On remembering, unlearning, and creating new stories

In this interview, Priya Basil—London-born author of fiction and essays who now lives in Berlin—reflects on colonial continuities and ruptures of Germany’s memoryscape. Taking the Humboldt Forum at the newly reconstructed Berlin Palace that houses Berlin’s ethnographic collections as a starting point, she talks about how the memory of the Holocaust and of colonial crimes committed by Germans connect yet also differ, what messages buildings such as the Berlin Palace communicate to visitors, whose voices are heard and silenced in the Humboldt Forum, and how this relates to some form of post-colonial justice—or not. She advocates for digging down into the provenance of objects in museums and exhibitions to unearth the dark histories that have led to their presence in Germany yet also in other former colonizing countries. To circumvent the master narrative of a collection, she argues it is paramount to let the objects “talk back” and to listen to their stories as opposed to the stories of the collectors and exhibitors.

Priya Basil is a London-born author of fiction and essays. She moved to Berlin in 2002 and now holds dual German and British citizenship. Her work includes two novels, a novella and two books of narrative non-fiction, as well as numerous essays. Her books have been nominated for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize and the International DUBLIN Literary Award. In Be My Guest (Canongate, 2019/German translation "Gastfreundschaft", Suhrcamp 2019) she connects stories about her family's Indian-Kenyan traditions, her British heritage and life in Germany to make a passionate plea for unconditional hospitality. She's written essays that have been widely published, including in Die Zeit and The Guardian. Her latest book Im Wir und Jetzt, Feministin werden (Suhrkamp, 2021) she once again blends the personal and political. 1 Priya Basil is the co-founder of Authors for Peace, a political platform for writers and artists, established in 2010, as well as a member of the advisory board of the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights. In addition to her writing and activism, she conceptualizes and curates events for various institutions, including the Humboldt Forum, which sparked the idea for this interview for the ZeFKo Forum on "Dekolonisert Euch! Kritische Betrachtungen auf die Friedens-und Konfliktforschung". In her video essay 'Locked In and Out' she reflects on the postcolonial legacy of the building and its collection. 2 The interview took place online on 29 September 2022. Koloma Beck: Thank you very much, Priya Basil, for doing this interview with us. Let me start with the observation that over the past years the interest in Germany's colonial history and its legacy has been increasing continuously. This is occurring not only in scholarship and research but also, of course, in the arts. As a consequence, there are controversies about how this new dimension of collective social memory might change, or challenge, or even contradict the established German memory culture. The main concern, voiced again and again, is that increasing attention for the colonial past might somehow weaken the commitment to commemorating the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes. 3 Against this background we would be interested in your views as a writer in Germany and now with German citizenship but not from Germany. You are therefore in a position to look at the issue from an inside and an outside perspective. According to you, what role does colonialism and its aftermath play in your own work as a writer?
Basil: To begin, I have to say that for me it is quite hard to disentangle the colonial memory work and the ongoing grappling with it from my biography because I see myself very much as a product of colonialism, British colonialism. My family was originally from India. They moved, like many Indians, during the British Raj to East Africa to work for the British administration. My parents were born in Kenya, I was born in England, but my family went back to Kenya soon after. I was born in 1977 and lived in Kenya for the first 19 years of my life. Although this was almost 15 years after Kenyan independence, the aftermath of colonialism was very present. Society was very segregated. I guess I grew up very much shaped by colonialism in the sense that it saturated my environment. Yet, I was not conscious of this when growing up, which shocks me now. I guess I was too sheltered and not questioning enough.
I studied in the UK and-as continues to be the case to this day-there was very little reckoning with the colonial past. Imperialism is very much still regarded in a highly celebratory way. Although there are elements of British society that have been critiquing this for a very long time, the 'empire as a force for good' attitude still dominates. It is not part of the education curriculum that you learn this history in a critical way. And so even during my studies in the UK at university level and working there for a couple of years afterwards, I never faced up to the colonial past that had shaped me.
