of colour
Katherine Agyemaa Agard
Selected by Mary-Kim Arnold for the 2018 Essay Press | UWB MFA Book Contest
of colour is an experimental essay about color, hybridity, and art-making. It is a memoir of Agyemaa Agard’s coming to North America and encountering binaries of black and white within global anti-blackness. It is a manifesto for an experience of color that embraces change: the prismatic, the perverse, and that which is wholly beyond categorization.
“One way to express the experience of the racialized body in America is to consider the notion that color is enacted on the body and expressed through it. We witness this in Agyemaa Agard’s text not through explication and summary but through the form of the text itself, its multiplicities and refusals.
This is a text about the act of making, about exposing seams, ruptures, and refusals… The profusion of poetic, colorful, intimate, and critical texts, and the rich images and photographs that follow this refusal enact a kind of exuberance in the face of lack. Refusal within this work provokes invention. Denial, contradiction, foreclosure becomes essential to the evolution of the work itself. This text enacts its own kind of writing itself into knowing and being. As if we are witnessing a growing literacy of the self, in all its surfaces, contradictions, and complexities. Agyemaa Agard says, ‘I am perpetually learning how to read,’ and by immersing ourselves in her intricate, lavish text, we are learning, too.”
— Mary Kim Arnold, from her judge’s note
“What it is to ‘remake’ a bloodline rather than lose it or break. How oceans ‘join us’ rather than separate bloodlines. Is there blood in the foam of the shoreline? Or: what it is to arrive at dark and call out to the dual mothers, the body-mother and the energy mother, the Virgin herself. Katherine Agyemaa Agard has written, but also made, by hand—with scraps of paper, swift drawings and tape—an open archive of migration and memory. I loved the account of a lecture by Walid Raad in Cambridge, Massachussets, in which artists of the present and artists of another time communicate through telepathy. The color red has been lost. What it is, then, to ‘desperately want’ that red. Without it, how do you create art at the intersection of displacement, or loss of other kinds? What: ‘I wish I could have said.’ of colour is like that: a question, a gesture, an observation, a swerve, a great love, an antiquity, an ocean, a way of listening, a way of becoming an artist or a writer that is not different to the way a human being comes to feeling, or thinking, in the time before the world is lost again.”
— Bhanu Kapil
“In her formidable debut, of colour, Katherine Agyemaa Agard writes about the realities of race and sexuality in a way that is both irreverent, vulnerable, and brutal – what most people would not dare to touch, Katherine handles without gloves. In a climate exhaustingly inundated with North American perspectives on race, Katherine’s writing connects West Africa, the Caribbean and the coastal United States with a wild intelligence, illuminating the absurdities and sadnesses of whiteness and empire through her singular experience. Within the layers of this book-length essay, we see reality refracted through the prism of Katherine’s mind. It is bent into new forms, leading us into a parallel dimension where readers are forced to sit with multiple shifting and nested realities, a dimension with no closure, only choices to be made and decisions to commit to, where we must make our own meaning because here, we are refused easy answers and categories. A mutable text composed through gradients of opacity, of colour fundamentally asks readers to embrace the messiness of being human and alive.”
— Akwaeke Emezi
Katherine Agyemaa Agard is the eldest daughter of a zoologist and a botanist. At 18, she won, and declined, an Open National Scholarship in the Natural Sciences from the government of Trinidad & Tobago. Her interdisciplinary work is rooted in painting, performance, and writing. She holds a AB in Visual and Environmental Studies and Social Anthropology from Harvard College and an MFA in Writing from UC-San Diego. KAA has received fellowships from Kimbilio, Lambda Literary, VONA/Voices, and Callaloo. She lives in San Francisco and is a dual citizen of Trinidad and Tobago and Ghana.
