May Ayim

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Memorial plaque May-Ayim-Ufer (Kreuzberg)

May Ayim (actually Sylvia Brigitte Gertrud Opitz ; * May 3, 1960 in Hamburg as Sylvia Andler ; † August 9, 1996 in Berlin ) was a German poet , educator and activist of the Afro-German movement.

Life

The daughter of the Ghanaian medical student Emmanuel Ayim and the German Ursula Andler lived in a children's home in Hamburg-Barmbek-Uhlenhorst for the first year and a half . Her father was not allowed to take her to Ghana with him. She was then adopted by the Opitz family and grew up with them in Münster ( North Rhine-Westphalia) on. Her birth mother refused to make any contact throughout her life, and her birth father visited her several times with her foster parents since she was a child. She described her childhood as depressing, marked by fear and violence. The adoptive parents strictly wanted to raise them to be a model child who would give the lie to all “racist prejudices”. They rejected their later involvement in the “Black Community” as the long-term effects of an early childhood disorder and the pathological urge to cope with their skin color and Afro-German identity. In 1979 she passed the Abitur at the Catholic Peace School in Münster .

She later studied pedagogy and psychology at the University of Regensburg and graduated in 1986 with a diploma. During her studies, she traveled to Kenya, where her father now worked as a medicine professor, with whom she was no longer able to develop a close relationship, and to Ghana, which she referred to as her “fatherland”, although she felt foreign there and as a “white man” “Was viewed. She published her diploma thesis Afro-German: Your cultural and social history against the background of social changes - at that time still under the name May Opitz - in the volume confessed color , published together with Katharina Oguntoye and Dagmar Schultz , which was also translated into English. According to Ayim, the Regensburg professor in charge rejected the topic of the diploma thesis on the grounds that "There is no such thing as racism in Germany today". Instead, she found an examiner in Berlin who accepted the work.

From 1984 she lived in West Berlin , in whose multicultural environment she felt less isolated than in Münster or Regensburg. In 1986 Ayim was a founding member of the initiative Black Germans and Blacks in Germany . She established contacts with representatives of the international black women's movement such as Audre Lorde . In 1987 she began training as a speech therapist . Her thesis from 1990 is entitled Ethnocentrism and Sexism in Speech Therapy . She then worked as a freelance speech therapist and from 1992 to 1995 as a lecturer at the Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences , the Free University of Berlin and the Technical University of Berlin .

In lectures and also in her poems, she defended herself against racist discrimination, which she experienced herself in her everyday life. In particular, she criticized the offensive character of terms such as “ negro ”, “half-breed” or “ occupation child ”. In true colors , she wrote: "I grew up with the feeling that was in them. Having to prove that a 'mongrel', a, Negroes ', one, foster child' is a full human being is" The German reunification , they Ayim, who referred to it as "Sch unit", experienced it as overshadowed by increasing nationalism and violence against minorities. In the poem deutschland im Herbst (1992) she drew a connection from the “Kristallnacht” in November 1938 to the fatal attack on Amadeu Antonio in November 1990 and concluded with the words “I dread winter”. From 1992 she published under the name May Ayim. In 1995 she published the poetry collection blues in black and white . Her poem Exotik was included in it, which she had already written in 1985 and which shows the connection between her life experiences and her artistic work:

after they first blackened me out
then they dragged me through the cocoa
to finally want to make me white
it is completely inappropriate
- see black
"Exotic" (1985)

Ayim wrote not only political and socially critical, but also love poetry.

May Ayim is considered to be one of the pioneers of critical whiteness research in Germany:

“The Christian-occidental color symbolism has always associated the color black with the reprehensible and undesirable. Accordingly, examples can be found in the early literature where white people become " Moors " through unlawful behavior . In the church vocabulary of the Middle Ages, the terms " Aethiops " and " Aegyptius " were used in a striking way as synonyms for the term devil. Religiously determined prejudices and discrimination thus formed part of the foundation on which a conglomerate of racist convictions could easily develop in colonial times , which turned blacks into sub-humans (negroes). "

- May Ayim (1997)
May Ayim's grave, Alter St.-Matthäus-Kirchhof in Berlin, June 2015

Ayim had suffered from psychotic attacks since the early 1990s , which is why she voluntarily entered closed psychiatry several times. After being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis , she was in despair. The discontinuation of her psychiatric drugs used for depression in the context of the treatment of multiple sclerosis resulted in a rapid deterioration in her mental health. She fell to her death on August 9, 1996 from a high-rise building. May Ayim was buried in the Old St. Matthew Cemetery, Berlin .

