ART PERSONA versus BLACK IDENTITY: Psychical Mirroring/White Conditioning/Afro-familiarizing
Kofi Forson
To look at myself in the mirror, I see a black person. To exist as this black person, I've been pulled into thoughts and consciences magnified through concepts of whiteness.
The black person within my body, who exists in the flesh, therefore struggles in this manufactured world to think and carry on as a black person.
Concepts of whiteness in pop culture, socio-politics, social circles, all keep a lid on the freedom to seek the essence of decolonization.
White supremacy as probable instigator that which fuels the powering of racial politics, labeling of white beauty, philosophical thought, art history, colonization, separates the culturally white-conditioned person of African origin to encourage a livable circumstance where the body and mind exists on one's Afro-familiar origin.
For me this came with displacement, whereas some experience this through education, employment or industry.
The transference from propelling one's Black African origin, once subjected to a white conditioning, plays upon the history of race, enslavement, white violence, black poverty, black death. The physical black self, the actual body becomes a vessel for encouraging the very discipline which destroys.
Issue of sadism and masochism becomes prevalent when the conscience consistently draws from the programmable principles that certify whiteness as priority.
Moment in my very life when I felt this happen for the first time was when in anger towards one particular black person, I experienced disdain towards certain black pop cultural figures I admired. It was short-lived, but in the moment I saw myself hating myself, not for being black, but because other black people I knew were not experiencing the dying of their black conscience.
In this act of self-denial, I had created a persona which was to keep me isolated among black people for life.
Afro-familiarizing is real in the acceptance from other black people within the black diaspora.
Afro-culturalization is a given.
In the greater world one must learn instinct and survival. This differentiates what it means to be accepted by other black people and the will to manage an organized social structure which creates a manifestation, outside the diaspora and black cultural niche.
Afro-familiarizing for me is rooted in family. That protective circle, original in its history and lineage, which created the very person I am. Hence is responsible for all my self-damage, as well.
Mirroring of my conscience came in the association with the very center of the problem. My social circles were full of white students, friends, love interests, muses, who determined my psychiatric evolution. All of which increased in its psychosis.
The 2016 American Presidential campaign season saw a lot of this concentrated mind-bomb explode once I was exposed to white anger, rage, paranoia and elitism. It upended what I had known as a black person living in a white world.
Difficulty then was re-identifying myself as a person, artist with a sense of placement. Given my displacement I had found an acceptance in white culture, Christianity, art and rock and roll. To experience a shift in the social-structuring of race as experienced in my social circles, it was difficult to originate as self-disciplined.
Who and what I had become was under self-questioning.
Coming up from a spiritual and intellectual manifestation and concentration on black literary history, virtual pockets of anti-racists, I have slowly seen my body give way quite naturally from a karmic and psychical evaluation. I am faced with an attraction to a newly defined understanding of the self in its blackness, not as a black person living in Ghana, but as someone who developed a conscience as a set up from white colonization of the black mind, broadened in social circles.
In the city of Ghana, I was born a boy to Ghanaian parents, with a lineage to other Ghanaians who have existed and passed on and those who continue to exist there, or have migrated to other countries, but exist as Ghanaians within the associations and inter-connectivity with people from other countries and races.
Life as a boy in Ghana consisted of my school days at the Royal Preparatory, where I first expressed talent as an artist. These drawings reflected my love for sports, consisting of drawings of football (soccer) players and equestrians at the race track.
Given the culture I was surrounded by the sentiment and notion of a modern city, Accra, buildings, compounds, cars, fashion, music, and indeed art. One piece of art I was familiar with was a painting from the Dagomba tribe of masked men wearing raffia skirts holding spears. The painting, multi-colored with dazzling brush strokes frightened me. Not sure what the subjectivity of violence within the painting was enough to affect my psychology.
There were men known as the Kakamotobe, who were similarly dressed, more so extravagantly, in costumes and standing on stilts, accompanied by musicians, who stormed into neighborhoods during the holiday season and danced and caused a raucous.