Moving to Germany and going past Holocaust memorials on a daily basis in Berlin prompted me to think about the past in a different way. It is strange that the dedication to remembering this particular event in German history was the trigger for questions on why we do not remember any colonial crimes in the UK. I felt that grappling with the Holocaust was an opening towards looking at other histories, other traumas, and other atrocities. Because of my connection to different places and histories, I can't but consider atrocities alongside each other and think about what public memory means in the UK and Kenya and Germany today. In each place it is contested and controversial for different reasons and with different effects. I imagined that in Germany, which is renowned for its memory culture, it would be easier to have conversations about what and who to remember and how. It is a source of sadness, and disquiet and anger, too, that in fact this is not the case at all. Being practised in remembering parts of the past doesn't automatically make a society amenable to remembering more. I know that one can't always judge on the basis of one's own experience. But considering how enriching it was for me to encounter the remembrance of the Holocaust, how it gave me the scope, the push to remember other crimes of the past, I can't help wondering if it could work the other way, too. If our sense of how we remember the Holocaust could also be enriched through connection with other stories. Since many of the last Holocaust survivors are dying, and bearing in mind the great value of testimony and lived experience in memorialization, I wonder if this kind of experience, singular as it is, could be ... I don't want to say revived, but could be animated in other ways by other singularities, by other singular experiences of genocide, of trauma, and attempts to destroy a people and a culture.
Buckley-Zistel: Where do you see parallels-but also differences-when it comes to remembering colonial crimes in Germany or the Holocaust? Does the way the Holocaust is remembered give us some pointers and inspirations for commemorating colonial crimes? Are there moments when they overlap or when they move into different directions?
Basil: Well, they overlap on the ground of colonialism. This is why the notion is also a very productive one to think with, painful as it is. Many thinkers and scholars have drawn this line. Hannah Arendt did so in her work after the Second World War, although she didn't go far enough. 4 But she nevertheless identified that the crime of the Holocaust was in a line of imperialist colonialist enterprises and racialization. On that ground, it is possible to consider these different events, experiences, crimes, and tragedies in relation to each other.
Where they are distinct is in the individual experience and expression. It's very hard to argue with somebody's sense of loss and of trauma, these feelings must be acknowledged. So it is really important to allow distinction, on the individual or community level, of how a history or experience is still defining people. At the same time, though, it is important to find ways of seeing how there is a continuum of violence. Otherwise, we are at risk of repeating atrocities and also of not understanding why certain things are as they are in our world today. Colonialism as a framework to reflect on all this is really useful, also in light of the climate crisis. It really helps us to see these entanglements and to find ways of relating to them and to each other.
Koloma Beck: Let's continue with staying on the topic of colonialism for a moment and take a closer look at how this plays out in Germany at present. The symbolic anchor point of many discussions over the last years was the creation of the Humboldt Forum in the reconstructed Berlin Palace. 5 It is highly instructive to think about commemorating colonial crimes in view of this building because buildings always represent something, they carry meaning, they are symbolic. They also enact something in the present, and there has been much criticism around this palace already. Can you please give us your own take on what this monument signifies from your perspective and on what is commemorated in this reconstructed monarchic palace that is housing, hosting, hoarding belongings stolen from other people a long time ago?
Basil: The Berlin Palace is a really interesting building from which to think about Germany's memorial culture. I call it 'The Body Builder' because of the muscular, macho authority it tries to assert. It is a stunning indication of how Germany's memory culture has its limits because it's quite extraordinary that a society that has been so dedicated and devoted to memorializing the Holocaust, to honoring the victims, to committing to "Never again!", to repair, ends up rebuilding a place that embodies a time of militarism, colonialism, machoism. Doing it in a spirit of selfcongratulation, really believing this is the place where the world is going to come together and we are going to reflect the world. It was supposed to be the height of German cosmopolitanism. The total misunderstanding and miscalculation continue to shock me. Even though it shouldn't because it's just exposing what has always been there and I just didn't see for a long time, which is this kind of self-satisfied attitude, this sense of 'we know better'. What a construction! A recreated symbol of elitism, oppression, and domination housing objects, belongings that have been mostly stolen or violently taken from different communities all around the world.
It's very interesting to see how this space has catalyzed a conversation around the colonial past, probably unlike anything else. And in that sense, it's been crucial for the public debate. I mean, one would really wish that such awful mistakes hadn't been made and so much money spent before pre-Nazi colonialism could be taken seriously. But it seems to be a pattern in German society, and in other places, that one has to make major mistakes to face the error of one's ways. Maybe it's human nature to repeatedly err before we stop to reflect on what we're doing. For me, the Humboldt Forum somehow encapsulates in miniature the dilemma of contemporary Germany, which is, on the one hand, a certain very serious commitment to reckoning with the past, and, on the other hand, major blind spots and unwillingness to accept that memory is something dynamic and mobile. And that, maybe, memory is also a muscle that can be worked and can stretch to hold more. I'm curious to see what this building, with all its difficulties and that should never have been built, unlocks over the longer term in the discourse and practice of dealing with Germany's colonial history.
