Arriving In The Future : Black German Stories of Home and Exile
is an interdisciplinary approach to positioning, as a series of performances, website, and publications of poetry, short stories, and academic essays on identity by Black, P.O.C (People of Color), and Critical Writers who regard Germany as their home, and those who regard it as permanent or temporary exile. We will through our work attempt to add a new layer to the debate and construction of Black, P.O.C. and Critical Identity.
The project started as a collection of poems, short stories, academic essays, and simple narratives of Black experiences in Germany published in the anthology below Arriving in the Future: Stories of Home and Exile. It was most certainly not the first such publication since the birth of the Black German movement and it will not be the last. Arriving in the Future’s primary goal is empowerment. It is about us, all of us here arriving within the future we always speak of, a future where racism, and discrimination are a thing of the past, where equality and inclusion are taken for granted. Where voices of color within Germany and internationally no longer have to explain or qualify themselves. Each day, each performance, each article, each class, each poem, each book, each song, each act of resistance, and raising of our voices brings us closer to this future.
We are all of us arriving, arriving in the future.
Arriving in the Future: Stories of Home and Exile
Anthology of poetry and creative writing. Uncovering hidden chapters of activism, history, and literature production in the Black German Community and beyond.
Other Points of Interest
It is almost certain that Maurice was not the first African soldier to be interned upon German soil, but his name continues to ring throughout history. His life was not long but venerated…
Reflections on Black German History
For centuries people of African descent have been born and raised in Germany. The Black experience in Germany has been documented for over 300 years with the first known research on the African experience in Germany presented in Latin by….
The Black Experiences in Nazi Germany
Between 1939 and 1945 an estimated 200 thousand black troops recruited from France’s African colonies were serving in the European theater of war. The Africans were especially loathed by the SS because of the history of the Rhineland occupation. In many POW camps the Nazis segregated the Black prisoners of war from the rest of the camp’s population. Often, in what was a breach of their rights under the Geneva Convention, Black prisoners were …
The end of the First World War and the occupation of the Rhineland by French soldiers, including many Afro French soldiers, resulted in the birth of another generation Afro German children that were …
Influential African American’s in Berlin
As a brilliant writer, speaker, and activist Du Bois was the outstanding African-American intellectual of his time. Born in Massachusetts in 1868, (three short years after the end of the American Civil War, and just a few short months after Congress guaranteed black male suffrage through it would take a hundred more to become a reality) Du Bois would graduated from Fisk University and Harvard University. He became the first African American to receive the degree of doctor of philosophy from Harvard, and would spend influential years studying in Berlin. . .
Audre Lorde & the Modern Afro-German Movement
Lorde once wrote of Afro-German women, “I am excited by these women, by their blossoming sense of identity as they say, “Let us be ourselves now as we define us. We are not a figment of your imagination or an exotic answer to your desires. We are not some button on the pocket of your longings.” I see these women as . . .
Arriving In The Future 