The African Americans Part I

Reiner & Jens 

“Remember we used to do this for hours?”
“You were always trying to swing higher than me.”
“Yeah I was.”
“Why? Why were we always trying to outdo each other?”
“So you admit it? You were also competing with me?”
“You made everything a competition. I didn’t want to be the youngest and a loser.”
“Yeah, I was that brother, but I’m glad we outgrew all that.”
“Yeah me too. I was always trying to be faster than you. Smarter than you. Getting more than you.”
“Getting more than me?”
“More food, more toys, more attention.”
“Toys?”
“We had the same toys. If I got something you got something.”
“The teachers liked you better than me, but I had more friends. And I always got more food than you because you always chewed your food til it was mush.”
“You were like a vacuum, swallowing everything.”
“Oma used to get so annoyed when we would have our food races. But that’s not why we’re here. Talk to me.”
“What? What do you want me to say?”
“You only call me when you need something, unless it’s my birthday or to remind me to call opa or uncle Robert on their birthdays.”
“I call you everyday brother.”
“Yeah. You call me when you need something, and that means you call me everyday because you need something everyday. But today you called me and asked if you could drop by and now we’re in a park swinging in swings too small for our big butts talking about nothing. If you’ve got something on your mind, let it out. Tell me.”
“It’s Howard.”
“Now what did he do?”
“Don’t stop swinging. It’s not that bad. Come on!”
“Sigh. Okay.”
“It’s a lot sometimes.”
“Sometimes?”
“Come on!”
“Okay I’m listening. I’m not judging, but he’s loud, he’s opinionated, he doesn’t care what people think. I know opa and uncle Robert, they say things. Things they shouldn’t say but… they’re our family. They don’t… they don’t mean anything. They just don’t know any better.”
“Yeah, but… it’s not an excuse. Why don’t they just think about what they say, what it means, before they say it. When we were growing up they said things about Africans, foreigners...”
“You have to look at them, and when you think about it, you have to see them as products of their time, their generation. Lena came home with me. Then she came home with you, and then she left. They had these two brown kids that they didn’t know what to do with. We were the only people, we were the only people like us that they had any reason to be close to.”
“I think opa was really ashamed. I remember how stiff he was sometimes when we were walking around together.”
“He wasn’t ashamed. Not of us. Maybe about Lena. People were going to stare at us because we stood out. Opa never had to deal with that.”
“He was always distant with us, he…”
“He was distant with everyone. He wasn’t sensitive or affectionate. If you think about it, he never kissed oma, he never hugged her. At least, not in front of us. That’s just his way.”
“Yes, that’s true about oma.”
“What do you want from him? What do you want from, from our childhood? What could have been different, and how was anything that happened, oma or opa’s, or uncle Robert’s fault? It’s not. None of it. Both of our fathers abandoned us, our mother’s a drug addict who cares more about getting high than, than anything else. Who was supposed to take care of us? She dropped us in their laps, one after the other and then she just left. They weren’t prepared to have children again, there was no reason for them to expect to have a family so different from their families. They took care of us until they couldn’t. Us moving to Uncle Robert’s and leaving them... I remember opa making a fist and hitting me right between my shoulder blades. That’s the closest to a hug or any physical affection I… ever got from him. I don’t know what you want from them? You didn’t even think about this before, you didn’t talk like this until you start seeing Howard.”
“Well… I...that’s not exactly true.”
“Isn’t it though? We never talked about oma and opa, or uncle Robert like this. Like these stupid, racist, evil… Germans… that’s how Howard...”
“Howard never said that.”
“Opa… opa is opa. He was trying so hard! So hard. Really, you have to give him some credit. Me, uncle Robert, opa, everybody, we were all surprised when you… came out I guess, for us that was a shock. We didn’t see you like that.”
“Honestly your reaction surprised me the most.”
“I never saw it coming. I was, I, it shocked me. It did.”
“Yeah, I could tell.”
“Come on. It was awkward for days, tops. But we all came together. We all got over it, the shock, and opa, opa took a train here, and then we went to that Nigerian restaurant. Opa was like, ‘What should I eat here?’ I’ve never seen him look scared before.”
“It’s not funny Reiner.”
“I’m not laughing because… I’m just trying to find the humour in it.”
“But it wasn’t funny.”
“When you texted the name of the restaurant and the address I kept thinking to myself, okay but really? This is the first time, the first guy you introduce opa and uncle Robert to and we meet for dinner at a Nigerian restaurant?”
“I’m Nigerian.”
“We’re Bavarian.”
“We’ve never been Bavarian.”
“God, you sound just like him.”
“I can think for myself Reiner. I’m not a little kid anymore. I’m not that same kid trying to catch up to you, trying to blend in.”
“What does this have to do with me? Why are you bringing me up?”
“I’m bringing it up to say that… you’re acting like, like I can’t think for myself.”
“If you rewind and listen to what I said, that’s not what I said. I said you sound like him, but it’s, it’s more than that. I think for him, all this stuff that he’s always going on about, that’s true. That’s how it is in the U.S. You never had this, this crisis about who you are until you started hanging around him.”
“Who said I’m having a crisis?”
“I’m the only one you’re talking to. You’re not talking to opa. You’re not talking to uncle Robert. I don’t want to tell you what to do but you could just apologise to them for how he overreacted…”
“He didn’t overreact. He felt triggered…”
“Triggered?”
“You know what I mean.”
“No I don’t. I don’t want to know that word means. I wouldn’t have made it to where I am if I was triggered whenever someone asked me a stupid question. You’re absorbing everything that he’s spewing out, but he could learn from us. We were two out of six people in the village we lived in. It was just the six of us. We had to be strong. To them being strong is fighting everything, and fighting all the time, for what? What good is it doing them? What good does it do for us? No one can tell me that I’m beneath them because I’m not giving people that power. He’s in Germany now. He’s in Berlin. If he thinks it’s bad here, man… he better not leave Berlin. Why not just go back to America then. It’s not better there. It’s worse. Times ten.”

