Description

Text excerpt:

"What's your name?"

"Amir Shaheen.”

"Where are you from?"

"From Altena."

"I mean: from which country?”

"From the Sauerland."

My father used to be just a foreigner.

Today I have a migration background.

Reviews and press:

Ronald Schneider fromEKZ.Library service:

Amir Shaheen is a German writer born in Lüdenscheid in 1966 (last "Trace, residual light", 2019; not discussed here), which its Arabic name
lifelong misunderstandings and annoying appropriations as "foreigners". Because Amir Shaheen is a German native speaker, son of a German mother and a father Catholic religion teacher, who is, however, Arab and formerly Israeli possessed citizenship. The slim paperback contains sad-funny anecdotes and episodes from Shaheen's life, all illustrating how much we "bio-Germans" (Shaheen) are fixated on, fellow citizens with exotic names (or even dark skinned) to fixate on their foreign origins and their being different. Shaheen connects here a piece of educational work and an appeal to our liberality with highly entertaining Stories full of funny misunderstandings and involuntary comedy. Already in smaller libraries and in secondary school libraries as a literary invitation recommended to revise our prejudices.

 

Martin Rompp from the magazineROCKS Commends Shaheen's exploration of the concept of "migrant background"Learn more…