An invisible man makes the invisible…visible!
As Solomon Northup clings on for dear life, his head caught in a noose, outstretched with his feet on their tip toes on slip away from death. His suffering is invisible as his hanging is just another fabric of the landscape of his entrapped surrounds. The sun wistly shines, the wind still blows into the trees that involuntary punish him. The grass is still green that his soul of his feet cannot touch and the conditioned souls of tasks continue to be fulfilled by Northup’s fellow objects once human now immune to the horrors that bestows their eyes.
In my 6th post I talked about the factors that have made Project 5am such an integral part of my life, a realm that I can explore, create, see and respond from. One of a the issues I raised was they the need to have a place of being instead of being on the fringes of other the other. In examples I talked about been in a minority of many situations.
Being black British of the last of the first generation of the wind rush that came to the UK meant that my childhood was lived through the late 80s 90s. My football team was Liverpool F.C mainly because my favourite player was John Barnes. I saw Liverpool play Birmingham city in 1995 and I was in the city and I always remember when the game kicked off and Barnes got the ball, a voice from behind me bellowed “get the black bastard”. A guy next to me said “ignore him he’s an idiot but inside I was raging but at the same time powerless. Being in a minority back then meant you had to take it.
In 2012 I came across and was inspired to make a piece of art work from the book the ‘Invisible Man’ by Ralph Ellison (who’s 100th birthday would of been on march 2nd) where the author challenges minorities via African-American culture to embrace their invisibility as pathway to enlightenment of self.
Ellison published only one novel in his lifetime but it was a revolutionary work. Invisible Man came out in 1952 when the author was 39 years old. It follows the bleak adventures of an unnamed black narrator from the Deep South through to Harlem. Along the way he tries to impress preachers, teachers, radicals and hucksters. At every step, though, his efforts to forge an identity – to become a visible man – are thwarted by his skin colour.
Ralph Ellison: the man who made Black America visible -Sameer Rahim
Meanwhile I enjoy my life with the compliments of Monopolated light & Power. Since you never recognize me even when in closest contact with me, and since, no doubt, you’ll hardly believe that I exist, it won’t matter if you know that I tapped a power life leading into the building and ran it into my hole in the ground. Before that I lived in the darkness into which I was chased, but now I see. I’ve illuminated the blackness of my invisibility – and vice versa.
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
“Play the game, but don’t believe in it – that much you owe yourself … Play the game, but raise the ante, my boy. Learn how it operates, learn how you operate.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
It’s fitting that I write about Ellison’s work this week as yesterday I experience the scale of my invisibility as a black man at an art lecture where an inappropriate comment was made during a conversation about the Stevie McQueen film ’12 Years A Slave’
The moment which encapsulated my invisibility was not the remark which was absurd and stupid but the response of my fellow colleagues which was greeted with laughter (albeit awkward laughter). For me this experience was worse than my football match experience that took place in the mid-90s where a working class culture was slowly learning to adapt to a new footballing language. Yesterday’s incident took place in a time and surrounded where those kind of remarks should be shut down by silence, therefore I do feel let down as this put me in a place of alienation.
At the same time this incident has reminded alienation is one of the factors of the afrofuturist and why Project 5am is my gift to learn from any situation and transfer that into my future works thou that is the art of the invisible man
Invisible man -Project 5am
