When I have conversations with students about Black populations in Germany and other German-speaking countries, there is often a moment of confusion and hesitation. Any mention of Blackness and Germanness in a single sentence (let alone intertwined with an expression like “Black German”) disrupts the prevailing stereotype of a homogeneous white German population. I cannot fault them. It is not difficult to understand why these students (and many others) assume that Germany is synonymous with white identity, particularly when so much emphasis is placed on Germany’s National Socialist history depicting a singularly white Germany. As Nicole Hirschfelder notes, “Believing that Germanness and whiteness are, or have ever been, synonymous would not only be inaccurate but also misleading” (40). Despite an overarching misconception of Germany as homogeneously white, the performance and the perception of Blackness figure strongly in German language texts since the medieval period. As Geraldine Heng outlines in The Invention of Race, characters such as Belakane and Feirefiz are represented in courtly romance, uniting pejorative stereotypes about Africans and other racialized persons with odes to the glamorous fiction known as courtly culture.
Instead of focusing on negative stereotypes and the ways in which Blackness has been portrayed in white German cultural production, I shift to highlight a concept of Black gazing, pivoting away from the position of objectification or taxonomic classification to touch upon the haptic and visceral experience of living while Black. Tina Campt’s “Gaze, Note 184” in Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes (2023) extends Campt’s definition from Black Gaze (2021). Campt revises gazing as
[a] set of viewing relations that refuses to reduce individuals to the status of objects to be consumed. A practice of looking that bears witness to the simultaneous precarity and possibility of Black life. Neither looking at nor seeing through the perspective of Black people, a Black gaze renders our relationship to blackness in an antiblack world palpable, in ways that require us to reckon with our distance from or intimacy with the disposability of Black bodies. A Black gaze challenges us to embrace the affective labor of grappling with uncomfortable gaps between proximity and protectedness and in doing so, opens up the possibility of a future lived otherwise. (177)
The beauty in Campt’s articulation of a Black gaze lies in its action. Black gazing compels us all to consider the possibility of viewing and approaching the world in a way that decenters a white hegemonic perspective. It requires that we recognize the constraints that anti-Blackness and white supremacist logic place on our ability to engage with the world and others. It also (but not only) compels us to confront within ourselves and externally the polyphonic expressions of subjectivity—of beingness, Black or otherwise—that refuse homogenization or to be reduced to a single, dangerously inaccurate stereotype (Quashie; Nyong’o).
Using a Black gaze as an orientation, I consider the ways in which Black German cultural productions—and, with one example, canonical white German medieval literature—might “[bear] witness to the simultaneous precarity and possibility of Black life” in a way that “renders our relationship to blackness in an antiblack world palpable” and that “challenges us to embrace the affective labor of grappling with uncomfortable gaps between proximity and protectedness.” Not only does this aesthetically informed lens question “the supremacy of the white master-gaze,” it also rewrites the fixity of Others as “objects of the gaze” (Al-Samarai 55). In essence, I propose one version (and not the only version) that offers a shift away from Western epistemologies to center a Black diasporic mode of storytelling and retelling to imagine the quotidian differently.
While Campt arguably develops her “Black gaze” from the field of visual culture, I seek to blend gazing with the act of reading, looking to both literary and media sources. I settle on two “gazings” across various time periods that challenge and possibly reposition how Black gazing in a German context might look. The gazes are not big events or big names, such as history would like to focus on. Rather, the act of gazing as reading through the lens of Black German studies gestures toward the quotidian, the “changing same” (Amiri Baraka) and the “singular plural” (Gilles Deleuze) that become the premise through which multiple and multifaceted expressions of Blackness are born and fostered (see Nyong’o 32, 29). These gazings are informed by my own experience, following the trajectory of my career as I have navigated German studies while Black. Beginning with training in medieval studies before moving into Black (German) studies, I have found that these gazings cause me to pause and to reflect on the social and academic terrains that have shaped my inquiry.
