Afrosurreal Manifesto: Black Is the New black—a 21st-Century Manifesto

I’m not a surrealist. I just paint what I see.

—Frida Kahlo

The Past and the Prelude

In his introduction to the classic novel Invisible Man (1952), ambiguous black and literary icon Ralph Ellison says the process of creation was “far more disjointed than [it] sounds … such was the inner-outer subjective-objective process, pied rind and surreal heart.”

Ellison’s allusion is to his book’s most perplexing character, Rinehart the Runner, a dandy, pimp, numbers runner, drug dealer, prophet, and preacher. The protagonist of Invisible Man takes on the persona of Rinehart so that “I may not see myself as others see me not.” Wearing a mask of dark shades and large-brimmed hat, he is warned by a man known as the fellow with the gun, “Listen Jack, don’t let nobody make you act like Rinehart. You got to have a smooth tongue, a heartless heart, and be ready to do anything.”

And Ellison’s lead man enters a world of prostitutes, hopheads, cops on the take, and masochistic parishioners. He says of Rinehart, “He was years ahead of me, and I was a fool. The world in which we live is fluidity, and Rine the Rascal was at home.” The marquee of Rinehart’s store-front church declares:

Behold the Invisible!Thy will be done O Lord!I See all, Know all, Tell all, Cure all. You shall see the unknown wonders.

Ellison and Rinehart had seen it but had no name for it.

In an introduction to prophet Henry Dumas’s 1974 book Ark of Bones and Other Stories, Amiri Baraka puts forth a term for what he describes as Dumas’s “skill at creating an entirely different world organically connected to this one … the Black aesthetic in its actual contemporary and lived life.”

The term he puts forth is Afrosurreal Expressionism.

Dumas had seen it. Baraka had named it.

This is Afrosurreal!

This Is Not Afrosurreal

Surrealism

Leopold Senghor, poet, first president of Senegal, and African surrealist, made this distinction: “European Surrealism is empirical. African Surrealism is mystical and metaphorical.” Jean-Paul Sartre said that the art of Senghor and the African surrealist (or Negritude) movement “is revolutionary because it is surrealist, but itself is surrealist because it is black.” Afrosurrealism sees that all “others” who create from their actual, lived experience are surrealist, per Frida Kahlo. The root for “Afro-” can be found in “Afro-Asiatic,” meaning a shared language between black, brown, and Asian peoples of the world. What was once called the “third world,” until the other two collapsed.

Afro-Futurism

Afro-Futurism is a diaspora intellectual and artistic movement that turns to science, technology, and science fiction to speculate on black possibilities in the future. Afrosurrealism is about the present. There is no need for tomorrow’s-tongue speculation about the future. Concentration camps, bombed-out cities, famines, and enforced sterilization have already happened. To the Afro-surrealist, the Tasers are here. The Four Horsemen rode through too long ago to recall. What is the future? The future has been around so long it is now the past.

Afrosurrealists expose this from a “future-past” called RIGHT NOW.

RIGHT NOW, Barack Hussein Obama is America’s first black president.

RIGHT NOW, Afrosurreal is the best description to the reactions, the genuflections, the twists, and the unexpected turns this “browning” of White-Straight-Male-Western-Civilization has produced.

The Present, or Right Now

San Francisco, the most liberal and artistic city in the nation, has one of the nation’s most rapidly declining black urban populations. This is a sign of a greater illness that is chasing out all artists, renegades, daredevils, and outcasts. No black people means no black artists, and all you yet-untouched freaks are next. Only freaky black art—Afrosurreal art—in the museums, galleries, concert venues, and streets of this (slightly) fair city can save us!

San Francisco, the land of Afrosurreal poet laureate Bob Kaufman, can be at the forefront in creating an emerging aesthetic. In this land of...