By F.S. (Private Contributor)

In the margins surrealism, a movement that is often remembered as composed of white europeans, were Black francophone poets from across Africa and its diaspora accruing and formulating a Black surrealist tradition, one grounded in an anti-colonial politic. Franklin Rosemont and Robin D.G. Kelley, in the edited collection Black, Brown and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and its Diaspora, note that “African genius, as expressed in its boundless innovative propensities… [seemed] to have an intimate affinity with surrealism’s quest for a social order based on poetry, love and freedom (2009: 146); indeed, Black poets from across Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas developed Black Surrealism as both a means to and product of anti-colonial and liberatory politics. 

Rosemont and Kelley described surrealism as that which “signifies more reality, and an expanded awareness of reality, including aspect and elements of the real that are ordinarily overlooked, dismissed, excluded, hidden, shunned, suppressed, ignored, forgotten, or otherwise neglected” (2009: 3).  With this set of intentions, it should come as no surprise that Black Surrealism was most robustly cultivated by poets. Poetry is a form that has often concerned itself with, to borrow words from Amiri Baraka, “[using] the revelation of truth as a function of its beauty” (1988: 165). When Audre Lorde, in her 1977 essay Poetry is Not a Luxury, tells us that “it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are — until the poem — nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt” (7), she names why poetry has been so central to the Black Surrealist project: because at its core, it too aims to arrive at language (literally) for that which is ‘suppressed, ignored, forgotten, or otherwise neglected’. René Ménil, writer from Martinique who co-founded the Black Surrealist literary magazine Tropiques alongside Aime and Suzanne Cesaire, proclaims that he writes to offer a model “for that which has yet to come into existence,” (1944: 85) an ambition that summarises the deep conceptual intimacy between Black Surrealism and poetry. 

While Leopold Sedar Senghor, poet and Senegal’s first president, is perhaps the first to speak explicitly of a Black surrealist tradition — saying “African surrealism is mystical and metaphysical” in a 1965 speech — we might consider that the fundamental intention of Black surrealism is an epistemic project that has constituted centuries worth of intellectual and cultural production in Africa and across the diaspora: the imagining and creating of new worlds. In his Afrosurrealist Manifesto D. Scot Miller tells us that “beyond this visible world, there is an invisible world striving to manifest, and it is our job to uncover it” (2013: 116). We see this objective shaping African and Afro-diasporic cultures, where dreaming and visioning fundamental changes to reality (Reed 2013), cultivating ways of  “making new life” (Kelley 2002: 158), and “[plunging] into the darkest, most hidden corners of the unconscious” (Magloire-Saint-Aude 1941: 103) have driven discourse and history. Kelley, in his 2002 book on Black imagination, aptly states this point: “Surrealism was less a revelation than recognition of what already existed in the black tradition” (187). 

Black- and Afro- Surrealism take an alternative interest in time than the more recently popular, Afrofuturism. In his Afrosurrealist Manifesto  D. Scot Miller states very simply that “Afrosurrealism is about the present” (2013: 18). Black Surrealism’s investment in the temporality of now, and the temporal politics of the present, is a crucial source of its potentiality and possibilities as a framework for shaping liberatory thinking. Black Surrealism deviates from Afrofuturism and futurist visionings of Blackness in that, while requiring and necessitating imagination, it is not purely speculative; Kelley, on Black surrealisms says: “It is not enough to imagine what kind of world we would like; we have to do the work to make it happen” (2002: 187). Black Surrealists, most notably the Martiniquan poets of the 40s, understood surrealism to be a way of thinking that was made possible through ways of being. Black Surrealism was imagined as a framework made possible by and through choices made about how we choose to relate to others, ourselves, and our natural environment. To return once more to Menil: “As we live we elaborate the capacity of the world; [this is] the power of our imaginations” (1941: 83).

I offer this essay both as a brief introduction to the rich world of Black surrealism; but too as an appreciation of imagination — and the act of imagining — and the ways in which it has held and create both space and a sense of community across the Black world. Indeed the urgent and creative task of imagining (and practicing) freedom that composed Black Surrealism was, and continues to be, a pan-African project, one that took place across the continent and in the Americas. At its foundation, Black Surrealism was intended to be a diasporic and community-making venture: Suzanne Cesaire hoped that it would unite Black people around the world, declaring in her essay Surrealism and Us that “colonial idiocies will be purified by the welding arc’s [Black Surrealism’s] blue flame. The mettle of our metal, our cutting edge of steele, our unique communions — all will be recovered” (S. Cesaire 1943: 38). Black Surrealism’s potentiality in cultivating ‘our unique communions’ remains as ripe now as it was then: What will become possible when we allow ourselves to commit, radically and honestly,  to the act of imagination? How might imagining allow us to witness and encounter one another, as Black people on the continent and in the Diaspora? Aime Cesaire asked in 1941, “is it a small thing to create a world?” It is no small thing — but one that unfolds unending, in the margins of the world but at the centre of Black diasporic consciousness and all its Black Surrealist qualities. 

Works Cited

Baraka, A. (1988). ‘Henry Dumas: Afro-Surreal Expressionist’. Black American Literature Forum, 22(2), pp. 164-166.

Cesaire, S. (1943). ‘Surrealism and Us’, in Maximin, D., (ed) Writings of Dissent (1941-1945), Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, pp. 34-38.

Kelley, R. 2002. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Kelley, R. and Rosemont, F. 2009. Black Brown and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Lorde, A. 1984. Sister Outsider. New York: Ten Speed Press. 

Magloire-Saint-Aude, C. (1941) ‘The Surrealist Record’, in Kelley, R. and Rosemont, F., (eds) Black Brown and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, pp. 103-104.

Menil, R. (1941) ‘The Orientation of Poetry’, in Kelley, R. and Rosemont, F., (eds) Black Brown and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, pp. 82-83.

Miller, D. (2013). ‘Afrosurreal Manifesto: Black is the New black--a 21st-century Manifesto’. Black Camera, 5(1), pp.113-117.

Reed, A. (2013). ‘After the End of the World: Sun Ra and the Grammar of Utopia’. Black Camera, 5(1), pp. 118-139.