The first gazing, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s chivalric romance Parzival (1200–10) and the figure of Belakane, is admittedly a challenge, given how she is portrayed and articulated through the lens of white European courtly culture. And yet, Belakane’s significance lies just beneath the text’s surface, palpable through Black gazing, which connects to Marisa Fuentes’s archival research methodology to read fragmentary lives “along the bias grain” (Fuentes 16). The second gazing, the Black German rapper Megaloh and his track “Regenmacher” (2016; “Rainmaker”), contrasts times, spaces, colors, and acts of creation through the central metaphor of rain. Acting as and through the figure of the rainmaker, Megaloh depicts a form of Black gazing that merges his German and Nigerian cultural heritages alongside the visual landscapes of Berlin and Africa. In doing so, he creates a bridge between the two and asserts that he is both German and Nigerian.
First Gazing: Belakane, She Who Haunts
Parzival has been the focus of numerous articles, chapters, dissertations, and other scholarly works (see, e.g., Groos; Ghosh and Jones; Mertens Fleury; Mieger). Because of the pivotal character Feirefiz, Parzival’s half sibling, and his unique physical features—his skin color a mottled black and white hue resembling a magpie—the question of race has become an ongoing source of inquiry. Yet Belakane, Feirefiz’s mother and the central character in book 1 of Parzival, remains relatively untouched in scholarly discourse, bringing to mind distinct questions about Blackness, race, race-making, and gender in a medieval literary and social context.Footnote 1 Belakane therefore haunts scholarship on Parzival, her presence a form of absence. Dating from the first quarter of the thirteenth century, Wolfram’s retelling and reconceptualization of Chrétien de Troyes’s romance appeared after the first four crusades to Jerusalem. In many ways, the hyper focus on Blackness obscures how the portrayal and the performance of Blackness establish and uphold a vision of whiteness, haunting the narrative of Parzival not in how Blackness is depicted but in what Wolfram fails to iterate.
As Heng outlines, the discussion of Gahmuret—the father of Feirefiz and Parzival—and his romance with Belakane is situated within a dichotomy of opposites, to the point that “[fascination] with the erotic contrast of skin…black on white / white on black—may lend a certain piquancy to that noble, sweet love practiced by the queen and Gahmuret which readers are invited to imagine” (211). Working within the balance of comparison between presumed opposites—black as sinful, heathen, and immoral vs. white as pure, devout, and beautiful—Belakane’s Blackness comes into view not only as something necessary to complicate the presumptions surrounding race and race-making in Wolfram’s thirteenth-century text but also as a possible extension of Europe beyond its established borders. Belakane, the residents of her kingdom, and in fact the land, culture, and customs themselves are cast through the lens of European courtly culture. Collectively they are viewed through a “theorized universalism of chivalry, feudalism, and customs…[which] drives a hypothesis in which the world, for all its exoticism, wealth, and different colored populations, mirrors Europe, and is in fact (might as well be) Europe” (Heng 209). In conceptualizing Belakane’s Blackness, the focus remains on her skin tone, the juxtaposition of her internal qualities seen at odds with her epidermal Blackness (to think with Frantz Fanon and Heng), and what it might represent rather than the reality that the fictional work was developed for and by a white Christian European audience and author.
To read Belakane through a Black gaze seeks to set aside the centrality of the white gaze and to highlight how her agency and knowledge subversively render action possible. Belakane, as queen of Zazamanc, “at once imagined and material,” is a fabulation constructed out of the inability for white European courtly culture to world-build beyond a mindset of anti-Blackness (Ellis 3). Black gazing renders the spectrality of Belakane’s Blackness legible and recognizes the significance of her presence in Parzival. When readers first encounter Belakane, Isenhart, a knight who had offered both his service and his heart to Belakane, lies dead, and a faction outraged at Isenhart’s death wages war on Zazamanc.