Buckley ignored? What ways are there to fill the gaps or show the gaps? The absence of voices, people, positions, perspectives?
Basil: The reconstruction of the Berlin Palace came about through the lobbying of a certain group, the Friends of Berlin Palace, who, I think, represent a very particular delusional view of Germany, a kind of fantasy of pre-Second World War greatness and a wish to recreate this. This says a lot about Germany. It shows what a classist society it is that such a group of wealthy people could lobby to have such a building come about. Of course, it was also ratified by the German parliament, but I have no doubt that money and influence were very decisive in the decision. This is why I think that it was built for people who have a very glorified idea of their past and excludes all those who were exploited and killed and dispossessed so that such buildings could be built, so that such objects could be taken and displayed. The building has no consideration for colonized peoples nor their descendants who are now part of German society, citizens who live here now with post-colonial biographies that seem to have no place in a monolithic memory culture.
When one enters the Humboldt Forum, one really has the sense that marginalized groups and non-white Germans were just not part of the thinking in creating this space and in the way the exhibitions were set up. The names of the biggest donors are listed on the walls, but nothing recognizes the millions of people whose lives, livelihoods, cultures, and territories were destroyed by colonialism. This is very disturbing. The building asserts a sort of self-assuredness that in its sheer size and architecture is speaking to a very particular picture of Germany. I don't know how many people share this, but I imagine it's not just the elite Friends of Berlin Palace, who had it built. I think it's probably quite common. This is very troubling because we know there are openly right-wing people who are part of that Friends of the Palace association. This right-wing attitude in disguise is something that Germany's political class hasn't really grasped. The right wing we commonly picture is represented in extreme neo-Nazi groups, but there is another very active, very conservative, reactionary part of society which is propagating a mythology of a glorious Germany through projects like this.
There are efforts now, through the cultural program that some people at the Humboldt Forum have been developing over the last couple of years, to decolonize the space. The opening of the East Wing, which came two years after the initial opening, shows signs of a different engagement with the objects, they are treated more as belongings. The style of display and narration has changed, and restitutions are underway. So some things have evolved and have become less colonial.
As part of the new opening, there was a consultation with many indigenous groups who came from all over the world and had played a role in the curation of the new exhibitions. There was collective brainstorming over a couple of days, and afterwards a common statement was published outlining several commitments, including one to set up an Indigenous Embassy in the Humboldt Forum. If the Forum gave up a substantial amount of space for such an endeavour, that could be an interesting and hopeful turn. Though I wonder how people would feel being in that space? For me the discomfort has not reduced, even after many visits. And so even though there are promising signs, I remain skeptical about what is possible in such a building because it remains a monument to Coloniality. Since it is suffused K with coloniality, you're always working against that. And this already takes so much energy that I think many efforts are somehow diminished even before they begin.
Koloma Beck: And what would you say? How it is possible, then, if not in the Humboldt Forum but elsewhere, to somehow turn this colonial master narrative around?
Basil: From an artistic perspective, what I find very seductive and subversive is working with the gaps in the archive to imagine and bring out other stories. The American literary scholar Saidiya Hartman developed the notion of "critical fabulation". 6 This emerged out of her work with the archives around the Atlantic slave trade. There is so little recorded of that experience, so she came up with this approach as a way to imagine into all the blanks, to try and recreate the lives and longings of the enslaved that have been erased from the record. Dan Hicks, the anthropologist and critic of ethnographic museums, developed the notion of "necrography" as a call for institutions to dig down into the provenance of objects and unearth the dark histories that have led to their presence in collections. 7 I took these two powerful notions to coin the term "fabulography". For me, this means you're looking at the history and you're looking at the gaps-and then you're imaginatively making stories from this. Stories connected to objects. This is an approach I use in a project that I've been doing at the Humboldt Forum called "Objects Talk Back" 8 . It invites international writers to circumvent the master story of the museum, which has been mostly limited to listing the collector, the region, and the material of an object. Fabulography, as an intervention, offers a chance to go beyond the reductive museum narrative and create something more expansive and multi-sensory that has to do with enduring relations and belonging-even where much has been destroyed. I'm amazed and inspired by the unexpected connections the writers make, the fresh perspectives these stories offer. Actively seeking out many different perspectives on an issue is vital because the colonial view is onedimensional. So inviting very different actors to think together on matters can be a powerful practice. I find it exciting to consider postcolonialism as a methodology that offers ways of acting together to understand and shape reality. In that possibility, I find hope. And so, I'm attracted to approaches that go in that direction.
