Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture (18 page)

P
oet and artist D. Scot Miller was intrigued by Afrofuturism. As an advisor to the experimental journal
Nocturnes Literary Review
, Miller was immersed in the genre at the onset. The San Francisco resident frequented Alondra Nelson's Afrofuturism Listserv and later consulted with the East Coast collective the Black Futurists. But when Miller began writing his book
Knot Frum Hear
, he wasn't sure if Afrofuturism was the best way to describe the endeavor. “It's like science fiction, but it's not. It's like fantasy, but it happens in real time,” he said, recalling attempts to describe it to friends. It wasn't until he read Black Arts movement vanguard Amiri Baraka's introduction to Henry Dumas's
Ark of Bones and Other Stories
that he discovered the term Afrosurreal.

Baraka claimed that Dumas's hybrid mystical lens is Afro-surreal. Dumas “created an entirely different world organically connected to this one,” Baraka writes. “They are morality tales, magical resonating dream emotions and images, shifting ambiguous terror, mystery, implied revelation,” writes Baraka in his essay “Henry Dumas: Afro-Surreal Expressionist.” He continues, “But they are also stories of real life, now or whenever, constructed in weirdness and poetry in which the contemporaneousness of essential themes is clear.” Afro-surreal would come to explain the southern folklore and magic of Zora Neale Hurston as well as the hauntings and history of Toni Morrison.

Afro-surreal triggered a new worldview for Miller too. It described the mystical, present-day leanings in his work. In 2002 Miller reached out to Baraka and interviewed him. Impressed with Miller's excitement, Baraka encouraged the young poet. “He said I was open to continue to explore and continue to open
up doors,” Miller says. “It was like wind at my back. I took it pretty seriously.”

Miller, a pop culture writer, wrote a bevy of essays on art and referenced Afro-surrealism as he saw it appear in film and music. “My editor said, ‘OK, what is it?' and that's how we came up with the Afro-surrealism edition of the
San Francisco Bay Guardian.”
The edition ran in 2009 and featured essays and art from the likes of Greg Tate, known for his hip-hop and Afrofuturism critiques, and Amy Wiley. But it was Miller's “Afrosurrealism Manifesto” that became the anchor for a new wave of surrealists. Referencing the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and the Negritude movement by black francophones, Miller argued that Afro-surrealism, in all its fantastic forms, is not Afrofuturism, nor is it surrealism. The first world and third world have collapsed, says the manifesto. What we live in today is the Afro-surreal.

“Afro-surrealists expose this from a ‘future-past' called right now,” writes Miller. “Right now, Barack Hussein Obama is America's first black president. Right now, Afro-surreal 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.”

“I honestly believe it's the in-betweens,” Miller says. “It's outside of everyone's comfort zone.”

The manifesto's tenets celebrate the invisible world and nature, the absurd and the whimsical, in depicting the beauties and dichotomies of the day. “Afro-surrealists use excess as the only legitimate means of subversion and hybridization as a form of disobedience,” Miller writes. “Afro-surrealists strive for rococo: the beautiful, the sensuous, and the whimsical.” With a
penchant for masks, dandyism, and eighteenth-century aesthetics, Afro-surrealism decontextualizes the day. To quote surrealist poets Aime and Suzanne Cesaire, Afro-surrealism sparkles with “the marvelous.” The emphasis on today rather than the future, the minimal tech, heavy folklore, and mystical prism, according to Miller, makes an aesthetic all its own.

Miller is on to something. These are surreal times. President Obama's election and the countermovements, extremist media, and confusion of analysts and journalists who just can't reconcile what they were seeing without dropping dated lingo of the past would read as the sci-fi of yesteryear. Today the reelection of a black president, gay marriage, legalized marijuana, the war against women's fertility rights, violent outbreaks, the Arab Spring, class didactics, and the browning of America are causing some serious reevaluation, and the outbreak of fuming anger juxtaposed with excitable glee makes for great art.