At first glance, Wolfram presumably seeks to cast Isenhart as the discarded (Black) lover, allowing for the possibility of Belakane’s future (white) lover, Gahmuret, to slip into her bedsheets, if one centralizes a white supremacist reading of the Zazamanc arc. However, through a Black gazing, the depiction of Belakane suggests the presence of choice and the insistence of desire. As he writes, “Aldâ wart undr in beiden / ein vil getriulîchiu ger: / sie sah dar, und er sach her” (“Between the two of them there grew / a very mutual desire: / she looked there (to him) and he looked therein (to her)”; Wolfram 1.29.6–8).Footnote 2 Despite the fickle nature of Gahmuret’s love on the surface, which some might read as merely physical attraction, the impact of Gahmuret’s relationship with Belakane is transformational, haunting him long after he abandons her (Heng 196). In thinking about Belakane as “she who haunts,” I lean into the possibility for haunting to expand how we read both Gahmuret and Belakane, their relationship, and the ways in which Belakane’s Blackness roams like a specter in the narrative landscape of Parzival even after she is no longer active in the tale.
Although one might initially read the preoccupation with contrasting skin tones as the instance of racial fetish, to view Belakane, her relationship with Gahmuret, and their subsequent love child, Feirefiz, through a Black gaze entails a rejection of the status quo, of stereotypes, and of the objectification of skin color that shapes the narrative. Gahmuret’s cavalier personality and actions aside, after leaving Zazamanc and Belakane, Gahmuret is a man changed, unable to set aside Belakane’s memory as easily as he left the queen herself. There are several instances where Gahmuret expresses that Belakane is dearer to him than his own life (Wolfram 1.94.5). John Greenfield illustrates that textual evidence points to the fact that Gahmuret has every intention to return to Belakane someday (230). Belakane, through a Black gaze, is not simply the object of Gahmuret’s lust and brief romantic tryst. The impact of her presence in Gahmuret’s life compels a change in the trajectory of the narrative development, at first through the continued love Gahmuret holds for Belakane and later through the actions of their son, Feirefiz. Belakane, like a specter, runs the course of Parzival, casting a shadow on Gahmuret’s marriage to Herzeloyde but also complicating the depiction of Blackness. Indeed, she exposes the contradictions and inaccuracies expressed within the text, highlighting the extremely limited understandings of Black peoples and cultures. Focusing on Belakane through a Black gaze forces this Middle High German courtly romance to reckon with the inaccuracy of white European understanding, not only of the Black “other,” but also what German culture—literary and social—has been unable and perhaps unwilling to understand about itself.
Second Gazing: Megaloh’s “Regenmacher”
From the thirteenth to the twentieth century, the performance of Blackness in the German context remained within the confines and control of white German authorship, inscribing racializing stereotypes that cast Black persons as a subhuman Black other. As Michelle Wright outlines, “It is hard enough to respond to racist discourses that to begin with prefer fantasy to fact ([Black people] are over-sexed, morbidly violent, genetically inferior, etc.); how does one then respond to a discourse that seems incapable of understanding the basic facts of your existence?” (296). Indeed, the fantasy and the fiction of Blackness survive the passing of centuries, vivified in secular Christian and colonial stereotypes that align Blackness with the antithesis of white European cultural and social norms, including appearance, chastity, and so on. In German and in English, for example, “schwarz” and “black” are connected to illegal and non-normalized activities (for instance, “Schwarzmarkt” [“black market”] and “Schwarzfahren” [“riding without a ticket”]). There exists, therefore, an overlap between understanding “black” to denote something “illegal,” or undesirable personality traits (like “blackhearted”), and understanding it to denote darker skin tones, eliding “black” with the political self-identity marker “Black.”
Megaloh plays with the image of “black” and “Black” in his track “Regenmacher” from the first lines:
Sie fragen mich, kann ich inzwischen von der Mücke leben?
Könnt mir noch immer um vier Uhr morgens im Bus begegnen
Sie fragen mich, ob das Bild, das ich ihnen grad mal’, zu schwarz ist
Abgeturnt von den Sparauflagen wie Varoufakis.
(Megaloh, “Regenmacher”; emphasis added)
They ask me, can I make a living from music in the meantime?
