A moving documentary about the life and untimely death of Ghanaian-German poet, academic and political personality May Ayim will be screened today at Goethe Institut, Victoria Island, Lagos.
The free public screening is part of the Be Longing season of films which started in March and runs till July.
Titled ‘Hope in My Heart: The May Ayim Story,’ the movie is based on the true life story of May Ayim, a central figure in the Afro-German movement. She was the first scholar to investigate the history and living situation of Black women in Germany – despite all institutional resistance.
Some of her works in poetry include “Blues in Black and White” or “Boundless and Outrageous”. May Ayim lived from 1960 to 1996. In 2010, a street in Berlin was renamed after her, which previously bore the name of a colonialist responsible for the establishment of the Brandenburg-Prussian fortress “Groß-Friedrichsburg” in present-day Ghana and thus for the deportation and enslavement of Africans.
Ayim wrote in the tradition of oral poetry and felt a strong connection to other black poets of the diaspora. Poetry gave her an opportunity to confront the white German society with its own prejudices.
Interviews and poems reveal the search for identity, how and why the term Afro-German was introduced. An insightful look at how a young black woman experiences German reunification.
