When Sharon Dodua Otoo moved from Ilford to Hanover as an au pair in 1992, her family were concerned. Would a black girl from outer London cope with provincial Germany? \u201cThey were really panicked about it. \u2018Don\u2019t stay too long,\u2019 they said.\u201d<\/p>\n
Twenty-four years later Dodua Otoo not only still lives in Germany, but has just won arguably the most prestigious award in the German language, the Ingeborg Bachmann prize \u2013 for the first and only short story she has ever written in the language of her adopted homeland.<\/p>\n
Her entry, Herr Gr\u00f6ttrup Sits Down, is centred on the historical figure of Helmut Gr\u00f6ttrup, a scientist who worked first on the Nazis\u2019 V2 rocket, then on the Soviet rocketry programme and later wound up inventing the chip card. In a twist that stretches the conventions of anthropomorphism to their limits, the story is partially narrated from the perspective of an unboiled egg.<\/p>\n
At the prize event in Klagenfurt, the jury hailed Dodua Otoo\u2019s story as a surrealist parable grappling with fundamental philosophical issues around identity and otherness, drawing comparison with the work of Austrian absurdist Thomas Bernhard and the German comedian Loriot. \u201cYou have this British author telling the story of a forgotten chapter of German history \u2013 I think that\u2019s incredible,\u201d said critic Sandra Kegel, who had nominated Dodua Otoo for the competition.<\/p>\n
A review in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung described the prize-winning story as \u201cthe kind of work of literature that you have to go searching for because it hardly knows how sought after it is\u201d.<\/p>\n
The accolade is likely to provide a major career break for a writer who has until now only published two short novellas with Edition Assemblage, a small leftwing German publishing house that specialises in nonfiction.<\/p>\n
Dodua Otoo submitted her story on the suggestion of a friend, without being aware of the prize\u2019s significance. \u201cThat was probably a good idea,\u201d she told the Guardian, \u201cotherwise I wouldn\u2019t have submitted anything.\u201d<\/p>\n
Since winning the \u20ac25,000 (\u00a321,000) prize, which is chosen using a three-day X-Factor-style competition screened live on Austrian, German and Swiss television, Dodua Otoo has been swamped with offers from German publishing houses and literary agents. She is determined to take the opportunity to turn the short story into a novel. \u201cIt\u2019s a once in a lifetime opportunity\u201d, she said.<\/p>\n
Raised in a \u201cvery strict Ghanaian household\u201d in Ilford, Dodua Otoo studied German and management studies at Royal Holloway University after a year-long stint in Hanover and now lives in Berlin with her four sons.<\/p>\n
Though she describes herself as a \u201cblack British mother, activist, author and editor\u201d, her feelings towards her country of birth are mixed, she said. \u201cI have a British passport and London is my home, but there was still this something in the background music that said: \u2018You don\u2019t really belong here.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cBritish people know how to be polite and not to use the n-word, but I still felt there is a glass ceiling. In Germany, people say really stupid things to your face, and they say it with a smile because they don\u2019t know it\u2019s racist, but it just feels so refreshingly honest. I can deal with that.\u201d<\/p>\n
As an example, she cited the fact that some German journalists had insisted on carrying out interviews with her in English even after she had just won a prize for a German-language piece of fiction: \u201cIf you\u2019re being confronted with images of war-torn refugees all the time and then you sit in front of a black person who is just like you, sometimes that just crashes your hard drive.\u201d<\/p>\n
Recently, Dodua Otoo said, Germany\u2019s anti-immigration party Alternative f\u00fcr Deutschland had held a small demonstration right outside her Berlin flat, chanting \u201cWir sind das Volk\u201d (\u201cWe are the people\u201d). She and her eldest son had simply shouted back at them from their window, chanting: \u201cNo, we are the people too.\u201d<\/p>\n
The desire to make a stand against xenophobia and rightwing populism may have also played a part in the jury awarding her the prize, she said, \u201cbut I think in the end they voted for the quality of the story\u201d.<\/p>\n
She cites German-language writers such as Bertolt Brecht and Max Frisch as inspiration, for \u201ccombining sharp analysis of society with humour\u201d, as well as Toni Morrison and Mildred D Taylor, \u201cwomen writers who made the black experience in the US very tangible to me\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cPolitics can be very polarising and confrontational. With my writing, I would like to say: we can go out and demonstrate, but at the end of the day all we all want is to be understood and be treated with empathy.\u201d<\/p>\n
–<\/p>\n
Source: Guardian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When Sharon Dodua Otoo moved from Ilford to Hanover as an au pair in 1992, her family were concerned. Would a black girl from outer London cope with provincial Germany? \u201cThey were really panicked about it. \u2018Don\u2019t stay too long,\u2019 they said.\u201d Twenty-four years later Dodua Otoo not only still lives in Germany, but has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[137],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-231307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-showbiz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=231307"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231307\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=231307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=231307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=231307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}