I first watched The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till at ten years old. A random woman in the grocery store told me I looked just like Emmett Till; my mom’s response was typical: to show me the snake before it tried to bite me. That night, she made me and my brother watch the documentary from beginning to end, ensuring we saw the irrefutable realities of the ways we’re made criminal and grotesque in the wake of enslavement. Then, my mom looked at me and cried, because, back then, the resemblance between Till and me was uncanny. Almost every year since then, I’ve either been told of our likeness directly, or indirectly. It perplexed me why folx seemed transfixed with my resemblance to Till as a site of inquiry. Later, I understood what was being conjured.
In retrospect, thinking about my life, the cosmogenesis of my politics is almost deterministic. I was born into a space that sweltered in the “lifelong pandemonium that [B]lack flesh can cause” (Haile 81). Maybe that’s why I refused to open my eyes the first week after escaping the womb. Willingly blind to it all until I couldn’t be. Until life wouldn’t let me. It raises the question: What do you do when home becomes a haunt? What does it mean when you discover that it always has been?
Afrosurrealists measure the gaps between conceptions of reality and absurdity. These gaps are found in “the reappearance of the slave ship in everyday life in the form of the prison, the camp, the school … and elsewhere in and as the tension between being and instrumentality that is Black being in the wake” (Sharpe 21). In In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Black studies professor Christina Sharpe describes the time that has passed since emancipation, and the systemic oppressions and violences folded with it, as enslavement’s afterlives. Sharpe unveils and names the haunting cycles of violence within these afterlives as “the wake.” Sharpe’s work sits within the metaphor of the wake in the entirety of its meanings, which include: keeping watch with the dead, the path of a ship, a consequence of something, in the line of flight and/or sight, awakening, and consciousness (18). Sharpe uses the term to create a “method along the lines of sitting with, gathering, and a tracking of … the archives of the everyday of Black immanent and imminent death … [and] the ways we resist, rupture and disrupt [the] immanence and imminence aesthetically and materially” (13).
Afrosurrealism makes these cycles more clear by laying textual memory side by side to construct a puzzle by conjoining its parts. Through the spectacular and the uncanny, Afrosurrealists build worlds and the bridges between them. These cycles of the wake offer you a kaleidoscope to the traditions and institutions we adore and revile, so they can be seen in new lights. Afrofuturist Ytasha Womack writes that understanding the patterns within the kaleidoscope “requires that we rotate, shifting the lens, flipping the prism of our story to get a full view” (Womack 27).
Kal—beautiful, eidos—form, scope—used to see.
Afrosurrealism conjures this kaleidoscope to identify the constantly shifting patterns of the Black quotidian and offers tools that transmute the horrific into the spectacular. Afrosurrealism isn’t static or didactic. It acts as a portal to timelines and dimensions, giving you the place and space to measure the gaps between the past, the present, and the future through rememory.
In December of 2012, I was visiting home from my freshman year at Morehouse College, when I had to confront the afterlives of a dark legacy. After passing a swerving truck on a back road in Oxford, North Carolina, two white men chased me into a gas station parking lot. Imagine the surreal experience of a Black boy, after sundown, in known Klan territory, with a shotgun to his face, in post-Trayvon Martin America. Now, imagine this moment compacted with being insistently reminded you resemble the martyr of the Civil Rights Movement for the majority of your life … right! It was a confrontation of the past, and a cacophony of the future; a haunting from the unseen, unheard, unnamed, and yet-to-be Black bodies who faced a death foretold.
The haunt is the acquitted murder of Henry “Dickie” Marrow in Oxford, North Carolina, in 1970; and the alleged suicide of Oxford police officer Mark Waymer in 2008; and the conviction of Oxford’s sheriff for conspiracy to murder a Black deputy. The haunt is also the stories within my Indigenous family about spiritual returns and cyclical time structures, and ways to survive in the Black quotidian that predate colonialism and transcend geotemporal boundaries. These ancestral ways of being and knowing identify how we are forced to see patterns, and how we are left to conjure a method to stop the failed colonial project and its recurrence plot. It’s knowing, then seeing, then surviving to immi/anence at the end of the world (Sharpe).
Afrosurrealism is a shiver from the amygdala that your descendants inherit. It is a textual and visual legacy of communal horror and survival that drags the audience to the past, propels into the future, and roots in the right now. Afrosurrealism leans toward posturing ways to understand the quotidian. This understanding informed the visceral fear I felt re-membering Till’s death in the “Jig-A-BoBo” episode of Lovecraft Country; and the irony when first reading the fugitive slave ad from Granville County in the North Carolina section of Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad; and when viewing the book-to-film adaptation of Blood Done Sign My Name at the local theatre. My encounters with these texts varied in time and place, but they are representative of the subjectivity of the Afrosurreal across media, and the transmutation of personal history, to collective memory, to critical engagement. Home became a haunt for me to share.
