Suzanne Césaire [Roussi] (11 August 1915 to 16 May 1966) was born in Martinique, and was a French-speaking writer, poet, scholar, post-colonialist, and Surrealist.
In 1936 she married Aimė Cėsaire, with whom she had six children.
Raised and educated in an assimilationist French culture - she met her husband while finishing her education in Paris - Suzanne was a pioneer in the search for an alternative cultural framework to that provided for Martinique by colonial discourse. With her husband, she set up the magazine Tropiques, in an early edition of which she attacked both the aping of traditional French styles of poetry by West Indian writers, and 'The Happy Antilles' view of the island promoted by official French culture. Her poem of 1941, Misère d'une poésie, condemned what she termed "Littérature de hamac. Littérature de sucre et de vanille. Tourisme littéeraire" [Literaure of the hammock, of sugar and vanilla. Literary tourism].[1]
Her encounter with André Breton opened the way for her development of Afro-Surrealism[2] - her use of surrealist concepts to illuminate the colonial dilemma.[3] Her dictum - "La poésie martinique sera cannibale ou ne sera pas" [Cannibal poetry or nothing][4] - pointed the way to a re-capture of the Caribbean roots of her culture, as opposed to a force-fed Europeanism.
While largely overshadowed in her lifetime by her husband and his clear-cut, if theoretical doctrine of Nėgritude,[5] Suzanne's repudiation of simple idealised answers - whether assimilationist, Africanist, or creole - to the ambiguities of the West Indian situation has proved increasingly influential in later postcolonial studies.[6]
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Afro-Surrealism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Afro-Surrealism or Afrosurrealism is a literary and cultural aesthetic that is a response to mainstream surrealism in order to reflect the lived experience of people of color. First coined by Amiri Baraka,[1] this movement focuses on the present day experience of African Americans. Much of Afro-Surrealism is based on the manifesto written by D. Scot Miller, in which he says, "Afro-Surrealism sees that all 'others' who create from their actual, lived experience are surrealist..." Afro-Surrealism can be seen in music, photography, film, the visual arts and poetry. Notable practitioners of Afro-Surrealism include Bob Kaufman, Krista Franklin, Kool Keith, Samuel R. Delany, Roman Bearden and Deana Lawson.
Contents
1 Influence
2 Development
3 Themes
3.1 The Future-Past
3.2 The everyday lived experience
3.3 Haunting
3.4 Present day realism
4 Examples of Afrosurrealist Works
4.1 Zong!, M. NourbSe Philip and Setaey Adamu Boateng
4.2 Beloved, Toni Morrison
5 References
Influence
Afro-Surrealism came about after the initial rise in surrealism in the mid-1920s, after André Breton wrote the Surrealist Manifesto. Similar to the mainstream version of surrealism, Afro-Surrealism was not a single movement or style. Rather, it incorporated aspects of the Harlem Renaissance, Négritude and magical realism. Aspects of Afro-Surrealism can be traced to Martiniquan Suzanne Césaire’s discussion of the “revolutionary impetus of surrealism” in the 1940s.[2]
Marvelous Realism, coined by the Haitian novelist Jacques Stephen Alexis, can be seen as a precursor to Afro-Surrealism. In his 1956 essay for Présence Africaine, he wrote, "What, then, is the Marvellous, except the imagery in which a people wraps its experience, reflects its conception of the world and of life, its faith, its hope, its confidence in man, in a great justice, and the explanation which it finds for the forces antagonistic to progress?”[3] In his work, Alexis is seen to have an acute sense of reality that is not dissimilar to traditional surrealism. Suzanne Césaire, a Martinique writer, similarly wrote about the surreality of living away from the Caribbean yet having ties to it.
Development
Afro-Surrealism was coined by Amiri Baraka in his 1988 essay on Black Arts Movement avant-garde writer Henry Dumas.[2] Baraka notes that Dumas is able to write about ancient mysteries that were simultaneously relevant to the present day. This idea that the past resurfaces to haunt the present day is a crucial to Afro-Surrealism.
Cinematographer Arthur Jafa expanded the field of Afro-Surrealism by experimenting with film. Jafa introduces the idea of "the alien familiar," in order to represent the Black experience and its innate surreal characteristics. "I want it to have something that I and my friends call 'the alien familiar.' If a work succeeds in a way or is able to conjure what a Black cinema would be or what this hypothetical manifestation of this particular tradition in the cinematic arena might be, it should be both alien because you’ve never seen anything quite like it, and at the same time, it should be familiar on some level to Black audiences."[4] This focus on the alien aspect of the Black experience, and on Black folk culture, are what separate Afro-Surrealism from magical realism and surrealism.
A Manifesto of Afro-Surreal was written by D. Scot Miller's and was published in 2009.[1] The manifesto delineates Afro-Surrealism from Surrealism and Afro-Futurism. The manifesto also declares the necessity of Afro-Surrealism, especially in San Francisco, California. The manifesto lists ten tenants that Afro-Surrealism follows including how "Afro-Surrealists restore the cult of the past," and how "Afro-Surreal presupposes that beyond this visible world, there is an invisible world striving to manifest, and it is our job to uncover it."
