Reading: Behzad Karim Khani and Simone Atangana Bekono in conversation about anger

as part of texttage.nuernberg

The ten-year-old protagonist of the novel ‘When We Were Swans’ beats up another boy so brutally after school that he falls to the ground unconscious. The sixteen-year-old first-person narrator of the novel ‘Salomés Zorn’ takes out her anger on a boy so brutally that she ends up in a juvenile detention centre. The anger felt by Reza in Germany and Salomé in the Netherlands has similar structural causes. Both books show growing up in the midst of a society that is hostile and racist and tell in a powerful way how strongly the feeling of being foreign can dominate a life. The humiliation, which also extends to one’s own parents, leaves devastating consequences, turns into anger and seeks a release. How do you find your place in a hostile society – and do you even want to?