Hope In My Heart – The May Ayim Story

1997

28min

The film presents a portrait by Maria Binder of May Ayim, Ghanaian-German poet, academic and political activist. May Ayim was one of the founders of the Black German Movement, and her research on the history and present situation of Afro-Germans, but also her political poetry, made her known in Germany and in other countries. May Ayim wrote in the tradition of oral poetry and felt a strong connection to other Black poets of the diaspora. Poetry gave her an opportunity to confront the white German society with its own prejudices. The film shows the author in performances in South Africa and in Germany. Interviews and poems reveal the search for identity, how and why the term Afro-German was introduced and how a young Black woman experienced the German unification. May Ayim lived from 1960 to 1996. In Berlin, a street which had the name of a colonialist was renamed in 2010 after May Ayim.