Y’all could always run into me at 4 a.m. on the bus
They ask me, if the picture I paint for them is a bit too black [or Black]
Turned off by austerity conditions like Varoufakis.
Megaloh uses the word “schwarz” to play with its reference both to black or illegal things and to Black people, exposing the connection between everyday existence in Germany and broader structural and systemic influences. The appearance of Yanis VaroufakisFootnote 3 draws parallels between the financial crisis and infrastructure issues in Greece on the one hand and the sociocultural norm of racialization and the daily grind of working and living within racialized and capitalistic societies on the other hand, a condition for which Cedric J. Robinson coined the term “racial capitalism.” In other words, without hope for a new road forward, the future is “black” (that is, grim), just as Megaloh’s version of the story is too “Black” because it centers a nonwhite perspective.
The Black German scholar Nicola Lauré Al-Samarai notes that “the world of gazes and being looked at by others [constitutes] one of the central aspects of how racism is lived and received.” “Reclaiming the gaze,” she clarifies, is “a sort of beyond sight, one of intimacy” that compels “a quest for affective understanding [that] nullifies the thingification the (white) gaze previously held” (55). Therefore, Black visual artists seek to “[refuse] white fantasies of control and authority,” and their work of Black gazing “reveals a landscape in the visual present tense that enables them to draw from the global archive of diasporic expressivity and (re)connect the multitude of dispossessed Black German spatiotemporal experiences with other Black time-spaces” (57). Focusing on the premise of connecting time-spaces and space-times that Wright outlines in Physics of Blackness, a Black gaze functions as an act of speculation and self-making to recognize that white societies are incapable of rendering Blackness legible.
Along these lines, Megaloh explains the motivation behind his track, creating a connection between the role of the rainmaker and the possibility to view himself, his Blackness, and history from a different perspective, stating in an annotation to his lyrics,
Der Regenmacher ist in Afrika ein Hoffnungsträger, Symbol für Familie. Der Regen steht hier auch für Erfolg und Geld. In meinem Fall, dass der Regenmacher kommt und den Realkeeper-Shit erzählt in der Dürre des Imageraps.
Ich maße mir nicht an diese Rolle schon einzunehmen, es ist eher der Prozess hin zu dieser selbstgewählten Rolle. (Megaloh, “Regenmacher”)
In Africa, the rainmaker is a bearer of hope, a symbol for family. Here, rain also represents success and money. In my case, it’s the rainmaker coming and telling the real-keeper shit about the drought of [or in] the image of rap.
I don’t presume that I play this role yet; it’s more a process of developing into this self-chosen position.
A symbol of family and bearer of hope, the rainmaker ushers in the knowledge of gazing and living beyond the onslaught of daily urban life. He gestures toward a path that is not focused solely on financial or commercial success but affords the possibility to foster community and understanding. Megaloh’s annotation outlines a multifaceted understanding of symbolism he weaves into the imagery of his lyrics that are enhanced by the music video. Rejecting the simplistic and inaccurate understanding of “schwarz,” Megaloh interweaves Berlin’s streets with the desert, looking to Africa and the figure of the rainmaker for potential pathways moving forward. Furthermore, Megaloh’s act of Black gazing incorporates not Europe or Africa but simultaneously pairs the two, merging landscapes, cultures, and peoples through actions and gestures in the video (Megaloh, “Megaloh—Regenmacher”). While Black gazing Parzival requires a conscious effort by the reader, Megaloh incorporates Black gazing into the creation of the track itself, compelling the contemporary (white) German audience to consider a Black worldview (Weltanschauung) and perspective.
