Search results for ""Author Birgit Weyhe""

The white German graphic novelist Birgit Weyhe meets Priscilla Layne, an African American professor of German studies. Growing up, Priscilla is too white for her Black classmates, too Black for the white kids. She becomes a rude girl, discovering a community where she feels valued. But how should Birgit Weyhe tell a life story like Priscilla's?

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Olivia Evezi's childhood is a happy one; her days spent listening to highlife records with her father and poring over the colourful postcards her mother receives from Germany. But Olivia is a dreamer and longs for more, leaving her hometown of Warri behind to live out her Enid Blyton fantasies in boarding school in Lagos. Instead of adventure and lacrosse, however, she is met with punishments, endless chores and hazing rituals, as she struggles to overcome the terror and disdain of the seniors. Olivia's restlessness takes her to Germany, her mother's homeland, where she is thrown into a hidden world of workers and migrants; a world of constant vigilance, where a piece of paper can hold the key to survival.

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Madgermanes is what the Mozambican workers once contracted out to East Germany are called today. At the end of the 1970s, some 20,000 of them were sent from the People's Republic of Mozambique to the GDR to labour for their socialist sister country. After the Berlin Wall fell, almost all of them lost their residency status. Decades later, they are still waiting for most of their wages to be paid. Birgit Weyhe depicts their search for belonging and a place to call home, caught between two cultures and two states that no longer exist. Based on extensive interviews, she creates three fictitious narrators and transforms their stories into a visual language that skilfully interweaves African and European narrative traditions. "Birgit Weyhe traces emotions and situations, translating them into overwhelming images by entering into an artistic dialogue between European and African culture." Max and Moritz Prize; "This book is a great document and a monument to the injustice that befell me and other contract workers in East Germany." Emiliano Chaimite

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