Oreo (novel)

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Oreo is the only novel by the US journalist and writer Fran Ross from the year 1974. The by a New York acting -Travel and the Theseus - Myth linked history of the 16-year-old heroine was initially little response. With the “rediscovery” in 2000, a new evaluation began (“brilliant novel overflowing with witty ideas and linguistic turbulence”), through which the book now enjoys cult status. In 2020 Pieke Biermann received the Leipzig Book Fair prize in the “ Translation ” category for her “terrific translation” into German - the first ever .

content

Christine Clark, called Oreo, is the child of a black mother and a white Jewish father, whose marriage is vehemently rejected by both parents and who also breaks up before Oreo is two years old. Since her mother travels through the country with a traveling acting company and her father disappears completely from the scene, the girl and her younger brother grow up with her maternal grandparents in Philadelphia . Oreo soon proves to be precocious in every respect. She doesn't even get to know a school; she jumps around with various tutors like with sparring partners . When it is time to arm herself physically, she develops her own self-defense technique, which borrows the best from the well-known and which she baptizes "Path of Interstitial Accurate Anger", WITZ for short. Armed in this way, at the age of 16, with the blessing of her mother and a generous rucksack for provisions from her ingeniously cooking grandmother, she set off for New York to discover “the secret of her birth” and to find her father.

Before he left, he had left her, along with a mezuzah and a pair of socks, a list of seemingly cryptic “clues” that should lead her to him. Oreo is more worried than that because the Manhattan phone book alone has no fewer than 48 people with his name - S (amuel) Schwartz. The three days that she needs to get to her destination are filled with encounters and adventures of a curious kind. You start on the train ride with a gay fellow traveler who, barely older than you, works as a "travel henchman" by writing letters of resignation Written for top managers , they continue about a pickpocket, a midget family and a mute sound engineer - and culminate in a confrontation with a shrill black pimp and his sidekick , an animal satyr who needs Oreo's martial arts and additional cunning. Finally, after she has found her father - the first encounter is unspectacular, the second all the more dramatic - her sharp mind, paired with even greater chutzpah , is asked once more as she clarifies how she and her brother conceive had been.

shape

The novel is divided into two parts and 15 chapters; the first, somewhat shorter part outlines the heroine's origins, “baptism” (Oreo) and growing up to a 16-year-old teenager, the second is about her “ odyssey ” through New York , which lasted only a few days . Two genres are already covered: development novel and hero's journey , or quest . In addition, the criticism classifies Oreo as a satire and “ feminist picaresque novel ” in which a “boisterous hyperrealism ” prevails, at least far from “simple” realism . Even new genre terms emerge, for example in a US review which states that the novel is “one of the great American food novels”.

Oreo is also a postmodern novel par excellence. Ross plays virtuously with the “archive of literary traditions”, which she “ queers , ridicules , rearranges, reinterprets and remixes”, be it genres, text types , language or characters. The scope of the epic traditional body text , for example, breaks Oreo , mainly in part one, by text types such as letters, lists, advertising slogans , graffiti sayings, jokes, scatterings in dramatic , school work (plus Oreos solutions that they themselves marked as wrong) Speech , Equations, a diagram , a quiz and the 5-page menu of an exquisite home-made menu, created by Oreo's grandmother, whose exquisite palate is solely responsible for the classification under the "great American food novels".

Against this background, stylistic and linguistic diversity are self-evident. Critics praised Ross' “delicious, language - explosive anti- political correctness program”, attested to her lightning-fast “ code switching within a sentence”, sovereign mastery of all registers between “ ordinary and educated, brash and polished, rubble dump and ornamental garden ”or describes their language as an“ amalgam of Afro-American English, Anglicized Yiddish , southern idiom , fantasy language and silence ”. What is not overlooked is the fact that almost every character is endowed with its own, often comical language tick , which makes language itself a character in a novel; Ross has mastered "the great art of pushing it to the limits of what is understandable in order to make the unique behind stereotypes and patterns visible".

subjects

identity

The eponymous Oreo . In New York, Oreo uses her “cream cookie smile” several times as a tactical weapon.
Theseus defeats Kerkyon . When Oreo “steps into the ring”, she tries to use her technique in such a way that the pimp doesn't even “touch” her.

