For the first year after my wedding, I made excuses about my new status as a married and somewhat hip married woman. Ever since I was twelve, I never thought I was above conventional rites of passage, which resulted from my anarchistic spirit. “My German visa expired at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, and my nuptials prevented me from being undocumented,” I professed to ex-girlfriends and comrades. Being a radical feminist married to a man felt like a betrayal of my principles, or worse, a slippery slope into the trap of subservience familiar from my childhood. Contrary to my dismay, my union is mostly emotionally satisfying, especially regarding our recurrent rituals—from extended conversations about our bowel movements to southern European mountain hikes. Patriarchy may loom, but we have broken our version of love.
However, my reluctance to declare my newfound identity has more to do with how marriage and families manifest globally than the state of my relationship. At best, these institutions can be stale, and at worst, they are violent. There are about 10 million cases of domestic abuse every year in the United States. Worldwide, one woman or girl is killed by someone in their family every eleven minutes. 60% of women and girls who were murdered in 2020 were killed by (male) intimate partners or family members. Radical feminists have taken note, offering their analysis about the latent terrors that hover over people in families. In her 2022 treatise Abolish the Family, Sophie Lewis opines that “loving one’s family can be a problem for anyone. It might put extra weight around the ankles of a domestic battery survivor seeking to escape (especially given the economic punishments imposed by capitalism on those who flee commodified housing). It might hinder a trans or disabled child from claiming medical care. It might dissuade someone from getting an abortion." As Lewis points out, the basis of the cruelty isn't merely when a hand is struck but the fear of losing material resources or bodily autonomy if or when one is no longer part of the family.
In my six years in Berlin, my outlook on family has taken on new meaning, mostly because I live nine thousand kilometers away from any blood relative I know of. The circumstance is not, in itself, a problem. Still, living in Europe is laced with rampant anti-Blackness and misogyny, I slowly became reassured by writers who adequately grasped life's big questions about what it means to form a community as an African diasporic scribe in Berlin. I have been absorbed by Black feminists in Germany who have been thinking deeply about the notion of family and marriage, with merciful attention to how society creates our desires. When I first watched Natasha Kelly's film, Milli's Awakening, at KW Contemporary Art Institute, I was enthralled by her profile of an intergenerational array of Afro-German women who generated a home in this country.
In the summer of 2023, when I met with Ghanaian-British author Sharon Dodua Otoo with her ten-year-old son in the East Berlin neighborhood of Prenzlauer Berg, conversations glided between Spiderman and Greek mythology. Kelly and Otoo have done heaps of work to gather a literary and intellectual community of Black women in Germany as poets, mothers, lovers, and lesbians. While many Black women I know in Berlin have admitted that their lack of a relationship is partially due to the hierarchy of desire, whereby white women are considered a more desirable mate, even by other Black people, what stands out is how Black theorists think about marriage and family.
Among these voices, I’ve been captivated by Emilia Roig, an Afro-French writer and a feminist who has come to bridge her marriage experience and the abolition of this institution. Born in France to a Martinican mother and a Jewish-Algerian father, she knows what it is like to harbor a hybrid identity. What drew me to her work was a thesis from her latest book, Das Ende der Ehe (The End of Marriage): "Feminism deals with the stuff of life, peeling back layer by layer of our identities, our effects, our relationships." As a political scientist nonpareil and a progeny of intersectionality, she understands that intimacy wasn't just a matter of the personal but part of the structural pillars that shape Black feminist thought in Berlin. Here is an electric and unflinching critique of marriage and our ability to see how we are shaped and shattered by family and marriage. Roig is taking the marriage debate somewhere other writers are still working through. When I read Leslie Jamison’s memoir Splinters, I was reminded that marriage and childrearing can lead to a relationship breakdown. But in Jamison’s case (spoiler alert), separating from her husband during the first year of their daughter’s life was necessary for her growth, parenting, and career. The thought of staying in an unfulfilling marriage for the children's sake has become an antiquated practice.
“In the 1970s, the philosopher Raymond Williams coined the term “structure of feelings,” indicating that our consciousness and relationships are historical phenomena. He noted, “To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.” Before my marriage, I spent most of my holidays and birthdays with my friends, which was often a matter of convenience, the usual effect of having plenty of time for myself. However, the convenience of living with someone and the habitual pattern of being confined to my flat for much of 2020 and 2021 has caused many of my formerly captious friendships to fizzle. There is something seductive about abolishing marriage and adopting a life that places less pressure on romance. By offering a life that centers on friendships and community, Roig suggests that we can and should love others, but it doesn't have to happen through marriage. Given how many communities and friendships were wrecked during the pandemic, I wonder if family abolition is the solution to our problems.
Whether it is mild or extreme, most people are scarred by the blunt residues of familial harshness, which may entail a relative eating your last slice of blueberry cheesecake or purposefully being pushed down the stairs. The people initially considered our family as not always of our choosing, but how we define our kin may have more to do with our outlook on the world and whether we have the people around us who can make an effort to engage in a collective project. I am still working through what it means to be in the world and who I want in my orbit. Unlike the previous generations of women in my family, I can, if I desire, refuse the marriage paradigm or rearrange kinship without guilt or apology.
Some News
I wrote a profile for Frieze Magazine about the South African artist collective MADEYOULOOK. In the text, I discuss their aesthetic journey and contribution to the 2024 Venice Biennale as representatives for the South African Pavilion. The exhibition was curated by Dr. Portia Malatjie, senior lecturer in Art History and Discourse at the University of Cape Town. I enjoyed speaking with the collective and curator, primarily for their loving reflection on the history and future of South Africa. Their empathy and care give me far more hope than the people who maintained divisions under and after legal apartheid. If you visit the Venice Biennale this year, please check out MADEYOULOOK’s work.
In May, I will be doing a residency at Dora Maar House in southern France. I will join two other brilliant minds: Amy Myers, a New York-based artist, and Sharon Robinson, a Grammy-winning songwriter. During the residency, I will dedicate my time to writing about reproduction, infertility, and art.
I began teaching “Writing Against the Grain,” a course at the Universität der Künste Berlin, in mid-April. During the semester, I am instructing students on how to write exhibition reviews and art essays. So far, we’ve gone on a field trip and had a guest lecture by Dr. Terri Francis. As an instructor who wants my students to take on the world entirely, I even made a playlist for my class to align with the weekly topic.
Some Recommendations
I’ve been thinking about Haiti regularly and the generations of people in my family who have had to leave, including some cousins who left as recently as 2023. Pooja Bhatia writes “Haiti on the Precipice” for the New York Review of Books.
Amy Littlefield, a member of my union, the National Writers Union, wrote an article for The Nation about the significance of collective organizing. As a freelance writer, she makes a compelling case for what we can win when we demand more. Our union will have several labor campaigns, so stay tuned for some literary rabble-rousers.
Joy Williams's “The Serene Steamroller” discusses Kafka's life and trials. The text is a psychological and corporeal profile of a disturbed writer, but it is entertaining nonetheless.
Closing Thoughts
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