Identitti

I’m writing this in an Indian restaurant. The only Indian in my Finnish town is at the railway station – there are more Nepalese around here. This one is at the railway station, and, like today, I often come here to get lunch before getting the train. Concerned, the server asked me if I was sure of my choice because it had two chillies. Not that this was a competition. Eating it, I thought that in Walthamstow, where I used to live, this would probably not even count as one-chilli hot. Those were the days. When you could get four naan for a pound, fried before your eyes on a hot tin drum crammed between the phone repair booths, and folded into a blue plastic bag to take home.

That’s the sort of thing the protagonist of Mithu Saynal’s Identitti longs for most. Growing up in Germany, with an Indian dad, she envies her Midlands cousins their strong sense of, well, identity, and community. Growing up in Germany, can she even talk of experiencing racism? Other Germans she meets are so enthusiastic about yoga and her ancient culture and well – raise your hackles here – how exotic it is. And why does she never think to ask her Polish mother about that part of her culture?

In the English translation, Alta L. Price kept the unsettled spelling for the title. It’s published by V&Q Books, an English imprint of the German independent publisher Voland & Quist. I got my German paperback edition from the lovely Prinz Eisenherz bookshop in Berlin. Publishing is political. Where and who you publish with, matters.

That’s the sort of thing the protagonist wrestles with most. What happens when the Brown professor she idolizes turns out to have been White, all along? Her whole career was built on a lie. The fallout is immediate and immense. It’s heavy on the theory, but there’s lashings of humour. These are extremely choppy waters to navigate, but I don’t remember laughing so much while doing so. Read it!

About Kate Sotejeff-Wilson

Translator, editor, writer, reader