The use of black and white for the video merges the different landscapes: the desert, the hut with the Babalawos (high priests of the Yoruba religion), and the streets of Berlin. Megaloh’s gaze, as depicted through the visual-acoustic landscape of the music video, collapses time and space, unraveling a distinct separation between his home (Berlin) and his mother’s home (Nigeria) to intertwine and layer the two into a single track. Using the palimpsestic portrayal of the terrain, Megaloh constructs a Black gazing that mirrors a concept of his own identity. Not solely German or squarely Nigerian, Megaloh performs his understanding of Black Germanness through aesthetic projection. The transition between scenes in the desert to those of the city streets where Megaloh walks alone emphasizes the isolation of creating one’s own path but also that wayfinding intersects with others, blending into the city streets. Using a combination of image and sound that merge an urban German setting with sub-Saharan African landscapes, Megaloh constructs a path not toward money or financial gain but rather toward the wealth of knowledge, understanding, and connection to “Vorfahren und Nachfahren” (“ancestors and descendants”) that defies the capitalistic preoccupation with money.Footnote 4
Megaloh renders rain as beyond time, a way of gazing that pushes back against the European philosophical tradition that both hyperlocalizes and simultaneously delocalizes the place of Blackness as outside or in the “elsewhere” of Europe and therefore also outside progress and modernity (see Trouillot). Megaloh reclaims the “elsewhere” to stipulate that his vision of Blackness and form of gazing see the beyond not from the periphery that European whiteness might situate him within but from the productive fabulation of Blackness as central and inherent to humanity and creative force itself. bell hooks describes the margins as a “space of radical openness,” in and through which Black people “living…on the edge…[develop] a particular way of seeing reality. We [look] both from the outside in and from the inside out…[focusing] our attention on the centre as well as on the margin” (19–20).Footnote 5 Rain, therefore, becomes a metaphor not simply for the flow in rap and creation of music but also for the potential for living otherwise,Footnote 6 of seeing the world with a potential for connection and joy. Water becomes a source of life needed for all living things as Megaloh constructs a vision of the way beyond, a wayfinding through sound-, city-, and memoryscapes.
Megaloh’s form of gazing calls out to listeners and viewers in the hope that his track will provide a glimpse of the rain and the possibility for something beyond the desert of city life. He raps, “Zähl’ die Segen, die ich habe im Leben, darf nicht aufgeben / In Zeiten der Dürre kann ich nicht mehr warten auf Regen / Ich lass’ es fließen!” (“I count the blessings I have in my life, can’t give up / In times of drought, I can no longer wait for the rain / I let it flow!”; “Regenmacher”). There is a sense of empowerment in Megaloh’s lines, not solely of himself but also of others. Pushing back against media preoccupation with Black suffering and trauma, Megaloh compels listeners and viewers to consider that life simultaneously affords joy and struggles. His lyrics remind his listeners that the paths they lead in life, while at times harsh terrain, are ultimately theirs to pursue. By acknowledging the lifeworlds and pathways of others, he designates his own path and invites others to do the same.
Looking Back, Gazing Beyond
While I have offered merely a glimpse into German cultural production, my aim is to highlight how gazing remains akin to wayfinding in a Black global context. From Megaloh glancing to the sky in hopes of rain across the desert (natural and urban) to Belakane’s haunting presence-absence and otherworldly knowledge, Black gazing allows for an understanding of the world from the margins.
Black gazing draws the reader in as active and participatory, which rejects the objectification of the colonial gaze and resists a singular definition, purpose, and positionality. To embrace Black gazing is to move from (Euro)centeredness to “a site of creativity and power, that inclusive space [in the margin]”—of the text, reality, and being—“where we recover ourselves, where we move in solidarity to erase the category of colonised / coloniser” (hooks 23), thereby expanding the possibility through and by which Blackness is expressed and conceptualized. As Maureen Maisha Auma, Eric Otieno, and Peggy Piesche outline in their discussion of Black studies in Germany, “knowledge that emerges…in the everyday and in interaction with others is regarded as crucial to collective liberation” to step away from academic degrees and classifications to “[propagate] ways of knowing and being” that render “racializing and colonizing tendencies” in “scholarly enterprise” legible (Auma et al. 345). A Black gaze compels us all not simply to acknowledge the precarity and shifting circumstances of living while Black in an anti-Black world. A Black gaze encourages us to read, to imagine, and to reflect on our world and actions otherwise to consider possibility in the infinite and multifold in the quotidian.
