Ayim’s Understanding of Medieval European Language

As a modern German historian by training and a scholar of Black German studies by choice, I have been reading and rereading Farbe bekennen for over twenty years now. Yet each time I open it, I discover something anew. It was during a recent rereading that I recognized Ayim’s early efforts to excavate a premodern history of Blackness with Blacks in Germany and, by extension, in Europe. Curiously, she pursued this work in the 1980s and 1990s, but scholars of medieval studies and history, such as Robert Barlett, Robert Greary, and Bernard Bachrach, have not engaged with her. Much like Robinson and Sylvia Wynter, whose works have often been ignored by Europeanists, Ayim recovered instances of race-making as well as processes of racialization in medieval Germany. So, in many ways, her early intervention helped initiate discussions about premodern race. Though she did this work within German academia, she received limited to no support from professors, who discouraged her from writing on this topic in 1984 because they claimed that racism was a problem only in South Africa or the United States. Ayim pursued this research in a German climate that perceived itself to be progressive and tolerant. The defeat of the Third Reich led to a national silencing of debates on race or racism on both sides of the Cold War divide. During the postwar period, East and West Germany clung to their own myths of antiracism and equality that the governments had codified in law in 1949.

Moreover, Ayim’s work not only interrogated the past but also demonstrated that language, like nineteenth-century Rankean empiricism, was not objective or value free. In a Foucauldian sense, she understood that language was tied to power and knowledge and that power reproduced knowledge. Ayim observed how language helped construct specific medieval realities (and imaginaries) for majority European and minority non-European populations. For her, studying the German language opened a space where one could observe premodern racial and historical changes that influenced linguistics. In addition, studying language and culture enabled Ayim to renounce Black Germans’ nonexistence (or nonhumanness) and counteract minoritized communities’ marginalization while also removing the cloak of invisibility German society imposed on them. She furthered this work in her 1990 speech therapy thesis, entitled “Ethnozentrismus und Geschlechterrollenstereotype in der Logopädie: Eine kritische Betrachung von Bildund Wortmaterialien mit Verbesserungvorschlägen für die Logopädische Praxis” (“Ethnocentrism and Gender Role Stereotypes in Speech Therapy: A Critical Consideration of Picture and Word Materials with Suggestions for Improvement in Specialist Practice”), at the Freie Universität Berlin. She shared in Farbe bekennen, for instance, that “[d]ie sprachlichen Veränderungen im Gebrauch der Bezeichnungen ‘M***’ und ‘N****’ spiegeln den Wandel der deutschen bzw. europäischen Beziehungen zu Afrika” (“the linguistic changes in the use of the terms ‘M***’ and ‘N****’ mirror the changes in German and European relations, respectively, with Africa”; 28).Footnote ⁵

She further explicated that

Ayim demonstrated that medieval Europeans interlinked race and religion, denoting Black as different or “other” from white and Christian. In this way, she laid bare what Heng explained in The Invention of Race:

Europeans’ “management of human differences” was predicated on the construction of boundaries of inclusion and exclusion in medieval society. Oftentimes, those European exclusionary practices revolved around commonplace usages that made Egyptian “als Synonym für Teufel” (“a synonym for the devil”; Ayim 28) and black as a descriptor for witches. With each example, the devil and witches were considered “Schwarz, hässlich und ohne gute Manieren, ein ‘ungehuire’” (“black [or evil], ugly, ill-mannered, and a ‘monster’”; 29). Moreover, Ayim noted that Blackness was depicted as the exact opposite of the medieval norm of whiteness. Drawing from “Wolfdietrich’s Saga,” an anonymous Middle High German heroic epic written around 1230, Ayim used the poem to illustrate how common this practice was. She utilizes the version of “Wolfdietrich’s Saga” that appeared in Gilman’s 1982 book. Ayim wrote:

After citing the passage, she explicated that

Revealing the religious undertones of the epic, Ayim indicated that the knight’s unspoken (yet assumed) whiteness was indexed to piety. The large ugly woman did not represent virtue. Rather, she was a devilish woman emerging from the trees or the wild and causing the knight harm with her dreadful appearance. The juxtaposition of light (the unspoken whiteness of the knight) and dark (the witch or monstrous woman) reinforced the epic’s meaning, which positioned Blackness as the antithesis to whiteness.