Who is Oreo? Who are you comparing to? With strong girl characters ( Pippi Longstocking , Zazie , Alice ) or with male characters like the biblical David , Jewish Schlemihls , the crooks of Isaak Babel ? Is she, simply because of the formal reference to the ancient hero myth , a modern Theseus ? Or a female anti-Theseus? There are just as good reasons for everything as there are counter-reasons. To “grasp” Oreo as a character is basically impossible, unless by reading the whole novel. Yet it has a solid core. From the beginning she is "herself". Sometimes one has the impression that she was born “finished”. Not that she can already do everything. But what she wants to be able to do comes to her, and she succeeds with ease. When and how does she actually learn to read and write? She is only three when she, bored by the stereotypical, meaningless letters from her mother, answers her for the first time herself, with just one sentence ("dear mama, let the shit"), in mirror writing ! It is significant (and plausible due to the spatial separation) that the replica is not child-friendly either; logical that Oreo feels equal to adults at an early age; It is also logical that she is mainly dying to assert her identity . With her self-defense technique WITZ she sets the keystone that is still missing.

When Oreo set off for New York , she had the maturity to tread the most adventurous pavement in the world at the time, in order to " meander " and " step into the ring" ( see above), even before reaching the age of majority the part and a chapter heading). She passed all tests with flying colors. If it were only about fighting strength and the art of fighting, perhaps paired with cunning, the novel would be nothing more than a revival of old myths. Oreo is asked for much more. In (estimated) a dozen encounters with twice as many people, of whom she has to win not all, but some for herself, in order to reach the goal, a lot is required of her: knowledge of human nature, social and emotional intelligence, tactical skills, communicative skills Competence, language and repartee skills, temperament restraint and relaxation and, last but not least, a moral compass. Oreo is therefore designed as a hero figure; not a “simple” realistic one , but one that, despite the satirical exaggeration that Ross indulgently indulges in, especially when designing the secondary characters, is a model for being flexible without bending, for developing a complex identity without becoming a self betray.

"Christine inherited the frizzy hair and delicate dark skin [...] from the Jewish part of the family, the sharp features, the rhythm and even more delicate skin from the black ." As for Oreo's origins and supposedly typical characteristics of " races ", this is it another of the less confusing sentences. In this regard, Ross has done everything to create so much confusion that any attempt to look for something to create identity here would be pure arbitrariness. A prime example of how social conventions govern the use (and misuse) of names is Christine's nickname Oreo. It is important to clarify its origin and use in the context of the novel, because in reality it is not only known as a product name (for a black double biscuit with a white filling ), but also as a swear word that suggests a black person is (inappropriately) like a white man to behave. In fiction , Louise dreams that her granddaughter Christine should be called “ Oriole ”, but a double misunderstanding leads her to “Oreo”, a name that is wonderfully appropriate for the little girl with the “deep brown skin and the broad Smile with the sugar-white milk teeth ”, which is ultimately just right for Louise, who likes everything that tastes good. So in the novel, Christine's nickname is based on a social agreement and is used benevolently by those who call her that. Apart from that, the person wearing it is drawn in such a way that, if defamation were to occur , she would be strong enough not to let her name and identity be determined by others: "Use the derogatory term and give it positive connotations."

language

“Christine had the same love as her mother for words, their nuances and cadences , juice and pulp, the variety and accuracy, the rocky and weird.” Even readers who pay more attention to the content than to the language will find it helpful when reading Oreo does not miss the fact that the author is also describing herself and her novel at this point , thus making a self-referential statement - a further characteristic of postmodern literature . Oreo, a prototypical figure of this genre , capable of absorbing everything that exists, lives out her curiosity for the unknown most intensely in her lust for language. It starts with individual words, goes through foreign languages ​​(French, Latin, Yiddish ), ebonics , dialects , idioms , accents , slang , high-level language and extends to "Tscha-ki-ki-wah", the fantasy language of your brother, and "Louiseisch “, The gibberish of her grandmother Louise. Depending on her mood and how she wants to meet her counterpart (getting involved, provoking, parodying , etc.), she uses them partly “pure”, partly mixed, and amazes with rapid code switching . She also uses the full range of her expressiveness for her personal motto : high-level Latin (“Nemo me impune lacessit”) versus slang (“I don't mind a nigger what I have to do or not”).

