It was a Colored Girl

1. How Do We Build?: Developing A Process

A report from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency states that “patterns of development, transportation infrastructure, and building location and design—the built environment—directly affect the natural environment.”12 Yet some architects have been building structures that co-exist with the natural environment, that promote harmony and an appreciation of nature. So can we develop new systems? Perhaps, but the reason we can’t dismantle anything is that we mimic and replicate the actions of our oppressors. We mimic the same surveillance, the same violence, the same approaches that could benefit from futuristic rethinking. We direct anger at people, who theoretically, could support us; we don’t extend invitations to collaborate. That’s a problem. It’s easy to direct anger or frustration at people with less power . . . Juan Breá and Mary Low, in “Notes on the Economic Causes of Humor,” published in the Surrealist anthology Black, Brown and Beige, explain humor and love to those unwilling to understand either. Humor should work to build equality.13 A good joke surprises and challenges existing power dynamics. The Surrealists build with humor and love. We can create new buildings, systems, and processes. We need to join forces, build a strong and beautiful working-class coalition. That’s what we need.

It was a colored girl.

My friend Jeremy invites me to his class to speak on AfroSurrealism. This kind gesture allows for a conversation with other artists interested in Surrealism, in its games, manifestos, and “submitted artifacts.”14 Jeremy asks me about Suzanne Césaire’s Great Camouflage, and I tell the class I’m embarrassed not to have read it. I’ve read only fragments of Césaire’s work in Rosemont and Kelley’s Black Brown and Beige. in the International Journal of Surrealism’s “The Problem of Woman” issue, and in scattered references from other Surrealist writers.15 After the guest lecture, I borrow Great Camouflage from Harlem’s Hamilton Grange Library.

And then I realize I did read it, many years ago, as an undergraduate, in a class titled “Africa Diaspora and the World.” The class introduced many students to Black political thought. We read Suzanne and Aimé Césaire. We read Frantz Fanon. We learned about the Mau Mau rebellion. We discussed the work of Patricia Hill Collins . . . I didn’t understand these ideas then but Suzanne Césaire allows us to understand Négritude. We usually think of the big three—Damas, Senghor, and Aimé. Suzanne’s writing, too, clarifies Négritude as confrontational. It addresses racist stereotypes and challenges and inverts them. If Leo Frobenius categorizes Black people as passive, Suzanne suggests that observation offers its own challenge and resistance . . . The Noble Savage is caricature—a stereotype associated with Indigenous colonized peoples. To live in harmony with the world isn’t to be weak. If we imply that the test of intelligence or personhood is domination or control, then we all lose. If we argue that those with greater power (physical or financial) or technologies are smarter, more deserving, or more human, then what does that mean for all people—racial and ethnic minorities, women, those in economic distress? What does that mean even for the wealthy man who is not of color? The work from disability justice advocates demonstrates that anyone can become disabled—lose a limb or an eye or develop a chronic illness. Anyone can lose power in societies built on hierarchized strata.

Suzanne’s rethinking of hierarchies deepens connection. It gets us to something more authentic. If you’re Black or Brown and you view people who aren’t of color as your intellectual superiors, then you can’t have a genuine conversation. If you believe you somehow deserve to be oppressed—or to be an oppressor—then you can’t form friendships, enjoy life, or create any sort of meaningful change. AfroSurrealism advocates for a better life for everyone. That’s its challenge and its beauty. Legal scholar Lani Guinier reminds us that “citizenship is the ultimate reflection of individual dignity and autonomy.”16 We must remind ourselves that historically, people of color and people with fewer resources have had to fight for citizenship. To be a citizen means to have a voice, and we’ve had to fight to maintain ours. We must also consider those who don’t have the full rights of citizenship. How do we guarantee their freedom? An AfroSurreal mindset helps. What if we listened to more voices? What if we said that children, people with mental illness, can be heard too, that their creativity is part of the exhibition, the installation, or the public sphere? Those ideas, we know, are gifts from Breton’s French Surrealism . . . If we extend this argument and amplify voices from Black and Brown communities, from women and less empowered genders, then that gives us AfroSurrealism or EthnoSurrealism. AfroSurrealism then reveals the co-existence of multiple political and economic concerns, including our relationship with the environment.

