A review by jayisreading
Identitti by Mithu Sanyal

challenging informative medium-paced

3.0

I want to first preface that I am not German, nor do I live in Germany. I think this is rather important to highlight because it is very clear that Sanyal is writing with a German audience in mind. On top of this, I’m reading a translation of the book, so I’m inevitably going to miss some nuances. That being said, I can understand a lot of the academic discourse in this book, being in academia myself. I can also understand what it’s like to not be white in a predominantly white space.

Anyway, as a non-German reader who doesn’t live in Germany, this book was interesting to read, especially because I got a glimpse of how racial identity politics was working outside the Anglosphere. It’s clear that Sanyal drew inspiration from the Rachel Dolezal scandal (which did happen in the United States), who pretended to be Black but is actually white. In Identitti, the character, Saraswati, did something similar, except she pretended to be Indian. There’s also the fact that Saraswati’s research focused on race and postcolonialism (welp). Furthermore, her ideology and accomplishments were all built on her masquerading as a Brown woman. When Nivedita, a biracial (Indian and white German) student working with Saraswati, discovered this, it understandably sent her reeling. However, another reason her world was upended was because it put to question her own racial identity, which she has struggled with most of her life. Who gets to decide how you identify racially in a country like Germany? Can being “transracial” actually be a thing?

There were some interesting (even clever) points made throughout this book about identity, but damn, was it executed poorly. The discussions just went in circles to the point of exhaustion, and by the end of the book, it didn’t really reach a conclusion on whether what Saraswati did was okay or not, which… bothered me. A lot. The characters were also exhausting to deal with, having over-the-top, grating personalities. I understand that satire often means excess, but there is such thing as too much. In addition, these characters had a lot of contradicting opinions, which combined with the roundabout discussions, really frustrated me. As a result, I think Sanyal’s satire backfired and ended up with her validating Saraswati’s actions. It’s really unfortunate, because there were a lot of opportunities that would have made this book a really effective piece of satire. Something else I should add is my jaw dropped when Sanyal used the Hanau shooting as a plot device, and it played a relatively big part in the direction of the (admittedly, near-absent) plot.

I think on the more logistical side of things, there were far too many moving parts (and a lot of them were weird) for one book, with Sanyal getting sidetracked by an array of things. One thing I did appreciate was the translator’s note on how she approached the text. I wish more could have been said about particular word/term choices, such as “BIPOC,” but this is more a personal interest in her approach to localization.

Again, I think it’s important to be mindful of where you’re from when reading about discourse on identity in other countries, because, well, they play out a little differently. Whether you take this into consideration or not, though, I have to say that this was a pretty exhausting book to get through that could have been a lot shorter and clearer. 
Expand filter menu Content Warnings