Buckley-Zistel: To move to the topic of repair and reparations: this interview is in a contribution to the Forum of the Zeitschrift für Friedens-und Konfliktforschung. In another article, the legal scholars Karina Theurer and Sarah Imani 9 look at the debates around German reparations for colonial crimes in Namibia. Do you believe that the destruction and injuries brought about by colonial rule can be repaired at all?
Basil: I don't know. A lot depends on how we might define repair. If it's understood as a restoration to a preexisting condition of wholeness, then it's quite unlikely. So much is already so damaged, yet there is potential to adapt and thrive even in a wounded state. It may be more fruitful to think of repair as ongoing attempts to 6 The notion of "critical fabulation" was developed in Hartman (2021). 7 See, for instance, Hicks (2020). See also Hicks et al. (2021). 8 For details on the project, visit Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss (n.d.). 9 The article mentioned is Imani and Theurer (2022). create more just conditions for those who have been most harmed, conditions which enable not just survival but flourishing. The trouble is, very often even gestures or acts that appear to constitute a form of repair can have side effects that are harmful. This is unfortunately the case with the draft agreement between the German and Namibian governments. Within Namibian society itself, this agreement is causing problems. The Nama and Herero people are dissatisfied with the terms as well as the process. Others, like the San, who were also affected by the genocide and are the most marginalized, feel overlooked once again. Sometimes these kinds of acts serve to amplify and exacerbate existing inequalities, differences, and grievances so that a society is actually destabilized by this supposed act of repair and reparation. We can never entirely anticipate what a restorative gesture might unleash, but with different processes that include those who might be indirectly affected, it might be possible to mitigate some of the worst effects. I want to believe in the possibility of repair because there is so much suffering. As something to strive towards, I wouldn't want to undermine the notion. But it is also necessary to have some caution about what it means for whom, plus awareness that there may be unforeseen consequences which then create an obligation to engage further-not digging in one's heels as the German government is now doing over the Namibia agreement.
With the climate crisis, which is related to colonialism, I think repairing the planet is actually no longer something that is within our human capacities, certainly not within the timespan of individual lives. What words, what language do we have for what we're trying to achieve with 'just' 1.5% heating or 2%? It can only be called crisis management or mitigation, not repair. But maybe within that broader effort to contain the damage, there is some measure of repair possible in how people are towards each other. Acts of listening, sharing, sheltering can be restorative especially when extended to strangers or those forced to migrate because of the climate crisis. The potential for repair is perhaps more present in such personal acts and relations than on a planetary scale.
Koloma Beck: As you say, there are different takes on how to deal with the colonial past including questions of repair and reparation. Yet another way would be to approach dealing with colonialism through the notions of learning and unlearning, which is also something that you mention in your video essay. 10 What does this entail? What is it we need to learn or unlearn?
Basil: It's probably different for everybody. For me, this notion of unlearning was and is very fruitful because the environment and society we live and act in-however much we try to cultivate a critical eye on the world and to act outside of the dominant dynamics-has really shaped us. For me, the unlearning is about cultivating a constant vigilance, an awareness of my own patterns and blind spots by seeking viewpoints and stories that are not in my immediate vicinity. It's an active engagement and requires allowing doubt, uncertainty, and humility in the face of things that seem to be self-evident.
We agreed that the Humboldt Forum has been a major catalyst for the German debate about colonial history in the last couple of decades and definitely more so in the last decade. For me, the second major landmark event in that respect has been 10 See fn 2.