While people may find Négritude too essentialist and outmoded, we should focus on one long-term implication, the paradox that Suzanne unfolds. Maybe here I’m just repeating what people have already heard, from stronger writers and thinkers, such as Hortense Spillers. Spillers’ “The Idea of Black Culture” suggests, from my thinking, that all cultures (if we define culture as a specific way of life) challenge and restructure dominant ideologies.17 That’s not to say that all cultures offer salutary effects, at all times. But if we all participate, willing or unwilling, in the broader framework, then we need to consider how specific communities alter our relationships with time, people, and physical space.

That’s how we start to build.

Can an AfroSurrealist framework allow us to construct something new? In the essay “A Voice for Surrealism,” we learn how Suzanne Césaire addressed the “topics of myth, gender, and race.”18 Further, we understand how Suzanne sought to

transform the mentality . . . [find] a force for decoloniality in the figure of nature . . . to deploy surrealist devices to reenergize a local culture that had been paralyzed by internalized colonialism . . . Echoing an image of canniablism that took on a variety of nuances among Latin American and Caribbean writers and artists in the first half of the

Twentieth century, she declared that ‘Martinician poetry will be cannibal or it will not be.’19

Hip-hop artists have reinvented and redefined “savage.” When a society labels people “uncivilized” for ferocious intelligence and a willingness to survive, we question that. We add new contours to the term. But Suzanne is the first to reclaim and repurpose savage.

2. The Actual Guidelines (Towards an AfroSurrealist Problem-Solving Framework)

Guidelines: 1) respect each other’s physical space and time 2) try to interact in nature and in person 3) provide low-cost resources 4) give everyone opportunities to be heard 5) decide, collectively, that we wish to build.

3. Investigating the Guidelines: The Actions

The first two guidelines intersect. We look to the things that can bring us joy. That’s why nature has a presence in the AfroSurreal text and AfroSurreal problem-solving. Our brains have to focus on something: a tender leaf, a generous blue sky. Our energy has to be replenished. Our elliptical thoughts need to be harnessed, sometimes. Perhaps nature relaxes us and provides opportunities for more fruitful discussions. And we must also consider strategies for respecting each other’s boundaries.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Undrowned examines several marine mammals, their natural tendency to collaborate and work towards the group’s survival.20 Gumbs provides an AfroSurreal manual for building connections. In the middle of these lessons, chapter ten, reminds us to “honor your boundaries.” Gumbs argues that connections, the ones that endure, result not from violating boundaries or trust, but from creating spaces that encourage acceptance. Gumbs reminds us that not everyone is meant to be your friend or lover. People don’t have to be open or vulnerable if they don’t want to be. People don’t have to share with others if they don’t want to. People don’t have to interact with those who violate them or betray their trust. Trust takes time. So Gumbs’ theory suggests collaboration arises from vulnerability and deeper discussions, a better understanding of nature (including marine mammals), a slowing of time.

Randall Horton’s memoir, Dead Weight, reinforces these ideas.21 Time deceives us. It compresses and extends itself, and reveals a capacity for loops and returns. The opening of Dead Weight, “The Protagonist in Someone Else’s Melodrama,” references Ralph Ellison’s “invisible” protagonist and a ghostlike outdoor sculpture in Hamilton Heights, a Harlem neighborhood. As Horton sits in the park and observes the sculpture, he notes with shimmering—near delirious—detail the natural and the built environment. The seagulls and the river, the trees, the scent of rain, and the red brick buildings peaking through the sculpture lift Horton into a dreamspace . . . The euphoria of humming, green-clustered spaces—the way our breath harmonizes with a rush of memories. It’s magnificent writing, but it’s also an argument for how our environments slow us and force us to reckon with historical and present moments. We learn of Horton’s birth in a segregated hospital, his family’s fight to survive in the Great Depression and afterwards.