These were all parts of the themes and subject of art and psychology growing up as a boy in Ghana.
The warrior mentality seeped through the minds of young boys, whether playing football, challenging another boy for the love of a girl, or that of guarding and protecting personal possessions or warning against intrusion onto another person's territory.
My immediate family, cousins, aunts and uncles, outside of the roles of mother and brothers, my father was traveling most of the time, were more creative in the arts and not drawn ideologically towards machismo or body-sizing. That notion of manhood was visible at times when there was a get-together for a feast, when my uncles chased and slaughtered a goat or killed a live chicken to be prepared and cooked for a stew.
The Telfers, my mother's maiden name, were prone to psychosis. The Buckmans, my grandmother on my mother's side's maiden name, displayed talent for draftsmanship.
Combination of socio-psychology and the fine arts is relevant to the lineage on my mother's side. Much of this is rooted in my very own karma and psychiatric development.
Life as a Ghanaian boy was exemplary in the discipline of my African spirit and pride. I was a black boy among other disciplined black people, whether I had a crush on a Ghanaian girl or was raised by a series of young Ghanaian girls who had come into the city from villages in search of an education or a better life.
That liberty to live and think as a Ghanaian was gradually removed from my conscience once I was displaced to New York City, when my mother, me and my brothers, along with a maid, took a plane and came to join my father.
The process of my mind being conscientiously whitened took on manifestations when I discovered the white muse, as an example in centerfolds from adult magazines, models in my mother's fashion catalogs and the young white female students at a neighborhood Catholic grade school.
The white female muse is sold to Africa as a colonial heroine, either the Queen of England, or Hollywood celebrity, like Shirley Temple.
These two were my earlier notions of the white female. There was a particular evening when my grandmother welcomed onto her compound, members of the Peace Corps for a gathering.
It was the first time I had seen a white person. There was the unusual perspective of their white skin and locks of yellow-brownish hair.
Here in New York City, I was welcomed into the circumstance of studying with other students who were primarily white. For once, in their company I immediately felt myself losing my sense of blackness. Whatever means I had of being a black person slowly diminished among the company of mostly white students, but also Indian, Puerto Rican and Black American.
The feeling of having landed in a foreign country was evident that first day of school. Much as the students fawned over me and made me feel as comfortable as they could have made me feel, I was confused and isolated in my thinking.
Somehow I was received as Jesus' second coming or a rock star. These examples were made much clearer to me as I became orientated in American culture and the idea of worship. The Almighty God being the first, but also those found in pop culture.
I prioritized the white muse in art when I started illustrating centerfolds. Several summers when I studied at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I was introduced to the female nude. During this time I voyeuristically watched adult programming on cable television.
Subject of art and pornography seeped into my conscience. It was also early on when I experienced abnormal behavior, like an eating disorder, which set the tone for future disorders.
The art persona which suits my chronic development was revealed much later when I read Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's "Venus in Furs". Along with Marquis de Sade and the development of sadomasochism, I had found a psychological patterning of an ideology relative to my thinking.
How art and sexuality overshadowed one's social interaction. Cult of which was the understanding of one's growth as thinker and social pathology. Moment when I discovered Roland Barthes, George Battaile and Jean Baudrillard in a humanities class at the School of Visual Arts.
During the course of my existence in New York City, I have also existed as muse to those within white circles, whether from boroughs of New York or other cities within the United States or white Europeans who had moved to New York City.
Indeed I have been a tragic figure, whether reminiscent of Jean-Michel Basquiat or Kurt Cobain.
Uniqueness of my persona as an artist with an international status served me well when I moved into transitional living and was confronted with examples of black men, different from the ones I had known or imagined. Worse yet they existed as examples of my greatest fear.
This has been my notion of blackness, not the hip hop artist, or well-to-do businessman or politician and even sports figure and Hollywood celebrity.
