibal. Gannibal is the great grandfather of Alexander Pushkin, author of Eugene Onegin and founder of modern Russian literature.
I know you’re probably thinking–where is this lady going with this? How is she in Munich and she’s speaking about Russia? What does that have to do with anything? I thought about these questions as I was developing this lecture and I almost abandoned this opening altogether until I remembered that upon accepting this opportunity, I was told by this evening’s coordinators that hope should be interwoven into tonight’s lecture. Hope, or Nadezdha in Russian, was Pushkin’s mother’s name. Hope was what I encountered in Pushkin’s prose and even in his face when I was the only Black student in my introductory Russian class 15 years ago.
I arrived in a small classroom within a Gothic-style building where I sought to investigate how the prose of someone like Pushkin or Dostoevsky or Bulgakov–all Russian stylists–could penetrate the heart and soul of a young Black American woman like myself–not realizing that we all understood–emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually, what it meant to exist on the margins.
Now, my lineage is a bit more…humble. I was born and raised in the southern part of New Jersey, which is about two hours outside of New York City. My father is an Obstetrician and Gynecologist and my mother is a real estate agent. When I was around 13, my mother remarried an Army veteran and psychologist, who we called Z. It was only two years into their marriage that my mother learned that Z was experiencing some cognitive issues. He was forgetting receipts at the grocery store, mixing up names, and pacing in our household in the middle of the night. Ultimately, he was diagnosed with Frontotemporal Lobe Dementia and Alzheimer’s and my mother became his caretaker.
As these illnesses were debilitating my stepfather and my mother’s livelihood and wellbeing, I was studying at Princeton University and my mental health was taking a toll. I could not sleep and if I did, I would wake up in the middle of the night with my heart racing in my chest. I was constantly on edge, emotionally raw, and very lost.
But one of my many anchors was literature—late 19th century Russian literature, to be exact. I remember going to a dinner in honor of the Department of Comparative Literature where I heard this scholar named Dr. Caryl Emerson read a single scene in three different English translations of Eugene Onegin. Visibly awestruck and moved, I approached Dr. Emerson at the end of the dinner and told her that her presentation made me want to learn Russian to which she passionately said, “Do it!”
So there I was, Monday through Friday, learning how to conjugate, communicate, and most of all translate. From the moment I took my first introductory Russian class, I knew I wanted to learn how to speak and read well because there had to be some inscrutabilities in Russian prose that no English translation could decipher. We’d use poetry and novel excerpts to strengthen our proficiency in the midst of a whirlwind of exams and written work. When finally, towards the end of the semester, I applied for the opportunity to learn intermediate Russian at the Nevsky Institute located in St, Petersburg for the months of June and July. I got in. My dream was to read Russian in the original, as part of my foreign language endeavors as a Comparative Literature major, and I was one step closer to my goal.
But one day, I was called into my Russian professor’s office and saw him seated at his desk and then another instructor seated on the opposite side, next to an empty chair, presumably where I would’ve sat. It was silent at first. I thought that I was in trouble. As soon as I took a seat, my professor told me that Russia had the current highest population of Neo-Nazis in the world. He never mentioned my identity as a Black woman–and neither did the other instructor. But when he gave me the option to not attend the summer program–perhaps out of fear for my safety, I knew it was because of that. Nevertheless, I still decided that I wanted to go. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity.
I arrived in St. Petersburg on June 1st, 2012–my 20th birthday. I didn’t celebrate with dinner or alongside college classmates who’d also got into the program. Instead, I dragged myself up a dark apartment building to a spare room fixed by a single Russian mom and spent hours trying to figure out how to connect to the Internet. What I most recall about this stay was not just the scalding hot water or the Pelmeni sour cream that the hostess made. I remembered the small portrait of Alexander Pushkin that she had mounted on her wall right in the hallway entrance of her home.
I was very lonely. I was the only Black person at the Nevsky Institute, where there were not only Russian locals perfecting their English but also English-speaking ones from America and countries like Scotland to learn the complexities of Lermontov, conversation, and sentence construction. I tried to never walk alone. I kept my head down as I walked to the local train station even as we passed men studying at the adjacent military academy and despite all this, I have never experienced such intense stares in my life. But as long as I was spending time seeing the neighborhood that inspired Crime and Punishment or seeing the room where Dostoevsky wrote The Brothers Karamazov, I found solace.
Finding Pushkin was another enlightened discovery for me. I visited his apartment that was turned into a museum. Peered down at a lock of his hair kept encased in a glass box. But when I saw a monument of Pushkin in the center of Arts Square, right in front of the Russian Museum, formerly known as Mikhailov Palace, I needed a moment. I scrutinized his features–particularly his face–and I studied the width of his forehead, his jawline, and his curly locks. I took a picture standing directly underneath the monument because it’s so large. But what I didn’t realize in retrospect is that when I saw him, I saw myself. I didn’t feel as alone when I thought of him and I didn’t feel as alone when I thought of my Blackness in this magnificent but also treacherous city.
I remember the evening so vividly because what transpired has a kind of otherworldly quality to it. Me and my friend, a Mexican-American named Alex, were having an early dinner with a Russian friend who was assigned by the Institute so that the friend could practice her English and we could practice our Russian. Let’s call her Natalya. Eventually we went to a bar with three Scottish students who were studying at the same institution. It was a chic semi-underground place towards the end of Nevsky Prospekt, the main thoroughfare of St. Petersburg.
I ordered something called a Long Island Iced Tea–which, if you’re unfamiliar-is a combination of cola, sweet and sour mix, and seven different liquors. Needless to say, I got drunk very quickly. In my haze, I did notice how the rest of our group was making friends with other bilingual, cosmopolitan, and Russian partygoers. These partygoers were very emotionally detached from each other, eschewed romantic labels, and carried themselves with an air of sophistication. They suggested that we go to another bar and suddenly, two of our Scottish friends–two women in particular–seemed to have vanished. After a bit of dancing on the dance floor, we collectively decided to go after them because they were attractive, female Westerners. They had to be drunk because their Scottish male friend urinated on the side of a building earlier. I still don’t know how he didn’t get caught.
We turned the corner down an avenue that was a lot less lit than where we first ended up. Much less lit and much quieter. There was a street lamp and some people hanging around outside and plus I wasn’t alone so I figured I should be safe. But then a random stranger pinned me against the wall. He didn’t physically touch me. But he has his arms out against the wall at both sides of my head. I felt trapped. I froze. If I said anything in the little Russian I knew, he could physically harm me. If I said nothing, he could also harm me. This stranger didn’t do anything else because suddenly the Scottish male, who was at least a foot taller than me, grabbed my arm and pulled me out from the confrontation, his maneuver as smooth as a knife slicing through warm butter.
