Afro-surrealism provides a radical framework to dispel the current orders of white supremacy and capitalism in all their rigidity, embracing chaos as a retaliation to rationality and flowing over the river beds of conformity. It is a revolt.
The term “Afro-surrealism” can be attributed to the introduction of African American writer and poet Henry Dumas’ book Ark of Bones and Other Stories. Here, fellow writer Amiri Baraka scribes the term in reference to Dumas’ work. Surrealism itself, however, can be traced back to the early 20th century when a group of European artists came together in Paris with the intention of emancipating the mind from learned structures by bridging the gap between dream and reality. They did this through artistic exercises which stimulated the subconscious mind, such as automatic writing, collage, and collective creation. They also engaged in anarchist and communist political thinking. Despite the term ‘surrealism’ having European origins, this way of thinking and acting flowed through the consciousness of Black people since the dawn of white supremacist resistance.
Following the socio-political conception of surrealism, Black Martiniquan thinkers and poets, such as Suzanne and Aime Césaire, who had a close relationship with some of the aforementioned artists, developed the idea further through the anti-colonial Négritude movement. The school of thought pushed for a richer appreciation of pre-colonial African culture and formed the groundwork for Afro-surrealism.
In a 1941 issue of Tropiques, a literary journal founded by the Césaire couple, Suzanne Césaire called on people to embrace “the domain of the strange, the marvelous and the fantastic, a domain scorned by people of certain inclinations.” She continues:
“Here is the freed image, dazzling and beautiful, with a beauty that could not be more unexpected and overwhelming. Here are the poet, the painter, and the artist, presiding over the metamorphoses and the inversions of the world under the sign of hallucination and madness.”
In a world dictated by white men, who have constructed rationality to divide the civilised from the savage, our expression of freedom appears as madness. Afro-surrealism is a revolutionary battle cry to embrace this madness through aesthetics of fantasy, absurdity and past-present-future Afro-timelines. All these challenges to the dominant norm are geared towards a unity of reality and our wildest dreams, a gap that has been widened by global systemic oppressions. Within this, many Black women have found a home, with crossovers of Afro-surrealism and #Blackgirlmagic, which work to undo the same rigid rationality of the patriarchal order.
This acceptance of “the marvelous” has been employed by artists from experimental jazz composers Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane and Thelonious Monk to writer Toni Morrisson to current filmmakers such as Nuotama Bodomo and Jenn Nkiru.
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British Nigerian filmmaker Jenn Nkiru’s 2017 film Black Star: Rebirth is Necessary is an electrifying example of Afro-surrealist. It explores Blackness through dreamlike scenes of harmonious blue cherubs with Afro hair; archival footage of Black joy, Black rage and Black power; a sound collage of experimental blues and jazz overlaid with pulsating visuals of energetic body poppers moving through the streets of Brixton, London, as if someone had just turned the dial to Black awakening. The film flips the script on the typical codes and conventions of chronological form and rational order. It jumps from past, present and future, between text, archive and original footage, between song, speech and sound glitch, meshing together dream and reality. It is a piece that does not bind to hegemonic conformity, blurring barriers to create fluidity. It is chaos. It is freedom. Commenting on her work, Nkiru writes:
"Creating this piece felt like therapy. It's where I got to reconcile my worlds—the material and the spiritual, the human and divine. This film is jazz; black magic in motion. I hope it can be a source of inspiration, affirmation and healing to others as it has been to me, especially the black diaspora."
In this self-commentary, Nkiru speaks of bridging the gap between the material and spiritual or human and divine, forming another expression of reality vs dream. It is our innate poetic expression that allows us to temporarily break away from the rigidity of systemic structures. This doesn’t just mean poetry in the very literal sense of writing verse, but in who we are away from coloniality.
As Audre Lorde put it in her 1985 essay “Poetry is Not a Luxury”:
“The white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black mothers in each of us-the-poet whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary awareness and demands the implementation of that freedom.”