K Documenta 15. 11 The way that it has been discussed in the public discourse really makes me wonder about the notion of unlearning. I guess I just can't understand how there is so much conviction about what is right. Of course, there can be conviction on certain things, such as what an anti-Semitic image is. A very spirited public debate started from an anti-Semitic image in a mural. But for a debate to be conducted on the assumption that one has the right position and the right way of looking at the world, even if one is totally ignorant of other histories, seems really problematic. I've been thinking about this a lot, trying to understand how the discussion has got so heated and how there seem to be divides that are impossible to bridge. One can discuss omissions, mistakes, or misunderstandings that might have happened in a process of dealing with the issue of an anti-Semitic image. But if-and I'm referring to Germany here as shorthand for the dominant discourse that has pervaded the media-if there can be an allegation that the centrality of the Holocaust in German history, culture, and society as well as in Germany's understanding of itself has been underestimated by the Indonesians, then I think there also has to be an equal acknowledgment of the fact that Germany has underestimated the centrality of the Nakba to many societies that have been colonized and are grappling with their own violent histories and ongoing struggles. The troubling and really sad thing is the seeming impossibility of acknowledging any shortcomings on one's own side, in this case the German side. And so, I guess I would wish for an unlearning of this ... what the Germans call "Deutungshoheit" or the superiority of interpretation-this impulse to assume that you have it right already because you did a really good job of remembering this awful crime committed by the Germans-as if there would be no more room for learning or even improving on that-I mean, it's not like that's been perfect.
I find unlearning a very productive notion to think with. I wish that there was a bit more self-questioning, humility, and willingness to listen and thus unlearn one's own assumptions. I think this is a responsibility for all who engage in public debates which involve many different histories and biographies, some of which one might, understandably, not have much knowledge of. It's impossible to know about every culture and every past, but the opportunity to learn from each other, which Documenta 15 offered, was squandered. This is so sad, because I think that-in contrast to the Humboldt Forum, which is this monument to Coloniality-Documenta 15 offered an experience of (un)learning. It took me some time to understand this because visiting was also a discomforting experience-though in a very different way to the Humboldt Forum. At the beginning, I couldn't figure out what it was I was encountering and what it meant. I kept trying to relate it to things I knew, and it wouldn't fit. Only after much reflection did I realize I didn't have the imagination, while I was there, to see that they had created a world after or beyond capitalism. When you're so shut up in the system, you can't even recognize the alternative you've been dreaming of! It is a pity that so much of what was realized at Documenta 15 in really extraordinary, playful, joyful, and challenging ways was lost through a very accusing, antagonistic, and reductive debate.
Documenta 15 and the Humboldt Forum for me are deeply revealing of German society, of how much there is still to deal with. I'm thinking a lot about trauma at the moment because I'm currently Writer-in-Residence on a project called Mindscapes from the Wellcome Trust. 12 I know it's tricky to apply theories of how trauma works on individuals at a societal level, but I can't help suspecting that there is a kind of triggering going on in German society, which has been grappling for decades with the Holocaust and its legacy. I imagine being confronted with other crimes connected to German and European colonialism is touching deep nerves. Trauma can express itself in all kinds of ways: you can lash out, have fits, seem very out of character, not make sense. It's like we're in the midst of very public fits and lashing out. Psychologists observe how it's difficult to reach someone with words and reason when they're still 'in it'. Perhaps we're in a phase where dialogue across differences simply can't happen. Absurd as it sounds, maybe it would be more fruitful to dance or sing or act together, to calm down before trying to talk again and maybe repair the rifts. The ongoing discourse is so damaging for so many people and also, I think, for Germany's own practice of memorializing. The demeaning and dismissing of others and their traumatic histories risks undermining the incredible achievement of remembering the Holocaust. How we work through this as a society now is really decisive.
Buckley-Zistel: In the context of the Humboldt Forum, but also in other forms of engagement and activism, there's often an argument that when critique about its colonial content and orientation is articulated, it runs the risk of being appropriated by the institution or the organizers. By being appropriated, it is often sanitized and turned into something that may make the experience richer and deeper, but by doing so, also deflects the very core and the substance of the critique. Do you see a way of maneuvering between avoiding being assimilated for the sake of showing, portraying to the outside that an institution takes critique seriously, and actually being able to voice substantial critique?
Basil: This is a really interesting and important question. Often, when a phenomenon achieves a certain salience in society, everybody wants to be seen to be part of it. Over the last years, 'postcolonial' and 'decolonizing' as notions have left the realms of academia and activism and joined mainstream discourse. Sometimes it seems use of these terms is like a form of branding to signal being anti-racist and progressive, which many institutions are understandably keen to highlight in their mission or programme. In practice, these terms mean dismantling structures of domination, including racial, social, and discursive hierarchies. It's not evident that this is happening in any significant way. There's a risk of institutions colonizing postcolonialism through rhetorical appropriation that doesn't translate into action. Striking asymmetries of power remain in terms of those who are really embodying, really living the implications of these questions, and those who are able to sit in a very sheltered environment and work with them as concepts. We're seeing these terms become ubiquitous, attached to anything, used in contexts where nobody explains them, as if they were a reference that everybody understands and experiences the same way. This misuse can rob decolonizing approaches of their power.
