Cymbals of Deeper Experience: Introducing Black Surrealisms

Guest editors Grégory Pierrot and Abigail Susik introduce their new special issue of African American Review: "Black Surrealisms" — now available at Project MUSE.

During his 1945 visit to Haiti, André Breton declared surrealism to have “a common cause with people of color” and spoke of a goal shared by surrealism and “the so-called ‘primitive’ mind…to do away with the hegemony of the conscious and the everyday in order to strive to conquer revelatory emotion.” Cuban author Alejo Carpentier was none too impressed: although he would only write about it in 1949, he had experienced his own Haitian epiphany two years before Breton, reaching a slightly different conclusion. In his essay “On the Marvelous Real in America,” Carpentier explains how he found in the genuine “marvelous reality” of the Caribbean island, which he contrasts with the “tiresome pretension of creating the marvelous,” typical of the surrealists, in his mind.  The marvelous “presupposes faith,” which the surrealists, children of the Age of Reason, whether they like it or not, lack; they have to follow stilted recipes to force the marvelous into being.  “The results of willing the marvelous,” he continues, “is that the dream technicians become bureaucrats.”  Leave it to the Latin Americans, Carpentier essentially argues, suggesting that, in this geography, literal distance from Europe allows for closer proximity to the marvelous; “after all, what is the history of America if not a chronicle of the marvelous real?”  

Maybe, for some of us, it is also a tale of genocide, racial terror, and slavery. It is telling that, in his critique of Breton, Carpentier conveniently avoids addressing what racial distance might add to the American marvelous even as his epiphany is steeped in it, and his own imaginary is inseparable from the white West’s. He appropriates Haitian history without so much as evoking what a central role race plays in the ‘marvelous reality’ of the episodes and figures he singles out (Mackandal, leader of a revolt of the enslaved in the 1750s who is said to have turned into a mosquito as he was being burned at the stake; Pauline Bonaparte, wife of general Leclerc sent by her brother Napoleon to reestablish slavery on the island; Henry Christophe, who defeated him and became the island’s one and only king). Carpentier only evokes race in the essay’s final paragraph, with puzzling references to “the Faustian presence of the Indian and the black man” and “the fecund racial mixings” favorited by the discovery of America.  However familiar the ‘marvelous’ may seem to Carpentier, it remains coded as Other; it happens in the clash between Europe and the Americas, it happens in race. And aware though he clearly is of Caribbean history, Carpentier cannot help but “monster” it, to use Mathew’s term, in the way he presents king Henry of Haiti as “much more surprising than all of the cruel kings invented by the Surrealists.”  In his critique, he reveals how his own white wonder and disbelief at the fact of Black humanity is essential to this idea of the marvelous; that for all his recognition of Black and indigenous spirituality, he no more–and perhaps less–than the Europeans he scorns had managed to transcend a vision of the Caribbean made surreal by race.

Indeed, to the extent that throughout the Americas people of African descent had to live in various versions of the fantastical doubled world so strikingly described by W.E.B. Du Bois, a great extent of Breton’s surreality was in fact the reality of diasporic Africans.  This is not to diminish the importance that surrealism could have in a Black context, much to the contrary. Aimé Césaire would later testify that, to him, surrealism had been “more of a confirmation than a revelation;” while it promised to “[shake] up everything” from a white, European French point of view, it meant something entirely different for a Martinican of African descent.  Beneath the “burdensome, overused forms” that surrealism proposed to sweep away, Césaire expected to find something specifically and “fundamentally black…an authentic character… a profound being, over whom all sorts of ancestral layers and alluviums had been deposited.” Surrealism, a weapon that had already “exploded the French language,” could, would serve other purposes specific to the African diaspora.   

This special issue of the African American Review proposes to consider Black surrealism not just to say, as Breton does when writing about Césaire: “I was unable to distinguish his will from my own,”  but rather to reassert that it was not inspired by, or even necessarily contemporary with, European, white surrealism, but indeed that it fed it, predated it; ‘primitif’ indeed, in that it always already came before, if only as a necessary element to the conditions that made surrealism possible. Because the world from which surrealism stemmed, and outside of which it meant to find existence, was built by, and out of Africans as well. Because the wealth of France, literal and metaphorical, economic and cultural, was in no small part pilfered from Africa, Africans, and their descendants: springboard and raw material all at once, Breton’s will ultimately mimicked legacies of Black rejection of Western ‘reason.’ Amiri Baraka explains how, in Henry Dumas’ writings, “symbols sing, are cymbals of deeper experience, not word games for academics.”  The essays in this special issue resonate with a century of these cymbals’ vibrations, to celebrate an antiversary of surrealism.

Header image: Sarah Maldoror and Maya Angelou on set in the Everglades. Body image: Sarah Maldoror in the Everglades for Aimé Césaire: Mask of Words. Used with permission of Les Amis de Sarah & Mario.

Grégory Pierrot is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut at Stamford where he teaches American and African American literature.

Abigail Susik is Department Chair and Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History and Theory at Willamette University.