Lorde is critiquing Cartesian philosophy as the destruction of true freedom. Cartesian philosophy describes the ideas inspired by French philosopher René Descartes who sewed the seeds for the ensuing Age of Enlightenment by focusing on rationality over empiricism. He is well known for proposing the separation between mind and body and uttering the famous idiom “I think therefore I am” to explain the certainty of existence. His views lay the ground for the separation of object and subject or dreams and reality through scientific reason. Lorde asks us to reconnect with ourselves as poets outside of this paradigm and to value feeling over-rational (white supremacist) thought. She argues, as the Surrealists do, that the true self has been so violently repressed that it only appears to us in our dreams: pulling our dreams into reality is moving with “revolutionary awareness” or “jazz”, as Nkiru puts it.
Jazz became a soundscape for Afro-surrealism, with its imaginative, experimental and spontaneous construction, reflecting the billowing winds of revolt. In Robin D G Kelley’s description of Thelonious Monk, in his book Freedom Dreams, he says:
“Monk’s music appealed especially to the surrealists’ struggle for complete freedom and the overthrow of bourgeois concepts of beauty and art. He made music that destroyed many Western ideas about music making, turning conventional rules of composition, harmony, and rhythm on their heads. He stripped the romantic ballads of their romanticism and took his listeners on wild harmonic rides filled with surprising dissonances.”
The unabashed fire to burn structural constraints projects onto jazz’s forthright sound, which powered the abolition of hierarchy through modes such as collective improvisation.
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In her film, Jenn Nkiru not only features jazz as a predominant sound, she also includes visuals of Sun Ra in her archival footage. Sun Ra is a face usually linked to Afro-surrealism. As a pioneering experimental jazz composer, philosopher of Black consciousness and buzzing space traveller, his legacy is proceeded by a vibrant musical style and personality. He believed in the concept of outer-space emancipation, which put forward that in order for us to be liberated as Black people, we must move to another planet due to societal alienation. He himself claimed that he was from Saturn and told of his travels to the cosmos. His 1973 album, Space Is The Place, and 1974 film of the same name, reflect this philosophy. In the realm of “absurd” expression, this idea is presented through shiny metallic clothing, outer-worldly jazz composition and aliens. However, what we can take away from his message is that our liberation cannot be found on the grounds of this system which was not intended to serve us. He proposes a completely new world, inspired by pre-colonial African traditions through a futuristic lens.
Despite his aims for a completely new world, his expression clumsily falls into the realm of Black nationalism. Sun Ra often evoked images of Ancient Egypt, famously wearing a sun-disk head adornment on top of an Egyptian pharaoh’s headdress. This glorification of very stratified Black civilisations, such as Ancient Egypt, Mali under Mansa Musa, or Great Zimbabwe, still perpetuates hierarchy and therefore does not go far enough in destroying the system’s core: that of toxic civilisation. This is not just a limitation of Sun Ra but one of many Afro-surrealist, or similarly Afro-futurist, expressions, such as in Marvel’s Black Panther. Why do we not appreciate pre-colonial societies which were more communal and egalitarian? In a lot of ways, the anti-colonial, anti-systemic roots of Afro-surrealism have been blurred by Black capitalism and admiration for the ostentatious clothed in gowns embroidered with a Black fist. How do we take the expression of Afro-surrealism and turn it forward into a revolutionary political movement?
To bring it back to Suzanne Césaire, she referred to Afro-surrealism as "the tightrope of our hope.” In her essay, 1943: Surrealism and Us, she expressed:
"Roused from a long benumbling torpor, this most deprived of all people will rise up, upon plains of ashes. Our surrealism will then deliver it the bread of its depths. Finally those sordid contemporary antinomies of black/white, European/African, civilised/savage will be transcended. The magical power of the mahoulis will be recovered, drawn forth from living sources. Colonial stupidity will be purified in the blue welding flame. Our value as metal, our cutting edge of steel, our amazing communions will be recovered."
Césaire’s expression of “hope” as a “tightrope” elucidates the idea that revolution is not an easy stroll. It requires destruction of the system, turning it into “ash”, and then rising up to destroy the bonds of civilisation’s binaries. In order to get here, we must use the tools found in surrealism, such as the detachment from reason and rationality, whilst also noticing the limitations. Within Afro-surrealism, the “Afro” will always be tethered to a European moniker, a product of white civilisation as much as it strives against it. Our movement does not need to be bound by name, but rather, it needs to understand the intrinsic nature of liberation as an opposition to the current system.
Art has been used and will continue to be used as a method of communication for our deepest calls to freedom. We must reconnect with the poet within us to paint our wildest dreams.