Certainly, Ayim’s usage of this medieval example bolsters Christina Sharpe’s concept of “monstrous intimacies.” Monstrous intimacies were essentially “those subjectivities constituted from transatlantic slavery onward and connected, then as now, by the everyday mundane horrors that aren’t acknowledged to be horrors” and are “a set of known and unknown performances and inhabited horrors, desires, and positions produced, reproduced, circulated, and transmitted, that are breathed in like air and often unacknowledged to be monstrous” (Monstrous Intimacies 3). Ayim shared the monstrous intimacies that pervaded medieval Germany, which normalized monstrous Blackness in the quotidian. Through the anonymous poem, she emphasized that the Western and European system structured ontological claims that contributed to the negation of Blackness that prevailed not only in the medieval period but also in later centuries.

In her research Ayim showed that

She emphasized European medieval processes of race-thinking, race-making, and boundary-making in poetry and stressed how medieval epics and medieval poetics presented seemingly entrenched cultural and political ideas about belonging and unbelonging. In this way, language had the power to shape both fictionalized and real-life medieval accounts. Ayim shared Heng’s belief “that a hierarchal politics of color, centering with precision on the polarity of black and white, existed and is in evidence across the multitude of texts and artifacts, sacred and secular, that descend to us” (42). Ayim’s intellectual contributions broke with the image of a preracial white Middle Ages that underpinned late-twentieth-century medieval scholarship. Instead, she created work that complemented her activism by exposing the myths of “white innocence” (Wekker) in Germany’spast and present.

Quotidian Intellectuals on the Move

I examined her intellectual work within and beyond Germany in my 2020 book, Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement, and its 2023 German translation, Black Germany: Schwarz, Deutsch, Feministisch-die Geschichte einer Bewegung. I maintained that Ayim and her Black German compatriots were quotidian intellectuals “who thought, theorized, wrote, performed, and circulated their ideas and knowledge textually, visually, or orally through publications, workshops, conferences, presentations, and other artistic forms in the public sphere” (Mobilizing 6). I argued that quotidian intellectuals, a concept I coined,

Black German quotidian intellectuals were not connected to Karl Marx’s historical materialist tradition, nor were they like Antonio Gramsci’s organic intellectuals (187n26). They produced work that often existed beyond the traditional German academy and the scholarly channels of knowledge production. Indeed, these quotidian intellectuals created and disseminated knowledge through their collectives, magazines, exhibitions, poems, speeches, and edited volumes, which often remained on the margins of German society. Black Germans’ intellectual work established that the synthesis of theory and practice was achievable in everyday life.

Undeniably, Ayim was a quotidian intellectual par excellence who saw how entrenched white European empiricism was in obscuring the role of people of African descent in European history. And like Ayim, who sought to expose the erasure of the contributions of Black peoples in a European context, I recovered her by demonstrating her own critical contributions to intellectualism. Her early research and writing in Farbe bekennen, in particular, proved that she understood the importance of the European Middle Ages as a site for demarcating difference and advancing forms of exclusion. Ayim’s subsequent essays and presentations in Germany and elsewhere indicated that intellectual work could be accomplished on and in the quotidian.Footnote ⁶

Internationally, she made a critical mark that readily appealed to scholars of German in the North American academy as well as to writers and researchers in cultural centers. Through Farbe bekennen’s English translation and her networks with many across the Black diaspora, including Dionne Brand, Maryse Condé, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and Audre Lorde, she gained more visibility.Footnote ⁷ In Germany, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall, her profile rose. Ayim garnered invitations to present and contribute to edited volumes on intersectionality, racism, and Black German ethnic minorities. With the publication of her first poetry volume, blues schwarz-weiß (blues black-white) in 1995, she increasingly gained attention. Ayim also knew that her audience included not only white and Black Germans but other people of color and white communities across the globe who remained clueless about Germany’s Black diaspora.

Thus, Ayim’s written work and activism “allowed Black Germans to enter the public sphere” (Florvil, Mobilizing 6). Together with her compatriots, they “remade the public sphere, typically an exclusionary site, a Black space that did not ignore or bracket racial difference” (148). Her knowledge production challenged white European empiricism and epistemologies as well as the claims of pastlessness that aimed to minimize the presence and contributions of Africans and Black diasporic communities. Ayim’s act of recovery, moreover, entailed intellectual labor and enabled her to rewrite and unsilence Germany’s historical past, which also represented her past. “For what history is changes with time and place,” as Michel-Rolph Trouillot argued in Silencing the Past,

Indeed, Ayim’s act of storytelling, historical retrieval, and knowledge-making were powerful interventions in a late postwar, post-Holocaust, and later post-Wende Germany.