Dead Weight describes, unflinchingly, the public nature of Horton’s felony record. The felonies were nonviolent drug offenses, at a time when tough-on-crime policies led to inflated sentencing for Black men. Still, the “dead-weight narrative” becomes part of every job interview, and Horton doesn’t attempt to obscure or hide this information from potential employers. But the disclosure has a psychic toll: “In order to kill the memory, you have to relive it.”22 For one teaching position, Horton details his history numerous times; he submits the applications and references and undergoes multiple interviews and a background check. Finally, he is hired and signs a contract. After all that, the job offer is rescinded, the administrators say, because of Horton’s background yet “all knew [Horton’s] incarceration history.”23 Horton went through an expensive and time-consuming process designed to diminish him through a visible, public interrogation. As Horton reminds us, “I did not ask for a handout–only to be judged on merit and the ability to have an impact on campus.”24

I’d like a bit more honesty with how we treat each other. We have to respect people’s time and space. Boundaries should be discussed more, in fiction and in real life. That’s why we fell in love with Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X, a brilliant novel in verse.25 Sections of The Poet X make you remember so deeply those times when no one believes you have boundaries, or the right to private interior space26. People comment on your body like it belongs to them; they tell you what to think and when to smile (always? don’t look perplexed or angry or sad) . . . People want you to be the muse, not the creator. Heaven forbid you have your own ideas. Heaven forbid you want to be left alone. That’s Surrealism’s problem with women too, as the International Journal of Surrealism’s “Problem of Woman” issue points out. Our intellectual energies are stymied when we don’t have space. Acevedo fights all that. We see Ximora, or X, the protagonist fighting to have her own voice and remain connected to her family, her community. The need for community doesn’t obliterate the desire for privacy too. If we want to build, then we can’t bend: people need both privacy and community. That’s how necessary disagreements and discussions flourish.

4. Memory

Written in 1996, McElroy Ansa’s The Hand I Fan With both emphasizes physical and psychological spances—and leads a discussion on eco-literature. Its concerns about St. Simon’s Island and the Clear Flo river We see that in McElroy Ansa’s work, which locates deep spiritual connections in nature:

After the Big Flood of ‘94, all the receding water did not soak back into the earth immediately. The ponds and puddles and ditches of standing water gave rise to generations of mosquitoes that swarmed all over the country in the warm spring. But no one really had time to complain about the biting, stinging pests because swarms of dragonflies appeared right after the mosquitoes showed up and began eating. The dragon flies zipped through the spring air feasting on the mosquitoes so quickly, so efficiently, that the bugs didn’t have time to bite and rebreed.

The Ocawatchee was a different river now.

It still came meandering out of the North Georgia mountains, but by the time it eased into Middle Georgia where it usually gently sidled up to Mulberry, it had taken on so much effluence from other swollen rivers and estuaries that its old banks could barely contain it.27

Nature can make us gentler but it also suggests cycles.

Labor. Time. Love. Rest. Nature.

Our attempts to organize our time, manipulate it, reveal our willingness to enjoy processes larger than ourselves. (Our bodies remind us. Having gone through menopause, my body feels reset. Have I entered a second childhood? My body regains its ease–before it felt like being punched in the stomach every month.) Spinoza, spoke of the power of “intuition and logical inferences . . . as valid proofs for the reality of ideas.”28 Spinoza’s point was to prove the reality of the Idea, not the Idea itself. Surrealism, too, has entered a cycle. And as you’ll see, we can comprehend the marvelous effects of Surrealism more clearly than its definition.

Martha Schwendener, art critic, tells us “[t]his is the 100th anniversary of the Surrealist manifesto, a document written in France for a radical art movement whose resonance endures in our chaotic moment at the 10th edition of the Tefaf New York art fair.”29 You must be invited to enter. Tickets are $55. This is not Surrealism. Perhaps I am salty because my invitation never arrived. Or perhaps I understand Surrealism’s anti-capitalist impulse. The real Surrealism can be found outside my doorstop, on my street: at the Kente Royal Gallery, where the owner greets me warmly after I apologize for my disheveled appearance or the Claire Oliver Gallery, where again, the owner greets me warmly after I again apologize for my disheveled appearance, or at the Curtiss Jacob Gallery, where both my husband and I apologize for my disheveled appearance (“she was getting ready to go for a run and wanted to drop in and see you”) or the Artistic Noise, where the owner greets me warmly even though I’ve stopped apologizing for my disheveled appearance . . . Life grows rushed during the school year. We don’t always have time to get our hair braided and our ‘fits coordinated. It also seems we lack time to slow down, to stare and take in all the glories around us. Yet they exist: amazing galleries and murals flood the boulevards, Adam Clayton Powell and Frederick Douglass; one street over, Lenox Avenue, the Good Vibrations pop-up installation sparkles with promise. (All of these works will be discussed more fully in a future issue of BE, A Journal of Black Experimental and Interdisciplinary Work.) People build here, create.

