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The Corona year changed many lives.
For Kate Tempest, too, the signs were pointing to a new beginning.
In August, the literary-musical superstar announced that from now on it would no longer be called "Kate", but "Kae", pronounced like the English letter K, which means something like jackdaw and symbolize death and rebirth.
The feminine pronoun "she / her" must die, Kae is reborn in the non-binary "they / them".
The change in identity is accompanied by an artistic change in genres.
The first work published under the new name is an essay.
One had actually thought that Tempest - a tribute to Shakespeare, with which Tempest is often compared - had long since proven itself in all genres.
Born in South London in 1885 as the youngest of five children, the angelic-blonde, curly-haired man with rough street credibility dropped out of school to play rap, poetry, plays and spoken word performances on the world's major stages.
At the age of 28, Tempest won the prestigious Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, and a few weeks ago the Silver Lion of the Biennale Theater Festival for Lifetime Achievement.
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Tempest already made a turn to prose with a novel debut, so now the first volume of essays is appearing (Kae Tempest: “Verbundensein”. Suhrkamp Nova, 137 pp., 12 €).
It's about empathy, solidarity and the power of creativity.
It's not innovative.
But even when the words notice their own lack of imagination, they come up with a punch line: “It's typical that I once again lag behind the zeitgeist.
Look at him!
He's blocking the road. ”Tempest's emotive sentences are not hidden behind a fashionable“ man ”, but dare a decided me, you and us.
The chapters imitate a concert: from “setting up” to “soundcheck” to “feeling how it happens”.
Tempest describes the intoxicating performances of the youth in autobiographical terms;
And the advice again and again: put your cell phone away!
From no other mouth does it look so fresh that you could almost stick to it.