Afrosurrealism and the Absurd: Making Sense of Love, Life, and Death in “Queen and Slim”
by Najha Zigbi-Johnson
Queen: Can I be your legacy? Slim: You already are.
I remember feeling so devastated and hopeless, and I remember the strikingly sharp pain on the right side of my chest after the film ended. I remember walking out in a daze, thinking about how I would write something when the pain settled. I felt so betrayed and let down. Why did we need to see more Black death, more deep red run out of our bodies and onto the unforgiving cement? The onslaught of Black dying and pain has become etched into my psyche and soul. It’s so deep, that I begin to think the pain I feel in my chest is maybe just a little bit of what Queen felt, and Slim felt, and Nia Wilson, and Tamir Rice, and Ayanna Jones, and all the Black people who have died at the hands of the state. Because Black people, we’re connected.
“Queen and Slim" continues to unsettle me, yet with some time and distance, I am beginning to see the film through a new lens, one rooted in the cosmo-vision of afrosurrealism. In so many ways I am still trying to grasp the fullness of the afrosurrealist tradition, and in this quest I look particularly to the work of comrade-scholar-dreamer, Robin D.G. Kelley. During an interview with D. Scot Miller for the San Francisco MOMA, Kelley says, “so much of what makes surrealism so appealing to Black writers was being able to find the language to experience and express the absurdity of being Black. It’s absurd.”[1] Afrosurrealism is chiefly concerned with our present reality, and experiences of everyday Black life. It highlights the tension of what is, while acknowledging that Blackness has always been infinite in its possibility and grandeur.
With its roots in the early Black francophone and Negritude movement, afrosurrealism is fundamentally transnational and decidedly Diasporic in its artistic, cultural, and scholarly display. From Amiri Baraka, Henry Dumas, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and René Ménhil, to its more contemporary representatives like artists Krista Franklin, Kara Walker, and Kehinde Wiley, afrosurrealism has come to expresses “feelings of worry, liberty, and injustice, offering up an “unfiltered Black conscious thought.”[2] Afrosurrealism is evocative and avant-garde, bringing forth the emotions that come with Black death, betrayal, love, fear, and memory within the context of white materiality and the colonial world. Yet afrosurrealism simultaneously moves beyond the limits of whiteness, in that it invites us all to dream of, and build in the spirit of total revolution and freedom.
“Queen and Slim” is in all ways, I think, an afrosurrealist project, marked by the simultaneity of beauty and despair- it is a Black love story rooted in possibility and reality. Written by Lena Waithe, and directed by Melina Matsoukas, “Queen and Slim” exemplifies the quest for total freedom alongside the inevitability of death. The movie opens to a scene in an Ohio diner, where two unnamed characters are on an awkward tinder date. The woman, a lawyer, who is played by Jodie Turner-Smith, is understandably curt after finding out that one of her clients has been sentenced to death. Her date, played by Daniel Kaluuya, offsets the tense energy with his intentionality and calm. As the two head home during the winter night, a version of Bilal’s “Soul Sister” plays from the car- in that instant, you can feel the sweetness of a possibly burgeoning Black romance. Yet the scene is cut brutally short when a white officer pulls them over for failing to signal a lane change. After Kaluuya asks the officer if they can “hurry up” because “it’s cold,” (and because these sorts of stops are frivolous) the cop becomes enraged, defensive, and violent within a matter of seconds in the way that cops are seemingly trained to do. Quickly, the cop’s gun is aimed at Kaluuya, sparking this moment of liminality between life and death. When Turner-Smith gets out the car and demands for the cop’s badge number, she is shot in a fit of uncontrollable rage. The precarity of Black life and the insatiability of white rage marks this desperate moment. The officer ends up dead after Kaluuya shoots him in self defense, and thus the odyssey of Queen and Slim, two fugitives, begin.
It is in the seconds after the racist cop is shot that Queen chooses freedom. It is Queen’s intrepid insistence that they not turn themselves in and become “property of the state,” which catalyzes the film into a world of afrosurrealism. Rather than submitting to the arbitrary and racist legal structure of the state, Queen insists on freedom and sovereignty, even if just for a little. Queen’s determination comes from a deep place of knowing- from watching her clients lose losing battles, and die at the hands of the state, and from a clarity that can only come from an ancestor like Harriet Tubman, whose resolve and steadfastness glimmers in her. It is the immediacy of that scene, shaped by the absurdity of white supremacist violence, which creates the context for surrealism in “Queen and Slim.”
In Kelley’s seminal piece, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination he writes that “Surrealism, a unitary project of total revolution, is above all a method of knowledge and way of life; it is lived far more than it is written, or written about, or drawn. Surrealism is the most exhilarating adventure of the mind, an unparalleled means of pursuing the fervent quest for freedom and true life beyond the veil of ideological appearances.”[3] For Queen and Slim, (afro)surrealism becomes the modality through which they choose to live, and it is also the cultural framework through which we can understand Matsoukas’s artistic direction.
After fleeing to New Orleans, in the hopes of receiving support and guidance from Queen’s Uncle Earl, a war veteran, and possible pimp, Queen and Slim must change their physical appearance so as to not be recognized after their faces have been plastered on the front of national newspapers and televisions. Their stay is cut short after Uncle Earl and one of the women in his house get into a physical altercation and the cops are called. In a hurry, Queen and Slim must leave New Orleans in fear of being caught. With their new hair cuts, they quickly grab a set of clothes to change into, in an attempt to go incognito. For Queen, it is a tiger-striped slip with knee high animal print boots, and for Slim it is a red velour sweatsuit. The irony of this moment is that while Queen and Slim ostensibly stand out in their striking outfits, to some degree they are invisibilized with this new facade, fading into conceptions of Blackness that render individual subjectivity intangible. Particularly, it is this dissonance of being totally invisible, if human at all, while being highly visible, that speaks to afrosurrealist life, which is marked by an illustrious, creative excess against the melancholy of existential invisibility and worthlessness.