Reception and honors

May Ayim was included in the Daughters of Africa anthology published in 1992 by Margaret Busby in London and New York.

In 1997 she was portrayed by Maria Binder in the film Hope in the Heart . The reggae musician Linton Kwesi Johnson dedicated the song Reggae fi May Ayim to her in 1998 .

In 2004 Afrotak TV gave cyberNomads (in cooperation with the German section of UNESCO , the House of World Cultures and the Power of the Night Team) the May Ayim Award , the “first Black German International Pan-African Literature Prize.” The winners were Mario Curvello ( Epik ), Olumide Popoola ( poetry ) and MC Santana ( multimedia ).

On 27 May 2009 decided in Berlin Borough Assembly of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg , which after the Prussian Lieutenant General Otto Friedrich von der Groeben , founder of the Brandenburg slave fort and colony United Friedrichsburg in West Africa (now Ghana), named Gröbenufer in banks May-Ayim- rename . On February 27, 2010 the street signs were put up.

Google Germany honored Ayim on February 27, 2018 with its own doodle .

factories

Non-fiction
Volumes of poetry
various

Work settings

  • 2002: Marc Pendzich: Nachtgesang - 9 pieces on poems by May Ayim for a female voice, oboe, percussion, violoncello and double bass.
  • 2013: Oxana Chi, Layla Zami: I Step on Air. Dance-Music-Performance
  • 2017: Marc Pendzich feat. Danny Merz: Nachtgesang - A tribute to May Ayim , music album at vadaboéMusic

Web links

Commons : May Ayim  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Margret MacCarroll: May Ayim: A Woman in The Margin of German Society. Master thesis. Florida State University. (PDF; 475 kB), p. 3.
  2. ↑ a b c d May Ayim , Goethe Institute.
  3. ↑ a b c d e f g Silke Mertins: What should the last words be. In: taz. the daily newspaper. December 23, 1997, p. 23.
  4. ↑ a b Clara Ervedosa: The May-Ayim bank in Berlin. In: Jürgen Zimmerer: No place in the sun. Places of remembrance of German colonial history. Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2013, pp. 424–441, on p. 429.
  5. ↑ Katharina Oguntoye, May Ayim / Opitz, Dagmar Schultz : Confessing color: Afro-German women on the trail of their history. Orlanda Frauenverlag, Berlin 2006, p. 5: "The beginning was the joint initiative of Audre Lorde." Page 18: "With Audre Lorde we developed the term 'Afro-German' based on Afro-American."
  6. ↑ May Ayim , Digital German Women's Archive.
  7. ↑ Show your colors. 2006, p. 207.
  8. ↑ May Ayim: Blues in black and white. Poems . 4th edition. Orlanda-Frauenverlag, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-936937-27-3 (quoted from Ecoleusti ).
  9. ↑ May Ayim: The Afro-German minority. In: Susan Arndt (Ed.): AfrikaBilder. Studies on Racism in Germany. 2001, ISBN 3-89771-407-8 , pp. 71-86.
  10. ^ Military 13. Accessed February 27, 2018 .
  11. ↑ Gröbenufer becomes May-Ayim-Ufer. In: New Germany. May 29, 2009.
  12. ↑ Google Doodle Today: Who Was May Ayim? In: Augsburger Allgemeine . February 27, 2018.
personal data
SURNAME Ayim, May
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Opitz, Sylvia Brigitte Gertrud (real name); Andler, Sylvia (maiden name)
SHORT DESCRIPTION German poet, educator and activist of the Afro-German movement
BIRTH DATE May 3, 1960
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH August 9, 1996
PLACE OF DEATH Berlin