Afrosurrealism is my paternal grandmother’s alleged suicide in a state penitentiary; it’s her son, my dad, being murdered via neglect also under state care; it’s her grandson, my brother, living in their wake, also under state care. It’s Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s juxtaposition of prisoner, imprisoner, and the victims in the wake of the prison industrial complex in Chain-Gang All Stars. It’s me on the stage of Essence Fest, talking to Adjei-Brenyah of the ways his book reflected my family’s past, my present, and the plausible futures of the victims of a carceral state.
Afrosurrealism holds a mirror with thousands of refracted images, and dares you to find your reflection. Amiri Baraka explores how his contemporary Black experience manifests for Black people through his Afrosurreal plays, poems, and stories. Through Amiri’s essays, he draws windows to shared histories and subjective idiosyncrasies across the diaspora. In “Henry Dumas: Afro-Surreal Expressionist,” Baraka states that the world that Black people “inhabit rests on the bottom of the ocean, harnessed by memory, language, [and] image to that ‘railroad of human bones’ at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean” (Baraka 166). The Afrosurreal brings the bottom of the ocean to the surface for readers or, for writers, challenges you to get in the water to find it yourself.
In the “Afrosurreal Manifesto,” D. Scot Miller argues that Afrosurrealists look for what makes them feel “that beyond this visible world, there is an invisible world striving to manifest.” Based on Miller’s manifesto, it is the Afrosurrealist’s aim to identify “the invisible” and express the “unknown wonders” within the Black historical and cultural aesthetic. Audre Lorde frames that the ability to “acknowledge dreams is to sometimes acknowledge the distance between those dreams and our present situation” (Lorde 1984, 38). The possibilities embedded in juxtaposing what was, what is, and what could be are a lesson in how vantage points inform Afrosurreal thought. This juxtaposition of non-linear time seeps into the gaps between Black people with shared histories of being othered, yet traversing a multitude of different lived experiences inside, outside, and through the haunting. The Afrosurreal closes the gaps between what is possible and what is plausible, challenging the audience to sit with why the difference between the two even matters.
Afrosurrealism explores othering through anthropomorphizing labor in Sorry to Bother You, turning the hood into a deep tech experiment in They Cloned Tyrone, and marking the monumental targets on the backs of Black boys in I’m a Virgo. The range of Afrosurrealist media often marks the experience that “the most violently antagonistic of contradictions, colors, [and] shapes animate the personalities, settings, [and] language” at the heart of the continually insidious colonial project (Baraka 165-166). Through the construction, reconstruction, and deconstruction of tropes, themes, and motifs, Afrosurrealist texts create a smorgasbord of meaning to decode, in hopes of conjuring a sociohistorical literacy throughout the African diaspora.
Afrosurrealists illustrate the idiosyncrasies and peculiarities of their Black environment through representing and subverting the histories and interiorities of specific communities and histories. The discourse that emerges from this conjures a plurality of synchronous ideas and perspectives on Blackness, or a Black fantasia, from throughout the diaspora. The Afrosurreal crafts a space to freely understand the rhapsody that emerges from this discourse across media. My reading considers a myriad of sources, both material and imaginative, to conjure an improvised but synchronous narrative of the Black quotidian. When Afrosurrealists intentionally sit in the wake, and evoke the plurality of experiences that connect the diaspora, they ensure that other Black creators are initiated into our collective histories. Through the continued contributions of Afrosurrealists—and the reading of old texts with an Afrosurrealist lens—emergent writers and thinkers can build on the Black ontologies and epistemologies inherent to speculative thought. In Mumbo Jumbo, Ishmael Reed argues that through this process of re-membering, one becomes susceptible to the Black codified language that Ishmael Reed calls Knockings, or the “ultra ultra high frequency electromagnetic wave propagation” that “we came over here with” (Reed 25). Afrosurrealism, then, is breaking the code and simultaneously reading and contributing to a palimpsest of Black histories, poetics, and praxologies.
Speculative movements have worked alongside sociopolitical movements, supplementally providing the needs, dreams, and realities of Black people throughout the diaspora. While activists forge a praxis through their advocacy, community, and disruptive work, Black speculators have crafted narratives that reveal pasts, challenge the present, and foretell futures. Afrosurrealism’s concomitant engagement in radical thought and action plays a significant role in speculating, (re)imagining, and (re)historifying. The Afrosurreal thrusts the audience into a cycle of repetitive images that incessantly broadens their understanding of the world through simultaneously affirming and disrupting how we perceive meaning from transmedia texts. Take Sorry to Bother You, Supacell, They Cloned Tyrone, and Get Out, all of which position Black people as colonial experiments toward the advancement of white society. While each of these pieces of media approaches interrogating Black people as lab experiments in unique ways, the discourse between them emphasizes the known histories of Black people and communities being experiments, like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the immortalization of Henrietta Lacks, and Adriana Smith’s corpse being used as an incubator. The speculative and the fantastic hold space for the existential concerns of our family, neighbors, and communities to be explored, resisted, and resolved. Further, in the realm of the fantastic, meaning, safety, catharsis, and hope can be found amongst the o/repression and sorrow.
