The fear of cultural belonging: Sharon Dodua Otoo's transnational writing

Cultural conflicts, perduring racism and the lack of a broader acceptance of plural identities, in Europe have been thematised in recent years by several “Afropolitan writers”. In their case, collective emotions like fear, disease and cultural-based misunderstandings are shaped by literary presentations which may open new identity discourses, and which very often are focussed on gender-specific narrations of the body and of the individual affectivities. This paper aims to discuss the (often unsolved) dialectic between the fear of and the effort for cultural belonging, by analysing the narrative texts of the Black British-Ghanaian writer and activist Sharon Dodua Otoo, author of two novellas written in English and both translated and published in Germany (The things I am thinking while smiling politely, 2012; Synchronicity, 2014), where she has been living and working since 2006. In 2016 Dodua Otoo was awarded with the prestigious Bachmann-Preis, for her yet-to-be published short story Herr Gröttrup setzt sich hin, dealing with reincarnation and with the German Nazi-past. By passing from a realistic style in The things I am…, a novella in which the story of a heartbreak seems to be the pretext for a delicate but candid discourse about racism and xenophobia in present-day Germany, to a sort of magical realism in the fragmented Syncronicity, Sharon Dodua Otoo shows the importance of the point of view of blackness in order to deal with imagery of fear and disease in European society. The ways to overcome this cultural anxiety the writer experiences are very personal, and full of literary reshaped “poly-colours”.