Ark of the Bones
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.
Friend and poet Eugene Redmond painstakingly championed Dumas’s work and memory. In 1974 he edited Ark of Bones and Other Stories and later assembled other anthologies of Dumas’s poems, stories, and unfinished novels. Today Dumas has a cult following, and Toni Morrison claims that he’s a literary genius.
In 2009 historian Robin Kelley and surrealist Franklin Rosemont compiled Black, Brown, & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora, the most comprehensive book on black surreal movements around the world. The book traces the Negritude movement back to the Martinican students in France, led by Etienne Lero, and Legitimate Defense, a journal published in 1932; it also includes the surrealist influences on Richard Wright. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is deemed Afro-surrealist. Beat poet Bob Kaufman and poet/artist Ted Joans emerged in the black power movement as well. Both were self-described surrealists, and Kaufman is now credited as a forerunner in the spoken word movement.
Together Black, Brown, & Beige and “The Afrosurrealism Manifesto” are the pillars of emerging Afro-surreal works today. The Dumas/Sun Ra connection and their shared use of myth, mysticism, and culture forever connect the aesthetics.
Inspired by Miller’s manifesto, Alexandria Eregbu curated Marvelous Freedom / Vigilance of Desire, Revisited at Columbia College in Chicago. The show, which ran from January to March, 2013, highlighted emerging black artists who create the Afro-surreal. But it also was an ode to the epic Chicago Surrealist Group and the 1976 exhibition Marvelous Freedom / Vigilance of Desire, the largest show of its kind. The 2013 show included works by Krista Franklin, Devin Cain, Stephen Flemister, Christina Long, Cecil McDonald Jr., Kenrick McFarlane, Hannah Rodriguez, Chelsea Sheppard, Michael Tousana, Cameron Welch, and avery r. young.
The Afro-surreal canon is growing. There’s an Afro-surrealist film festival in Negril, Jamaica, that was started in 2010, a DC samba band recently adopted the name Afro-Surreal, and Franklin presented the manifesto at Columbia College in Chicago. Other writers are taking Miller’s lead, adopting the Afro-surreal lens too.
“I’m really excited about the Afro-surreal work that’s out here,” says Miller. His job won’t be done until the manifesto manifests, he says. Afro-surrealism draws a line in the sand when it comes to the virtues of the present versus the future, which echoes Sun Ra’s popular belief that the much-ballyhooed end of the world already happened. Whether the future is now or the past is the future really depends on the actions taken today.
At heart, artists always hope to move their viewers. They hope their work gives some meaningful thought to ponder or at least shines a floodlight on matters ignored. And there are those who expect their radical fiction and flicks to be calls to action, spurring readers and viewers to change course, jump ship, or move with the techno beat of new times.
Controversial author Sam Greenlee likes to say that his only regret regarding his book The Spook Who Sat by the Door, a story about a black government agent who leads a revolution, is that he didn’t do it himself. But artists like Greenlee aren’t the norm. Most artists, fiction writers, etc., while having some intention for the viewer, are in a constant state of flux with the meteoric transference of ideas and how they blossom once they hit the main stage. I’m sure the Star Trek creators weren’t thinking that by casting a black woman in their sci-fi series they would inspire the first black woman astronaut, although they knew it would somehow alter the face of race dynamics. I would guess that while Henry Dumas yearned to end inequality, he didn’t know his short stories would birth a genre dubbed the Afro-surreal. What would an artist do if they knew audiences were hungry to use their work for real world social change?
“I was mind-blown by anyone who used art as real world planning,” said N. K. Jemisin. “It can be helpful or inhibiting to know that someone is trying to use my work for real world application. It could fill me with horror, or I would become more conscious.” Jemisin said she views activists as people who put their lives on the line; to know that her work could contribute to that is a larger-than-life responsibility almost too awesome to comprehend.
There are many activists who look to Afrofuturism and the canon of literature and theories as a platform for social change and the stoking of the imagination. Adrienne Maree Brown, Colleen Coleman, and Rasheedah Phillips are three women in three different urban communities, but they share a belief that triggering the imagination through tales about the future compels thinkers to break out of their circumstances.
An Imagination Rekindled
In 2011 I attended the Think Galacticon conference. Unlike the typical science fiction conference, the creators of Think Galacticon hoped to use science fiction as a platform for broader changes in society. Held at Chicago’s Roosevelt University, the conference brought activists, science fiction writers, and fans together to share new perspectives on social change and privilege. Panels included talks on classism in fantasy novels (Why don’t the paupers ever challenge the prince for power?), the growing black independent comic book scene, and personal growth tools for the revolution.
