Surrealism As A Mirror in Black Art
I write to escape.
I cannot escape this.
A Black man, killed on what amounts to national television, with a casual kneel.
A White man, dressed in all black, wearing a gas mask, wielding a black umbrella on a sunny day, smashing windows with a hammer during a peaceful protest.
A police precinct lit ablaze in the night.
A person, silhouetted against a burning liquor store, carrying an American flag in distress.
Legions of black vehicles with no license plates, stalking through neighborhoods after sun down.
These are images – among thousands more – from the last few days in my cities, the cities I chose to live in as an adult after leaving my hometown of Milwaukee, WI, itself, a place familiar with the violence that arises from injustice, an injustice that is the living condition for Black Americans.
Watching a Black man lynched (lynching is not limited to hanging, but defined as a murder, “by mob action without legal approval or permission” – do 4 policeman qualify as a mob? I do not have the emotional energy to parse these semantics)…
…and watching those streets burn themselves to the ground…
my eyes well with rage and grief.
This is all something we’ve seen before, and yet, as always seems to be the case with racially-fueled violence, it doesn’t fail to shock.
I am a White man.
I am not writing this article to dissect the morality of our current situation.
Enough of that is being debated – and will forever continue to be debated – in our homes, on our televisions, and worst of all, on the internet.
I am writing this because I am seeing things I have seen before.
I graduated with a degree in American Studies at the University of Minnesota, where many of my professors had profound and lasting impacts on the way I see the world, and, to an out-sized influence relative to their numbers, my Black professors provided me with tools and insights that have given me the benefit of viewing my America with context – among them Alexs Pate, Leroy Gardner Jr., and another professor (whose name I can’t find online, lost, for now, to my memories), who told our African American literature class that the images of Black life in America are often so violent, so unbelievable, it can be hard to fictionalize them at all.
I write this preamble to give context to the things I am about to write, which I hope, in turn, can give some small amount of context to the broader moment.
Because, while the word “context” sounds passionless, sterile, it is a powerful tool, a word that contains within it others: history, systems of power, pain, capitalism, slavery, identity, cultural politics.
Context is the ability to understand the world you are living in, as part of larger forces that began long before your existence.
Invisible Man
The painter of the above painting, a painting whose haunting beauty, since the day I first laid eyes on it, I have not been able to unsee (and all the things that says about me and, in part, my Whiteness), said this about the surrealist masterpiece Invisible Man, winner of the 1953 National Book Award for Fiction, one of the 20th centuries 100 Greatest English Language’s novels,
“Ralph Ellison’s book presented me with an idea that struck me as being really meaningful and worth exploring, the way in which a thing could be two things at once—the condition of simultaneously being present and absent in the world, but not as a phenomenal condition. When HG Wells writes The Invisible Man, he physically becomes invisible, transparent to view. But in the case of Ellison’s character in the novel, it’s not a physical invisibility, it’s a psychological invisibility. That whole scene in the prologue of the book, where he has the encounter with the man on the street and he talks about the fact that, “I could cut his throat right now and he wouldn’t know what happened to him.” Because, essentially, he doesn’t see me. Even though we just bumped into each other here, this is an interaction we’re having because he is psychologically incapable of seeing who I am.”
I fear to take this next paragraph, from the above mentioned prologue to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, out of context, as art, out of context, begs to be misconstrued by those that don’t agree with it, but I can’t help but be struck by the mix of the following phenomenon:
- Disrespect
- The Human Need for Justice, as an Apology
- Violence
- Anger
- Disgust
- Amusement, almost to the point of Hysterics
- The Black Man Existing Only As A Figment of the White Man’s Imagination
One night I accidentally bumped into a man, and perhaps because of
the near darkness he saw me and called me an insulting name. I sprang at him, seized his coat lapels and demanded that he apologize. He was a tall blond man, and as my face came close to his he looked insolently out of his blue eyes and cursed me, his breath hot in my face as he struggled. I pulled
his chin down sharp upon the crown of my head, butting him as I had seen
the West Indians do, and I felt his flesh tear and the blood gush out, and I
yelled, “Apologize! Apologize!” But he continued to curse and struggle, and I
butted him again and again until he went down heavily, on his knees,
profusely bleeding. I kicked him repeatedly, in a frenzy because he still
uttered insults though his lips were frothy with blood. Oh yes, I kicked him!
And in my outrage I got out my knife and prepared to slit his throat, right
there beneath the lamplight in the deserted street, holding him by the collar
with one hand, and opening the knife with my teeth — when it occurred to
me that the man had not seen me, actually; that he, as far as he knew, was
in the midst of a walking nightmare! And I stopped the blade, slicing the air
as I pushed him away, letting him fall back to the street. I stared at him
hard as the lights of a car stabbed through the darkness. He lay there,
moaning on the asphalt; a man almost killed by a phantom. It unnerved me.
