Meet the Author #6
Mirrianne Mahn
In an event at the Goethe-Institut Stockholm, Mirrianne Mahn discussed her 2024 novel Issa and the question of how literature can be written from marginalized perspectives. Her reading highlighted the significance of literature as a practice for critiquing power structures, emphasizing how literature can help recenter women’s stories—which are often overlooked in the process of historiography.
Mahn explained how the process of writing her novel Issa also functioned as a form of self-healing and self-reflection. While her own political activism is often motivated by resistance, the novel form provided opportunities for Mahn to decouple themes like racism and discrimination from her own personal experience. In doing so, her work did not simply provide a platform for one “angry black woman,” it provided numerous complex figures to showcase the complexity of discriminatory structures—allowing Mahn to finally do justice to the pressures and urgency of her own activism.
Issa weaves together the perspectives of five black women over the course of a century (from 1903 to 2006), illuminating topics like colonialism, healing, violence, ritual, and intersectionality. The new literary and historical backdrops of each character’s perspective are narrated through unique voices, inspired by Mahn’s own background in theater. Mahn conducted significant archival research to prepare for her novel, encountering, among other things, documents about the building of a church in Buea, Cameroon, during the Pallottine Mission in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These documents referenced women without their names, almost as afterthoughts. Period photos from the colonial era are blurred or relegate female figures to the background. Mahn had to ask herself: “Then what? What happened to these women?” These questions inspired her to draw these women out of oblivion and restore their dignity.
Humor plays an important role in her novel. Mahn emphasized how she wanted her work to celebrate the joy and vitality of the Black diaspora. In doing so, it became crucial to approach serious topics with a certain levity, without trivializing them. She instead employs conscious narrative omissions and subtle clues that allow readers to recognize the earnestness behind absurdities themselves. For Mahn, this approach allows for the empathy and sensitization which often become lost through an oversaturation of violence in media today.
Female ancestors are another central element of the novel; their communications become integrated in the plot and facilitate Issa’s healing. Mahn spoke frequently about her own biography, her experience of growing up in a small village in the Hunsrück, and her relationship to the cultural roots she initially rejected in an attempt to find acceptance from a racist society. She is grateful today for the influences of the women in her family whose struggles permitted her to find her own place in the world.
Mahn’s discussion with El Hissy thematized Cameroon’s colonial history as well as the diaspora in Germany, providing a critical reflection on “white saviorism” and Eurocentric approaches to international cooperation and aid programs. Her work demonstrates how complex characters and narrative perspectives can reflect and rearticulate sociopolitical realities—that literature and fiction have power both to challenge political processes and create new points of access.
Issa weaves together the perspectives of five black women over the course of a century (from 1903 to 2006), illuminating topics like colonialism, healing, violence, ritual, and intersectionality. The new literary and historical backdrops of each character’s perspective are narrated through unique voices, inspired by Mahn’s own background in theater. Mahn conducted significant archival research to prepare for her novel, encountering, among other things, documents about the building of a church in Buea, Cameroon, during the Pallottine Mission in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These documents referenced women without their names, almost as afterthoughts. Period photos from the colonial era are blurred or relegate female figures to the background. Mahn had to ask herself: “Then what? What happened to these women?” These questions inspired her to draw these women out of oblivion and restore their dignity.
Humor plays an important role in her novel. Mahn emphasized how she wanted her work to celebrate the joy and vitality of the Black diaspora. In doing so, it became crucial to approach serious topics with a certain levity, without trivializing them. She instead employs conscious narrative omissions and subtle clues that allow readers to recognize the earnestness behind absurdities themselves. For Mahn, this approach allows for the empathy and sensitization which often become lost through an oversaturation of violence in media today.
Female ancestors are another central element of the novel; their communications become integrated in the plot and facilitate Issa’s healing. Mahn spoke frequently about her own biography, her experience of growing up in a small village in the Hunsrück, and her relationship to the cultural roots she initially rejected in an attempt to find acceptance from a racist society. She is grateful today for the influences of the women in her family whose struggles permitted her to find her own place in the world.
Mahn’s discussion with El Hissy thematized Cameroon’s colonial history as well as the diaspora in Germany, providing a critical reflection on “white saviorism” and Eurocentric approaches to international cooperation and aid programs. Her work demonstrates how complex characters and narrative perspectives can reflect and rearticulate sociopolitical realities—that literature and fiction have power both to challenge political processes and create new points of access.