Both the panels and attendees were incredibly enthusiastic. A cross-cultural assemblage of radical activists and sci-fi fans, they were excited to attend the workshop and chat run by noted activist Adrienne Maree Brown.
“It’s amazing to change the world, but it’s heartbreaking, bone-cracking work, and you often don’t see the change in real time,” Brown says. “For me as an organizer, what gets me through has been immersing myself into these sci-fi worlds.” She uses sci-fi to frame an inspirational perspective for youth that she works with too. “Your life is science fiction,” she’s told them. “You are sci-fi, you are Luke Skywalker but way cooler; you’re trans and black and you’re surviving the world of Detroit.”
Brown began her activism work in college. She is a former executive director of the Ruckus Society, a nonprofit that specializes in environmental activism and guerilla communication, and is heavily involved with the League of Pissed Off Voters. A Detroit resident, she describes herself as an organizational healer, pleasure activist, and artist and is “obsessed” with learning and developing models for action and community transformation.
But she’s also a sci-fi fan. After discovering Octavia Butler’s w
ork, she was inspired to develop new work of her own. Brown is using Butler’s pivotal series The Parables and its postapocalyptic tale of discovery as a template for change agency in desperate communities. Her workshop at Think Galacticon was titled “Octavia Butler and Emergent Strategies.” And the workshop description read as follows:
“All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.” These words of Octavia Butler’s have impacted people very seriously on a personal level—but how do we apply her wisdom on a political organizing level? How do we approach the strategic planning we’re all supposed to do if we accept, and come to love, the emergent power of changing conditions? This session will be half popular organizational development training, half inquiry into what the future of organizational development and strategic planning will look like.
As far as Brown is concerned, many abandoned urban communities are postapocalyptic in nature. Such places are rife for community-born transformation. “If you look at cities in the US right now, there are cities or communities in apocalyptic situations,” says Brown. She references challenged areas in New York City, New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina, Cincinnati, and her new home, Detroit. “Detroit used to be this booming industry town. This used to be a big, booming factory town. You could make a living here, probably a better living if you were a black person than most other places. Now there’s seven hundred thousand living in the city proper. That’s a huge shift.”
When Brown first arrived, her first impression was that Detroit was in a postapocalyptic state. The town felt as if it had been abandoned, she said. But slowly she recognized the supports and humanity. “It made me look at other cities [with blighted communities] differently. There are people living in places that we associate with the end of the world, but it’s not the end of the world, it’s the beginning of something else. An economy based on relationships and not the monetary value you can place on someone else.”
In fact, Brown now teaches activists how to use strategies from Butler’s books to build communities in areas where resources are scarce. She presented a workshop on her strategies at the conference. Such strategies include community farming, building relationships with neighbors, and essential survival skills.
She emphasizes that people in troubled areas need to have self-determination over their food supply. She says, “In The Parables Butler talks about the Acorn communities—it’s an intentional community, a place where people come in an intentional way to build a life together. They are farming and they have some accountability to one another. They have a spiritual community. I feel that is one strategy that’s laid out as one of the ways to survive a future where our resources are unsure.”
She adds, “Another is door-to-door relationship building that is nonjudgmental. After the Acorn community is trashed, instead of the main character feeling smashed, she goes door-to-door and starts to build a community of believers who are not rooted in one place, but rooted in a shared ideology. It’s very similar to the Zapatista ideology. They went around for ten years building relationships one by one. Now a lot of organizing is done around the Internet and tweeting each other. If we weren’t able to do that, what would we do? We would work with whoever is there with us.”
She’s also a big advocate of teaching essential survival skills that are necessary in postapocalyptic circumstances, including gardening, basic care for the sick and wounded, and serving as a midwife. “I’m also looking at building homes and bathrooms. How do you make a bathroom where there is none?” she asks.
While some might challenge the apocalyptic comparison, Brown argues that her main point is to generate solutions. “We shouldn’t spend the majority of our time trying to get someone else to be accountable for what happens to our communities,” she says. “What I like about Octavia is that there are so many people working outside of the system in her works. She says, ‘Don’t wait for someone to do it for you; you provide the solutions yourself.’ That apocalyptic situation is not something that someone else is going to get you out of; you have to lift yourself out of that.”
