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Sinthujan Varatharajah: "Reject Imperial Logic Within Imperial Languages"
Photo: Lilian Scarlet Löwenbrück / hanser blue
Sinthujan Varatharajah found a picture taken by his own father in an old photo album.
It shows a scene from the elephant house at Munich's Hellabrunn Zoo in the early 1990s: three animals are standing on the straw-covered floor.
Some green shines through a door-sized opening in the enclosure on the right in the picture, the silhouette of the mother can be guessed on the bottom left.
“Suddenly something moves.
Not on the picture that was printed on glossy paper in my hands, nor in the space that I see in this picture, but in me«, writes Varatharajah about the effect of the rediscovered picture.
In the new book »to all places that lie behind us« Varatharajah uses private photos to tell the story of his family's flight over a good 350 pages and at the same time creates a history of colonialism.
It is an unusual volume, a mixture of memoir, political essay and chronicle – from the raids of the “discoverers”, some of whom are still called “discoverers”, to present-day Germany.
Varatharajah now lives in Berlin, is a cultural scientist and writer.
In the latter capacity, Varatharajah read at the Bachmann Prize in 2014 and published two novels.
However, Varatharajah is known to a broader public above all through a complicated controversy about a Berlin bookstore and German culture of remembrance, in which she*he attested the Germans to have a »Nazi background« as a counterpoint to the »migration background«.
Varatharajah himself fled to Bavaria in the mid-1980s as a small child with his parents and siblings to escape the civil war in Sri Lanka. At that time, the government was committing genocide against the Tamil minority to which the family belonged.
The family found safety in Germany, but had to live in Germany's asylum system for years.
Only the photographs taken by the father's camera gave the dreary everyday life "a material form of memory that outlasted the legal limbo of the asylum," as Varatharajah writes.
In the hands of the colonialists, on the other hand, the camera was "converted into a weapon that began to travel like rifles, Bibles and maps of the Europeans and was used against the interests of colonized people".
With the support of historical secondary literature and on the basis of his own story of escape, Varatharajah draws attention to institutions and public facilities in an associative manner.
He sees the world exhibitions, for example, as horror chambers of exploitation, and the greenhouses that emerged in the 19th century as artificial hoards for tropical plants.
And: Varatharajah also sends very direct verbal signals.
Terms that »derive from colonial logic or naming«, according to an accompanying letter from the Hanserblau publishing house, are in italics throughout.
The declared goal: "to refuse imperial logics within imperial languages." Specifically, this refusal applies to dates and years according to the Gregorian calendar as well as cardinal points, the metric system, geographical designations or epoch designations proclaimed by Europeans.
Conversely, a continent is suddenly called Abya Yalas without comment and not in italics.
These irritations often work well, as the reader suddenly notices their own ignorance, researches and finds out that Abya Yalas is a name for the pre-colonial American continent, which was only named arbitrarily after an Italian seafarer centuries later.
But it also becomes clear: in the act of undoing language, Varatharajah clearly propagates his own worldview.
At the same time, the principle therefore reaches its limits or creates connections that one does not want to leave as they are.
It is no surprise that Varatharajah also counts the state of Israel among the obliquely inclined terms, i.e. those that arose from a colonialist logic and naming convention.
Anti-Semitism has only just been discussed in Germany in the wake of the Documenta scandal.
The question of when criticism of Israel turns into anti-Semitism and whether this also has something to do with who is speaking out splits in many places an old left from a young left that is moved by migration and identity politics – to which Varatharajah belongs.
In June, a panel co-organized by Varatharajah on the “Dynamics of the Global Right” ended in a series of rejections – including those from Varatharajah himself – after the Palestinian activist Mohammed El-Kurd whom she*him had invited was uninvited by the Goethe-Institut in Hamburg was.
According to the Goethe-Institut, El-Kurd had "made several comments about Israel online that the Goethe-Institut found unacceptable".
When asked, Sinthujan Varatharajah's publisher Hanserblau distanced itself from the italics for Israel.
"The statements of our authors reflect their opinions or assessments, not those of the publisher," says a brief written statement.
No language experiment
However, Varatharajah's essay is weakest in the places where he presents his own general analyzes of the world and history, probably also because the text seems so highly ambitious.
In parts, »to all places that lie behind us« reads like a classic academic essay – which is surprising in view of the storm against the Western, scientific nomenclature of flora and fauna.
Above all, the chapter on aviation stretches too far and sometimes gets lost in details, sometimes in general knowledge of military historiography.
And the book is at its strongest when Varatharajah poetically reappraises his own experience: »I think of my family and my many relatives who wear colonialism on their bodies, whose bodies* can be worn away like a landscape, from their deep brown skin down to the organs, layer by layer, organ by organ, to delve deeper into the pain of so-called history.« There are passages where the balancing act between personal pain and the devastating facts about colonialism and its effects succeeds.