I was both disgusted and ashamed. I was like a drunken man myself,
wavering about on weakened legs. Then I was amused. Something in this
man’s thick head had sprung out and beaten him within an inch of his life. I began to laugh at this crazy discovery. Would he have awakened at the point of death? Would Death himself have freed him for wakeful living? But I didn’t linger. I ran away into the dark, laughing so hard I feared I might rupture myself. The next day I saw his picture in the Daily News, beneath a caption stating that he had been “mugged.” Poor fool, poor blind fool, I thought with sincere compassion, mugged by an invisible man!
Throughout Invisible Man the main character goes through a litany of experiences, some heightened, some so surreal as to seem a leap even for a fiction writer: to get into a good college, the main character (never named in the novel) has to participate in a battle royal with other Black men, for the amusement of the White elite watching.
Invisible Man bends reality, but some of its most shocking images, like those of all-Black Battle Royals, were real.
After the Civil War, the battle royal entered a popular phase, but one also considered shameful and disreputable in retrospect. In it, promoters for boxing events would arrange for brutal free-for-alls with few rules that were generally between all black boxers.
Just as the opening of Invisible Man is an overture for the rest of the book – being a microcosm for all the themes to come – I use this reading of Invisible Man as an overture for this essay.
Surreal Violence
I will now quote directly from the opening of Harvey Young’s seminal paper titled, “The Black Body as Souvenir in American Lynching”, which in turn quotes a primary source,
On 2 April 1899, approximately two thousand white men, women, and children participated, as both witnesses and active agents, in the murder of Sam Hose in Newman, Georgia. Sam Hose was burned alive. In the final moments of his life, the assembled crowd descended upon his body and collected various parts of it as souvenirs. The Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican recounted the scene of Hose’s dismemberment in the following manner:
Before the torch was applied to the pyre, the negro was deprived of his ears, fingers and genitals of his body. He pleaded pitifully for his life while the mutilation was going on, but stood the ordeal of fire with surprising fortitude. Before the body was cool, it was cut to pieces, the bones were crushed into small bits, and even the tree upon which the wretch met his fate was torn up and disposed of as “souvenirs”. The negro’s heart was cut into several pieces, as was also his liver. Those unable to attain ghastly relics paid their more fortunate possessores extravagant sums for them. Small pieces of bones went for 25 cents, and a bit of liver crisply cooked sold fo 10 cents.
The instances of violence that have been visited upon Black Americans, due solely to their Blackness, is so shocking as to seem ill-conceived by a novelist, and are so numerous that they can be named nothing short of an American tradition.
But this tradition, as extensive and pervasive as it is, still never fails to shock, no matter how many times I read, or re-read about the experiments at Tuskegee,
Clinicians… continued the study without treating any participants; they withheld treatment and information about it from the subjects. In addition, scientists prevented participants from accessing syphilis treatment programs available to other residents in the are...Researchers knowingly failed to treat participants appropriately after penicillin was proven to be an effective treatment for syphilis and became widely available
or, about how, in Tulsa in 1921, members of the Greenwood community (Black Wall Street) looked up into the sky only to see White owned planes carrying White men with rifles pointed downwards, dropping literal bombs on to their community,
Lurid flames roared and belched and licked their forked tongues into the air. Smoke ascended the sky in thick, black volumes and amid it all, the planes – now a dozen or more in number – still hummed and darted here and there with the agility of natural birds of the air.[8]
Planes circling in mid-air: They grew in number and hummed, darted and dipped low. I could hear something like hail falling upon the top of my office building. Down East Archer, I saw the old Mid-Way hotel on fire, burning from its top, and then another and another and another building began to burn from their top.[8]
The side-walks were literally covered with burning turpentine balls. I knew all too well where they came from, and I knew all too well why every burning building first caught fire from the top
or how, after the Civil War, Whites did everything they could to make everything about being Black, illegal, through what have been called Black Codes or Pig Laws (pre-dating Jim Crow by decades),
It was a crime in the south for a farmworker to walk beside a railroad…it was a crime…to speak loudly in the company of white women…[1]
In Texas…Negroes could choose their employer, before a deadline. After they had made a contract, they were bound to it. If they quit “without cause of permission” they would lose all of their wages [2]
the simple taking of livestock, and I put quotes around “taking” because in many of these cases African Americans were entitled to the very fruits of their labor that they were being cheated out of, but when they defiantly claimed those things, which could be pigs, could be chickens, could be the instruments of the field…as something as their own, they were subject to felony offenses now [1]
Or how, in Elaine, AR in 1919, officials sent all the White people out of town by train and cut the telephone lines as Whites poured in to the town and hunted all Black people in a 200 mile radius,
Throughout the day at least 1,000 white vigilantes came from all over the state and from Mississippi to join plantation owners, their managers, sheriffs, deputies and the veterans to put down what they called an uprising. It was effectively an invasion. By day’s end, countless black women, men and children had been slaughtered.
