Displacement:
Euro/African/American
New York/Liverpool

Kofi Fosu Forson


The word “nigger” is commonly used in this postmodernist society. That in itself is a digression. Patty Smith laid claim to Jesus Christ as nigger. She was before her time.

Before this deluge of the common man as nigger, I anointed myself as “Euro-nigger.” From here on forward I whole-heartedly reject every notion of any individual as “nigger.”

There are those who draw a conclusion between what is black and what is global. This identity is founded in employment, cyber space and personal conclusion. What defines them is language, not as vernacular but as philosophical appeasement.

If America is the great divide, I count myself as among those who have benefited. What would have happened had I lived in Liverpool?

New York City is a sponge. It soaks up the eccentricities and poignancy from all over the world. It is a place I call home. And with the fortune of having embraced people from different cultures, I hereby define myself as American.

What then becomes of my heritage as an African? I am not African-American. Or is there room for a new definition? I am African. New York is the city where I live. And recently I have formed a logical conclusion with Liverpool as a conscientious and philosophical state of mind.

The two people who make this possible are artists/curators Gaynor Evelyn Sweeney and Jo Derbyshire. Together and through cyberspace our minds and existences harbor a place of art, ideology and inclusion of the self as body in space manifesting while the politics of the world revolve.

Jo is my intravenous needle. Gaynor is my heroin. There’s a metaphor here. That philosophy to me is a drug defines my displacement and hunger.

Gaynor Evelyn Sweeney fuels my need for intellectualism. Jo Derbyshire is the resolution, the hereafter.

I live the reality as seduction of language. To convict any further would be orgasmic.