With The Homes We Carry, the young director Brenda Akele Jorde tells in a very personal way the story of a German-African woman in search of her identity. But it is also the story of the father, one of the 17,000 contract workers in the GDR who, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the East German state, suddenly had to return to Mozambique. This documentary, presented at the Créteil International Women’s Film Festival, touches us in two ways, because all the questions relating to skin color, nationality and gender roles arise at least in two ways. Interview.
RFI : The Homes We Carry tell at least two stories : on the one hand, Sarah’s quest for identity, a German-African. On the other hand, you show the fate of his father, Eulidio, one of the 17 000 contract workers in the GDR, who came from Mozambique and were forced to return to their country. How did you arrive at these themes ?
Brenda Akele Jorde : In fact, the story of indentured laborers in the GDR came to me, through David, the project’s co-director and cameraman. He is German and lived for a year in Mozambique. There, sooner or later, you meet former contract workers, especially in the capital Maputo. When they hear you speak German, they often call out to you. There, every Wednesday, there is also a demonstration of former workers who demand part of their wages until today. That’s how David discovered the story. It was he who had also met Sarah in Mozambique, during a language course. David and I met at film college. And since I’m also German-African, like Sarah, and I was looking for a story, we met.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, many victims of GDR injustices were compensated. Why was this not the case for these indentured laborers from Mozambique, now also called madgermanes » ?
THE “ madgermanes is a special case. The contract between Mozambique and the GDR provided that Mozambicans would receive their money in a savings account. But, when they returned to Mozambique, they discovered that the very corrupt Mozambican government had paid them only a very small part. There are many different cases, but no one has received their full salary. Mozambique was a very poor country and this contract with the GDR was doomed from the start, because Mozambique had a lot of debts to the GDR. And contract workers, unknowingly, have somehow honored those debts. Mozambique probably never intended to actually pay this money.
In your film, we discover Sarah, the daughter of one of these contract workers. After the fall of the Wall, he returned to Mozambique and left his German girlfriend at the time pregnant in Germany. Did he have to leave ? Was it his pregnant girlfriend who didn’t want to live with him ? Or is it secondary for your film if the separation had been caused by an arbitrary decision of the State or by the decision of Sarah or Eulidio ?
You have to imagine that at the time, the chaos was total and that East Germany simply no longer existed. And the contracts with the GDR no longer existed either. The contract workers were given a ticket back to Mozambique and told that if you go back to Mozambique, your money is waiting for you there. In Germany, at that time, racism was very strong. The chaos was such that the workers no longer knew where to go. In addition, these workers had always lived in a very isolated way and had not learned at all to make decisions independently. Most of them therefore thought that they would return to Mozambique, receive their money there and then return to Germany when the situation had calmed down a bit, racism had subsided, reunification a little stabilized.
There are a lot of separated, torn families, a lot of multiple identities. What makes this German-African family special ?
Particularly exciting is the fact that Sarah and her daughter Luana find themselves in a situation similar to that of her mother, Irene. Luana’s father is also far away. He is also African. He is also in Mozambique. Many questions have surfaced, for example : do we repeat such stories? When will we break the stories of our parents ? Through this story, we can tell a story both in the past and in the present. In fact, it’s even three generations : Eulidio, the contract worker, Sarah, and her baby. Even if at the beginning, we had planned things differently… [rires].
Through Sarah, do you have the feeling of having portrayed a woman who took her destiny into her own hands? ? A woman who stepped out of her victim role to make the same decision, but in the other direction, that is, this time, she was the one who went to Mozambique, fell in love there and then made the decision to return to Germany, with “ the best gift from [sa] life in the womb, but without the father.
It’s something that I only understood during the shooting. During her first long trip to Mozambique, at the age of 25, Sarah first conquered all her Mozambican “heritage”. She was there for a year and a half and she fell in love. For me, it’s a success story, because it was born from the fact that she didn’t feel completely accepted in Germany. She just wanted to know : “ Do I belong in Mozambique » ? “ What can I take from Mozambique ? » « How can I have a sense of home there ? For all of this, Sarah is very strong for me. Many other German-Africans have never had this experience, perhaps because they were afraid to go to this country.
In that sense, it’s a success story, even if the journey I show is also painful and trying for Sarah. But, in the end, she says : “ I know and I belong to both countries, to both cultures. I have taken root and can evolve in both cultures “.
Your film also paints a double portrait of a part of German history that is rarely shown today. You document the fond memories of these indentured laborers speaking of a past “ happy in the GDR, resurrected through photos that Mozambicans proudly show in front of the camera.
The meeting with this family was for me the first opportunity to do research on the GDR. The result is two very different stories. On the one hand, for Mozambicans, it was a crazy experience to suddenly have all these material things, to live independently. In Mozambique, at the time, there was civil war. Even though they weren’t able to choose the professions they wanted in the GDR, they also had a great time socially. Today, they have a lot of nostalgia.
The other rupture with the narration usual about the GDR is when the film shows the moment of reunification. This event, always celebrated as a happy moment, meant defeat for all these families.
There is yet another kind of double portrait, when you talk about racism in Germany over three generations. It starts with the experience of Irene and Eulidio, and the whole generation of indentured laborers in the GDR. It continues with Sarah, German-African and daughter of an East German, growing up in a reunited Germany. And it continues more than 30 years later with little Luana who utters the terrible sentence that she would rather have fair skin.
This last sentence of Luana, a two-year-old child, saying that she would like to be clearer, shocks many. It’s important to talk about this, because I don’t know anyone of color in Germany who, as a child, didn’t say the same thing. I do not know anyone. And we should ask ourselves the question, why, from childhood, does a child of color not feel good about himself in a predominantly white society.
You yourself were born in 1993, in Germany. “ What home do you carry? » What kind of house do you carry on your back or inside of you ?
I grew up in Hamburg. “ What home do I carry? “I grew up with my mother and father until I was three years old. Then he returned to Ghana. So I can relate very well to a lot of things that Sarah has been through. But there are also things that set us apart. I have never experienced such blatant racism as Sarah’s. When I was 25, I moved to Ghana to experience all this, but I wasn’t looking for a second home. I am at home in Germany and I also say clearly: I am German. Then I have that little something extra. In my opinion, it would be wrong to say that I am half and half. It would give the impression that we are really neither of the two. Yes, I’m German, but I also have Ghanaian roots that I only really knew when I was 25.
I was lucky that my mum and dad stayed in very good contact and I went back to Ghana at age three, age five, age seven, age nine and so on. Of course, the black parent was not there. It also remains a lack for me, but I always knew that I could go there.
What were the reactions to this documentary in Germany ?
What particularly marked and touched me were the screenings organized with theInitiative schwarzer Menschen in Deutschland (the Black People’s Initiative in Germany), Cologne and Hanover. We had a lot of people who identified themselves and then shared their experience a lot with us.
In recent years, in Germany, there have been more and more debates about the colonial and African past. Do you feel that certain things are moving or becoming more visible ?
Yes, absolutely. I see this for example also with the community with whom I spoke after the screening of the film. Self-confidence is now enormously strengthened. People gather. And the media make it possible to come together, to no longer feel alone. This is the first step, to connect. It’s happening a lot right now. This is also seen with the second generation community of contract workers. They are now all in their thirties and there is currently a lot going on in terms of interconnection and memory work.
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►The Homes We Carrydocumentary by Brenda Akele Jorde, presented at the Créteil International Women’s Film Festival, from March 24 to April 2.