When Carmen Quiroga moved to the small town of Coventry, Connecticut, a few weeks ago, she found herself in the midst of a culture war. She wasn’t interested in politics at all. It was all about delicious breakfast with eggs and above all about coffee, the good coffee from the local roastery. Coffee that wakes you up.
Awakened means in English woke. That’s why Quiroga called her new café “Woke Breakfast & Coffee”https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/.”When you wake up in the morning, the first thing you think of is a good cup of coffee,” she says. “To really wake you up.” What she particularly liked about the word “woke” was the O in the middle. She and her son designed the new logo together with a fried egg in which the yellow part of the egg represented the O. The Quiroga family renovated the white wooden house on Main Street, hung the new sign over the windows and had menus printed. It cost them thousands of dollars, but they got it ready in time for the January 19 opening.
What Quiroga didn’t know: The word woke has developed into a metaphor in English in recent years for the supposedly left-liberal awareness of all social and political injustices, such as racism and discrimination against women and trans people. weekness first became a catchphrase for the resistance, but then very quickly became an insult for “woke leftists” who acted as morally superior. The word is the little brother of the term cancel culture and has long since arrived in the German language.
Quiroga is from Mexico, her English is not perfect. For years she worked in various restaurants, sometimes in twelve-hour shifts, at home the children waited. She says she hardly followed politics and the news. No time. She googled “Woke Coffee” and “Woke Restaurant” but only found out that the name was still up for grabs. There was nothing about the Kulturkampf.
When she moved from a neighboring town to the 12,000-strong town of Coventry in December and applied for the final permits, city officials cautiously suggested that Woke might not be the best name. There is a Facebook group in which resistance against them is forming. Quiroga called up the Facebook page and found: calls for a boycott. protest plans. And a lot of swear words. “I was very worried,” she says. What if she opens her breakfast restaurant and no one shows up? She thought about changing the name quickly, but she didn’t have the time and, above all, the money.
But then everything turned out differently. The few people who boycotted Woke Coffee were replaced by those who explicitly supported the store. On Facebook, the Republican branch called on the angry right-wing to moderate: “Sometimes words can mean exactly what they always meant.” For the first few days, people queued outside the door with the Woke sign, soon Quiroga ran out of eggs. People send emails and want to order t-shirts, mugs or bags with their logo. She wants to have some printed now. “We’re happy,” she says. “But I completely understand the word woke still not.”