For the next five days, Colonel Jencks and his troops, assisted by vigilantes, hunted black people over a 200-mile radius. They scorched and burned homes with families inside, slaughtered and tortured others. The troops were aided by seven machine guns.
These images are so violent, so extreme, they stretch the mind’s ability to comprehend.
And yet, we need to remember them, to understand what our country is capable of, and, perhaps most importantly, to sturdy ourselves against the arguments that are sure to come:
- that things aren’t that bad
- that Black people are exaggerating
- that if Black Americans were only to do something different, they would be treated differently (from complying to police demands to pulling themselves up by their bootstraps)
- that the system – since it works so well for White people – works for Black people
Do not be swayed by arguments that appeal to your reason: that things couldn’t possibly be that terrible.
We are already seeing this narrative start.
The preliminary autopsy by the Hennepin County Medical Examiner found that the cause of death was not asphyxiation but
“the combined effects of Mr. Floyd’s being restrained by police, underlying health conditions, and any potential intoxicants in his system”
According to the Hennepin County Medical Examiner, 2 out of the 3 reasons George Floyd died, were George Floyd’s fault.
When I see these images, of a White police officer flashing a White supremacist hand signal in uniform, I see the sixth episode of The Watchmen in which the police of New York City were in league with, if not solely responsible for, the Cyclops, an underground White supremacist group that was basically code for the KKK.
I am not here to conflate art with suffering, a trope as damaging to the artist as it is to the understanding of art, and, in the context of genocidal violence towards Americans of African descent, an especially dangerous idea: that without the pain inflicted by White America, Black Americans would not create the beautiful things they have created.
People create beautiful things.
After finding food, water, and shelter, creating beauty is the most essential of human traits.
Finding The Beautiful
Maybe I’m just trying to find beauty in the horror.
Maybe I’m pacifying myself with art to ease my pain.
Maybe that’s not the worst thing. People do terrible things in the pursuit of easing their own pain.
We need art and beauty because the world is so brutal and unjust.
With all that said, I would simply like to share some of these images that came to mind after seeing the violence in America: the art that helps me find peace and understanding that a 24 hour news cycle cannot – and does not – attempt to provide.
There is the…
Collage Installations of Ebony G Patterson
The beauty and pain in…
Rashid Johnson’s Work
The way Fly Away (“when I die Hallelujah bye and bye, I will fly away“) puts fauna – wildlife, lush and beautiful – in man made compartments, organized at right angles, kept in a room with much more space for it to grow, were it to be allowed.
The reclaiming of imagery, and a title which points to the absurdity of living in a world where your death is as random as the actions of a children’s game,
Gary Simmons’ “Duck, Duck, Noose”
As many are probably more familiar with his famous portraits, the work,
“Sleep” by Kehinde Wiley
Which, as the Knight Foundation points out,
celebrate and venerate black male subjects through engaging cartoonish rendering and pastiched European Classical painting
These images are beautiful, painful, often surreal.
John Dowell’s Cotton: The Soft, Dangerous Beauty of the Past
John Dowell was having dreams about his grandmother. After his siblings told him his dreams meant that “Big Mommey” wanted something from him,
Dowell remembered that his grandmother, long since passed, had told him that when she was very small – 4 or 5 years old – she got lost in a dense field of cotton.
He created larger than life photos, and included a shrine to his grandmother surrounded by cotton still on the stem.
Atlanta
Atlanta is (season 3 is scheduled for 2021) the best show on television.
It takes beauty, natural dialogue, and the constant threat of violence, to levels of artistic complexity I have never seen on a television screen before.
Atlanta is often so grounded in reality that the instances of surrealness are all the more striking.
A Black child, Tobias Walner, staring his way to an episode’s ending, bemused smile on his Whiteface,
A rapper, fleeing to the woods of Georgia (Ray Charles lilt on “…As moonlight through the pines…” comes to mind, taking on a more sinister, possibly, always sinister, connotation in this context) after an attempted mugging, only to encounter his own ghost.
A rapper driving an invisible car through a crowd.
A man in a batman mask, knocking on the door of – and suddenly running away from – Paper Boi, just because he wanted to see where the new hot rapper in town lived.
An uncle with an Alligator in his house and a golden gun.
The way the show turned Florida Man into a single, unknown White boogey man, committing atrocities across the state, an “alt-right Johnny Appleseed”.