“How come it’s always ‘If you don’t like it leave’? What problems does that really solve? It doesn’t. We couldn’t leave. When we were kids we couldn’t leave and that’s not the solution when you’re at home but you don’t feel like it’s home. We were born here. Right here. Lena’s German. Uncle Robert, oma, opa, too. All German. But we weren’t treated like that. Our Fathers, the things they gave us, that made us not German. I never understood how it cancelled out everything else. That power that having these fathers, from these places that we didn’t know, coming from two people that we didn’t know, that made us not really German, and it was like it erased us from being German.”
“ That’s not how it is. We can’t do anything about people who said things like that. How do I think about this and move on with my life? I just… you know what I don’t like about this? I don’t want to feel sorry for myself.”
“He doesn’t feel sorry for himself…”
“He feels sorry for himself or he feels entitled.”
“Entitled? Entitled to what besides not being treated like we don’t belong here.”
“Well he doesn’t have a right to be here.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Make it simple.”
“We had to stand up for ourselves all the time. To kids at school, to neighbors, teachers. And when we were too tired to stand up, there was no one there. 
“So we had to fight? Everybody has to fight for something. We won!”
“What did we win?”
“What did we win? I don’t know. I don’t know what we won. We didn’t lose. If you’re happy with this guy, with Howard, okay. You just don’t sound like… you don’t sound like yourself anymore.”
“If that’s what you think, it’s because I didn’t have a way into understanding how to talk about things that I’ve been quiet about. For years. These feelings aren’t new, me… finding a way to talk about what I go through, what we went through, that’s what’s new. I didn’t know how to talk about it before.”
“The question is, are you using someone else’s words, someone else’s language? It doesn’t sound like you, like my brother. You’re repeating. It’s just you repeating something..”
“Reiner, I’m trying to tell you. You’re not listening to me. You’re blaming him but I’m telling you that I have been thinking about this. All our lives, I’ve been thinking about this. You were always, I don’t know, closed, when I wanted to talk about, about racism.”
“We didn’t… we don’t know racism! We don’t. Did we have encounters with stupid people who called us names? So what they told us we didn’t belong. We’re still here. Did that change our lives in any way that’s significant? No it hasn’t. You need to be careful. Be careful about this guy, because he’s going to have you making yourself a victim just like him. You can’t afford to be a victim here.”

