by Manish Dutta
Something has been bothering me, but before I come to the bother itself, I want to begin with something I noticed while working in a supermarket in Hamburg.
During Christmas in Germany, many sweet things appear more visibly on the shelves. Some of them are there year-round, but around Christmas, they seem to sell more, disappear faster, and become more prominent as traditional foods. One of these things is Kemm’sche Kuchen, a sweet biscuit (or cookie?) associated with Hamburg. I had seen it in the supermarket before, but during Christmas I began to notice it more carefully. Last night, while reading about it, I found that its recipe goes back to 1782 and that it is still presented as a traditional local product.
What interested me was not only its history, but its ingredients. Kemm’sche Kuchen has, among other things, cloves and cinnamon. I mention this because cloves and cinnamon are also common in Bengali doodh cha, or milk tea. For milk tea, the milk is not added at the end; the milk and a bit of water are boiled together with ginger, cardamom, cloves and sugar. It then slowly turns into a dark, thick sugary concoction. Over time, we started eating Kemm’sche Kuchen by dipping it into milk tea. In that sense, it reminded me of a Bengali habit: dipping Parle-G biscuits into tea. Dipping a biscuit into tea makes it softer and infused with the flavour of the tea. And the softened Kemm’sche Kuchen tasted good, which made sense because the flavours were not completely foreign to me. The cinnamon and cloves created a small bridge between a Hamburg biscuit and a Bengali cup of milk tea, which also contained cloves and cardamom, and it stimulated just the right places in my brain.
Something similar happened with Zwieback. Zwieback is another product that sells well and is available throughout the year. It is of a hard texture because it is baked twice. But Zwieback, under different names, exists in many countries. In India and Bangladesh, it exists as a toast biscuit. So when I first encountered Zwieback in Germany, my reaction was: Is this not just a toast biscuit? After looking into it, I realised that, in many ways, yes, it was.
For me, these experiences, the act of thinking through how different cultures intersect with each other, how certain food practices emerge, is itself beautiful, but the act of thinking these things through is in itself a form of privilege, even as the thought process happens with the experience of being othered.
The paradox of development studies and colonial goods
Daniel Bendix, in a 2024 article in the European Journal of Development Research, shows that students from the Global South come to Germany to enter what he calls ‘the white field of international development’, a study program that is concerned with the topics of ‘marginalisation, discrimination and inequality’. Global South students studying development studies in Germany often find themselves working in low-wage sectors. They face racism, labour-market exclusion, and a contradictory social position. They are educated, but their education does not automatically translate into access to the labour market they imagined. Their degrees and aspirations seem to promise something else. Yet they are there anyway.
Similarly, I, being a brown worker in a supermarket in Germany becomes a place where similar multiple contradictions arrive. One day, I was opening new packages and placing them on the shelves. I overheard two old ladies talking in German.
“Ich brauche Knorr-Pulver für Spargelcremesuppe.” I need the Knorr powder for making the cream of the asparagus soup.
The other lady said, “Ich weiß nicht, wo man das finden kann. Vielleicht sollten Sie den Mitarbeiter fragen.” I don’t know where it is found. Maybe you should ask the employee.
“Ja, aber versteht er Deutsch? Vielleicht versteht er nicht…” But does he understand German? Maybe he doesn’t understand.
I had my back to the ladies, but I could understand that the employee they were talking about was me. No other employee was nearby. The first lady finally asked me, and I showed her the Pulver für Spargelcremesuppe. Meanwhile, my mind kept reminding me that a few days ago, I received the Deutsch C1 Hochschule Zertifikat (A certificate that enables prospective students to get into German-taught degree programs in universities and is sometimes also important for employers).
After so many experiences of varying shades of racism, ignorance and sometimes outright hate, it was clear to me that the lady was unsure of asking me the question in German because my skin colour doesn’t tell if I speak German (and for her, maybe the assumption was that it is extremely unlikely that a brown person would speak German). The experience left me angry and sad, and I kept thinking till the end of the shift about the paradoxical position I inhabit.
In the supermarket, the shelves are full of objects presented as local, traditional, German, or Hamburg-specific. But my encounter with them is not simply an encounter with foreignness. What appears local is already connected to other worlds like the Kemm’sche Kuchen and Zwieback. But here is another level of link. The supermarket chain I work for takes its name from the spoken form of an abbreviation of Einkaufsgenossenschaft der Kolonialwarenhändler — the purchasing cooperative of colonial goods dealers, founded in 1898. Colonial goods (Kolonialwaren) were long-distance trade products that found their way to Europe through European expansion since the 18th century. That includes tea, coffee, cocoa and spices – cinnamon, cloves and cardamom. It hit me that the shelves are in an institution whose name contains a link to the very trade system that moved those spices from South Asia, the Maluku Islands, and other regions that became part of the colonial spice trade, and those spices are now what make a Hamburg biscuit taste right in a Bengali cup of tea.
Not having enough time to think
I completed my master’s degree in international relations at a German university. During my studies, I read theory, with its roots in the Enlightenment period. The program had an aspirational promise: By being trained in such theories and the art of critical thinking, you would contribute to knowledge creation, which, for a Global South student in a Global North academia, is very revolutionary. Now I write to professors, and I try to build a research project with the aspiration to complete a PhD. And yet I also find myself in the supermarket while trying to enter the university space again.
What the promise made by such programs misses is that students like me don’t have the time. To dip Kemm’sche Kuchen into doodh cha and ask what this small act reveals about migration, memory, labour, and coloniality may sound ordinary, even trivial. But to think through such an experience properly requires time. It requires rest. It requires the ability to sit with an observation and ask what it means.
That time is precisely what precarious labour takes away.
The precarity that Global South students face, even those who are trained in the tools of critique, has epistemic consequences. It shapes who has time to think, who has time to write, who has time to connect their experience to books and theories, and whose experience remains only personal struggle.
I see this in my own situation. I am trying to write this article, but the thought process this article requires is itself a privilege. It requires a kind of time I do not always have. And time is exactly what gets taken away when one is constantly pressed by the machines of capitalism.
This is the violence I want to name. A slow violence that appears as tiredness, lost time, delayed writing, abandoned ideas, and the quiet shame and disappointment of unfulfilled promises. It is the violence of being placed close enough to theory to understand your own condition, but not being given the conditions to theorise it fully.
About the author
Manish studied International Relations at the University of Bremen and currently lives in Hamburg. Their current interests are the contradictions of everyday life and how global power structures shape such paradoxes and human lives.