Race, Law and Liminality: The Poetry of May Ayim

This article examines the poetry of the late Afro-German poet, May Ayim (1960-1996), and the theory and politics of her work at the juncture of law, Blackness, and Germanness. The article demonstrates that Ayim, through the images, themes, and devices that she employs in her writing, theorizes race, belonging, and citizenship in Germany by troubling the parameters of domestic, insular, and largely ahistorical focus of popular social thought around being both Black and German. Ayim draws on geographically and temporally liminal sites in which her experience and knowledge are situated, which forces the reader to engage with the importance of historical events, the immediacy of transatlantic discourses of racial violence, and the persistent legal, social, and political bifurcation of Europe and Africa. Ayim’s insistent centering of liminality in her work allows her readers to identify resonances between her work and critical scholarship in a search for ways to more faithfully articulate the past and envision a diverse democratic order.