Fotograf Gandalf Hammerbacher
We walked upstairs to what looked like a hole in the wall–me, Alex, Natalya, and the Scottish man. At the top, there was a female bouncer. When I handed her my license, she asked, “Are you American?” I replied, “Yes.” And she replied, “Good luck.” At first, I thought perhaps she didn’t know the English translation for “Have a good time” but I could not shake the feeling that she meant something more ominous. There were a few college-age boys dancing drunkenly in the corner. I kept my eye on Alex, who was also very visibly drunk. Despite me having a Long Island Iced Tea about an hour ago or less, my senses were sharp. Once I returned from the bathroom, I could not find the Scottish man until I turned a corner and saw him about to approach a group of bald-headed white men who were all dressed with jet black t-shirts. The Scottish women who we lost at the bar were sitting in this circle and the Scottish man went up to them and stuck out his hand, with the intention of shaking theirs. Now, remember: this Scottish man is about a foot taller than me or more and he’s also gay but presents very masculine, very straight. I stood behind him during this introduction and perhaps that saved me because I was hidden.
When the Scottish man tried to introduce himself, one of the bald-headed men said in almost a facetious way, “Do you know what I am? I am a skinhead.” Once I heard that, the room fell silent. I immediately grabbed Alex’s arm and it felt like we flew down the flight of stairs. I don’t remember my feet touching the ground. Before I could register what just happened–from the bars and dancing to this bar to even my Russian professor warning me of this danger back at university–Alex was yelling in my face, wondering why I did what I did. Natalya followed behind–visibly shaken. I told Alex to be quiet and follow me. Eventually, we wound up sitting inside a sandwich shop.
We sat there in that sandwich shop till sunrise. Those Scottish women eventually joined us where they spoke about how those men made them do salutes that would get someone arrested in this country but I never forgot their dispositions while recounting their experiences: light, facetious, perhaps even a bit cheer-y. They did not seem afraid or shaken like I was. They told what happened to them in the manner as if this was another wild, drunken night for them. I was relieved that given the build-up to this climax, they were not physically harmed. But I was not relieved for myself. I knew that when morning arrived, I would get on the subway with only a child’s level of Russian and I hoped I would not run into one of those men–or anyone for that matter–who would do me great harm. Just four years before I arrived in Russia, one African-American was stabbed. Five years after me, in 2017, another Black person was stabbed but this time, the wounds were fatal.
I was obsessive and anxious as I took the train to the station where I would get off, scared for my life again, when I had to walk home in the early hours of the morning. And then once again, when I had to return to a dark apartment building. I took one look at that Pushkin portrait on the one of the entrance walls of the home where I was staying, got into bed, and a few minutes later, I heard a few knocks then the host mother said, “Завтрак через несколько минуты” or “breakfast in a few minutes.” I had to register how normal she sounded. Did she know I just arrived home? Did she hear me enter? She had no questions about where I’d been? Maybe she respected my privacy since she had much experience in being a host mother to international students. But in that moment, I felt like my world did not extend beyond the four corners of my bedroom not only because of my emotional processing but also for my survival.
What saved me during my studies in St. Petersburg was literature. Within the lines of some of the world’s greatest literary wordsmiths, my body became limitless, my skin became unimportant, and my world became that much bigger. When I think of what happened to me on that summer evening, sometimes I wrestle myself to really believe that that was reality. As I get older and the years melt away, it’s hard for me to reckon with the fact that I didn’t just make it up. Perhaps that’s how trauma works. Trauma has a way of disrupting your throughlines of memory and any harm that was done to you is either reconsidered, justified, or defended. After all, I came back from that night physically unscathed. But psychologically? I’m not sure.
It wasn’t until I was on my way home back from Russia to the United States–on a surprisingly upgraded flight at that–where I met another American who studied there just like myself. We had a long flight and I told him just a little about my experiences of feeling as though I were a target and that every time I stepped outside, I was always being stared at. People–particularly men’s gazes were so fierce and penetrating. He counteracted by telling me that one of his classmates, another Black woman, received all the aforementioned and more. According to that man, this other Black woman was not only stared at but kids would point at her on the street. Some would even call her a “monkey.” I was horrified by hearing this because the stories reminded me of something from a previous era: Jim Crow–where racial segregation was legal in America.
When I finally touched down on American soil, I felt…irresolute. I carried more questions than answers in my heart. But what was an anchor for me throughout my entire trip abroad and back into an advanced Russian class in the fall was my love for literature. You see, when it was time for me to declare my major at Princeton and to write my paper during my third year, Dr. Caryl Emerson—the one who read those Eugene Onegin translations at that faculty dinner–was now my advisor. What I remember most fondly about our meetings together was a book that sat prominently on the shelves of her personal library. It was called Under The Sky of my Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness. I found him again–not etched in stone, not painted on a portrait–he was right there. Instead of me looking up at him in St. Petersburg, he was looking at me in Princeton.
In that moment, we didn’t seem, as two writers of African descent, as positioned on opposite poles of each other. Pushkin, like myself, knew what it was like to be an outsider on the basis of race. When he was only 24, he was exiled because he published a poem called “Ode to Liberty,” which emphasized human yearning, liberation, and justice. That poem, among his other writings, is said to be romantic. And so I began to wonder: What does it mean to be a romantic? What does it mean for an African-originated soul to label themselves and their prose as such? What does it say about how he sees the world and how the world sees him?
First, I needed to investigate: What is a romantic? No, I am not talking about someone who desires another, possesses elaborate fantasies as a couple, and may even “romanticize” or over-emphasize the good qualities about another person to the point of obsession or even delusion. I’m not referring to dates, candlelit dinners, roses, or a “happily ever after.” I’m referring to a romantic in the literary sense. Well, for starters, the history of the romantic period was somewhere around 1798 to 1837. Writers were inspired by the French Revolution or the calls for the abolition of slavery. They were critical of the industrial advancement of their time period as well as the aristocracy and various elite factions of the era. Many scholars also considered the Romantic period to be a response to the age of Enlightenment where ideologies surrounding reason, logic, and order were most upheld.
As a result, romantic writers, like Alexander Pushkin, and poets, such as Byron, Keats, and Shelley needed to rebel. And this movement was not only confined to writers–composers such as Mendelssohn or Chopin or painters, such as Francisco Goya or W.M.W Turner were also involved. They emphasized the importance of nature and the wild, expansive nature of our imagination that could inform and even transcend our regular, everyday lives.
Now, don’t get me wrong, Alexander Pushkin was a romantic in the sentimental sense. Eugene Onegin is about a bored aristocrat who rejects the affections of a woman from the countryside, and he eventually regrets it. What’s eerie about this literary work is that there is a scene where Onegin is involved in a duel with another man, fatally killing him, and Pushkin himself was fatally wounded during a duel.