Yet it is in their escape from Ohio to New Orleans, and then to Florida, with the hopes of making it to Cuba, that both Queen and Slim do the opposite of hiding in many instances. Rather, they lean into experiences of total joy and unencumbered sweetness. In a particular scene, after hours of driving, Slim insists on taking Queen out on a proper second date. They stop at a juke joint in Georgia, ready to risk their lives for a couple minutes of pure bliss. In the all-Black juke joint, Queen and Slim are safe under the knowing protection of fellow kinfolk who marvel at their now larger-than-life personas as modern day heroes in the fight against police brutality. This is the first scene where Queen and Slim get to properly indulge any sort of romantic intimacy with one another, as they hold each other close while dancing. In a voice-over we hear Queen say “I want a guy... to show me scars I never knew I had. But I don’t want him to make them go away, I want him to cherish the bruises they leave behind. Someone that’s gonna hold my hand and never let go.” Slim responds “she gotta be special though, ‘cause she’s gonna be my legacy.” The urgency of their tenderness and love speaks to the precarity of their lives and the inevitability of their deaths. As Carvell Wallace so perfectly writes in his piece, Queen & Slim Could Be One of the Greatest Love Stories of All Time- if You Let it this scene “is the spiritual center of the film. In this exchange love is presented against wounds and against time. That they are running both away from and into all these things is exactly the point.”[4] The quest to engage in a total and even impulsive freedom outweighs the possibility of surrender for Queen and Slim.
Kehinde Wiley, Officer of the Hussars, 2007. Oil on canvas.
In another scene while driving to Florida, Queen and Slim stop on the side of the road near a pasture of grazing horses, after Slim remarks that he’d never been on one. Queen, the most audacious of the two, affirms Slim’s fantasy, and urges him to lean into his desires. Slim trusts Queen, so he hoists himself atop a large white horse. This moment is at once magical and daring. While watching the scene unfold, all I wanted was for Slim to get off that horse, high up on an open field in someplace hostile to Black folks. From my seat in the AMC theatre, I could not imagine that need for total autonomy and impulsive freedom. Slim was magestic on the white horse, even if just for a moment. During that scene I thought of Kehinde Wiley’s portraitures of Black men on horses, and the brilliant juxtaposition of Napoleon-esq imagery with “everyday” Black men. Wiley’s attention to the contours and movement of the Black male body is intentional and caring. His use of bold and striking colors affirms the importance and complexity of Black men and Black people- that indeed we are human, and multilayered, and we are here. Similarly, Slim’s few moments atop the white horse conjures up a parallel feeling that can be understood through an afrosurrealist declaration of Black life as visible and spectacular.
Now I see, “Queen and Slim” is a love story. It is a film punctured with moments of bliss and infinite, enduring love. With some distance from the immediate pain and tears I felt when leaving the theatre, it is the scenes of freedom that stick with me most. Queen and Slim fall in love as they choose to lean into one another and trust each other fully. While the inevitability of Queen and Slim’s death is constant, their end still felt particularly jarring and unsympathetic, and I still feel unsettled. But I think it is this very fact that speaks to the absurdity of Black life. That even in our infinite possibility, brilliance, splendor, and beauty, Blackness continues to exist in a time and space that is unforgiving and cold. So the question becomes, how do we want to live our lives, and what then is our legacy?
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[1] Miller, D. Scott. “A Conversation with Robin D.G. Kelley.”Open Space. May 30th, 2017. https://openspace.sfmoma.org/2017/05/a-converstion-with-robin-d-g-kelley/
[2] Adams, Kier. “Afro-Surrealism: Embracing & Reconstructing the Absurdity of “Right Now” Medium.
[3] Kelley, D.G. Kelly. “Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination.” Keeping’ It (Sur)real: Dreams of the Marvelous. Beacon Press: Boston, 2002. pg. 158-159.
[4] Wallace, Carvell. “Queen & Slim Could Be One of the Greatest Love Stories of All Time- if You Let it.” New York Times Magazine. November 21st, 2019.
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Works Cited:
Adams, Kier. “Afro-Surrealism: Embracing & Reconstructing the Absurdity of “Right Now” Medium.
Jackson Angelique. “Lena Waite, Melina Matsoukas on Making: ‘Protest Art,’ Represetning Black Culture With ‘Queen & Slim.’ Variety. December 2nd, 2019.
Kelley, D.G. Kelley. “Black Brown, & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora.” University of Texas Press: Austin, 2009.
Kelley, D.G. Kelly. “Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination.” Keeping’ It (Sur)real: Dreams of the Marvelous. Beacon Press: Boston, 2002.
Miller, D. Scott. “A Conversation with Robin D.G. Kelley.” Open Space SFMOMA. May 30th, 2017.
Miller, D. Scott. “The Afrosurreal Manifesto: A Living Document.” Open Space SFMOMA. November 29th, 2016.
Wallace, Carvell. “Queen & Slim Could Be One of the Greatest Love Stories of All Time- if You Let it.” New York Times Magazine. November 21st, 2019.
Najha is a second year Master of Theological Studies candidate at Harvard Divinity School, exploring Black Diasporic religions and culture. She is also the founder of the course, “Freedom School: A Seminar on Theory and Praxis for Black Studies in the United States,” a student-led popular education colloquium at Harvard.