Cherrypicker | Literature
On searching and finding family roots

With her debut novel, Mirrianne Mahn realises her desire to write a story about strong women in Cameroon and Germany. The result is a work of art of immense power that reaches back to the German colonial era in Cameroon.

By Laura Riedner

“This story is my story and at the same time it is fictional. Not everything in it is true, but everything about it is real,” is how Mirrianne Mahn describes her debut novel Issa, published in spring 2024. The activist, politician and theatre-maker has long wanted to write an intersectional feminist book that entertains and touches. With Issa, she has succeeded in doing so in a powerful and haunting way.

This family story follows the fates of five women in Cameroon and Germany whose lives are more than a century apart. And yet they are closely connected.

It is the story of strong women.
It is a story of motherhood and becoming a mother.
It is the story of pain and the love of a family.
It is the story of a country, Cameroon.
And it is a story about colonialism.

THE BEGINNING OF A JOURNEY

In 2006, the heavily pregnant German-Cameroonian Issa from Frankfurt am Main travelled to her home town of Buea after her mother persuaded her to do so. There she meets her grandmothers and a traditional healer who is to perform initiation rituals with her to mark her pregnancy. Issa is not particularly enthusiastic about her mother's idea at first, but after a while she recognises the healing beauty of the rituals. She also takes the well-intentioned, albeit sometimes very flowery, words of her great-grandmother Marijoh to heart. As Issa gradually gets to know her roots better and better, the reader is led deeper and deeper into Issa's family history. The narrative perspective also changes throughout the novel: the entire story takes place in 1903. In that year, the ancestor Enanga gives birth to Issa's great-grandmother Marijoh. Just like the life of the protagonist Issa, the reader can now also follow Marijoh's life at the beginning of the 20th century.

The characters in Mirrianne Mahn's novel are not one-dimensional, but are carefully and sensitively endowed by the author with multi-layered character traits, biographies and a good pinch of humour. In a livestream on Instagram, Mahn emphasises that this was particularly important to her. She also didn't want to write in a preachy tone. She deliberately refrains from using the words racism or colonialism in her book.

DECOLONISATION AND EVERYDAY RACISM

A world opens up vividly for the reader in which, without much explanation, it becomes clear how black people in Cameroon at the beginning of the 20th century wanted to celebrate life and at the same time were forced to somehow come to terms with it under German, British and French colonial rule. The novel once again raises the question of whether Germany has sufficiently come to terms with its colonial crimes and is acting in a decolonising manner in the present. Novels like Issa make a valuable contribution to this complex of issues.

What's more, in the present day, Issa gets to know her home country of Cameroon in the hairdressing salon or at the market with its colourful fabrics and impressive variety of fruit in a completely different way to her great-grandmother back then. Nevertheless, they share the same fate. Issa struggles with being too black in Germany and too white in Cameroon. She thinks back to her childhood, when she repeatedly had to endure racist experiences. She once laughed along at racist jokes so that she could continue to belong to her clique. In Issa, white people read about the everyday racism that black people in Germany are still exposed to on a daily basis.

UNCONDITIONAL WILL TO LOVE AND LIVE

The story is also characterised by a feminist concern. Whether in Germany or Cameroon, Mirrianne Mahn uses the fates of five women to tell the story of a patriarchal system and how women try to empower themselves, despite all the dead ends. “You can see what patriarchy means in my characters,” says Mahn in an interview with the Rowohlt publishing house, “Each of them is affected by the fact that somewhere in the world a man makes a decision and a woman suffers as a result.” And yet, in the book's aftermath, the unconditional will to love and live of these strong women prevails.

Issa,– a story that shakes you up, hurts, has a lot of humour and empowers you at the same time - should be read urgently, especially nowadays.