It will be all right if you come again, only next time
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1994 / 2025, 5-channel installation |
From all available evidence no black man had ever set foot in this tiny Swiss village before I came. I was told before arriving that I would probably be a “sight” for the village;
I took this to mean my complexion was rarely seen in Switzerland, and also that city people are always something of a “sight” outside the city. I didn’t occur to me—possibly because I am an American —that there could be people anywhere who had never seen a Negro.
[...]
In the village there is no movie house, no bank, no library, no theater; very few radios, one jeep, one station wagon; and, at the moment, one typewriter, mine, an invention which the woman next door to me here had never seen.
James Baldwin: ‘Stranger in the Village’ in: Notes of a Native Son (1955)