And, of course, every damn thing about Teddy Perkins.
Season 2 of Atlanta was subtitled, Robbin’ Season.
Atlanta Robbin’ Season refers to an actual time period in Atlanta during the holidays, before Christmas, in which robberies exponentially increase.[3]
In every episode of that season, a theft occurs.
Sometimes it’s a cell phone, in the opening scene of the season, it’s the armed robbery of a fast food restaurant.
“Are you gonna eat or are you gonna be eaten?” Donald Glover said. “I think that’s something people don’t realize. Black people have to make a choice. That choice defines who you are. It’s hard.” Glover said it was “surreal” that his brother, Stephen, rented an Airbnb two houses away from where they grew up.[3]
I’ve never seen a television show pack so much depth, so much surrealness rooted in plot and character, so much dense meaning, into its episodes.
For instance, the Whiteface/Tobias Walner scene starts with a teacher walking up to Vanessa Keefer (played by Zazie Beetz) in the hallway. The entire discussion that follows revolves around the logistics of taking Tobias Walner to the security office (ISS) at school.
Security and especially, police officers in schools, are a major problem in America’s largest cities, which means, they are disproportionately a problem for Black Americans.
It’s a real conversation, by real characters, that comments on one of the most important factors in the juvenile-to-prison pipeline that is being created by the increase in police presence in schools.
The images in Atlanta are often surreal.
The images we’ve been seeing the last week have been surreal.
I imagine this is not new for Black Americans.
The World Is Yours
I could chose a thousand verses from the history of Hip Hop. I could chose a verse explicitly about the struggle, like Common’s “The Corner“.
But the opening verse of “The World Is Yours”, by Nas, jumped to mind immediately when I thought about imagery.
What Nas does in “The World Is Yours” is talk about life in the midst of life, from his perspective at the center; making the ordinary, glorious.
He takes taking a cab, spitting (literally and figuratively), and watching the movie Ghandi, to the level of high art.
And finally, he ends his verse with the most powerful, surrealist imagery in the song: dead presidents – many, slave owners themselves – now serving a Black man’s purpose of self-representation.
I sip the Dom P, watching “Gandhi” ’til I’m charged
Then writing in my book of rhymes, all the words past the margin
To hold the mic I’m throbbin’, mechanical movement
Understandable smooth shit that murderers move with
The thief’s theme: play me at night, they won’t act right
The fiend of hip-hop has got me stuck like a crack pipe
The mind activation, react like I’m facin’ time like
“Pappy” Mason, with pens I’m embracin’
Wipe the sweat off my dome, spit the phlegm on the streets
Suede Timb’s on my feets makes my cipher complete
Whether crusing in a Sikh’s cab, or Montero Jeep
I can’t call it, the beats make me falling asleep
I keep falling, but never falling six feet deep
I’m out for presidents to represent me (say what?)
I’m out for presidents to represent me (say what?)
I’m out for dead presidents to represent me
Watching Ourselves on TV
CNN’s headquarters are in Atlanta.
They were attacked Friday night.
I turned on the news to see this image.
If this isn’t an image from a dystopic movie – a news station filming its own attack – I’m not sure what is.
Images like these are all around us now.
Our society has created the conditions in which these images can come to exist.
If the police exist to uphold justice, as their modern manifestations profess, that means Black people live in a country where the powers who are, they’re told, there to defend them, attack them.
The only section of society authorized to use “force” (pseudonym for violence) use this authority against them.
Is there a greater irony in a society? Then its protectors attacking those they are purported to “protect and serve”?
Police, as we know them today, originated as Slave Patrols and Night Watches,
In 1704, the colony of Carolina developed the nation’s first slave patrol. Slave patrols helped to maintain the economic order and to assist the wealthy landowners in recovering and punishing slaves who essentially were considered property.
Slave patrols and Night Watches, which later became modern police departments, were both designed to control the behaviors of minorities
The term that seems to be the motto of police forces today “Protect and Serve” didn’t originate until 1955, through a LAPD mail-in contest.
In February 1955, the Los Angeles Police Department, through the pages of the internally produced BEAT magazine, conducted a contest for a motto for the police academy. The conditions of the contest stated that: “The motto should be one that in a few words would express some or all the ideals to which the Los Angeles police service is dedicated. It is possible that the winning motto might someday be adopted as the official motto of the Department.”
The winning entry was the motto, “To Protect and to Serve” submitted by Officer Joseph S. Dorobek.
The surreal nature of living in a country trying to kill you, while telling you it’s there to protect you, is a condition that Black artists have expressed for as long as they’ve been able to practice art (slaves were not allowed to learn to read or write).
Their art is key in helping the rest of us understand what we’re seeing, we would do well to look, to listen.