Afro-Surrealism

D. Scot Miller penned "The Afro-surreal Manifesto" for The San Francisco Bay Guardian in May, 2009.^[3] Until that time, the term "Afro-surreal Expressionism" was used solely by Amiri Baraka to describe the writings of Henry Dumas. Later that year, Miller spoke with Baraka about extending the term by shortening the description. It was agreed by the two of them that "Afro-surreal" without the "expressionism" would allow further exploration of the term. Afro-surrealism may have some similar origins to surrealism in the mid-1920s, in that an aspect of it Négritude came after André Breton wrote the Surrealist Manifesto, but as Leopold Senghor points out in Miller's manifesto, "European Surrealism is empirical. African Surrealism is mystical and metaphorical."^[3]

Afro-Surrealism is directly connected to black history, experience, and aesthetics, particularly as affected by Western culture. British-Nigerian short story writer Irenosen Okojie describes the genre:^[4]

Afro-surrealism, which couples the bizarre with ideas of black identity and power, allows for more expansive explorations of blackness. If blackness shrinks or feels limited under the crushing, often insidiously damaging weight of western systems of oppression, specifically the endemic tolls of structural racism, then the extraordinary provides space to construct new realities and absurdist visions that reconfigure what blackness as an aesthetic can be.

Afro-Surrealism more specifically incorporates aspects of the Harlem Renaissance, Négritude, and Black Radical Imagination as described by Robin D. G. Kelley in his book Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination,^[5] and further with his Afro-surreal historical anthology, Black, Brown, & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora (2009).^[6] Aspects of Afro-Surrealism can be traced to Martiniquan Suzanne Césaire's discussion of the "revolutionary impetus of surrealism" in the 1940s.^[7]

Suzanne Césaire, a surrealist thinker and partner of Aimé Césaire, was an important figure in the history of the Afro-surreal aesthetic.^[8] Her quest for "The Marvelous" over the "miserablism" ^[8] expressed in the usual arts of protest inspired the Tropiques surrealist group, and especially René Ménil. Ménil says in "Introduction to the Marvelous" (1930s):

The true task of mankind consists solely in the attempt to bring the marvelous into real life, so that life can become more encompassing. So long as the mythic imagination is not able to overcome each and every boring mediocrity, human life will amount to nothing but useless, dull experiences, just killing time, as they say.^[9]

Suzanne Césaire's proclamation, "Be in permanent readiness for The Marvelous", quickly became a credo of the movement; the word "marvelous" has since become recontextualized with regard to contemporary black arts and interventions.^[8]

In his 1956 essay for Présence Africaine, Haitian novelist Jacques Stephen Alexis wrote: "What, then, is the Marvellous, except the imagery in which a people wraps its experience, reflects its conception of the world and of life, its faith, its hope, its confidence in man, in a great justice, and the explanation which it finds for the forces antagonistic to progress?"^[10] In his work, Alexis is seen to have an acute sense of reality that is not unlike that of traditional surrealism, and his coining of the term "Marvelous Realism" reflects his influence by the earlier works of the Négritude/Black Surrealist Movement.

The term "Afro-surreal Expressionism" was coined by Amiri Baraka in his 1974 essay on Black Arts Movement avant-garde writer Henry Dumas.^[11] Baraka notes that Dumas is able to write about ancient mysteries that were simultaneously relevant to the present day. Comparing Dumas' writing to "Toni Morrison's wild, emotional 'places'," Baraka writes that "[b]oth utilize high poetic description—language of exquisite metaphorical elegance, even as narrative precision". But, for Baraka, this "language tells as well as decorates":

The world of Ark of Bones, for instance, shares a black mythological lyricism, strange yet ethnically familiar! Africa, the southern U.S., black life and custom are motif, mood and light, rhythm, and implied history.^[12]

Dumas, therefore, was—"despite his mythological elegance and deep signification"—still "part of the wave of African American writers at the forefront of the '60s Black Arts Movement".^[13] Precisely because of its strangeness and its deformation of reality, Dumas work bears a deep political truth: "The very broken quality, almost to abstraction, is a function of change and transition."^[14]

Unlike Afro-Futurism which speculates on possibilities in the future, Afro-surrealism, as Miller describes, is about the present. "Rather than speculate on the coming of the four horseman, Afrosurrealists understand that they rode through too long ago. Through Afro-surrealism, artists expose this form of the future past that is right now."^[15]