Saturday Night Live
made history with their record-breaking political parodies, but most of the laughable skits were verbatim quotes from presidential debates and press conferences. No satire needed. If you followed the chair debacle from the 2012 Republican National Convention, at which actor Clint Eastwood berated an empty chair, supposedly talking to the president in an attempt at improv theater, you've seen the surreal. Thousands of people took to their cell phones and iPads, tweeting photos of themselves waving a finger at an empty La-Z-Boy during the convention, to which President Obama's feed responded with a photo of him seated in a White House chair, back to the audience, full ears in profile, and the caption, “This seat's taken.” It's the ultimate slam-dunk tweet. The next day, all the political media talked
about was Eastwood's chair episode. Forget the party platform, forget the other speakers that night; the chair stole the show. It could all read like a bizarro-world alternative history if it weren't reality. Capturing the dramatic victories and the about-face politics in all their folkloric glory in real time is Afro-surrealism.

In fact, Miller says he couldn't have written his manifesto without President Obama's polar shift. “It highlights so much of the module change that has taken place, and the absurdities of the outcomes of that change. Like when Bill O'Reilly said America is no longer a white nation … America hasn't been a white nation in a long time.”

When I think about Afro-surrealism, I think of divvying up Sun Ra's work into a right brain/left brain, masculine/feminine hybrid, with, say, his love of all things futuristic, space-bound, and electric on one side and his African mythmaking, metaphysics, and real-world efforts to heal through music on the other.

The attempt to divide him in two is very sci-fi, but it makes for a great example. Afro-surrealism, as Miller frames it, is lowtech, present-day, and sees very little difference between the dream world and the waking one. “For other cultures dream time and real time is the same time. This idea that dreams are premonitions, all of us do that,” Miller says.

“It's not about tapping into the subconscious, but you're already tapped in to that. You're bringing in the dream, the fantasy and the marvelous. While you're asleep and awake you are manifesting. People have to be able to transform their living situation.”

The genre differs from surrealism only in the highly mystical bent. Leopold Senghor, Senegal's first president and also a poet, saw a difference between early black surrealists and their European contemporaries, believing that European surrealism was “empirical” while African surrealism was “mystical and metaphorical.”

What else is Afro-surreal? Wale Kehinde's Renaissance-style paintings of modern-day black men with the flower-tinged backgrounds and Kara Walker's infamous Victorian-style silhouettes of slave-era stereotypes fall within this vein, says Miller. Wale takes men with hip-hop swag and poses them like the French kings, knights, and dukes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Walker's silhouettes, despite their popularity, are harshly criticized as profane and offensive for their large-scale size and the freakish sex and violence.

“With Afro-surreal, it allows us to address the absurdity head-on,” says Miller. “That's why. Kara Walker has an understanding of the absurdity of it. Sometimes you have to be irreverent. Sometimes the situation is so absurd that the only way to address it is to be absurd.”

Artist Nick Cave's
Soundsuits
exhibit, a hybrid of monstersize wearable art and sculpture is Afro-surreal. Writer Johnny Ray Huston described them as “acid-trip Bigfoot creatures.” A former Alvin Ailey dancer and chair of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's fashion department, Cave made the giant ensembles from natural and artificial materials.

Rapper Nicki Minaj's cartoonish high fashion, neon wigs, comical expressions, and multiple personalities; the social commentary, spaghetti western violence, and humor in Quentin
Tarantino's
Django Unchained;
the mythology in the post-Katrina narrative
Beasts of the Southern Wild;
even the over-the-top irreverent antics in rapper Trinidad James's near-ridiculous video for “All Gold Everything” are evidence of the Afro-surreal in pop culture.