But I’m more interested in how Pushkin’s Blackness inspired his romantic side in a literary sense. About 10 years before Pushkin’s tragic death, he began to write a novel in honor of his African great grandfather, titled The Blackamoor of Peter The Great. After about 30 pages, Pushkin abandons this novel and we never know why. Yet what we have is rich because the main character named Ibrahim is not only idealized as “the son of a sultan,” he is as full of contradiction about his Blackness as Alexander Pushkin is of his own.
Fotograf Gandalf Hammerbacher
For starters, Ibraham is exoticized in the midst of white European circles, not for his prominent lineage, but rather for his outward appearance. He was met with wonder at Parisian balls and suppers because people did not expect an African to be so gregarious, educated, and attractive. The same can be said for Pushkin’s personal life: Though immensely talented, he stood out in school because of his prominent features that reflect African, rather than Eastern European, origins.
Being Black was an oddity in imperial Russia, as written by Jennifer Wilson in The New York Review of Books. I knew what it was like to be an oddity in St. Petersburg over some 200 years later. All the stares that I received, how an elder woman in a museum called me beautiful, how I evaded things being thrown at me or called “monkey,” or how some men oogled at me because they did not perceive me as what they imagined a Black woman looked like. One Russian woman guessed incorrectly that I had family in the Caucasus region.
I’m not going to lie, as a twenty year old, I did not interrogate this kind of attention. On the contrary, I was relieved and flattered by it. I liked that my presence, my body, was a curious and enigmatic site. I liked being seen as beautiful. Similar to Pushkin’s Ibrahim in The Blackamoor. Despite him having all the education and social ineptitude that money and class could offer, he wasn’t sure if the people in his midst looked upon with a deep, respectful fondness or fetishization.
If I interrogate my experience more deeply–and perhaps uncomfortably, I’d say, for me, it was the latter. Because in that one summer evening when I had a near brush of violence with neo-nazis, I was, as mentioned earlier, physically unscathed. What if it was because no one thought of me as Black? What if I had escaped because I had escaped their conceptions of a narrow, stereotypical, and perhaps racist view of a person of African descent?
This idea of being seen particularly as a Black person–and therefore a social outsider–is also prevalent in Erika Mann’s writings. From October 1927, she and her brother Klaus traveled around the world as a way to escape their troubles—she from a bad marriage and he from negative reviews on his most recent play. She spent time in both Russia and even Japan, like myself. She documented this in a travel journal called “Round About: The Adventure of a Journey around the World”. One of the countries where the Manns traveled is to the United States, specifically Chicago, where they encountered an intriguing person named Nora Holt.
Nora Holt was a blues singer and nightclub performer in Chicago, who was considered to be one of the most fascinating figures during the Harlem Renaissance, which was an era of explosive Black artistic, cultural production. Now, her vocation is quite interesting because of music. Blues began in the deep south of the United States, particularly in Mississippi–the Blackest–by that I mean the most Black people–in the entire country. When Black Americans were terrorized by racist white people in the deep south and oftentimes had difficulty finding stable employment and housing for their family due to the racist infrastructure of that time, they migrated to the north in cities, such as New York City, Detroit, Philadelphia, and of course, Chicago.
Erika Mann describes her introduction to Nora Holt as such:
Nora comports herself with the manners of a Duchess. When she is introduced to a gentleman, she lowers her eyelids with the almost piqued dignity that characterizes a true lady. Only later does she become more jovial. She is a singer of most exquisite reputation.
Not one of the popular type, the revue queen—such as Josephine Baker—: She is the sensation of selected circles, a friend of international intellectual circles. She is not a true Negro. Recently, she even has had her hair straightened, for a long time it has been dyed blonde. The procedure to straighten unmanageable hair has been invented especially for successful ladies of her race.
It requires complex machines and is said to be expensive and painful. Her blonde boyish hairdo looks provocative with her broad nose, shining eyes, and flamboyant thick-lipped mouth. The lady who today wears her silver dress with elegant nonchalance, who makes herself up in as costly a way as any lady on Fifth Avenue, hails from New York’s darkest area. The beginning is called Harlem, the black Quarter).
Nora Holt was one of the leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance but she also was the first-African-American to receive a Master’s Degree in Music in the United States. I could talk at length about her many accomplishments, such as studying in France, composing over 200 pieces of music, writing music criticism for the Chicago Defender, which was one of the most important African-American newspapers in America at that time. But according to the excerpt from Erika Mann’s travelogues, Nora Holt’s intrigue is not her profession, but rather her performance.
Nora is said to act like royalty and when she is around male company, it’s as if she is a true lady. In comparison, Josephine Baker, arguably the world’s first Black female superstar in history, who was born and raised in the deep south of America, is not considered a “true negro” because she dyed her “unmanageable hair” blonde. In other words, Josephine Baker upends Erika Mann’s ideas surrounding Blackness. Similarly to how Ibraham Gannibal did in St. Petersburg, similar to how I did in the same place.
What first strikes me about Erika Mann’s observations is she recognizes the art of performance. Nora Holt is a Black American woman performing in a room full of white people. Holt knows how to perform her race in such a way to make upper class white people comfortable in order to generate money and therefore keep her career.
What also strikes me about Erika Mann’s observations is about her subtle quest for cultural authenticity. Even she as a foreigner knew that those like Nora Holt and Josephine baker manipulated their appearances to “appear white” for professional mobility and social acceptance. Erika Mann recognizes how these Black female performers’ eroticism and physical manipulation pulled through from the margins to center stage. But what does it mean to be a true negro? What does it mean to be a true African? What does it mean to be a true African-American woman?
I don’t know for two reasons: 1) Race itself is a fiction with real, material consequences–whether it’s me running from white supremacists in St. Petersburg, Ibraham Gannibal’s capture from West Africa to Russia, Pushkin’s challenging, social environment, and the vestiges of chattel slavery in America. Secondly, I don’t know because as I am navigating the world in and out spaces, both domestically and internationally, I am just trying to exist. That trying–that endeavoring is what keeps me firmly rooted in my humanity.
When I mean that I am just trying to exist, I’m not saying this because my health is failing, thank goodness, or that I am going through some kind of existential crisis. What I mean is that as an African-American, as a Black woman, I know what it’s like to undermine or escape other people’s gazes because I’m not what they “think” a Black woman in their minds should be. I have manipulated my appearance before in order to gain white acceptance. I had chemically straightened hard, wore certain clothes, even changed my manner of speech so that I would not be invisible. I also graduated from the top university in my country, I speak multiple foreign languages, I’ve traveled the world–everything from how I speak, dress, and look is often under scrutiny because these particular spaces were not traditionally meant for me to thrive, much less for meant for me and my people at all.