That said, something has been set in motion that cannot be stopped. The fact that these terms and ideas are entering so many spaces starts to have some cumulative effect. It's a process, and where it will lead is not clear. Maybe it's inevitable that along the way power absorbs the critiques against it and, in that sense, temporarily diminishes them.
What is more difficult and problematic for me is the way in which there are institutions who want to be seen to be engaging with post-colonial and decolonial issues by commissioning artworks or inviting people who have typically been marginalized in these spaces to engage. But often the institutions are not structurally set up in any way to host or to help these projects flourish. So, for instance, a theater commissions a post-colonial opera based on certain German colonial records-you imagine it would be quite clear that this story must center on biographies of characters that have been colonial subjects and are probably not white, because decolonizing opera would involve having different people with different stories on stage. But then the ensemble at the theater is majority white and aghast at being presented with a libretto where the majority of characters are people of colour. In the end, the project is cancelled by the theatre because that's easier than dealing with the challenges such a production poses. So you have this scenario where the good intentions, the apparent openness to change, is actually impossible to realize. I believe that art can catalyze personal change, but it can't transform institutional structures. Commitment to decolonizing also requires having people in your institution who are dedicated full-time to diversifying, educating, and restructuring. And that's happening in very few cases, which is a really serious problem because meanwhile certain stories and people will remain excluded.
Koloma Beck: As a last question, we would like you to reflect on the two different fields of our engagement. As an author, you are clearly situated within the field of art, yet in your own work, you quite intensely engage with scholarly work, also in this interview when you cited Higgs or Hartmann. How would you describe the significance of the relation between arts and scholarship in decolonial or postcolonial movements, intellectual movements and practices, too?
Basil: I love this question because this nexus of scholarship and artistic practice and imagination is, for me, such a beautiful and exciting space. I might come at it with a bit of a scholarly slant first. I realized, through reading the work of the feminist philosopher Miranda Fricker, that sometimes we do not have the words or the language to describe our experience. She calls this "hermeneutical injustice". 13 For her, women, for instance, at some point might not have the language to describe the way they're discriminated against, so they can't even articulate that discrimination to themselves, let alone a wider public. I remember having this feeling when I read Kate Manne on misogyny and suddenly understood it as a system of power which is distinct from sexism. 14 Understanding these different forms of discrimination was so visceral, it was a really profound moment where you just feel very validated and also empowered to express yourself because of the language that has been afforded you. 13 See Fricker (2007). 14 See Manne (2017).
Scholarship has been, for me, a really, really rich source of vocabulary to understand different experiences in the world, including my own. It has made me think about different ways also of writing, it's given me methodologies for my creative practice. Donna Haraway, in her essay 'Situated Knowledges', describes how recognizing your extreme subjectivity is the only way to be objective, or is the closest one comes to being objective. 15 This pushed me to wonder how I could acknowledge this in my work and also develop other means of looking at an issue. The principle of polyphony in my writing was something that developed from these reflections. I feel so indebted to scholarship for the way that my thinking and writing has evolved. I really want to celebrate that. The idea that you individually form thoughts and come up with new ideas in a vacuum, that you are some kind of lone genius, is something I reject. Thoughts are built on thoughts, and books are built on books. In academia, there's an established protocol of citation, an acknowledgment of borrowing from, contradicting, or extending other knowledge. I'm inspired by this evidence of thinking as a communal activity, and I've tried to incorporate that into my literary writing. I love to mention the people I'm quoting, not leaving it to the end, but keeping it, as a stylistic choice, in the main body of the text.
To sum up, scholarly work has really influenced my writing as well as my ability to recognize things as they're happening in the world. Returning to Documenta 15-I had an insight for which I'm thankful again to Miranda Fricker and her amazing book Epistemic Injustice. One form of epistemic injustice that she talks about is "testimonial injustice", where a person is not taken seriously as a teller or as a knower. This is partly what was at play in the German discourse vis-àvis Documenta 15: certain people's experience and knowledge is just not given the same regard and authority. Recognizing this gives one reason for pause. You think, what other dynamics are at play here? Why is the discussion going this way and not another? For me, academic writing can really help to sharpen our understanding of the world because it identifies and develops language for lived experience.
Funding Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.

Declarations
Conflict of interest S. Buckley-Zistel and T. Koloma Beck declare that they have no competing interests.
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/.