For this reason, we love to observe. At the Claire Oliver Gallery, artists Sami Tsang, Ebony Russell, and Suyao Tian–artists splinter and repair viewers. “Teetering on the Brink: Femininity, Inheritance, and Disaster” reveals something monstrous in violated boundaries. The pink sculptures overwhelm us. The owner tells us that all of the artists in the exhibit overcame something. They fought and attempted to define themselves. They set their own boundaries.

I wear my hair natural and dye my hair blonde because I like sunflowers. Sunflowers. Most days I feel unattractive but on good, joy-filled days, I imagine myself as a sunflower—my dark brown face surrounded by a yellow halo. The sunflower glimmers with importance in the Surrealism tradition. Suzanne Césaire’s The Great Camouflage locates in the sunflower “manifold meaning radiating from all directions.”30 If we seek to hide, the sunflower seeks to dazzle. To bring forth truths. Nature provides a forum for deliberating on the future, for enjoying the humid past without clinging to it. When we see nature restore itself, it gives us hope. We should then guard it, do what we can to mitigate damage. We should allow ourselves to define ourselves, for ourselves. Suzanne describes a legal system that circumscribed Blacks’ ambition, political or financial power: “outlawed the practice of medicine . . . law . . . wearing clothes identical to those of Whites.”31 A “[f]ree men of color” had to “take out permits to work anywhere other than in the fields.”32 This seems to have happened in the United States, in South Africa, in Palestine, in Sudan, in India. Divisions of color and caste separate us. They shouldn’t. But the “subordinated caste,” Isabel Wilkerson writes, “would only rise with the permission of the dominant caste.”33

That’s what Lena and Herman resist. They are African Americans of different skin tones, educational backgrounds, and generations—Herman died in 1895.34 Still, they are very much in love. As Lena and Herman trompe through the woods, or watch the “shooting stars that arched over Mulberry,” they demonstrate the power of love.35 Time is malleable. But we have to understand how people use it: in an ideal world, where would people direct their attention?

For Lena, it’s listening to Herman tell stories about “Africa–West African tales that his father had heard from his father about the meaning of honor and the creation of the sky.”36 For Lena, it’s listening to Herman play the guitar “with the frogs and crickets playing backup”37; it’s splashing “cool river water . . . on her forehead.”38 For Lena, what matters is connecting with time and history and nature. She reminds us that we’re all deserving of joy.

It was a colored girl.

5. Resources

At the University of California-Berkeley, you can walk through a grove of trees, cross a bridge, and walk up a short hill to the campus’s center. When you arrive at the Library, you’ll put on gloves and dig through boxes, and you’ll uncover the often humorous, sometimes sensual papers of Ted Joans, perhaps the most famous self-proclaimed AfroSurrealist.

Joans, as a lover of jazz, was also a lover of improvisation. The Afro- or Ethno-Surrealist text suggests we need to be real, flexible, less concerned with outer appearances . . . Tom Cho’s effervescent Look Who’s Morphing suggests this idea. On the cover of Cho’s book, a handsome man dressed like James Dean, suggests the flood of pop culture events. Now that I’m auntie age, the Aunties in this surreal collection stand out. They make sharp, funny statements. They are authentic. Yet the collection also calls for improvisation. From the title story, “Look Who’s Morphing”: “a boy who went to sleep as a human being but woke up as a dragon . . . a call center operator who became a deadly cyborg . . . a talking sultan that changed into a box of a very popular band of cereal . . . a bottle of bear that turned into a curvaceous woman.”39 What? . . . This collection reminds us that we may grow older and our outsides may change, but play and wonder can still dominate our inner worlds, our spirits. And older women, Effie Rentzou suggests in the powerful “Old ‘Femmes-enfats,’” can “embody time in a different way.”40 They can demonstrate a “fusion between young and old selves,” feats we see in the work of Joyce Mansour, Leonora Carrington–and McElroy Ansa.