When I mean that I am just trying to exist, I mean that when I am under someone else’s gaze, particularly a white person’s, there is a power dynamic at play. Before I even had language to communicate my experience, I knew that I had to perform my beauty in such a way that made white people comfortable. I’ve had to move in and out of physical spaces in such a way in order to survive and I’ve been trying to evade preconceived stereotypes of what I should be like because of the horrors of slavery–hypersexualized, demonized, masculinized, diminished, invisibilized, or erased. My body, historically, has been a contested site for colonialism, domination, and violence. In America, there is a saying–one of which I strongly disagree– that children are meant to be seen and not heard. Black women were meant to neither be seen or heard; their original purpose in the global north was to relentlessly work and to be narrowed into existence in order to maintain social order and racial hierarchy.
But what I’ve learned as an author, an intellectual, as a public thinker and speaker, is that while people are looking at me, I can look back at them. I’ve always been looking at them. And this is why I call myself a romantic.
Fotograf Gandalf Hammerbacher
I am a romantic because when I write, I do not have a third party dictating to me if my experiences are important or not. I’m used to this kind of treatment in my regular life as an African-American woman who often is expected to excel better than her peers in order to get half the recognition. When I say that I am a romantic, I not only narrativize my experiences, but I also center the emotional truth about them. Whenever I write, it is a deeply sensorial, corporeal experience. I can feel a flutter or tightness in my chest, a chill down my spine, or a tear forming in my eyes, if I write about any experience that means something deeply to me. To me.
When my body physically reacts to a memory that I have held within my heart from a short while or long time, it reminds me that my human existence holds multiple dimensions: I see, I hear, I smell, I taste, I touch, I wonder, I think, I question, I feel. I do not need to be strong and distant from my own passions, which is often a stereotype characterized to Black women because of the historical legacy of how much we have been forced to sacrifice for our survival.
When I say that I am a romantic writer, that means I’m deeply sentimental and vulnerable, and that my emotions exist along a spectrum, each one worthy of highlighting and contextualizing. I feel soft however I am firmly grounded in my own body. I am the authority of my own experience and the creator of my own history as it’s happening in real time. I am developing an archive where I am speaking in and out of text where my ancestors only existed on page at the point of violence or their untimely deaths. And best of all, I do not need to perform within prose. I can define and redefine what it means to be myself even as I’m learning and evolving as a person.
A passage from one of Erika Mann’s works was read earlier this evening and unfortunately I understood none of it because I cannot understand German. However, I was given a translation prior to my arrival here in Munich and there were a few parts that stuck out to me and I am going to abbreviate a bit of what she said in English:
“My view of the crucial issues facing modern society is more emotional than intellectual – not dogmatic, but humane. I am neither a partisan nor a crusader. My political views and actions have always been determined more by my personal experiences and impulses than by abstract principles. The only ‘principle’ I adhere to is my stubborn belief in a few fundamental moral ideals – truth, honour, decency, freedom, tolerance.
Because I wanted to tell the truth, I had to know what was really going on in the world: I couldn’t rely on other people’s stories, I had to find out for myself. I had to travel around. And that’s exactly what I did…Of course, all these places, the people I met there and the events I witnessed became an essential part of my personal history. Every new experience – travel, friendships, dangers and defeats – taught me something new, or rather, every new adventure confirmed, deepened and expanded one of the fundamental truths that have always guided me.
I don’t t want to develop theories, but I do want to draw certain conclusions from what I have seen and experienced. I have seen and experienced the ugly triumph of brutal violence, the bankruptcy of diplomatic tricks and conventions, the suffering of decent, misguided people. But I have also seen the awakening of the victims, the rebellion of the ordinary man, his bravery and grim determination…”
I found within this passage that Erika Mann too was also a romantic outsider. She was courageous and that courage led her to being exiled. She emphasized the importance of personal experiences and she was more concerned with emotions rather than intellect when it came to the undercurrents of our modern society. In the same way, so was I. I could develop theories, like she did, but that’s not where my deepest power resided. Instead, it was in the centering of myself in the midst of a rapidly changing world and injecting my sensitivity into all that I observed.
Like her, I was not satisfied with the cataloguing of others’ experiences, which is why I learned Russian and multiple other languages, and that’s why I traveled the world like she did. I didn’t want to only read about the world, I wanted to become fully immersed in it. Every new experience did teach me something new–even the dangers, as she referenced.
I escaped the “ugly triumph” of brutal violence that night when I was in St. Petersburg but I experienced violence in other forms, whether it’s through the devaluing of my thoughts and opinions in regular conversation, mockery and humiliation over how I look, especially the hair that grows naturally out of my scalp, or the dismissal of my accomplishments even as I strive to be accepted into institutions that weren’t made for me. Violence, as I learned, does not only come through the might of a fist or the strength of a bullet. Violence can also come through words, sneers, and gazes. Its inflicted pain can sear that psyche quite deeply, leaving no physical scars but an ocean of emotional ones.
But that’s the beauty of this work. That’s the beauty I’ve found in Erika Mann’s body of work as well as Pushkin’s and even my own–each sentence, each turn of phrase has an immortal quality to it. It’s to show to the world that they were here–I was here. Because of their contribution, I realized that I was not alone and even though my ancestors survived in places where they were considered less than human, I learned through traveling and documentation that I too was a participant in the human condition. My hope is that years later, my responsibility as a person of letters is that what I have been endowed in me through others can be endowed into someone else so that they too realize that they aren’t alone. They never were. And they never will be.
Morgan Jerkins, Fotograf John Midgley
Erika Mann Lecture 2025 mit
Morgan Jerkins
Die renommierte US-Autorin Morgan Jerkins hielt am 26. Juni die diesjährige Erika Mann Lecture in der Großen Aula der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.
Morgan Jerkins ist Autorin, Journalistin, Editorin, Filmemacherin und Dozentin. Sie veröffentlicht sowohl Romane als auch Sachbücher. Ihr aktuelles Werk „Zeal“ (Harper, 2025) wurde u.a. von Time und Publishers Weekly als „Most Anticipated“ gelistet. Zweifach mit dem National Magazine Award ausgezeichnet und Teil der Forbes 30 Under 30, feierte sie mit ihrem Kurzfilm „Black Madonna“ Festivalerfolge in New York, Los Angeles und beim Pan African Film & Arts Festival. Aktuell lehrt sie Kreatives Schreiben an der Princeton University.
Zusätzlich hat die Schauspielerin Wiebke Puls ausgewählte Textpassagen aus Erika Manns umfangreichem Werk vorgetragen und den Zuhörer*innen Einblicke in das faszinierende Schaffen der Autorin gegeben.
