The CrossCurrents of African and Queer waters: a wave whose end is its beginning, always fleeting. Photography is a space for creative expression, to enact performances of being at home in spaces and in our bodies. The frame is a literal space shaped for us and by us, and within it, we can experience pleasure, belongin', mourning, ourselves and each other. I look to Queer/African/Diaspora. Each word rubs against and spills over, it is never a neat hyphen but a union that is as unstable as a wave - constantly in motion, ever-changing, recognizable through its insistence on remaining abstract, formless, and reoccurring. This 'Diaspora' that I am looking at is of various histories of arrivals and departures, histories that overlap, and some whose overlaps we don't know of just yet.
I am in this wave, I am a point of departure, arriving multiple times.
James Mbuthia (Ramah Amandla)
Nairobi, Kenya - North Carolina, USA
2020
"I finally became free through Amandla - power! I finally have it [power] in my name and I have finally given it to every Black person who walks into my world. So once in my world, it clicks: every time I see a Black person they just become Amandla, the sense of home, the sense of desiring freedom but never achieving it... because what is it [freedom]? It's the end."
"But the king is the name - it's in the name. That's the kingdom: the ability to name. I decided to rename myself Ramah Mbuthia Amandla."
