4/29/2023 0 Comments Moca museum black frames![]() ![]() While race, identity, and nationality differ, one can also be identified differently in various contexts. We can keep lamenting on the state of being in limbo, or we accept it is okay to be in between places. Such experience puts our presumptive identity in question. In fact, it is quite common for many of us to be seen as foreigners even when returning to our place of birth, after growing up elsewhere. Gray chose to stick it out and eventually was accepted by local people through friendship and trust, rather than racial identity. Being called “obruni” (foreign man or white man) by the locals in Akwidaa fishing village, where he built his house, was one of those instances. The romantic notion of going back to the motherland was not without conflicts and challenges. This decision was prompted by his desire to experience being part of the majority. Having no record of where he was from, Gray recalled Wonder telling him that “There’s a high probability that we came from Ghana, because it’s a direct route to the Caribbean-the Eastern seaboard,” and so Gray poignantly picked Ghana to “return” to. Wonder encouraged Gray to explore his roots and “return” to Africa and he indeed made his move in 2006. Los Angeles and Ghana-based artist Todd Gray visited Ghana for the first time in 1992 to shoot an album cover for Stevie Wonder who had plans to move to Ghana in 1975, before headlining FESTAC ’77. But for many diasporic Africans on this continent, I can only imagine the burden of history and the constant negotiation of where home was is a heavy load to bear.Ĭan one return to a place of origin that one has never known or been to? As a former Vietnamese refugee resettled in the USA, I have the privilege of knowing exactly where I came from. Sitting in the audience, I was moved to tears by the music and voice-feeling the emotions of seeing “home” for the first time. In 2019, the piece was presented again in New York. Harris created this work to convey his experience of FESTAC ’77: “Every day, I would go to the different compounds of different countries and absorb myself into my people-so different, yet so alike” -says Harris. FESTAC ’77, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture brought many artists, writers, musicians, activists and scholars from Africa and the Black diaspora to Lagos, Nigeria in 1977, to “position Africa as the original homeland of African diaspora peoples.” In 1981, African American composer Craig Harris composed FESTAC ’77, an eight-section work for a small chamber ensemble of five strings, three reeds, two brass, four percussions and a vocal. The program encouraged African Americans and the African diaspora to come to Ghana to invest, settle, and turn Ghana into a key travel destination. In 2018, President Nana Akufo-Addo of Ghana launched the Year of Return, Ghana 2019 to commemorate 400 years since the first group of enslaved Africans landed in the colony of Virginia in 1619. Todd Gray, Slipping into Darkness, All the Honey Gone, 2018, three archival pigment prints in artist’s frames and found frames, UV laminate, 153.7 x 11.4 cm. 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), article 13. “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.” ![]()
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