Die Erika Mann Lecture ist ein gemeinsames Projekt der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, dem Rowohlt Verlag und Holtzbrinck Berlin – Inspire Together in Kooperation mit der Monacensia im Hildebrandhaus und dem Kulturreferat der Landeshauptstadt München.
In Vorbereitung auf die Erika Mann Lecture hat die Kulturredakteurin Anna Steinbauer für die SZ mit der US-Bestsellerautorin über ihr Verhältnis zu Erika Manns Wirken gesprochen.
Fotograf Gandalf Hammerbacher
Art as a Romantic Outsider
Erika Mann Lecture,
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität,
26. Juni 2025
In 1698, there was a man who was born in the Ethiopian empire, or modern day Cameroon. His lineage would change the contours of world literature forever. This man might’ve been considered in his motherland to have a noble title because his father reportedly had quite a bit of livestock, several wives, and nineteen children. But one day, while this man’s father was defending his property and people from being conquered by soldiers of the Ottoman Empire, this proud family fell apart. This man was kidnapped and brought to Constantinople where he served in Sultan Ahmed III’s household for about a year. And then around 1704, a Russian ambassador was looking for a few African slaves to take to the Tsar’s Palace in Moscow and our main character landed in Russia. Impressed by this enslaved man’s intelligence and military service, this man was brought into Peter The Great’s household, baptized in a Russian Orthodox church, and given the name Abram Gannibal. Gannibal is the great grandfather of Alexander Pushkin, author of Eugene Onegin and founder of modern Russian literature.
I know you’re probably thinking–where is this lady going with this? How is she in Munich and she’s speaking about Russia? What does that have to do with anything? I thought about these questions as I was developing this lecture and I almost abandoned this opening altogether until I remembered that upon accepting this opportunity, I was told by this evening’s coordinators that hope should be interwoven into tonight’s lecture. Hope, or Nadezdha in Russian, was Pushkin’s mother’s name. Hope was what I encountered in Pushkin’s prose and even in his face when I was the only Black student in my introductory Russian class 15 years ago.
I arrived in a small classroom within a Gothic-style building where I sought to investigate how the prose of someone like Pushkin or Dostoevsky or Bulgakov–all Russian stylists–could penetrate the heart and soul of a young Black American woman like myself–not realizing that we all understood–emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually, what it meant to exist on the margins.
Now, my lineage is a bit more…humble. I was born and raised in the southern part of New Jersey, which is about two hours outside of New York City. My father is an Obstetrician and Gynecologist and my mother is a real estate agent. When I was around 13, my mother remarried an Army veteran and psychologist, who we called Z. It was only two years into their marriage that my mother learned that Z was experiencing some cognitive issues. He was forgetting receipts at the grocery store, mixing up names, and pacing in our household in the middle of the night. Ultimately, he was diagnosed with Frontotemporal Lobe Dementia and Alzheimer’s and my mother became his caretaker.
As these illnesses were debilitating my stepfather and my mother’s livelihood and wellbeing, I was studying at Princeton University and my mental health was taking a toll. I could not sleep and if I did, I would wake up in the middle of the night with my heart racing in my chest. I was constantly on edge, emotionally raw, and very lost.
But one of my many anchors was literature—late 19th century Russian literature, to be exact. I remember going to a dinner in honor of the Department of Comparative Literature where I heard this scholar named Dr. Caryl Emerson read a single scene in three different English translations of Eugene Onegin. Visibly awestruck and moved, I approached Dr. Emerson at the end of the dinner and told her that her presentation made me want to learn Russian to which she passionately said, “Do it!”
So there I was, Monday through Friday, learning how to conjugate, communicate, and most of all translate. From the moment I took my first introductory Russian class, I knew I wanted to learn how to speak and read well because there had to be some inscrutabilities in Russian prose that no English translation could decipher. We’d use poetry and novel excerpts to strengthen our proficiency in the midst of a whirlwind of exams and written work. When finally, towards the end of the semester, I applied for the opportunity to learn intermediate Russian at the Nevsky Institute located in St, Petersburg for the months of June and July. I got in. My dream was to read Russian in the original, as part of my foreign language endeavors as a Comparative Literature major, and I was one step closer to my goal.
But one day, I was called into my Russian professor’s office and saw him seated at his desk and then another instructor seated on the opposite side, next to an empty chair, presumably where I would’ve sat. It was silent at first. I thought that I was in trouble. As soon as I took a seat, my professor told me that Russia had the current highest population of Neo-Nazis in the world. He never mentioned my identity as a Black woman–and neither did the other instructor. But when he gave me the option to not attend the summer program–perhaps out of fear for my safety, I knew it was because of that. Nevertheless, I still decided that I wanted to go. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity.
I arrived in St. Petersburg on June 1st, 2012–my 20th birthday. I didn’t celebrate with dinner or alongside college classmates who’d also got into the program. Instead, I dragged myself up a dark apartment building to a spare room fixed by a single Russian mom and spent hours trying to figure out how to connect to the Internet. What I most recall about this stay was not just the scalding hot water or the Pelmeni sour cream that the hostess made. I remembered the small portrait of Alexander Pushkin that she had mounted on her wall right in the hallway entrance of her home.
I was very lonely. I was the only Black person at the Nevsky Institute, where there were not only Russian locals perfecting their English but also English-speaking ones from America and countries like Scotland to learn the complexities of Lermontov, conversation, and sentence construction. I tried to never walk alone. I kept my head down as I walked to the local train station even as we passed men studying at the adjacent military academy and despite all this, I have never experienced such intense stares in my life. But as long as I was spending time seeing the neighborhood that inspired Crime and Punishment or seeing the room where Dostoevsky wrote The Brothers Karamazov, I found solace.
Finding Pushkin was another enlightened discovery for me. I visited his apartment that was turned into a museum. Peered down at a lock of his hair kept encased in a glass box. But when I saw a monument of Pushkin in the center of Arts Square, right in front of the Russian Museum, formerly known as Mikhailov Palace, I needed a moment. I scrutinized his features–particularly his face–and I studied the width of his forehead, his jawline, and his curly locks. I took a picture standing directly underneath the monument because it’s so large. But what I didn’t realize in retrospect is that when I saw him, I saw myself. I didn’t feel as alone when I thought of him and I didn’t feel as alone when I thought of my Blackness in this magnificent but also treacherous city.
I remember the evening so vividly because what transpired has a kind of otherworldly quality to it. Me and my friend, a Mexican-American named Alex, were having an early dinner with a Russian friend who was assigned by the Institute so that the friend could practice her English and we could practice our Russian. Let’s call her Natalya. Eventually we went to a bar with three Scottish students who were studying at the same institution. It was a chic semi-underground place towards the end of Nevsky Prospekt, the main thoroughfare of St. Petersburg.
