Aaiún Nin writes against the silence about Angola
Published: Sunday, Jan 14th 2024, 10:31
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Aaiún Nin writes poems about her own uprooting from Angola, against homophobia and racism. Nin also writes against our ignorance, which prevents us from knowing more about Angola. A poetic reconquest of one's own biography that always begins anew.
Aaiún Nin has been living and working in Bern as an artist in residence at the Swiss-German PEN Center since March 2023. Nin is currently painting an abstract, multi-layered series about the visual impact of colonialism on architecture and aesthetics in Angolan society, particularly in the capital Luanda. Nin was born there in 1991. In the midst of the civil war that had been raging since 1975 and during the dictatorship of the Dos Santos clan, which controlled Angola's destiny for almost 40 years and defrauded the oil-rich country of billions of dollars in the process.
The fact that we in Switzerland and Western Europe know and learn so little about Angola - this silence is a prison: "If there is no outcry, it will continue. The sheer cruelty will simply be a footnote in history. For me, silence cannot lead to freedom, because it has not saved any of us." In German, the first volume of poetry is therefore entitled "Denn Schweigen ist ein Gefängnis".
"I write ...
At the age of six, Nin fled the war with two older siblings to Zimbabwe and a few years later to Capetown in South Africa. Nin was to stay there for 11 years, the longest time in one place to date. Even as a teenager, Nin experienced a lot of xenophobia: "I grew up in an environment where the majority of people were black. But in many parts of the African continent, tribalism leads to hostility towards black people who come from other parts of the world."
... because silence didn't save me"
The next upheaval took Nin to Denmark. It was only there that writing took on a new meaning: "While I was waiting for my residence permit, I was not allowed to work or study. I had no money, but a lot of time. Paint is expensive, but all I needed to write was a pen and a piece of paper."
Nin joined a collective and met her future mentor Mette Moestrup. This was followed by readings, performances and finally a publishing contract: the first volume of poetry "Broken Halves of a Silky Sun" was first published in Danish translation. "When I held my book in my hands for the first time, it contained poems in a language I couldn't read. It almost felt as if I had been robbed of my own work.
... because I refuse to be broken"
The poems are an expression of a reappropriation of Angola and its long oral tradition: there is a lot of music and spoken word in Angola, fewer books. For Nin, fictional narratives and Wakanda universes distract from reality: "Our stories are too often told from the perspective of a third party, often emotionlessly and statistically as numbers of victims. That's why it was important for me to inscribe the concept of the self in my work." This "I" breaks through the paradigm of silence and tells of humanity detached from race and gender, of queer love, of uprootedness and anger, and empowers "Black girls".
The book is not available in Angola or in Portuguese, and her own family has not read it. "We are quite distant. The constant moving and the physical separation mean that I have lost some connections. Before I came out, it was possible to maintain closeness. Now there is a reality that they have no idea about. When I realized that I could never be safe as a queer person in Angola, this feeling of separation became stronger and stronger."
... because I am not made of pain"
"I remember one of the last times I traveled to Angola for my sister's wedding and everyone remarked on how cold I had become. Apparently I had also adopted Scandinavian characteristics." But after five years, Denmark rejected Aaiún Nin's asylum application following the apparent repeal of the Angolan law criminalizing same-sex relationships in 2020.
Waiting for her own deportation, Nin began her second book: "Writing became my passport, so to speak. Something that enabled me not to return to my home country, where I would continue to be persecuted as a queer person. In my case, the current tendency for art that comes from suffering to be romanticized was useful. I got access to various programs - such as International Cities of Refuge Network (Icorn) - and thus the residence permit for Poland and now for the stay in Bern."
Before that, Nin arrived in Krakow in 2021, one of the 100 cities in Poland to declare itself an LGBTQ-free zone, which was revoked after protests in September 2021. In this conservative Christian Polish society, Nin felt like the perfect enemy: black and queer. "I still have gaps in my memory about how I managed to live there. I was scared and there were hardly any racialized people to talk about these things." In order to break this silence, work on the second volume of poetry must be completed soon.
"I write to slow the passage of time / by surveying the days and savoring the salt / I write to teach myself not to flinch at tenderness / and to surrender to things I may never/ understand. "*
*This text by Philine Erni, Keystone-SDA, was realized with the help of the Gottlieb and Hans Vogt Foundation.
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