I Keep My Shadow Light
is a novel about feeling lost and learning how to belong in Berlin. Spot snippets around the city and sign up for free extracts.
I Keep My Shadow Light follows the struggles and joys of a diverse group of characters all signed up for a German Integrationskurs. Maeve, Zehra, Viktor and Karam are the core four – all lost and lonely 20-somethings newly arrived in big bad Berlin. They keep going thanks to their dark sense of humour, semi-reliable friends, exciting parties, romantic distractions and warm classroom community. The book explores pressing issues about European and personal identity, and the relationship between the individual and the state. At its heart is the fundamental question – what does it mean to belong?
The balcony was a thin rectangle of concrete, only wide enough for two chairs to stand in a row, as if they were there to spectate the world rather than participate in it.
‘Want to sit down?’ She started to doubt that she could go through with it. He had shaved pubes and a golden body. Next to him, she felt like a soft toy.
After class, Maeve hit the big bad Jobcentre. The smoker’s bin next to the front door had a new Che Guevara sticker on it, and there was a fresh crack in the glass door, a jagged hole at its epicentre shaped like revenge.
‘It is the ministry of love!’
Svenja gestured theatrically at the Am Urban Hospital as if she was introducing a new act in a talent show. But instead of a hula-hooping girl, a big brutalist monster loomed behind them like the mistakes of the past.
Neukölln could cater for extravagant wedding processions, circumcision parties, Eid. And for people like Maeve, who would probably never be invited to such occasions, but liked to rub up against the atmosphere of them. For that reason, Neukölln also had rising rents.
A man barged into Viktor’s cubicle after him and slammed the door closed. He was wearing a grubby white t-shirt with the slogan “My name is Lord of all Evil but I'll answer to satan”
So the devil takes coke, Viktor thought.
The bell rang. Panic elbowed excitement out of the way.
Luckily, Viktor was Maeve’s partner for the speaking section of the exam. Unluckily, he was high on speed and in a foul mood.
‘Why did you come to Berlin?’ Zehra asked Maeve via Google Translate.
‘A friend lived here, and I liked the city. Und du?’
‘Husband.’
‘And you, Viktor?’
‘My government tried to kill me.’
Most people have a cold expectation - growing slowly like mould in a corner out of view - that partners and lovers will eventually fall out of their lives.
They don’t usually think that of friends. Maeve didn’t, until she had spent a little while in Berlin, and experienced how quickly frivolity could be simmered down into flippancy, and then to nothing.
In 2018, I attended an Integrationskurs and was struck by the German states’ assimilatory, rather than integratory, approach to imparting a sense of belonging to its newest arrivals. I wrote a critique of the course material and then transformed it into a novel because as well as pointing out the flaws in the system, I wanted to explore the emotional struggles of the integration process. The result is, I hope, an entertaining story with an underlying social commentary, spiked with black humour and rich with emotion.