I ordered something called a Long Island Iced Tea–which, if you’re unfamiliar-is a combination of cola, sweet and sour mix, and seven different liquors. Needless to say, I got drunk very quickly. In my haze, I did notice how the rest of our group was making friends with other bilingual, cosmopolitan, and Russian partygoers. These partygoers were very emotionally detached from each other, eschewed romantic labels, and carried themselves with an air of sophistication. They suggested that we go to another bar and suddenly, two of our Scottish friends–two women in particular–seemed to have vanished. After a bit of dancing on the dance floor, we collectively decided to go after them because they were attractive, female Westerners. They had to be drunk because their Scottish male friend urinated on the side of a building earlier. I still don’t know how he didn’t get caught.
We turned the corner down an avenue that was a lot less lit than where we first ended up. Much less lit and much quieter. There was a street lamp and some people hanging around outside and plus I wasn’t alone so I figured I should be safe. But then a random stranger pinned me against the wall. He didn’t physically touch me. But he has his arms out against the wall at both sides of my head. I felt trapped. I froze. If I said anything in the little Russian I knew, he could physically harm me. If I said nothing, he could also harm me. This stranger didn’t do anything else because suddenly the Scottish male, who was at least a foot taller than me, grabbed my arm and pulled me out from the confrontation, his maneuver as smooth as a knife slicing through warm butter.
Fotograf Gandalf Hammerbacher
We walked upstairs to what looked like a hole in the wall–me, Alex, Natalya, and the Scottish man. At the top, there was a female bouncer. When I handed her my license, she asked, “Are you American?” I replied, “Yes.” And she replied, “Good luck.” At first, I thought perhaps she didn’t know the English translation for “Have a good time” but I could not shake the feeling that she meant something more ominous. There were a few college-age boys dancing drunkenly in the corner. I kept my eye on Alex, who was also very visibly drunk. Despite me having a Long Island Iced Tea about an hour ago or less, my senses were sharp. Once I returned from the bathroom, I could not find the Scottish man until I turned a corner and saw him about to approach a group of bald-headed white men who were all dressed with jet black t-shirts. The Scottish women who we lost at the bar were sitting in this circle and the Scottish man went up to them and stuck out his hand, with the intention of shaking theirs. Now, remember: this Scottish man is about a foot taller than me or more and he’s also gay but presents very masculine, very straight. I stood behind him during this introduction and perhaps that saved me because I was hidden.
When the Scottish man tried to introduce himself, one of the bald-headed men said in almost a facetious way, “Do you know what I am? I am a skinhead.” Once I heard that, the room fell silent. I immediately grabbed Alex’s arm and it felt like we flew down the flight of stairs. I don’t remember my feet touching the ground. Before I could register what just happened–from the bars and dancing to this bar to even my Russian professor warning me of this danger back at university–Alex was yelling in my face, wondering why I did what I did. Natalya followed behind–visibly shaken. I told Alex to be quiet and follow me. Eventually, we wound up sitting inside a sandwich shop.
We sat there in that sandwich shop till sunrise. Those Scottish women eventually joined us where they spoke about how those men made them do salutes that would get someone arrested in this country but I never forgot their dispositions while recounting their experiences: light, facetious, perhaps even a bit cheer-y. They did not seem afraid or shaken like I was. They told what happened to them in the manner as if this was another wild, drunken night for them. I was relieved that given the build-up to this climax, they were not physically harmed. But I was not relieved for myself. I knew that when morning arrived, I would get on the subway with only a child’s level of Russian and I hoped I would not run into one of those men–or anyone for that matter–who would do me great harm. Just four years before I arrived in Russia, one African-American was stabbed. Five years after me, in 2017, another Black person was stabbed but this time, the wounds were fatal.
I was obsessive and anxious as I took the train to the station where I would get off, scared for my life again, when I had to walk home in the early hours of the morning. And then once again, when I had to return to a dark apartment building. I took one look at that Pushkin portrait on the one of the entrance walls of the home where I was staying, got into bed, and a few minutes later, I heard a few knocks then the host mother said, “Завтрак через несколько минуты” or “breakfast in a few minutes.” I had to register how normal she sounded. Did she know I just arrived home? Did she hear me enter? She had no questions about where I’d been? Maybe she respected my privacy since she had much experience in being a host mother to international students. But in that moment, I felt like my world did not extend beyond the four corners of my bedroom not only because of my emotional processing but also for my survival.
What saved me during my studies in St. Petersburg was literature. Within the lines of some of the world’s greatest literary wordsmiths, my body became limitless, my skin became unimportant, and my world became that much bigger. When I think of what happened to me on that summer evening, sometimes I wrestle myself to really believe that that was reality. As I get older and the years melt away, it’s hard for me to reckon with the fact that I didn’t just make it up. Perhaps that’s how trauma works. Trauma has a way of disrupting your throughlines of memory and any harm that was done to you is either reconsidered, justified, or defended. After all, I came back from that night physically unscathed. But psychologically? I’m not sure.
It wasn’t until I was on my way home back from Russia to the United States–on a surprisingly upgraded flight at that–where I met another American who studied there just like myself. We had a long flight and I told him just a little about my experiences of feeling as though I were a target and that every time I stepped outside, I was always being stared at. People–particularly men’s gazes were so fierce and penetrating. He counteracted by telling me that one of his classmates, another Black woman, received all the aforementioned and more. According to that man, this other Black woman was not only stared at but kids would point at her on the street. Some would even call her a “monkey.” I was horrified by hearing this because the stories reminded me of something from a previous era: Jim Crow–where racial segregation was legal in America.
When I finally touched down on American soil, I felt…irresolute. I carried more questions than answers in my heart. But what was an anchor for me throughout my entire trip abroad and back into an advanced Russian class in the fall was my love for literature. You see, when it was time for me to declare my major at Princeton and to write my paper during my third year, Dr. Caryl Emerson—the one who read those Eugene Onegin translations at that faculty dinner–was now my advisor. What I remember most fondly about our meetings together was a book that sat prominently on the shelves of her personal library. It was called Under The Sky of my Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness. I found him again–not etched in stone, not painted on a portrait–he was right there. Instead of me looking up at him in St. Petersburg, he was looking at me in Princeton.
In that moment, we didn’t seem, as two writers of African descent, as positioned on opposite poles of each other. Pushkin, like myself, knew what it was like to be an outsider on the basis of race. When he was only 24, he was exiled because he published a poem called “Ode to Liberty,” which emphasized human yearning, liberation, and justice. That poem, among his other writings, is said to be romantic. And so I began to wonder: What does it mean to be a romantic? What does it mean for an African-originated soul to label themselves and their prose as such? What does it say about how he sees the world and how the world sees him?