A fully mature and realized woman, no longer the “baby of the family,” McElroy Ansa’s Lena McPherson registers as grown. But what does it mean to be an adult? Part of the book involves Lena’s letting go of certain responsibilities. It also gives Tina McElroy Ansa’s The Hand I Fan With, of pleasure and luxury, that everyone should have some, that the body is something to be celebrated and enjoyed. Lena is as sensual as Ted Joans. Her love of nature, human creativity, and sensuality intertwine and resonate. She and Herman enjoy a heated, passionate relationship. In middle age, Lena discovers within herself a well of sexual energy, some of the most “open, joyous, generous loving in her life.”41

In an essay exploring memory in Proust and James, Phyllis van Slyck tells us of the repressed sexual desire expressed through memory.42 Systems can cause confusion and distress. And, to borrow language from the tech world, the systems need updating. They require a restart. Our boundaries and solitude–remember guideline number one–can guide us. The constant emphasis on Black Excellence and grind/hustle culture needs to be cushioned by something else. Perhaps we need more privacy, more quiet, gentle moments. We need to protect our bodies, especially those of us with vulnerable bodies. Or maybe we should do more than protect our bodies; maybe we should treat them with care. Our love-making, our physical enjoyment of exercise and nature and sunlight and rest challenge societal mandates that Blackness represents labor and toil. In Communion, bell hooks notes how isolation compounds mental illness.43 A manifesto for relationships, romantic and otherwise, Communion describes hooks’ search for relationships that emphasize “mutuality, equality, and equity.” hooks suggests the ways capitalism intrudes on the most personal interactions . . . We need space, but we also need connection. Loving, but not smothering attention, hooks suggests, is one of the best resources we can offer. Perhaps shelter and education are the others.

Recall McElroy Ansa’s The Hand I Fan With suggests this: pleasure and luxury belong to us all; everyone should have some; the body is something to be celebrated and enjoyed. Nature, human creativity, and sensuality intertwined. Lena provides shelter to people in her community. By repurposing housing, she provides a space for young people to rest and live, to be heard. Lena provides a mode, and guidelines three through five urge us to listen, to offer resources, and to decide to build.

We can build structures, conversations, and new systems with the right resources and with careful, active listening. The Open Pedagogy Notebook reminds us of the enormous costs associated with higher education.When faculty use free or low-cost textbooks, they are “directly impacting that student’s ability to attend, succeed in, and graduate from college.”44 Further faculty who use Open Education Resources (OERs) often “rethink our pedagogies in ways that center on access.” This, in turn, leads to

asking broader questions that go beyond “How can I lower the cost of textbooks in this course?” If we think of ourselves as responsible for making sure that everyone can come to our course table to learn, we will find ourselves concerned with the many other expenses that students face in paying for college. How will they get to class if they can’t afford gas money or a bus pass? How will they afford childcare on top of tuition fees? How will they focus on their homework if they haven’t had a square meal in two days or if they don’t know where they will be sleeping that night? How will their families pay rent if they cut back their work hours in order to attend classes? How much more student loan debt will they take on for each additional semester it takes to complete all of their required classes?

