Mithu M. Sanyal
As a child, Sanyal’s grandmother moved from Zabrze in Poland with her family at the end of the First World War to Duisburg, where miners were needed at the time. Mithu Sanyal can still hear the “Ich bin ein Marxloher Mädchen” [“I am a Marxloh girl”] today. Her grandfather came from somewhere near Kraków. His mother died early from an illegal abortion and he was then brought up in Munich. With his grandparents, he learnt to play different wind instruments and demonstrated a great talent for painting. However, when he returned home in 1949, after having been a prisoner of war in Russia, he stopped playing music and stopped painting. When his daughter trained to be a secretary and became a salaried employee, as a proud representative of the working class, he considered this a ‘break with culture’. So he hardly noticed it when she married a ‘black man’, more precisely an engineer who had left his home in Bengal to try his luck in Germany after finishing his degree. And, like other Bengalis in the 1950s and 60s, he did find work there. And he also found a wife. Mr and Mrs Sanyal wanted to start a family but they failed to fall pregnant. After a few years of trying without success, the doctors advised the couple to give up hope. And precisely at this moment, Mrs Sanyal found out she was pregnant, and less than a year later, Mithu first saw the light of day in the Marienkrankenhaus hospital in Düsseldorf.
With her mother, a working class woman with a Polish background, and her father an Indian graduate from a Bengali Brahman family, the highest and very well educated caste in Hinduism, Mithu Sanyal’s background could be described in some respects as “diverse”. She worked out very early on that people wanted to pigeonhole her – usually wrongly. She says, “The fact that people were compulsively unable to stop pigeonholing me – as in ‘oh, you are so racial’ – always left me searching for genuine propositions.” By “genuine”, Mithu Sanyal predominantly means consistent for oneself and for others.
From an early stage, writing was always her way of seeking out the genuine propositions. “I was writing before I could write” she says and tells how she dictated her first stories to her mother; stories which she is embarrassed about today. It is all Enid Blyton’s fault: “From the moment my mother read the first Enid Blyton books to me, I wanted to be an author”. Sanyal has now written a long essay about Blyton, which also tackles the racism debates concerning the English children’s author. The text will appear in autumn in the anthology “Canceln. Ein notwendiger Streit” published by Hanser Literaturverlage.
Sanyal’s subjects are diverse and are often at the centre of pressing issues of co-existence: Identity, racism, sexism and post-colonial heritage. With these charged issues, she comes across as a curious and passionate fighter for the emancipation of all misanthropic myths and restrictive beliefs. According to her, the subject matters just come to her, she merely leaves the door open to them. And with every book she thinks, “I have now said everything I had to say. Now I have filled the last white spot on the map of our world knowledge and there is nothing more that I can write about.”
That’s how Sanyal felt after she finished her first book: “Vulva. Die Enthüllung des unsichtbaren Geschlechts”. The book came from a PhD thesis which Sanyal was working on for her doctorate in “German Literature” at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf. What came out of it is a somewhat different cultural story of the Western World at the centre of which is the genitalia, which is usually tabooed and rendered invisible and which we often incorrectly call the vagina. What is meant is the vulva, which only covers the visible part of the vagina. Confusing the vulva and vagina is similar to mixing up the penis and the testicles. After completing the manuscript, Sanyal thought that she had extracted everything from herself, and that she would not write another book. But, of course, she continued to write for magazines and newspapers such as “Frankfurter Rundschau”, “Missy”, “Spex” and “Literaturen”, but also for the Federal Agency for Political Education.
Her published articles are about the Me Too movement, about sex work, and also about the new translation of Charlotte Brontë’s classic “Jane Eyre”. She is also often invited to panels and podia, gives lectures at universities and writes theatre plays, quite a few radio features and, up to now, five radio plays for WDR, for whom she has worked as an in-house author since 1996. On the side, she also started her “Mithulogie” column in the “taz”, which stopped in August 2019 after the hate messages on Twitter got too much for her.