According to Terri Francis: "Afro-surrealism is art with skin on it where the texture of the object tells its story, how it weathered burial below consciousness, and how it emerged somewhat mysteriously from oceans of forgotten memories and discarded keepsakes. This photograph figures Afro-surrealism as bluesy, kinky-spooky."^[16]

Irensonen Okojie wrote of the genre's flexibility have a relationship to life's breadth:^[4]

If we are to embrace all the dimensions of the movement, its symbiotic potential through an Afro-surrealist lens, then there must be room for black joy, black virtuosity, black mediocrity, space to fail upwards. The autonomy to define our stories, to operate within and beyond frameworks that already exist should lie in our hands. Storytelling is power. It is cultural currency. The elasticity of Afro-surrealism gives room for every facet of blackness to be explored.

In the manifesto from which present day Afro-surrealism is based, writer D. Scot Miller states in a response to Afrofuturism:

"Afro-Futurism is a diaspora intellectual and artistic movement that turns to science, technology, and science fiction to speculate on black possibilities in the future. Afro-Surrealism is about the present. There is no need for tomorrow's-tongue speculation about the future. Concentration camps, bombed-out cities, famines, and enforced sterilization have already happened. To the Afro-Surrealist, the Tasers are here. The Four Horsemen rode through too long ago to recall. What is the future? The future has been around so long it is now the past."

As "The Afro-Surreal Manifesto" and Afrofuturism come to the fore in artistic, commercial and academic circles, the struggle between the specific and "the scent" of present-day manifestations of black absurdity has come with it, posing interesting challenges to both movements. For Afrofuturists, this challenge has been met by inserting Afrocentric elements into its growing pantheon, the intention being to centralize Afrofuturist focus back on the continent of Africa to enhance its specificity. For the Afro-surrealists, the focus has been set at the "here and now" of contemporary Black arts and situations in the Americas, Antilles, and beyond, searching for the nuanced "scent" of those current manifestations.^[17]

Toni Morrison's Beloved: A Novel^[18] remains an important milestone for Afro-surrealists. Here, Morrison imagines a narrative of a formerly enslaved woman grieving the death of her baby daughter, Beloved. With no trace of a past, Beloved reappears on the steps of her mother's home, confused and looking for her mother. Following this moment, the novel crafts a haunting tale of a woman seeking to understand the sudden reappearance of her daughter and the scars left behind from slavery. In Beloved, Morrison attempts to come to grip with the legacies left by slavery, challenging the notion that these exist only in the past. From the epigraph, "Sixty Million and more", Morrison presupposes there is no way to count those affected from slavery and additionally, that the number is ever-growing into the present. In her award-winning novel, Morrison expands on the idea of the past, attempting to demonstrate the past is ever present.^[19]

In Zong!, M. Nourbese Philip crafts a counter-narrative surrounding the events of the Zong massacre.^[20] Utilizing the words from the legal decision to build her poetry, Philip rejects the idea of an archival past. Instead, Philip looks to the present moment to understand how to read this legal decision and understand the case. Following the footsteps of Morrison's Beloved, Philip presupposes the notion of a past that is not past allowing these past artifacts to haunt the present moment. Rather than organize the fragments, Philip allows the fragments to tell themselves. This is not to say that Philip gives the fragments voices, but instead gives them space. The space in the poem allows Philip's audience to hear the silence of these voices, to truly understand the missing narratives form the past and the role that has on the present.

Atlanta is an American comedy-drama television series created by Donald Glover that premiered on September 6, 2016, on FX. The series centers on college dropout and music manager Earnest "Earn" Marks (played by Glover) and rapper Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry) as they navigate a strange, seemingly otherworldly version of the Atlanta rap scene, examining racism, whiteness, existentialism and modern African-American culture through Afro-Surrealism.^[21] It also stars LaKeith Stanfield and Zazie Beetz.

Sorry to Bother You is a 2018 American surrealist, urban fantasy, science fiction, black-comedy film written and directed by Boots Riley, in his directorial debut. It stars LaKeith Stanfield, Tessa Thompson, Jermaine Fowler, Omari Hardwick, Terry Crews, Patton Oswalt, David Cross, Danny Glover, Steven Yeun, and Armie Hammer. The film follows a young black telemarketer who adopts a "white accent" to succeed at his job. Swept into a corporate conspiracy, he must choose between profit and joining his activist friends to organize labor.^[22]

Random Acts of Flyness (2018–present) is a late night sketch comedy series created by American artist Terence Nance for HBO.^[1]