By Ross almost all figures also characterized through their language, it invites the reader to constantly align the extent he considers the language used with a view of the speaker's age, temperament, education level, etc., for "normal" or not. The simple equation of language skills and intelligence works for Oreo. But not for Louise. Oreo's maternal grandmother is introduced as a person who cannot remember the most common names and whose “pulpy”, crudely reduced southern state idiom would need a “Louise-English dictionary” to make it understandable. On the other hand, she is “a cook by eternal grace and an adept of countless ethnic and international cuisines .” How does her linguistic limitation fit in with her gustatory genius and cosmopolitanism? Easier to understand than this paradox is that of her husband James, who, although he hates Jews , mixed Yiddish vocabulary into his speech - at least while he was still speaking (his daughter's announcement that she was going to marry a Jew put him in a state of shock): He does business with the hated opponent, always with the intention of ripping him off if possible. A third paradox is even more surprising: How can it be that a child who grows up in the care of a “mute” and a “gibberish woman” flourishes linguistically like Oreo? Ross doesn't resolve it. The parallel to her strategy of confusion, with which she wants to prevent identity with origin from being short-circuited, is of course obvious.

reception

Oreo , the story of a black “superwoman with a super brain”, appeared in 1974, at the height of the Black Power movement - and flopped . In retrospect, literary criticism reveals why by comparing it with the hit novel by Ross' compatriot, who is also of Afro-American roots, published just two years later : Alex Haleys Roots . The essential difference is already contained in both titles: Roots go back to a mythical past of a “ racial purity”, while Oreo faces the present (and future) with its “more polluted racial waters” . Haley fulfilled what the zeitgeist of black America was focused on: the search for an identity rooted in Africa and a male black power; Ross, on the other hand, with her novel about a multiracial woman who, instead of looking for her black, searches for her white ( Jewish ) origin, was very far from what was expected of African-American authors at the time.

Two aspects were added that prevented Oreo from being successful at the time of its publication. Oreo is essentially a feminist odyssey ; In the mid-1970s, however, feminism in the United States was still generally seen as a movement of mainly white women; a decade later, when Alice Walker's The Color Purple was honored with the country's highest literary prizes, things looked different. Above all, however, Ross differs from Haley as from Walker in that it does not invite the reader to empathic identification; Oreo as a figure evades such appropriation that Oreo as a work of art is “the ultimate idiosyncratic novel”. The one who postulated this was none other than Harryette Mullen , the woman who at the turn of the millennium, 15 years after Ross' untimely death, arranged for a new edition of Oreo and explained in an accompanying essay why Ross was ahead of her time with her only novel. Danzy Senna, who launched the second new edition 15 years later, confirmed Mullen's thesis with the memory of her first reading of Oreo at the end of the 1990s: the novel, which was already a quarter of a century old at the time, seemed to her like one whose publication was still to come.

There are now weighty male voices promoting Oreo , such as Mat Johnson (2011), Dwight Garner (2015) and Marlon James (2018); almost identically, their articles close with the prediction that the time has finally come for Ross' only novel. James' contribution in the Guardian , a review of the third new edition in the English-speaking world, also piqued the curiosity of the German writer, journalist and translator Pieke Biermann . She absolutely wanted to translate the novel into German, which she managed to do in a spectacularly short time ("three to four months") and in an affordable quality. Her performance is praised in all German-language reviews, sometimes hymnically , and in 2020 she won the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in the translation category .

Reviews

“Fran Ross is possibly the bravest [among] rediscoveries, possibly not the most approachable, but definitely the weirdest. […] Rarely does one notice so much in a novel the passion with which it was written, with how much joy it takes to whistle completely with all literary conventions. Maybe that's the kind of fun Pynchon - or Foster-Wallace fans get when they smile at their postmodern tomes? Except that Fran Ross' heroine is sexier, cooler and funnier than the protagonists of many of her colleagues. "

- Fatma Aydemir , Taz

"Even the most difficult topics are told completely without lamentation, but with lust and disrespectful wit."