Afro-surrealism also flirts with sexual ambiguity, one of the tenets in Miller's manifesto. The androgyny and dandyism of pop star Prince (who pioneered the seventeenth-century French aesthetic in 1980s fashion) is a strong influence. But Afro-surrealism relishes ambiguity in general. In Ralph Ellison's
Invisible Man
, Rinehart the runner, a dandy pimp, snakes through a fluid underworld as a prophetic underlord who brings light to a world that the main character has never seen, thus blurring reality. Miller says that Rinehart's trademark sunglasses and hat are masks. Masks are treasured in the Afro-surreal—the more gothic and indigenous, the better. Why? The mask is magical, draws wearers out of their conventions. But Afro-surrealism isn't always over the top. The theater of Suzan-Lori Parks and her contemporary plays about black life are also under the Afro-surreal banner.

“Afro-Surrealism rejects the quiet servitude that characterizes existing roles for African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, women and queer folk. Only through the mixing, melding and cross-conversion of these supposed classifications can there be hope for liberation. Afro-Surrealism is intersexed, Afro-Asiatic, Afro-Cuban, mystical, silly and profound,” write Miller.

Today, many artists who create Afro-surreal writing and art are also Afrofuturists. Just as Sun Ra embodies both aesthetics (he wouldn't have called himself Afrofuturist or Afro-surreal), so do the new wave of artists working in the twenty-first century.
But like Sun Ra, even those who describe themselves as both often have a hard time separating the two ideals in their work. “I actually like that struggle, that both of these terms are very much still being defined,” says Krista Franklin, a renowned collagist interviewed by Sixty Inches From the Center. “I'm a science fiction geek and I love horror and the supernatural, so it makes a lot of sense for my work to be described as Afrofuturist and Afro-surrealist.”

The two are flipsides of the same coin, with shared influences and champions. Today, the two aesthetics are so intertwined that it's nearly impossible to talk about one without talking about the other. For the Afrofuturist, the future can be mystical and technology can be mythical. As a society, we're hardwired to technology we can't live without, from Google Maps and satellites to energy pipelines that heat our homes. We are technology dependent today. In this space-time continuum where the future is now, the idea of the present gets sticky. But the best distinction is that Afrofuturism is more tech-heavy and races between the future and the distant past, whereas Afro-surrealism is low-tech and placed squarely in today, though it has a serious infatuation with seventeenth-century fashion and masks.

Henry Dumas is one of the vanguards for new age Afro-surrealists. An unsung poet with a growing cult following, he was born July 20, 1934, in Sweet Water, Alabama. He quickly became one of the emerging writers in Harlem's Black Arts scene. Sun Ra and prolific writer Amiri Baraka were friends of his. But Dumas's work
was uniquely different from the work surfacing in the Black Arts movement of the time. A former airman in the air force, Dumas was introduced to Sufism and Arab arts and myths while stationed in Saudi Arabia. Combining his longtime fascination with folklore and his studies of mysticism, Dumas wove both into poems and stories about contemporary love and life. Through Dumas's lens, the fantastic and magical were treasures of daily life, and he wrote the ordinary and extraordinary as a through line for the contemporary black experience. His work appeared in black literary magazines, including the
Negro Digest
and the
Liberator.
And he was one of the contributors to the black liberation anthology edited by Baraka and culturist Larry Neal. “Ark of Bones” is Dumas's most popular story. When an ark lands in an Arkansas river, Headeye is initiated to claim his destiny as the head of the ship. The ship itself contains the bones of black people who died in the Middle Passage or through other racist means.

Those who chronicle Dumas's life note that he and Sun Ra were very close, swapping mystical insights, cultural nuggets, and their own theories on art's role in shaping the culture of the day. Dumas was heavily influenced by Sun Ra's takes on space, and Sun Ra was captivated by southern folklore. They shared an inquiry into the esoteric. In the spring of 1968, after leaving one of Sun Ra's band's sessions, Dumas, then a married father of two, was murdered by a policeman in a New York subway. It was a case of mistaken identity. Dumas was thirty-three.