First, I needed to investigate: What is a romantic? No, I am not talking about someone who desires another, possesses elaborate fantasies as a couple, and may even “romanticize” or over-emphasize the good qualities about another person to the point of obsession or even delusion. I’m not referring to dates, candlelit dinners, roses, or a “happily ever after.” I’m referring to a romantic in the literary sense. Well, for starters, the history of the romantic period was somewhere around 1798 to 1837. Writers were inspired by the French Revolution or the calls for the abolition of slavery. They were critical of the industrial advancement of their time period as well as the aristocracy and various elite factions of the era. Many scholars also considered the Romantic period to be a response to the age of Enlightenment where ideologies surrounding reason, logic, and order were most upheld.
As a result, romantic writers, like Alexander Pushkin, and poets, such as Byron, Keats, and Shelley needed to rebel. And this movement was not only confined to writers–composers such as Mendelssohn or Chopin or painters, such as Francisco Goya or W.M.W Turner were also involved. They emphasized the importance of nature and the wild, expansive nature of our imagination that could inform and even transcend our regular, everyday lives.
Now, don’t get me wrong, Alexander Pushkin was a romantic in the sentimental sense. Eugene Onegin is about a bored aristocrat who rejects the affections of a woman from the countryside, and he eventually regrets it. What’s eerie about this literary work is that there is a scene where Onegin is involved in a duel with another man, fatally killing him, and Pushkin himself was fatally wounded during a duel.
But I’m more interested in how Pushkin’s Blackness inspired his romantic side in a literary sense. About 10 years before Pushkin’s tragic death, he began to write a novel in honor of his African great grandfather, titled The Blackamoor of Peter The Great. After about 30 pages, Pushkin abandons this novel and we never know why. Yet what we have is rich because the main character named Ibrahim is not only idealized as “the son of a sultan,” he is as full of contradiction about his Blackness as Alexander Pushkin is of his own.
Fotograf Gandalf Hammerbacher
For starters, Ibraham is exoticized in the midst of white European circles, not for his prominent lineage, but rather for his outward appearance. He was met with wonder at Parisian balls and suppers because people did not expect an African to be so gregarious, educated, and attractive. The same can be said for Pushkin’s personal life: Though immensely talented, he stood out in school because of his prominent features that reflect African, rather than Eastern European, origins.
Being Black was an oddity in imperial Russia, as written by Jennifer Wilson in The New York Review of Books. I knew what it was like to be an oddity in St. Petersburg over some 200 years later. All the stares that I received, how an elder woman in a museum called me beautiful, how I evaded things being thrown at me or called “monkey,” or how some men oogled at me because they did not perceive me as what they imagined a Black woman looked like. One Russian woman guessed incorrectly that I had family in the Caucasus region.
I’m not going to lie, as a twenty year old, I did not interrogate this kind of attention. On the contrary, I was relieved and flattered by it. I liked that my presence, my body, was a curious and enigmatic site. I liked being seen as beautiful. Similar to Pushkin’s Ibrahim in The Blackamoor. Despite him having all the education and social ineptitude that money and class could offer, he wasn’t sure if the people in his midst looked upon with a deep, respectful fondness or fetishization.
If I interrogate my experience more deeply–and perhaps uncomfortably, I’d say, for me, it was the latter. Because in that one summer evening when I had a near brush of violence with neo-nazis, I was, as mentioned earlier, physically unscathed. What if it was because no one thought of me as Black? What if I had escaped because I had escaped their conceptions of a narrow, stereotypical, and perhaps racist view of a person of African descent?
This idea of being seen particularly as a Black person–and therefore a social outsider–is also prevalent in Erika Mann’s writings. From October 1927, she and her brother Klaus traveled around the world as a way to escape their troubles—she from a bad marriage and he from negative reviews on his most recent play. She spent time in both Russia and even Japan, like myself. She documented this in a travel journal called “Round About: The Adventure of a Journey around the World”. One of the countries where the Manns traveled is to the United States, specifically Chicago, where they encountered an intriguing person named Nora Holt.
Nora Holt was a blues singer and nightclub performer in Chicago, who was considered to be one of the most fascinating figures during the Harlem Renaissance, which was an era of explosive Black artistic, cultural production. Now, her vocation is quite interesting because of music. Blues began in the deep south of the United States, particularly in Mississippi–the Blackest–by that I mean the most Black people–in the entire country. When Black Americans were terrorized by racist white people in the deep south and oftentimes had difficulty finding stable employment and housing for their family due to the racist infrastructure of that time, they migrated to the north in cities, such as New York City, Detroit, Philadelphia, and of course, Chicago.
Erika Mann describes her introduction to Nora Holt as such:
Nora comports herself with the manners of a Duchess. When she is introduced to a gentleman, she lowers her eyelids with the almost piqued dignity that characterizes a true lady. Only later does she become more jovial. She is a singer of most exquisite reputation.
Not one of the popular type, the revue queen—such as Josephine Baker—: She is the sensation of selected circles, a friend of international intellectual circles. She is not a true Negro. Recently, she even has had her hair straightened, for a long time it has been dyed blonde. The procedure to straighten unmanageable hair has been invented especially for successful ladies of her race.
It requires complex machines and is said to be expensive and painful. Her blonde boyish hairdo looks provocative with her broad nose, shining eyes, and flamboyant thick-lipped mouth. The lady who today wears her silver dress with elegant nonchalance, who makes herself up in as costly a way as any lady on Fifth Avenue, hails from New York’s darkest area. The beginning is called Harlem, the black Quarter).
Nora Holt was one of the leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance but she also was the first-African-American to receive a Master’s Degree in Music in the United States. I could talk at length about her many accomplishments, such as studying in France, composing over 200 pieces of music, writing music criticism for the Chicago Defender, which was one of the most important African-American newspapers in America at that time. But according to the excerpt from Erika Mann’s travelogues, Nora Holt’s intrigue is not her profession, but rather her performance.
Nora is said to act like royalty and when she is around male company, it’s as if she is a true lady. In comparison, Josephine Baker, arguably the world’s first Black female superstar in history, who was born and raised in the deep south of America, is not considered a “true negro” because she dyed her “unmanageable hair” blonde. In other words, Josephine Baker upends Erika Mann’s ideas surrounding Blackness. Similarly to how Ibraham Gannibal did in St. Petersburg, similar to how I did in the same place.
What first strikes me about Erika Mann’s observations is she recognizes the art of performance. Nora Holt is a Black American woman performing in a room full of white people. Holt knows how to perform her race in such a way to make upper class white people comfortable in order to generate money and therefore keep her career.
What also strikes me about Erika Mann’s observations is about her subtle quest for cultural authenticity. Even she as a foreigner knew that those like Nora Holt and Josephine baker manipulated their appearances to “appear white” for professional mobility and social acceptance. Erika Mann recognizes how these Black female performers’ eroticism and physical manipulation pulled through from the margins to center stage. But what does it mean to be a true negro? What does it mean to be a true African? What does it mean to be a true African-American woman?