The philosophy reinforces that equity underlies education. Education provides not only economic opportunities but also self confidence and opportunities to listen. Everyday problem-solving infuses the OER movement. By making texts accessible, we reduce the environmental impact (less paper and fewer dead trees), and we allow more voices to be heard. OER reworks W. E. B. Du Bois’s Talented Tenth by suggesting a massive educational movement. (DuBois has been criticized for being elitist, or neglecting the intellectual and creative energies of the vast majority of Black Americans, who were in extreme poverty in the early twentieth century. To be fair to DuBois, he wrote a generation after slavery ended . . . In “Our Sorrow Songs” from The Souls of Black Folk, his strategy advocates that those with more resources–financial or educational–share with those with less.45)

We can build systems that address these ideas—widespread education and systems of shared finances–and we can fight environmental destruction. This idea dominates and propels AfroSurreal narratives. Shantel Riley, writing in “The Children of Flint, Ten Years Later,” tells us of the emotional and physical hazards resulting from lead-tainted water.46 Yet the hazards don’t have to be. We can seek and develop something better. Aimee Nezhukumatathil reminds us we can find “tenderness in your quiet,” in the “bend of a tree branch,” a bird’s “stoic stillness.”47 Ross Gay delights in statues holding flowers instead of guns.48 The introduction to Camille Dungy’s Black Nature reminds us that we are “stewards of the land.”49 Black and Brown poets have written about the land, but slavery, sharecropping, and other forms of exploitation and violence have complicated that relationship. The “urbanization after the northern migrations,” Camille Dungy writes, means that our nature writing isn’t always celebratory.50 But as every human has the right to experience nature, to live in spaces free of environmental toxins, then part of the AfroSurreal project is figuring out how to do so harmoniously.

But to do that, first you have to walk through the trees.

***

Final Note: An epigraph from the poet Patricia Spears Jones opened this conversation.51 A true woman of the world, Spears Jones, travels and crosses boundaries like Ted Joans. She describes the Great Migration, a father who is “Lonely in Korea” and lonely post-Korean War when he returns home to find racism and the “lonely roads in Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee and Texas.”52 Spears Jones also describes New Yorkers homesick for Cuba or for Africa,53 the “[d]istant cities of Chicago, Pittsburgh Detroit,”54 finding friends in San Francisco55 or the perfect lipstick in New York City,56 and what King called our “beloved community,” our caring neighbors–perhaps a Bangladeshi man, a Latina woman, or a Black woman–in the neighborhood laundromat and everywhere we journey.57 Spears Jones demonstrates what we hope to bridge.

AfroSurrealism connects many dots. It offers an argument for love in action. You’ve read Miller’s Manifesto, so you’re aware of AfroSurrealism’s concerns with the Diaspora, with oppressed and marginalized people from across the globe. AfroSurrealism relocates people who have been placed at the periphery—People of Color, the Working Class, LGTBIQA, Religious Minorities, and People with Disabilities–and repositions at the center. AfroSurrealism overlaps with EthnoSurrealism, Africanfuturism, Afrofuturism, Chicanafuturism, Indigenousfuturism, and the AfroGothic. The politics underlying AfroSurrealism encompass forward-thinking politics and an interest in what we can do now. What can we change? How can we intervene?

Part of that interest, then, is with the environment, that walk through the trees. That’s part of the love, the care we show for each other and the world. Emily Raboteau, a multiracial Black woman and environmentalist, cites an EPA study that revealed “people of color in forty-six states live with more air pollution than whites.”58 We see that writers such as Alexis Pauline Gumbs describe marine mammals and connect to them. These mammals teach us to “live with a graceful ferocity.”59 And their oppression, Gumbs suggests, reinforces destructive colonial ways of thinking, the need to create hierarchies and to exist in brutal, less than harmonious ways with those with whom we share the planet. Aimé Césaire’s soul-shattering Notebook on a Return to Native Land, tells us that earth’s rage corresponds to our need for dominance and brutality.60

Camille Dungy, Ross Gay, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Tina McElroy Ansa, powerful writers of color, describe the delights of nature, the near-magical wonder when we encounter the outside. In McElroy Ansa’s fiction, a river snakes through south Georgia and mimics and replicates her protagonist’s emotional landscape. Lena Mcpherson, her protagonist, sees ghosts, and those ghosts allow for miraculous experiences with nature and a reconnection with the soul. Our ghosts can exist as imaginary writers in an endless library via Borges; nature and our creative works don’t die, but cycle and replicate. The natural environment leaks into the built one. Ngugi wa Thiong’o tells us of a Kenyan school that is “a four-roomed barrack with broken mud walls . . . gaping holes and more spiders’ webs.” Our words help us understand, and possibly, construct.

