JAMES CUDJOE
PEACHCAN GALLERY
Have you ever experienced a strange feeling familiarity? Possibly in song that provoked some kind of emotion or shift in energy? Or perhaps in an art gallery filled with picturesque paintings of a fishing village in Ghana? Familiarity is a mysterious, ill defined, consciousness where neither the scene nor the subject is entirely new. In most cases dreams are what we would allude to, however, sometimes we experience familiarity during conscious perceptions in identifying certain people, places or things. These are cases of an inexplicable sense of familiarity and recognition that suggests a link between our conscious, subconscious and unconscious minds; or a middle passage between two points or perceptions.
James Cudjoe, born September 1971 and educated at Ghanatta College of Art in Accra, belongs to a long tradition of pastors/painters and painters/pastors that stretches back to Fra Angelico. Full time artist and resident pastor at Holy Fire International Church located in Cape Coast, Cudjoe specializes in painting cityscapes of the harbour and oil city in Takoradi; in addition to marine scenes of Elmina - a fishing town in Ghana. Here, the castle looms as a juggernaut overlooking Elmina - a castle to serve as a trading port on the Gold Coast and later used a the holding ground/last place of departure for slaves being exported to the “New World” via Middle Passage.
“While historical studies of the Atlantic slave trade have demonstrated the magnitude of slave mortality during the Middle Passage, we have started to examine how captives might have endured and coped with this traumatic experience, in addition to its impact on the metaphysical, psychological, social and cultural journey that captives were forced to undertake. In Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness - a cartography of celebratory journeys, he refers to and stresses the rites of Middle Passage as a kind of origin myth for later chosen tales of ocean crossings by Wright, Du Bois, Douglas and others who make a modern journey from the Americas to Europe. In Gilroy's attempt to anchor “black modernism” in a “continued proximity to the unspeakable terrors of the slave experience,” the slave experience becomes an icon for modernity; and in a strange way, the Middle Passage becomes a metaphor anchored somewhere in a vanishing history. Questioning the choice of exile and passage by Wright, Du Bois, Douglas and others along with the conveyors of hip hop, soul music and rap, Gilroy celebrates the Middle Passage as a “cross cultural circulation” and “nomadism” in this idea of redemption.”
The living dead of the Middle Passage are bodies added to the road of bones that paves the bottom of the sea. They are a collective of souls joined to countless others who “forever trouble the peace of the ocean.” They are the link between our conscious, subconscious and unconscious minds; reminding us that we are the redemption and that it is time to return. On an unending voyage, not only of the victims of the Middle Passage but also their descendants who have endured the legacy of slavery, the death that took place aboard remains unfinished because it reoccurs in other forms, other places and other time.
Peachcan Gallery
