Artist Statement 

When I was a child, I espoused and internalized the cultural practices of discrimination with a desire to dominate people the way it had been imposed upon me. It seemed inevitable that I would struggle with identity given that I was born and raised in the postcolonial nations of Ghana and Lebanon. My identity became a desire to absorb the Eurocentric influences. It wasn’t until adulthood that I turned to writing in an attempt to articulate my authentic self, bring understanding to my fragmented experiences, and examine relationships in terms of power and subjugation between the self and the marginalized other. I have at different times throughout my life held the status of refugee, immigrant, and or citizen of the nations of Ghana, Lebanon, Germany, United Kingdom and United States. I have as a result discovered that to be an immigrant, even after becoming a citizen, is to live as an adopted thing; as one who lives in fear of being rejected; as one whose security of citizenship depends on the whim of a country’s governing party. Citizen it seems exists only insofar that a marginalized/immigrant-other exists. And the immigrant-other never seems to attain a sense of self, or citizenship, and instead is trapped in subservience towards validating the framework for maintaining the powers that adopted him or her. Through this framework echoed in linguistics, the absence of the marginalized other is maintained. Because in language, when we frame things, we do so in figurative language and often metaphorically; thus, the comparisons make visibility an impossibility, and identity through the metaphor remains unmentioned. As a writer, I cannot uncover the thing that is unmentioned, displaced, and hidden in language through the traditional narratives since traditional practices keep the unmentioned, hidden. For me, to be able to write effectively and authentically means I must subvert language and traditional writing practices. And so, I often attempt to write away from the literary expectations. And since it is my identity that is the unmentioned thing, that is the other, that is the thing at stake, that is the thing that remains hidden, I am compelled to write so as to make the myself as the other visible, known.