Themes
Deana Lawson, Emily and Daughter, 2002
The Future-Past
[5] Unlike Afro-Futurism which speculates on black possibilities in the future, Afrosurrealism, as Scot describes, is about the present. Rather than speculate on the coming of the four horseman, Afrosurrealists understand that they rode through too long ago. Through Afrosurrealism, artists expose this form of the future past that is "RIGHT NOW." Most Afrosurrealists reject the study of the future pushing themselves to focus on the present, the future that has already past.
The everyday lived experience
Much of Afro-Surrealism is concerned with the everyday life because it is said that there is nothing more surreal than the Black experience. An example of this would be a photo by Deana Lawson called Emily and Daughter. According to Terri Francis, "Afrosurrealism is art with skin on it where the texture of the object tells its story, how it weathered burial below consciousness, and how it emerged somewhat mysteriously from oceans of forgotten memories and discarded keepsakes. This photograph figures Afrosurrealism as bluesy, kinky-spooky."[6]
Haunting
Afro-Surrealism is often described as having a sense of a haunting welcoming. As Francis describes it, there is a sense of disruption from the past in an otherwise ordinary or comfortable situation. An example of Afro-Surrealism seen as haunting can be seen in Toni Morrison's Beloved, in that the dead baby comes back to haunt Sethe.[3] The past resurfacing in the present is key aspect of Afro-Surrealism.
Present day realism
Afro-Surrealist scholar Rochelle Spencer identifies at least three different subgenres of black speculative art, and Spencer argues that Afro-Surrealism is the most present-focus, though it is not devoid of technology and may include allusions to modern technology.[7] According to Francis, the juxtaposition between the old and the present day is what makes Afro-Surrealism so unique. As Francis puts it, "Surrealism here, the Afro-surreal, like the marvelous discussed above, is actually a realism so real, so contrary to the norms of publicized blackness, that it represents a rupture, a radical break from ordinary understanding such that the old feels new—because it was never known."[3] Although this movement is related to Afrofuturism, it is different in that instead of focusing on the future, Afro-Surrealism focuses more on the present day.
Examples of Afrosurrealist Works
Zong!, M. NourbSe Philip and Setaey Adamu Boateng
In [8]Zong!, M. NourbSe Philip crafts a powerful counter-narrative surrounding the events of the Zong massacre. Utilizing the words from the legal decision to build her poetry, Philip rejects the idea of an archival past. Instead Philip looks to the present moment to understand how to read this legal decision and understand the case. Following the footsteps of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Philip presupposes the notion of a past that is not past allowing these past artifacts to haunt the present moment. Rather than organize the fragments, Philip allows the fragments to tell themselves. This is not to say that Philip gives the fragments voices, but instead gives them space. The space in the poem allows Philip’s audience to hear the silence of these voices, to truly understand the missing narratives form the past and the role that has on the present.
Beloved, Toni Morrison
As mentioned earlier, Toni Morrison’s [9]Beloved remains an important milestone for Afrosurrealists. Here, Morrison imagines a narrative of a slave women grieving the death of her baby daughter, Beloved. With no trace of a past, Beloved reappears of on the steps of 124, confused and looking for her mother. Following this moment, the novel crafts a haunting tale of a woman seeking to understand the sudden reappearance of her daughter and the scars left behind from slavery. In Beloved, Morrison attempts to come to grip with the legacies left by slavery, challenging the notion that these legacies exits only from the past. From the epigraph, “Sixty Million and more,” Morrison presupposes there is no way to count those affected from slavery and additionally, that the number is ever-growing into the present. In her award-winning novel, Morrison expands the idea of the past, attempting to demonstrate the past is ever present and moreover, that the past is RIGHT NOW.
References
D. Scot, Miller. "Call it Afro-Surreal". San Francisco Bay Guarian. Retrieved 8 December 2015.
"Editor's Notes". Black Camera. 5 (1): 1–2. 2013-01-01. ISSN 1947-4237.
Francis, Terri (2013-01-01). "Introduction: The No-Theory Chant of Afrosurrealism". Black Camera. 5 (1): 95–112. ISSN 1947-4237.
Arthur Jafa, “The Notion of Treatment: Black Aesthetics and Film, based on an interview with Peter Hassli and additional discussions with Pearl Bowser,” in Oscar Micheaux and His Circle: African-American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era, ed. Pearl Bowser et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 18.
Miller, D. S. "Afrosurreal Manifesto: Black Is the New black—a 21st-Century Manifesto." Black Camera, vol. 5 no. 1, 2013, pp. 113-117. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/525948.
Francis, Terri (2013-01-01). "Meditation". Black Camera. 5 (1): 94–94. ISSN 1947-4237.
"Why Black Science Fiction Studies Matter". www.themarysue.com. Retrieved 2015-12-16.
Philip, Marlene Nourbese. Zong! Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2008. Print.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved: A Novel. New York: Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 1987. Print.