Yet Ayim created a tension in Farbe bekennen, hewing to the Martinican theorist Frantz Fanon’s idea of an “epidermal racial schema” as a modern invention in the postmedieval world (Black Skin 92). She claimed that “[b]is zum 18. Jahrhundert waren Vorurteile gegen Schwarze weitgehend frei von Vorstellungen über die Existenz unterschiedlicher Rassen. Erst im Zeitalter der Aufklärung vollzog sich ein deutlicher Wandel, der mit der raschen Kolonialisierung der afrikanischen Länder südlich der Sahara einherging” (“until the eighteenth century, prejudices against black people were largely free of ideas about the existence of difference races. It was only in the Age of Enlightenment that a German transformation occurred, which coincided with the rapid colonization of sub-Saharan African countries”; Ayim 29). Ayim dismissed the possibility that race was a specific referential point for difference in medieval thinking while simultaneously demonstrating that it was. Once again, she used language to depict the transformation of terms and meanings. Ayim noted:

This constructed color schema strengthened Europeans’ claims of superiority and justified their dominance. It is unsurprising that this ideological shift helped sustain European settler colonialism and imperialism.

Citing Fanon, Ayim acknowledged the moment that “Schwarze Afrika” (“Black Africa”) was fully constituted, and it was “bezeichnet man als eine träge, brutal, unzivilisierte –eine wilde Gegend” (“described as sluggish, brutal, uncivilized—a wild region”; Fanon, Die Verdammten 138). To this extent, she wrote, “‘N****’ (aus dem lat. Niger=schwarz) wurde im Laufe kolonialer Ausbeutung, Versklavung und Fremdbestimmung zu einem ausgesprochen negativen Etikett” (“‘N****’ (from the Latin niger = black) definitely became a negative label through the course of colonial exploitation, slavery, and foreign domination”; Ayim 30).Footnote ⁹ The categorization of the continent also advanced the idea that it was pastless and therefore needed Europe’s civilizing mission. With the negative connotation of N****, Europeans linked physical, intellectual, and cultural characteristics. During Africa’s violent encounter with the West, Europe controlled Africa, allowing it to potentially enter world history. Ayim recognized the differences between the past and present and proved how the past was never past. She used Germany’s past (or history) to make sense of its present and future conditions. As a quotidian intellectual, Ayim utilized her research, writing, presentations, and activism to illuminate the contributions of people of African descent and expose centuries of racism in Germany and Europe.

Later in Farbe bekennen and subsequent academic and nonacademic work, Ayim continued to analyze race and gender, as well as minoritized communities and the Black diaspora in Germany, from the colonial period to post-1945 periods. By doing so, she offered historical context that positioned people of African descent in the metropole and in the colonial peripheries, demonstrating the permeability of European borders. Ayim’s intellectual work affirmed that one did not need to acquire traditional “scientific” training to produce history.

Farbe bekennen reflects the academic tensions about race in the premodern and modern periods and offers insights into Ayim’s own thought processes. She grasped, on the one hand, that the premodern period was a site that included differentiation by color (black and white). On the other hand, she was attached to Fanon’s epidermal schema of the modern world. But these were two sides of the same coin. Ayim allowed those contradictions to sit next to each other, which represented the messiness of her own thinking. She also did not shy away from retrieving other legacies of Blackness “in the wake” (Sharpe). While Farbe bekennen was the beginning of her intellectual journey, her quotidian intellectualism achieved an afterlife in the ashes of Africa’s pastlessness, Europe’s racelessness, and Germany’s antiracism.

The afterlives of medieval race and race-making are evident in the current European landscape, which includes heightened ethnonationalism, racism, anti-Semitism, and neofascism. The previous practices of medieval racialization, indeed, have evolved to fit the modern discourses of right-wing parties, especially Alternativ für Deustchland (Alternative for Germany), or AfD. AfD is now the largest opposition political group in the parliament or Bundestag, and they have achieved more support by bolstering antimigrant sentiment and claiming that Islam is incompatible with German democracy. Yet AfD is not alone in espousing this rhetoric. Green Party leaders and other left-leaning groups have also appropriated the far right’s arguments against migration, continuing to shatter the myth of German antiracism, a myth that Ayim already helped challenge in her activism and intellectual work. Because of all her critical intellectual labor, I urge scholars to observe Ayimism as a form of critical thought (just like Kantian or Hegelian thought) and use it as a form of epistemic liberation. Once we obtain epistemic liberation, we too can become “radical thinkers who timelessly imagined other ways to live and never failed to consider how the world might be otherwise” (Hartman xv).