Dealing with Complex Identities: Learning from Birds

In her youth, realities collided. Searching, Elisabeth Wellershaus now writes about identities in “Where the Stranger Begins”.

Elisabeth Wellershaus on the Berlin Panke, where she often walks Photo: Amelie Losier

“First, it was birds that I rediscovered during the pandemic. Hooded crows that took on magpies because they fought over breeding territories. Swifts returning from the south and nesting in the cracks of the house across the street. Tiny movements that took place in front of my window, that passed by and remained fleeting,” writes Elisabeth Wellershaus.

These “tiny movements” are encounters between living beings that have to negotiate their coexistence with each other. Again and again. This applies to birds as well as to people, especially in urban areas where a lot of life meets little space.

This negotiation, which Wellershaus observed from her window in Berlin-Pankow at the beginning of the pandemic, laid the foundation for her first book. In it, the author embarks on a search for what makes us all special and what we try to fathom all our lives: our own identity.

The subtitle suggests that this is not so easy to define: “On Identity in the Fragile Present”. How fragile this present is can not only be seen in media debates. In everyday encounters, too, many experience how fragile, even fragile, society is with all of its individual identities.

Where does the stranger begin?

What was once considered certain now seems postponed. Much can perhaps be booked as a learning process, but some things simply remain foreign to us. This is where Wellershaus comes in, trying to understand the concept of foreignness based on one’s own history, one’s own supposedly rigid identity. To find out, as the title of the book testifies, “Where the stranger begins” and how to meet it.

Wellershaus takes almost 150 pages for this topic, which is not entirely new to her. Already in her work as a journalist and editor at time online-Newsletter “10nach8” and the multilingual art magazine Contemporary And she dealt with foreignness, mostly as something attributed to her from the outside.

Born in Hamburg in 1974, Wellershaus grew up with her mother and grandparents in the middle-class district of Volksdorf. Everyday life in Hamburg is interrupted by summer visits to the Spanish Costa del Sol, where the father, who fled Equatorial Guinea, still lives.

Wellershaus impressively describes how she balances between these two realities of life: “My weightless Mediterranean life and the down-to-earth German suburb: they kept crashing into each other at full speed. Because they smelled the strangeness in each other and could hardly stand it.”

Attempts to adapt due to foreign attribution

Her Spanish life reeks of “a whiff of oranges, churros and strong detergents”. In it there is room for her father’s best friend, who kisses men, and for the brief holiday love between the parents that was considered normal.

In Volksdorf, on the other hand, she and her mother are considered unconventional. The supposed difference is cushioned by the grandparents, because “with the two long-time residents we had fulfilled the ideal of the perfect nuclear family in a shifted way”. After her death, Wellershaus began trying to adapt in order not to attract attention where others always attributed her to being a stranger.

“Untangle the connections and knots that made up my own everyday life,” she wanted, that’s what the book says. She puts it similarly during a walk together along the Panke, which flows through the Berlin districts of Pankow and Wedding. She walked here a lot when there was little else to do in the city.

From the “pillars of prosperity, security and homogeneity”, which carry their current primary home in Pankow in a building group, via the physically demolished border, but clearly marked by gentrification, right into Wedding, where “strangers Poverty, strangers cultures, strangers Languages ​​and the strangeness of lack of opportunities exist,” she writes. She says the plan was to unravel with the goal of gaining new certainties about community and collectivity.

Two robins land on the sandy path in front of us. They seem tiny compared to all the other birds that have set up their temporary habitat in the green area: Huge, dangerous-looking crows, socially ostracized pigeons and cheeky sparrows fly around, starlings and even the odd blackbird can be seen.

longing for connection

When it comes to birds, Wellershaus seems enthusiastic. Watching the winged townsfolk has become a passion within her family. She enthusiastically tells of Dara McAnulty and his “Diary of a Young Naturalist”. The 19-year-old environmental activist from Ireland, whose nickname is lon dubh, which means blackbird, offers a very different perspective on the world in his book, since McAnulty is autistic.

He, too, often had to reposition himself in his life, due to family moves, but also because of bullying experiences. “Some people think that roots come from rocks and mortar, but ours grow like underground mushrooms in all directions, merging into a core of shared life so that no matter where we go, we are always rooted,” he writes in the foreword.

You can tell from her style that Wellershaus read McAnulty’s diary. She describes what she sees and who she meets in a similarly poetic manner. Like McAnulty, she does not locate her home in a single place to which she must stoically hold fast. It can be “here as there”.

What always resonates in her words, however, is the desire for connectedness – a universal longing that often leads to debates about identity politics and frequently criticized collective affiliations. Wellershaus knows about the problems behind identitarian attributions and observes how the demarcation that goes with it isolates us.

Man as a multi-collective being

As human beings, we are after all different from fungi, whose subterranean roots that are not visible on the surface are enough to be connected. But we have to see and feel, if not also perceive with other senses, so that we can feel connected. The “certainty of being part of a diasporic, global whole” slipped away from Wellershaus during the pandemic with its tight lockdowns. What she tries to do in her book is to bring together what currently seems separate.

Wellershaus therefore contrasts her growing up as a black child in the Hamburg suburbs with other realities: that of her cousin living in London, with whom the author shares her paternal Equatorial Guinean family and experiences of Afropean life; that of S., who lives as a Syrian refugee in Brandenburg and mediates between long-established residents and newcomers; that of mother and aunt whose upbringing was shaped by a generation of war traumatized people.

Wellershaus is concerned with showing that we are all “multicollective beings with a multitude of personal affiliations”. That we are connected to each other even when we are strangers and that the experiences of others can “serve us as a compass for localization”. If she has learned one thing, it is that we must learn to tolerate our inherent differences “without using the differences of the other as an excuse for devaluation,” she quotes the writer Toni Morrison as saying.

Wellershaus’ book is a “search and foretaste”, an attempt to talk about one’s own experience and to link it to larger socio-political issues. The fact that this does not provide any clear results, and does not present a universal solution for the identity-political debates of our time, is not a shortcoming.

Rather, it shows how complex our identities actually are, how the feeling of strangeness overtakes us all as soon as we leave the familiar, and how the longing for belonging shapes us. If there is one certainty, then perhaps it is that there is hardly any, writes Wellershaus. Her foreignness is criss-crossed by gray areas “that refuse to be clear. Solidarity with the unknown alone seems to know the exact path.” Everything else remains – the birds know it – a matter of negotiation.