In that spirit, I invite you to share or create your own manifesto for your communities: what can we address? What are your guidelines? How do we participate in a shared revolutionary struggle? How do our interests align?

Remember, I suggested you do this.

It was a colored girl.

Rochelle Spencer is author of AfroSurrealism (Routledge) and The Rat People (The Fantasist and The Coil), and with Jina Ortiz, co-editor of All About Skin: Short Fiction by Women of Color (University of Wisconsin Press). Rochelle is co-curator, with the AfroSurreal Writers, of the Digital Literature Garden, an NEA-funded exhibition, and Let’s Play, and a participant in workshops from Clarion West, the National Black Writers Conference, VONA, and the Vermont Studio Center. Rochelle is a former board member of the Hurston Wright Foundation and The Clearing, the collective founded by Serena Simpson, and a current member of the National Book Critics Circle. Rochelle teaches at LaGuardia Community College, and she is represented by the writer and agent Kima Jones.

Notes

1. 1. bell hooks, All About Love (HarperCollins, 2001).

2. 2. Ricardo Alberto Maldonado, The Life Assignment (New Directions, 2020).

3. 3. Tina McElroy Ansa, The Hand I Fan With (Random House, 1996).

4. 4. Robin D. G. Kelley, “Working-Class Democracy and the Question of Palestine,” Lecture at LaGuardia Community College, March 18, 2024. In a recent talk, Dr. Robin D.G. Kelley argued that disavowing the violence against Palestine is part of the Black Radical Tradition (the philosophy that informs AfroSurrealism). In addition, Dr. Kelley called on the audience to reject the Islamophobia and Antisemitism that have clouded the discussions. Dr. Kelley was introduced by Drs. Karen Miller and Doug Henwood. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6zDvSacg1c&t=135s.

5. 5. Suzanne Césaire, The Great Camouflage Writings of Dissent (1941–1945). Trans. Keith L. Walker. (Wesleyan Press, 2012). Originally published in Tropiques, 8–9, October 1943.

6. 6. Emily Raboteau, Lessons for Survival (Henry Holt, 2024).

7. 7. Harriet Washington, A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and the Assault on the American Mind (Little Brown, 2019).

8. 8. Kimberlé Crenshaw Williams. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991), 1241–99. https://doi.org/10.2307/1229039.

9. 9. Sonya Renee Taylor. The Body is Not an Apology (Random House, 2021).

10. 10. Zora Neale Hurston. Their Eyes Were Watching God (Amistad, 2006) [1937].

11. 11. Franklin Rosemont and Robin, D.G. Kelley, eds. Black, Brown and Beige, (University of Texas, 2009).

12. 12. Environmental Protection Agency and the Office of Sustainable Communities. “Our Built and Natural Environments.” Environmental Protection Agency, 2013. https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2014–03/documents/our-built-and-natural-environments.pdf.

13. 13. Rosemont and Kelley, 58.

14. 14. Jeremy Biles. “Religion ≈ Surrealism: The International Congress for Infrathin Studies.” Religious Studies Review. vol. 49, no. 4. (2023), 583–585.

15. 15. See María Clara Bernal’s “A Voice for Surrealism: Suzanne Césaire and the Tropiques Group,” International Journal of Surrealism, vol. 1, no. 1 (2023), 40–46, and Kate Conley and Alyce Mahon’s “The Problem of Woman” in Surrealism, International Journal of Surrealism, vol. 1, no. 1 (2023), v-ix.

16. 16. Guinier, Lani. “Groups, Representation, and Race-Conscious Districting: A Case of the Emperor’s Clothes,” Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement. Ed. by Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotando, Garry Peller, and Kendall Thomas (New Press, 1995).

17. 17. Hortense J. Spillers, “The Idea of Black Culture,” The New Centennial Review. vol 6, no 3, (Winter 2006): 7–28.

18. 18. Bernal, 41.