I don’t know for two reasons: 1) Race itself is a fiction with real, material consequences–whether it’s me running from white supremacists in St. Petersburg, Ibraham Gannibal’s capture from West Africa to Russia, Pushkin’s challenging, social environment, and the vestiges of chattel slavery in America. Secondly, I don’t know because as I am navigating the world in and out spaces, both domestically and internationally, I am just trying to exist. That trying–that endeavoring is what keeps me firmly rooted in my humanity.
When I mean that I am just trying to exist, I’m not saying this because my health is failing, thank goodness, or that I am going through some kind of existential crisis. What I mean is that as an African-American, as a Black woman, I know what it’s like to undermine or escape other people’s gazes because I’m not what they “think” a Black woman in their minds should be. I have manipulated my appearance before in order to gain white acceptance. I had chemically straightened hard, wore certain clothes, even changed my manner of speech so that I would not be invisible. I also graduated from the top university in my country, I speak multiple foreign languages, I’ve traveled the world–everything from how I speak, dress, and look is often under scrutiny because these particular spaces were not traditionally meant for me to thrive, much less for meant for me and my people at all.
When I mean that I am just trying to exist, I mean that when I am under someone else’s gaze, particularly a white person’s, there is a power dynamic at play. Before I even had language to communicate my experience, I knew that I had to perform my beauty in such a way that made white people comfortable. I’ve had to move in and out of physical spaces in such a way in order to survive and I’ve been trying to evade preconceived stereotypes of what I should be like because of the horrors of slavery–hypersexualized, demonized, masculinized, diminished, invisibilized, or erased. My body, historically, has been a contested site for colonialism, domination, and violence. In America, there is a saying–one of which I strongly disagree– that children are meant to be seen and not heard. Black women were meant to neither be seen or heard; their original purpose in the global north was to relentlessly work and to be narrowed into existence in order to maintain social order and racial hierarchy.
But what I’ve learned as an author, an intellectual, as a public thinker and speaker, is that while people are looking at me, I can look back at them. I’ve always been looking at them. And this is why I call myself a romantic.
Fotograf Gandalf Hammerbacher
I am a romantic because when I write, I do not have a third party dictating to me if my experiences are important or not. I’m used to this kind of treatment in my regular life as an African-American woman who often is expected to excel better than her peers in order to get half the recognition. When I say that I am a romantic, I not only narrativize my experiences, but I also center the emotional truth about them. Whenever I write, it is a deeply sensorial, corporeal experience. I can feel a flutter or tightness in my chest, a chill down my spine, or a tear forming in my eyes, if I write about any experience that means something deeply to me. To me.
When my body physically reacts to a memory that I have held within my heart from a short while or long time, it reminds me that my human existence holds multiple dimensions: I see, I hear, I smell, I taste, I touch, I wonder, I think, I question, I feel. I do not need to be strong and distant from my own passions, which is often a stereotype characterized to Black women because of the historical legacy of how much we have been forced to sacrifice for our survival.
When I say that I am a romantic writer, that means I’m deeply sentimental and vulnerable, and that my emotions exist along a spectrum, each one worthy of highlighting and contextualizing. I feel soft however I am firmly grounded in my own body. I am the authority of my own experience and the creator of my own history as it’s happening in real time. I am developing an archive where I am speaking in and out of text where my ancestors only existed on page at the point of violence or their untimely deaths. And best of all, I do not need to perform within prose. I can define and redefine what it means to be myself even as I’m learning and evolving as a person.
A passage from one of Erika Mann’s works was read earlier this evening and unfortunately I understood none of it because I cannot understand German. However, I was given a translation prior to my arrival here in Munich and there were a few parts that stuck out to me and I am going to abbreviate a bit of what she said in English:
“My view of the crucial issues facing modern society is more emotional than intellectual – not dogmatic, but humane. I am neither a partisan nor a crusader. My political views and actions have always been determined more by my personal experiences and impulses than by abstract principles. The only ‘principle’ I adhere to is my stubborn belief in a few fundamental moral ideals – truth, honour, decency, freedom, tolerance.
Because I wanted to tell the truth, I had to know what was really going on in the world: I couldn’t rely on other people’s stories, I had to find out for myself. I had to travel around. And that’s exactly what I did…Of course, all these places, the people I met there and the events I witnessed became an essential part of my personal history. Every new experience – travel, friendships, dangers and defeats – taught me something new, or rather, every new adventure confirmed, deepened and expanded one of the fundamental truths that have always guided me.
I don’t t want to develop theories, but I do want to draw certain conclusions from what I have seen and experienced. I have seen and experienced the ugly triumph of brutal violence, the bankruptcy of diplomatic tricks and conventions, the suffering of decent, misguided people. But I have also seen the awakening of the victims, the rebellion of the ordinary man, his bravery and grim determination…”
I found within this passage that Erika Mann too was also a romantic outsider. She was courageous and that courage led her to being exiled. She emphasized the importance of personal experiences and she was more concerned with emotions rather than intellect when it came to the undercurrents of our modern society. In the same way, so was I. I could develop theories, like she did, but that’s not where my deepest power resided. Instead, it was in the centering of myself in the midst of a rapidly changing world and injecting my sensitivity into all that I observed.
Like her, I was not satisfied with the cataloguing of others’ experiences, which is why I learned Russian and multiple other languages, and that’s why I traveled the world like she did. I didn’t want to only read about the world, I wanted to become fully immersed in it. Every new experience did teach me something new–even the dangers, as she referenced.
I escaped the “ugly triumph” of brutal violence that night when I was in St. Petersburg but I experienced violence in other forms, whether it’s through the devaluing of my thoughts and opinions in regular conversation, mockery and humiliation over how I look, especially the hair that grows naturally out of my scalp, or the dismissal of my accomplishments even as I strive to be accepted into institutions that weren’t made for me. Violence, as I learned, does not only come through the might of a fist or the strength of a bullet. Violence can also come through words, sneers, and gazes. Its inflicted pain can sear that psyche quite deeply, leaving no physical scars but an ocean of emotional ones.
But that’s the beauty of this work. That’s the beauty I’ve found in Erika Mann’s body of work as well as Pushkin’s and even my own–each sentence, each turn of phrase has an immortal quality to it. It’s to show to the world that they were here–I was here. Because of their contribution, I realized that I was not alone and even though my ancestors survived in places where they were considered less than human, I learned through traveling and documentation that I too was a participant in the human condition. My hope is that years later, my responsibility as a person of letters is that what I have been endowed in me through others can be endowed into someone else so that they too realize that they aren’t alone. They never were. And they never will be.