And despite all these activities – and even more besides – things have happened differently to how Mithu Sanyal had imagined they would after she completed her “Vulva” book: For a second time, she attempted to explain the whole world to herself and to others, based on a single subject matter. The result was her book “Vergewaltigung. Aspekte eines Verbrechens”, which was published in Edition Nautilus in 2016. Sanyal analysed widely held beliefs and discourses and developed views on how rape can be prevented societally. The book can be considered a definitive work on a phenomenon which is still covered by taboos.
“Rape” was also the subject matter that introduced Sanyal to the biggest wave of outrage to date: During a reading from her book, she learned from the many people affected by sexual violence, who were present at the reading, that they consider the term “victim” to be a questionable compartmentalisation. It would perhaps be better to find a German equivalent for the term used in English-speaking countries - “survivor”. However, because this term can quickly evoke associations with the survivors of the Holocaust, those present suggested the German term “Erlebende“, which is akin to “experiencer”. Sanyal wrote an article in the “taz” with Marie Albrecht about finding the right term. What followed were insults, threats of murder and rape, which were mainly fired from right-leaning websites, which accused Sanyal of representing rape as a super experience. The fact that rape victims were less important to the Right than the verbal cudgeling of a non-white feminist - Marie Albrecht was spared the wave of outrage - is no overly bold conjecture. Since then, the wave of outrage has resulted in a corrective entry being written to counter this.
At the time, Sanyal also came up against a headwind from feminists and found out once again that there is not just THE ONE feminist position and grouping in Germany or anywhere else. The debate around “white feminism”, which was reignited in July 2022 by an interview in “Annabelle” magazine with Sophie Passmann, also bothered Sanyal because white feminism is a problem even if Passmann is not the enemy. Sanyal is extremely interested in the link between feminism and anti-colonialism, or rather post-colonialism, similar to the way it plays an important role in India. Sanyal says, “In Poland, it is Maria Janion, for example, who does a lot in this area and who inspires me very much.”
When it comes to the way Germans view their neighbour Poland, Sanyal says, “Reporting about our neighbour often has a kind of charm about it as if we are talking about a Banana Republic, only without bananas but with misogyny and xenophobia instead.” And even if this isn’t entirely incomprehensible to Sanyal, bearing in mind the conservative backlash in Poland and aberrations like the abortion law – what disturbs her about the view of Poland is the Germans’ tendency to forget history: “Who knows, for example, that until 1993 Poland had one of the most progressive abortion legislations in Europe? And who knows that colonial history does not always happen in exotic countries but that, for example, the German Empire was built on colonial expansion towards Eastern Europe?”
Sanyal has not been to Poland very often. She very much regrets that she didn’t manage to travel to the land of her ancestors to visit relatives with her mother before her death. Sanyal visited Kraków for the first time for the Conrad Festival at the invitation of the Polish Institute, and sums it up, “It was amazing. We also went to the book fair and I bought super hand-knitted socks there. Kraków is probably the most beautiful city I’ve ever been to.”
Mithu Sanyal is currently working on her second novel. According to her, her readers can look forward to an exciting and complex adventure at the beginning of the 20th century in which time travel and a locked-room mystery play a part - a criminal case, which is actually impossible, in which the victim is abducted from a locked room although all the doors and windows are being watched by the police. But above all, its intention is to tackle the question of whether unarmed resistance is always better than armed resistance. On this point, Sanyal says, “In India, we always thought that we did it right and defeated the British with non-violent resistance alone. But it is not as simple as that because Great Britain would never have given India up had it not been for the very violent resistance.”
Before this second novel, which is hungrily awaited by many, sees the light of day, Mithu Sanyal, who studied English and German literature, will have another book published on 6 October 2022 in the Kiwi series Bücher meines Lebens Mithu Sanyal über Emily Brontë.
Anselm Neft, July 2022
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