Everything Will Be Fine: an interview with Fatima El-Tayeb.(Interview)

Introduction

Fatima El-Tayeb collaborated with director Angelina Maccarone in writing the script for the feature film Everything Will Be Fine (Alles wird gut, 1997), for which they received a grant from the state of Schleswig-Holstein in 1996. The film has won awards at the New Festival in New York, at Toronto's Inside Out, and at the Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in Los Angeles. Alles wird gut was published in book form by the Orlanda Frauenverlag in 1999.

El-Tayeb is an Afro-German scholar who earned her doctorate in History from the University of Hamburg, where she wrote her dissertation entitled "Black Germans and German Racism: Oxymoron or Repressed History: African Germans and the Discourse on `Race,' 1900-1933." A revised version of this study, Schwarze Deutsche: Der Diskurs urn "Rasse" und nationale Identitat 1890-1933, has been published by Campus Verlag. El-Tayeb was the special guest at the 2001 Women in German conference in Rio Rico, Arizona. The interview was inspired by the discussion that followed the film screening there and took place via e-mail.

Interview

Barbara Kosta: You and Angelina Maccarone worked together to produce the script for Alles wird gut. Could you please talk about your collaboration? How did the idea for the film develop?

Fatima El-Tayeb: Angelina and I have been friends for a long time. While she was in the process of writing the script for her first movie Kommt Mausi raus? [dir. Alexander Scherer, 1994; Is Mausi Coming Out?!], we talked a lot about it and realized that we would probably work very well together. The experience she had co-directing that first movie was not very pleasant. Angelina was a newcomer and she was confronted full force with the power games in the film industry. The director and producer of Kommt Mausi raus? (for those who have seen Everything Will Be Fine, the character of the fish, Frau Muller, is based on the producer) went out of their way to put Angelina in "her place." A particularly annoying aspect was that they refused to have one of the protagonists played by a black actress. They insisted that the casting of a black actress should have been made explicit in the script (of course, the script did not say anything about the character being white either).

Angelina and I had talked before about writing a script together, but I think our idea to make a film with two black women in leading roles basically started then. The presence of black women on the screen is still extremely rare in mainstream films as well as in feminist/lesbian films, both in Germany and in the United States. The debates around racism in the lesbian community often resulted in the introduction of "the black character." In these cases, the protagonist is either reduced to being black, which means that blackness is used to initiate a discussion on racism, or a black person is totally "whitened," which means that she/he appears isolated in an otherwise white world with no connection to a community of color.