However, Brown has also found that the creation of science fiction by fellow activists is also a great way to keep activists and advocates motivated. “An activist can work on an issue, and the result won’t come until after their lifetime,” says Brown. She adds that the work, while rewarding, can sometimes feel never-ending. Exploring the future through science fiction can be a great support and healing tool, she says. In fact, she’s currently gathering works of science fiction from activists for a collection.
“What is the biggest story we can imagine telling ourselves and say about our future?” Brown posed to her colleagues. “It can be a utopia, a dystopia, but we wanted to get a perspective from people who are actually trying to change the world today. I’m really curious, what do they think will happen? What do they think is the best-case scenario? How do we get people to think of themselves as creators of tomorrow’s story?
Imagine a World
One year, while teaching art to a group of students in a troubled inner-city area, Colleen Coleman wanted to discuss a made-for-TV film that had aired the night before. She felt the film, an apocalyptic tale where only a few suburbanites survived, would stimulate an interesting discussion about survival and fortitude. To her surprise, the students resolved that if such a horror occurred, they would probably perish. She says, “I remember kids coming into the school saying, ‘We’re just going to die. It’s just going to be over.’ There was this certain apathy. They felt they had no control.”
It’s a sentiment she felt intensified after 9/11 and is only complicated by the proliferation of drugs in many communities and returning soldiers and families who are wrestling with PTSD. However, Coleman, a recent graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, did her thesis on Afrofuturism. She believes that Afrofuturism can stimulate the imagination and give many kids the confidence to hope and expect more.
“Afrofuturism allows you to play,” she says. Coleman was one of several teaching artists who worked with elementary and high school students to create art using Afrofuturism at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA) in Brooklyn. Coleman found that many of her students over the years weren’t in touch with their imaginations. She says, “There’s a lack of creativity being germinated, and it has to do with being taught to the test. Teachers don’t have time to introduce young people to their imagination.”
Coleman is now one of the teaching artists at the MoCADA, which is known for innovative workshops and exhibits. For the past twelve years, they have hosted a culminating art exhibit for the Artists-in-Schools Program, their twenty-to-thirty-week arts partnership with public schools in the neighborhood. They typically work with seven schools a year. “Most of our students’ schools don’t have art programs,” says Ruby Amanze, MoCADA director of education. The theme of the culminating art show changes from year to year, and the 2012 theme was a new one for the museum and the students: Afrofuturism.
The children were asked to visualize the future and to create collective art projects. One group of students created a large door symbolizing a passageway into the future. Another used photography to depict how they wanted to be remembered in the future. Others recreated what black music would sound like. While the artwork was intriguing, the processes that led to the creation of the work were incredible. “Although it’s a visual art program, 80 percent of the focus includes a historical focus,” says Amanze. She adds, “At one school the teacher asked the boys how they would feel if the girls told their history and wrote out the boys. The boys were really upset at the thought of it.” But the discussion compelled many of the children to give some serious thought to the future, their connection to the future now, and the impact of the past.
“I use Afrofuturism to get students to talk about their future,” says Coleman. “[Many] have a difficult time seeing a future. For some reason, the future is a blur, as if they live in th
e land where time stands still.” But she stimulates their minds. “I ask them why companies are building space stations. I ask them about the idea of people being intergalactic tourists and who will be able to afford it,” she says. “We talk about running out of water. I think they understand that there are dire issues that we have to address in the world. I’m hoping that by having these conversations, they will begin to think about what they can do for themselves as individuals and collectively how they can build a new society. I think it can open up a lot of possibilities.”
Reawakening and Prisons
Rasheedah Phillips launched the AfroFuturist Affair in 2011. A member of the Black Science Fiction Society, she wanted to create a community of artists in Philadelphia who could gather and share their work. The event began as an open-mic featuring writers and poets but soon evolved into a larger community of shared interests. Phillips hosted a charity and costume ball as well as an Afrofuturism lecture featuring women performance artists. When I spoke with her, she had just completed a workshop with recently released inmates who were in a work-reentry program.
“It was amazing,” she says. “Part of my mission is to spread the word about what Afrofuturism is beyond groups of intellectuals. I wanted to introduce this to people who might not have access to this audience.” Phillips won a micro-grant for the AfroFuturist Affair and, while presenting at the awards dinner, was asked to share her work at a reentry program. The participants in the reentry program ranged from their mid-twenties to late fifties. Most were men, a few were women. Most were black.
Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture Page 14
