Afro-Surrealism

Afro-Surrealism or Afrosurrealism is a literary and cultural aesthetic that is a response to mainstream surrealism in order to reflect the lived experience of people of color. First coined by Amiri Baraka in 1974, this movement focuses on the present day experience of African Americans. Much of Afro-Surrealism is based on the manifesto written by D. Scot Miller, in which he says, "Afro-Surrealism sees that all 'others' who create from their actual, lived experience are surrealist..." Afro-Surrealism can be seen in music, photography, film, the visual arts and poetry. Notable practitioners of Afro-Surrealism include Bob Kaufman, Krista Franklin, Kool Keith, Samuel R. Delany, Roman Bearden and Deana Lawson.

Influence

The AfroSurreal arts movement came about after D. Scot Miller penned The Afrosurreal Manifesto for The San Francisco Bay Guardian in May, 2009. Until that time, the term "Afrosurreal Expressionism" was used solely to describe the writings of Henry Dumas by Amiri Baraka. In 2008, Miller spoke with Baraka about extending the term by shortening the description. It was agreed by the two of them that "Afrosurreal" without the "expressionism" would allow further exploration of the term. [1]. Afrosurrealism may have some similar origins to surrealism in the mid-1920s, in that an aspect of it [Negritude] 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.”.

Afro-Surrealism incorporates aspects of the Harlem Renaissance, Négritude and Black Radical Imagination as described by Professor Robin DG Kelley in his definitive work Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2003). Aspects of Afro-Surrealism can be traced to Martiniquan Suzanne Césaire’s discussion of the “revolutionary impetus of surrealism” in the 1940s.

Though much has been written and said about artist/activist/statesmen Aimé Césaire, much more needs to written about his partner Suzanne, a brilliant surrealist thinker, and mother of the Afrosurreal aesthetic. Her quest for “The Marvelous” over the “miserablism” expressed in the usual arts of protest inspired the Tropiques surrealist group, and especially René Ménil.

“The true task of mankind consists solely in the attempt to bring the marvelous into real life,” Ménil says in “Introduction to the Marvelous,”[1930] “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.”

Suzanne Césaire’s proclamation, “Be in permanent readiness for The Marvelous,” quickly became a credo of the movement; the word “marvelous” has since become re-contextualized with regard to contemporary black arts and interventions.

In his 1956 essay for Présence AfricaineHaitian 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?” In his work, Alexis is seen to have an acute sense of reality that is not dissimilar to traditional surrealism, and his coining of the term "Marvelous Realism" reflects how he was influenced by the earlier works of the Negritude/Black Surrealist Movement.

Development

Afro-Surrealism was coined by Amiri Baraka in his 1974 essay on Black Arts Movement avant-garde writer Henry Dumas. Baraka notes that Dumas is able to write about ancient mysteries that were simultaneously relevant to the present day. This idea that the past resurfaces to haunt the present day is a crucial to Afro-Surrealism.

Cinematographer Arthur Jafa expanded the field of Afro-Surrealism by experimenting with film. Jafa introduces the idea of "the alien familiar," in order to represent the Black experience and its innate surreal characteristics. "I want it to have something that I and my friends call 'the alien familiar.' If a work succeeds in a way or is able to conjure what a Black cinema would be or what this hypothetical manifestation of this particular tradition in the cinematic arena might be, it should be both alien because you’ve never seen anything quite like it, and at the same time, it should be familiar on some level to Black audiences." This focus on the alien aspect of the Black experience, and on Black folk culture, are what separate Afro-Surrealism from magical realism and surrealism.

A Manifesto of Afro-Surreal was written by D. Scot Miller's and was published in 2009. The manifesto delineates Afro-Surrealism from Surrealism and Afro-Futurism. The manifesto also declares the necessity of Afro-Surrealism, especially in San Francisco, California. The manifesto lists ten tenants that Afro-Surrealism follows including how "Afro-Surrealists restore the cult of the past," and how "Afro-Surreal presupposes that beyond this visible world, there is an invisible world striving to manifest, and it is our job to uncover it."

Themes

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Deana Lawson, Emily and Daughter, 2002

The Future-Past

Unlike Afro-Futurism which speculates on black possibilities in the future, Afrosurrealism, as Scot 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 Afrosurrealism, artists expose this form of the future past that is "RIGHT NOW." Most Afrosurrealists reject the study of the future pushing themselves to focus on the present, the future that has already past.

The everyday lived experience

Much of Afro-Surrealism is concerned with the everyday life because it is said that there is nothing more surreal than the Black experience. An example of this would be a photo by Deana Lawson called Emily and Daughter. According to Terri Francis, "Afrosurrealism 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 Afrosurrealism as bluesy, kinky-spooky."

Haunting

Afro-Surrealism is often described as having a sense of a haunting welcoming. As Francis describes it, there is a sense of disruption from the past in an otherwise ordinary or comfortable situation. An example of Afro-Surrealism seen as haunting can be seen in Toni Morrison's Beloved, in that the dead baby comes back to haunt Sethe. The past resurfacing in the present is key aspect of Afro-Surrealism.

Present day realism

Afro-Surrealist scholar Rochelle Spencer identifies at least three different subgenres of black speculative art, and Spencer argues that Afro-Surrealism is the most present-focus, though it is not devoid of technology and may include allusions to modern technology. According to Francis, the juxtaposition between the old and the present day is what makes Afro-Surrealism so unique. As Francis puts it, "Surrealism here, the Afro-surreal, like the marvelous discussed above, is actually a realism so real, so contrary to the norms of publicized blackness, that it represents a rupture, a radical break from ordinary understanding such that the old feels new—because it was never known." Although this movement is related to Afrofuturism, it is different in that instead of focusing on the future, Afro-Surrealism focuses more on the present day.

Examples of Afrosurrealist Works

Zong!, M. NourbSe Philip and Setaey Adamu Boateng

In Zong!, M. NourbSe Philip crafts a powerful counter-narrative surrounding the events of the Zong massacre. 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 Toni 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.

Beloved, Toni Morrison

As mentioned earlier, Toni Morrison’s Beloved remains an important milestone for Afrosurrealists. Here, Morrison imagines a narrative of a slave women grieving the death of her baby daughter, Beloved. With no trace of a past, Beloved reappears of on the steps of 124, 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 legacies exits only from 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 the idea of the past, attempting to demonstrate the past is ever present and moreover, that the past is RIGHT NOW.