Afrosurrealism inspires writers and readers through its use of pastiche. Such interdiscursive aesthetics evoke a desire to return to the source, and place each text alongside the ones that came before, to craft new stories and expand the textual conversation across geotemporalities. The juxtaposition of existent and emergent Afrosurrealist media provokes an iconoclastic need to (re)mythologize around Black histories and futures in order to (re)orient a collective Black diasporic ontology through (re)membering. Through Afrosurrealism, we develop a love craft that prioritizes Black political thought and collective histories; a love craft which rejects Western understandings of the world while folding these histories and philosophies within grand speculative narratives. Afrosurrealism, then, becomes an ode to the limitless pasts and plausible futures.
Binaries are often viewed in the West in a way that has skewed the perception of the reality of cultural performance. Afrosurrealists have crafted narratives that evoke how iconography is used to disrupt Eurocentric, linear, censored, and constrained perceptions of the geotemporal. When one refers to the bottom, it is often deemed less than, while it can also be viewed as a foundation upon which everything stands. The West has taken the behaviors from people of the Global South and skewed them to be ridiculous and fantastical. Afrosurrealism reorients this worldview through its irony, pastiche, interdiscursivity, and the juxtapositions between the quotidian and the absurd.
In “The Great Change and the Great Book: Nnedi Okorafor’s Postcolonial, Post-Apocalyptic Africa and the Promise of Black Speculative Fiction,” Joshua Yu Burnett uses Nalo Hopkinson’s introduction to So Long Been Dreaming to read Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death. Hopkinson argues that Black writers who hope to achieve postcolonialism must “take the meme of colonizing the natives, and, from the experience of the colonized, critique it, pervert it, fuck with it” (Burnett 135). He takes Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s prophecy for an ultimate trickster, and utilizes the omnipotence and ambivalence of Blackness to develop a “postcolonial, post-apocalyptic Africa [that] is a messy, often ambiguous place” (Burnett 148). To take on the duty to read and write within what one believes to be Blackness is to craft a perspective that considers the exuberant and the flamboyant and the silent and sterile. In A Burst of Light and Other Essays, Audre Lorde writes, “caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Through Afrosurrealism, Black writers are taking on ontological work that is life-sustaining as it seeks and creates meaning in the failed colonial project.
Due to the visibility funnel perpetuated by publishing and access to literature, there are few writers who are able to craft out of love rather than capitalist gain. However, if I were to compile an abridged list, I would point to the works of Nnedi Okorafor, N. K. Jemisin, H. D. Hunter, Jabari Asim, Percival Everett, Rivers Solomon, Helen Oyeyemi, others aforementioned, some unable to be listed, and even more yet to be discovered. These writers “show postcolonial speculative fiction’s potential as a site for counter hegemonic discourse, as a space for examining possibilities that are not available within mainstream realist literature” (Burnett 134). These writers become conjurers as they operate between necromancy and prophecy to (re)imagine our ontological existence. What place has more space than the Black imagination? After all, who has died more than us?
Yvette Ndlovu’s Drinking From Graveyard Wells provides a speculative praxis for making space for and sitting with the dead. Her story “Three Deaths and the Ocean of Time” is a prime example for the ways that Afrosurrealist thought challenges, conjures, and facilitates an ancestral and archival seance. In “Three Deaths,” Yvette streamlined several complex ideas in just over fifteen pages. She details the haunts of our unnamed and unvoiced ancestors to reinter our histories, the disruption in Afrodiasporic scientific literacies by Western philosophies and ontologies, the disorientation of Western conceptions of time and the reorientation to more African notions through Sasa and the Zamani, and the gaps in the archive that relegate Black women and femmes to the margins and in some cases invisibility. But most importantly, she illustrates the importance of doing the work to recover our collective ancestors, bearing witness to these histories, and allowing your work to depart into the world to shift it on its axis. Through “Three Deaths,” Ndlovu theorizes and models how one can sit with living and vicariously institutional archives to be a witness to the histories wedged in the gap, and a steward for their memory. It’s the manifestation of Toni Morrison’s literary archeology, Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation, Christina Sharpe’s wake work, James B. Haile III’s analytical fiction, and more frameworks toward discovering, retrieving, conjuring, and teaching Black histories to understand the present and the quotidian.
Unlike Afrofuturism, which connects pasts with futures, Afrosurrealism centers the right now to understand the interiorities of the past, name how cycles are repeated in the present, and offer pathways to plausible futures.
Afrosurrealism is Zora Neale Hurston speaking from the grave. It’s Langston Hughes’s body being buried beneath the Schomburg, a remixed 135th Street library, the epicenter of the Harlem Renaissance. It’s Victoria Christopher Murray sitting with his grave as a site of discovery for her novel Harlem Rhapsody.
Afrosurrealism is a rhapsody and a rupture. Afrosurrealism is a theory, a praxis, a discipline, an aesthetic, a haunting, a requiem. It’s then; it’s now. The Black Quotidian reveals when we were the alien, the slave, the inhuman, the grotesque, the experiment, the revolutionary, the superhero, the brainwashed, the erased, the remembered. The apocalypse has happened. And it’s still. And we still.
Asé.