Ezra & Jens


“Look at you running for your life.”
"I made it. Phew, I made it. He saw me coming.”
“I was looking down to see if you were there somewhere, and then I see you sprinting through the traffic. You’re lucky he waited for you.”
“Yeah. Yeah. I know.”
“Are you gonna sit down?”
“I don’t remember the last time I sat up here, in the front. I usually just take a seat downstairs.”
“I always take the stairs and try to get the front seat if I can so I can see where we’re going, even though I know the way. With my music on just lookin out the window, watchin the city roll by.”
“Thanks for meeting me, for helping. I’m really bad at, at shopping. Howard said, he said not to overdo it, but they’re the first people I’m meeting from his family. I just wanna get something nice for his aunt. I feel like that’s something they always do in films. When you meet the family. He said it’s not important but I want to make a good impression.”
“Not like the exact opposite of what happened with your grandpa, right?”
“Yeah my grandfather and my uncle.”
“So what happened, cos in the text you just said it was bad. A disaster.”
“It’s still new for them. My uncle, my opa, and my brother, Reiner. I saw him yesterday and we tried to, we tried to talk.”
“And how did that go?”
“Yeah, it was another ‘hard talk’. He really doesn’t get it. And… my brother and Howard… they don’t mix.”
“As in they just don’t get on?”
“No, not at all. The first time we met it was sort of a double date I guess with Reiner, his girlfriend Elke, and then me and Howard. We went to a restaurant and from the moment we sat down it was clear. There was so much tension. I thought both Howard and my brother were really nervous. Maybe they were. It started with my brother asking Howard how long he had been in Germany. And then Howard told him a year and a half and then my brother said, because we were talking in English, that that was long enough for Howard to speak German.”
“What did Howard say?”
“Ohhhh. He told my brother that if he didn’t want to speak in English that he could speak German. He said he wasn’t forcing my brother to speak English to him.”
“Oh okay, Howard went there.” 
“To be honest, I think my brother’s right. Maybe it’s not about right or wrong but, if Howard spoke German it would really help him in a lot of ways, but I also understand that it’s not a priority for him. He… he would be mad if he heard me say this, but if he doesn’t speak German and people ask him why, he can’t be mad at the question.”
“That’s fair. We never speak in German. Would your brother ask me the same questions?”
“Probably, but I’m not sure. You know how it is, how white people don’t expect us to speak in my case, German. How they try to correct us on the one hand, and then they tell you how surprised they are at how well you speak. My oma used to be a German teacher. She was retired, but she was always telling us how to speak, how to say things, emphasising that we had to speak a certain way. Maybe I’m reading into it, but it, it always seemed like she was telling us without saying anything, ‘You have to be better than the others. You have to speak better than them, the Germans.”
“We had our own version of that too.”
“I think my brother, he internalised so much.”
“Is Elke white?”
“Yeah.”
“He only dates white girls right?”
“The whitest white girls. Blondes, redheads, natural blondes, he says. But before Howard, I never had a Black boyfriend.”
“Neither have I. I mean, I didn’t date Howard but you know what I mean. I’ve never dated a Black person. Just only white girls first, and then nothing but white guys. I haven’t even kissed or had… something with another Black guy. Most of the guys I’ve been with, they’ve had more experiences with Black men than me!”
“For me it was kind of the same. I mean I made some experiences when I was in Brussels.”
“Really in Brussels?”
“Yeah, it was kind of funny, kind of strange. I met a guy on the apps and he took me to this bar where there were only Black people. You had to press a button to get in. It was all Black men, and he took me there.”
“The guy, the white guy was Belgian?”
“No he was Bulgarian. I think… but we were talking the whole night, and I remember the bar stayed open really late, but we were talking the whole night with this guy, and dancing and drinking and then the Bulgarian guy went to the toilet and I was dancing with this guy and he was smiling and staring at me and then we kissed and he asked me to leave with him.”
“So you left with him?”
“Yeah. We just grabbed our jackets and we left.”
“The poor Bulgarian. You broke his heart Jens.”
“Well, it was worth it.”
“What happened with the guy?”
“We are connected on instagram and he likes my pictures sometimes.”
“I can’t believe I, I haven’t even kissed another Black guy.”
“Why not? Why do you think we don’t date each other?”
“I don’t know. I don’t see, I guess… I see other Black men and I think maybe we’ll be friends. I don’t…”
“Howard has only dated one white person.”
“He’s lying. Only one? Yeah but he’s from Florida. He lived in Atlanta. We don’t have the same options even if we wanted to date only Black men. Like that bar that the Bulgarian guy took you too, there’s nothing like that here and I’m not sure people would go even if it was here. white people would definitely be there.”
“It was something special, this place. It felt like, they were there for themselves. It was a place for us.”
“Is it weird that I haven’t been with or dated another Black guy?”
“Whenever I see another Black guy, when we go out with J.P., Gis, and Thiago, that guy that we don’t know…”
“That we don’t know yet…”
“Right. Ha ha, he, he’s always with a group of white guys.”
“You and Howard are unicorns. Black unicorns with big, ginormous…”
“...”
“A gurl can dream. But can she find her own Black unicorn in the big bad city?”
“Shoot your shot.”
“With who? I told you about Grindr.”
“Fuck Grindr, especially here.”
“In two weeks, blocked by two Black dudes. Just… for nothing… just looking at their profile. It made me feel ugly.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Okay I didn’t feel ugly but…”
“Is it the same in Norway. In Oslo?”
“Well, for starters there aren’t that many Black gays runnin around the town, and if there are, I know them all already and either they’re not interested or I’m not, but yeah, you’re kind of invisible there too. No one ever blocked me for being Black and looking at their profile though. No one Black at least.”
“What about you and Thiago?”
“Ahem. Ahem. Ahem, hem, hem.”
“What?”
“I’m just… You know, I’m his last call.”
“What does that mean?”
“If he can’t find a Prussian, he finds his way to… we go to my place. But even if at the last minute, the last possible second Dieter or Johan show up…”
“His beer goggles are securely fastened…”
“And these white menz that only four hours ago couldn’t pull if the world was gonna be destroyed in the next five minutes by nuclear weapons, suddenly, he becomes another Euromillions victory. I get a beer, stumble into my room, and wank til I fall asleep. I don’t even cum sometimes. And speaking of getting off…”
“Come on. Let’s go you wanker! You fookin wänker!”

Written by Isaiah Lopaz, Anthology / Appendix 2021