kosisochukwu nnebe

Well, I know this, anyone who’s tried to live knows this: that what you say about anyone else... reveals you.” This quote by James Baldwin and the words that immediately follow it suggest that whiteness and blackness constitute one another, and the concept of blackness is a reflection of whiteness itself — of its fears, and fantasies.

And yet, as these pieces demonstrate,by moving away from the centre -  a position of privilege - to the margins, a new understanding of blackness, and black womanhood more specifically, is made possible. Here the revelation is two-fold, if you allow it.

“All the women are white, all the blacks are men, but some of us are brave” is inspired by a collection of essays of the same name. Both highlight the erasure of black women in discussions about blackness and Feminism, and the need for a black feminist discourse that places the black woman at the centre. An intersectional approach to identity - one that looks at race, gender and all other identities at once - is  essential as taking blackness and womanhood individually renders the black woman invisible-- while all the while speaking for her.

“The uses of the erotic”, borrows from Audre Lorde’s essay of the same name, which describes the erotic as a  “measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.” The naked black female body is one hat is fraught with multiple meanings, and often subject to hypersexualization and fetishization, making it difficult to reclaim. The overlay of poems exploring themes of sensuality, desire, and love (both love for others and for one’s self) suggest that by embracing the power of the erotic, the black woman can reclaim both her body and sexuality, but also achieve a greater level of self-actualization.

n the opening passages of the chapter “The lived experience of the black man” in Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon describes an encounter with a young white boy and his mother in a way that is visceral and raw. The moment is one in which the narrator finds himself reduced to his race and seemingly stripped of all agency and indeed of his body altogether: “My body returned to me spread-eagled, disjointed, redone, draped in mourning on this white winter's day.” “Disruption” depicts this scene and the process of racialization that can be so disruptive to the daily lives of people of colour.

“Hyper/in/visibility” explores both the hyper- and in-visibility that black women must navigate in the North American context. Hyper-visible in an environment with predominantly white bodies and institutions. In-visible because these same institutions were never built for bodies like ours.  Because, as explained in the book The Fact of Blackness, “ the black woman, being neither white nor male, represents a double lack[...]: the antithesis of both whiteness and established notions of femininity and masculinity”.

How do you identify a black woman? Is it in the hair? The skin tone? The nose? The lips? By cutting out certain visible markers of identity, the pieces in this series force the viewer to make conscious choices in order to determine the race of the subjects depicted. In doing so, they show that the perception of race is not an objective process, but rather one that is subjective and motivated by the perceiver’s own biases. Once the first question of “guess my race” is answered, the next question becomes: “So what?” How does this change how others interact with these women, and how they are able to navigate society?

“70 degrees” refers to the angle created by tracing a line from the front of the incisor teeth to the jut of the forehead. Called the “facial angle”, this measurement was used  in the 18th century to create a ranking of humankind, from the Ape (58 degrees) to Apollo de Belvedere (100 degrees), who represented human perfection. At 70 degrees, the facial angle of Africans was seen as scientific proof that they were the missing link between man and Ape. This piece explores the way in which scientific racism was used to promote and uphold white supremacy, with ongoing effects to this day.

On a more personal level, “70 degrees” depicts a conversation between the artist and her ancestors, a moment of reconciliation, after years of internalized racism. 

"Rebirth" is a first glance at a new understanding of black womanhood. The canary, a recurring theme in the artist’s work, has a double meaning: its is both a symbol of oppression - the canary in the coal mine represents the first to suffer under oppression - and a symbol of freedom. In this piece, both meanings collide in a reversal of roles, with the black woman re-born as vanguard.