19. 19. Suzanne Césaire’s quotation appears in Bernal’ Voice for Surrealism”: Bernal provides information about Tropiques and the tightrope the female Césaire balanced as a Black woman artist (44).

20. 20. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned (AK Press, 2020).

21. 21. Randall Horton, Dead Weight (Northwestern University Press, 2022).

22. 22. Horton, 36.

23. 23. Horton, 38.

24. 24. Horton, 39.

25. 25. When they noticed that I had a copy of The Poet X, two teenage girls followed me all the way from a bookstore in Long Island City, Queens, halfway to Harlem . . . People seriously love that book.

26. 26. Elizabeth Acevedo, The Poet X (Harper Teen, 2018).

27. 27. Tina McElroy, The Hand I Fan With (Doubleday, 1996).

28. 28. Harry Austryn Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza (Meridian Books, 1958).

29. 29. Martha Schwender, “Surrealism Reigns at the Tefaf Art Fair,” New York Times, May 9, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/09/arts/design/tefaf-art-fair-armory.html.

30. 30. Suzanne Césaire, 27.

31. 31. Suzanne Césaire, 31.

32. 32. Suzanne Césaire, 31–32.

33. 33. Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (Random House, 2020), 233.

34. 34. McElroy Ansa, 152–173.

35. 35. McElroy Ansa, 250.

36. 36. McElroy Ansa, 545.

37. 37. McElroy Ansa, 542.

38. 38. McElroy Ansa, 115.

39. 39. Tom Cho, Look Who’s Morphing (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2009).

40. 40. Effie Rentzou, “Time Reclaimed,” International Journal of Surrealism, vol. 1, no. 1 (2023), 1–20.

41. 41. McElroy Ansa, 223.

42. 42. Phyllis van Slyck, “The Transmission of Memory in James and Proust: Composing Private Texts in The Wings of the Dove and La Prisonnière.” Reading Henry James in the 21st Century: Heritage and Transmission. Eds. Annick Duperray, Adrian Harding, Denis Tredy (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019), 167–177.

43. 43. bell hooks, Communion (HarperCollins, 2002), 28.

44. 44. Robin DaRosa and Rajiv Jhangiani. “Open Pedagogy.” https://openpedagogy.org/open-pedagogy/. A version of this article also appears in the Pressbook, A Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students, https://www.rebus.community/t/project-summary-guide-to-making-open-textbooks-with-students/512.

45. 45. W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (Dover, 1903).

46. 46. Shantel Riley, “The Children of Flint, Ten Years Later” Harvard Public Health Magazine, April 25, 2024, https://harvardpublichealth.org/environmental-health/the-children-of-the-flint-michigan-water-crisis-ten-years-later/.

47. 47. Aimee Nezhukumatathil, World of Wonders (Milkweed, 2020), 94.

48. 48. Ross Gay, Book of Delights (Algonquin, 2019), 188.

49. 49. Camille Dungy, “Introduction: The Nature of African American Poetry,” Black Nature (University of Georgia Press, 2009), xix–xxxv.

50. 50. Dungy, xix–xxxv.

51. 51. Patricia Spears Jones, “What the God of Fire Charged Me.” A Lucent Fire (White Pine Press, 2015).

52. 52. Patricia Spears Jones, “The Birth of Rhythm and Blues,” A Lucent Fire, (White Pine Press, 2015).

53. 53. Patricia Spears Jones, “Son Cubano,” A Lucent Fire, (White Pine Press, 2015).

54. 54. Patricia Spears Jones, “Lave,” The Beloved Community (Copper Canyon Press, 2023).

55. 55. Patricia Spears Jones, “San Francisco, Spring 1986,” A Lucent Fire (White Pine Press, 2015).

56. 56. Patricia Spears Jones, “The Perfect Lipstick,” A Lucent Fire (White Pine Press, 2015).

57. 57. Patricia Spears Jones, “The Beloved Community,” (Copper Canyon Press, 2023).

58. 58. Raboteau, 105.

59. 59. Gumbs, 73.

60. 60. Aimee Césaire, “Notebook on a Return to My Native Land.” Poets.org. https://poets.org/poem/notebook-return-native-land-excerpt.