- Gabriele von Arnim , DLF Culture

“One could accuse the book of a certain over-orchestration. So much ingenious imagination, such an immense wealth of innuendo threaten to flood the ordinary reading river bed, to overwhelm the capacity for absorption. But that's also what this novel is about, which expands the boundaries of what can be told and what can be told: saying goodbye to well-worn patterns always means being overwhelmed before new insights can emerge. "

- Antje Rávik Strubel , DLF Culture

“With Oreo, Fran Ross took an important step forward in both Jewish and black literary history, and it took us many years to notice. We can learn from this that literature can take the second step before the first - and that sometimes we cannot keep up. The rediscovery of this book and the terrific transmission by Pieke Biermann is a stroke of luck. Oreo shows us that other stories are needed to change our relationship with ourselves and our society. And that these stories already exist. The book opens up new perspectives for us by doing what good literature has to do - namely to broaden our conception of what is narrative and therefore possible. We didn't know, but we were waiting for this book. "

- Max Czollek

expenditure

English

  • Fran Ross: Oreo . Northeastern University Press, Lebanon (New Hampshire) 1974.
  • Fran Ross: Oreo . Foreword by Harryette Mullen . Northeastern University Press, Lebanon (New Hampshire) 2000.
  • Fran Ross: Oreo . Introduction by Danzy Senna. New Directions, New York 2015. ISBN 978-0811223225
  • Fran Ross: Oreo . Introduction by Marlon James . PanMacmillan, Basingstoke 2018. ISBN 978-1-5098-8846-7

German

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Antje Rávik Strubel : Black and white make for colorful. DLF Kultur , March 12, 2020, accessed on August 9, 2020 .
  2. ↑ a b c d Mat Johnson: 'Oreo': A Satire Of Racial Identity, Inside And Out. National Public Radio , March 7, 2011, accessed August 16, 2020 .
  3. ↑ a b c d Max Czollek : On the art of taking the second step before the first. Epilogue to: Fran Ross: Oreo. dtv, Munich 2019.
  4. ↑ a b c d e Maike Albath : With Samuel Schwartz in the sauna. Süddeutsche Zeitung , January 8, 2020, accessed on August 9, 2020 .
  5. ↑ a b c Beate Meierfrankenfeld: The 70s novel "Oreo" undermines our identity issues. BR24 , October 26, 2019, accessed August 9, 2020 .
  6. ↑ a b Dwight Garner: Review: 'Oreo,' a Sandwich-Cookie of a Feminist Comic Novel. The New York Times , July 14, 2015, accessed August 9, 2020 .
  7. ↑ a b Marlon James : Oreo: Marlon James on a crazy, sexy, forgotten gem of black literature. The Guardian , July 7, 2018, accessed August 9, 2020 .
  8. ↑ Isabella Caldart: Life Between Jewish and Afro-American Identity. Der Tagesspiegel , November 24, 2019, accessed on August 9, 2020 .
  9. ↑ a b Fatma Aydemir : Superhero in search. Taz , October 18, 2019, accessed August 9, 2020 .
  10. ↑ a b c d e Gabriele von Arnim : A Jewish black superwoman. DLF Kultur , September 26, 2019, accessed on August 9, 2020 .
  11. ↑ Fran Ross: Oreo. dtv, Munich 2019, p. 39.
  12. ^ A b Fran Ross: Oreo. dtv, Munich 2019, p. 56.
  13. ↑ Fran Ross: Oreo. dtv, Munich 2019, p. 59.
  14. ↑ "Nobody irritates me with impunity"
  15. ↑ Fran Ross: Oreo. dtv, Munich 2019, p. 78.
  16. ↑ Fran Ross: Oreo. dtv, Munich 2019, p. 25.
  17. ↑ a b Danzy Senna: An overlooked classic about the comedy of race. The New Yorker , May 7, 2015, accessed August 16, 2020 .
  18. ↑ Gabriella Lorenz: Pieke Biermann on Fran Ross' 'Oreo'. Munich Feuilleton, April 27, 2020, accessed on August 16, 2020 .