My experience with blackness has come later in life in a world where I had to fend for my life on a daily basis, when I lived among diseased, drugged men addicted to elements of troubled living and lifestyles. That environment opened my eyes to prioritizing instinct and safety.
Notion of one's individuality, either art-driven or God-blessed is enough to carry the person through any difficult circumstance. My survival is only valid because I was able to be myself, and draw from my background in schooling, family, social communities.
For years I balanced extremes of street culture with philosophical theorizing with a group of British artists within the virtual sphere and partying alongside artists from the New York City art world.
My art persona was always disassociated from the self-willed privileged authority present in most artists within the art circles. The very persona was also different from the world of emotionally violent dystopia I inhabited.
In essence I've had to mastermind a life whereby I fit in. As if I was a master of my very own psychosis.
Post-trauma and post-shock, and given the promoting of hyper-awareness of blackness, for the first time I've had to look at myself as a black person. I've always existed as a person who was black without prioritizing my blackness.
That was understood in my life as Ghanaian.
Blackness as viewed in the black diaspora is sometimes different for every person. We don't always claim a unified blackness. The perception is that we all love Bob Marley, Tupac and Barack Obama.
Whereas black self-governance, independent of spirit is a work load we all carry, the black spirit is central to each and every black person no matter where he or she comes from. We are in agreement of black pain and black success. How we experience these matters is relative to the individual.
At least this is what I believe to be true. The black person finds respect in the origin of our differences more than the similarities we share. Perhaps we all began from a given point in our histories. How we develop is a personal struggle. A struggle we have to conquer on our own, rather than seek blessings from each other.
The noise is outside.
In the greater and bigger world everyone is different.
Having endured the American presidency of a would be authoritarian, and experienced my share of eye-opening and mind-bending examples of white privilege, the very supremacist ideology that had influenced my upbringing and education and socializing, for the first time I questioned.
It created a self-paranoia of who my real friends were. Especially within some of the circles I had evolved from, there were examples of growing racism, or at least perceptions of white authority which reflected upon renewed changes in political and cultural placement.
I've had to associate art and blackness with racism. Something I never did before. The perception of living a white-oriented life was no longer safe. If not just as a socially conscientious entity but as a community of thinkers and talented people, I felt the terror of a personal history where I was not accepted as a person, but as fiction. Further accentuating the notion of whimsy and fantasy prevalent in the artist. As if to say by being an artist, one is an idea of a person, minimalist or abstract-expressionist. I thought to be black and be an example of this, one is totally obscure and living a faux self.
I found it difficult to exist both as an artist and as a black person. Conceptually, my artist self was driven by white principles. The black self more reliant on family circles. I found it difficult to bring the idea of family into my art. In other words there was no prioritizing of black-centeredness in my world outside of family. In a post-sensibility of decolonization, that is changing gradually. I have accentuated my virtual self profoundly as intellectual. In doing so I now attract like-minded people of color. Or at least those who promote black themes.
I have never questioned my identity.
One has to understand the origin of the black identity.
Academicizing of this origin is a fortune.
The black artist void of the academic relevance either lives in an art dystopia of false examining of self or he creates an environment where he articulates the notion of blackness, be it reserved in self-definition of blackness or meeting a regard for a diasporaic standard.
The post-post realm has encouraged a post-post-post realm given the reality of the world's Covid-19 quarantine.
The world and its life to come would have reorganized the notion of race, broadened the awareness of black reorienting through white circles and vice-versa.
The person I am and have become is an ongoing experiment governed by a spiritual God.
The glamorized and idolized gods who have come before are now part of a history that had to overcome, be born again, "die itself", to be true to its nature as human, self-willed.
To move further into other renewed circles, I have to trust and realize, mirroring is not a matter of race.
Mirroring is the psyche attracting another psyche, and of its mind and body, one is made situated.
This is the ultimate form of placement.
For a displaced person, it is everything.
