afro-surreal

You’ve got to love your local library

| Sheree

With my knapsack on my back, I went a wandering. Wandering and wondering is part of my summer field guide plans ( more to follow here with updates). It wasn’t too hot and it wasn’t too cold. It was just right.

I had a bundle of old photographs with me, probably half of my family archive of photographs, as I was going to get them photocopied for a project I’m working on ( more to follow here too).

At my local library, there are two photocopiers. I usually use the downstairs one. But this one was broken. Has been for a few weeks. So I had to go upstairs and use that one.

This photocopier upstairs is manually operated and all monies have to be given to the librarian sitting not far from it.

I asked to use the photocopier. They said yes and I started the job. As I’ve said there were a few photographs to get through and the librarian did say they were leaving momentarily, swapping out.

They stayed for the duration of the job. I paid for the copying and then I took a minute to turn around and look at the new books . Something I do from time to time.

The librarian said at the same time, I was just going to say that there are new books in if you want to have a look at them. Don’t you just love getting your hands on new books? And I had to agree with them.

And there, right in the middle of the shelf, facing me at eye level was the new book from Christena Cleveland, The Black Madonna.

You might remember that another book from Christena Cleveland has been featured on this blog. God is a Black Woman. Ring any bells?

A book I travelled with to Paris, and the outskirts as I took a mini trip to France in search of Black Madonnas.

Well, Cleveland’s next instalment is The Black Madonna, is a further reclamation of the divine feminine, part memoir, part global stories, part historical records, part invocations and rituals. Total liberation.

Part way through this book, where at the end of each chapter there is an invitation to actively allow Black Madonna into your life more fully, I’m drawn to the task of mapping Black Madonna’s loving pursuit of us. Of me throughout my life.

Cleveland presents the story that Black Madonna, is the sacred black feminine worshipped from time, from Africa. When the people of Africa were stolen, taken across the ocean to be enslaved, the sacred black feminine in the form of Osun, orisha of the Osun river begged Yemoja, Mother of all Orishas and Oceans, to let her go with them. Osun’s love for her people was limitless and she didn’t want them to think that she had forsaken them, forgotten them or stopped loving them because of their forced departure .

Yemoja granted Osun’s wish by transforming her into rain, so she could cross the ocean and be with her people who needed her most. So within the Americas, and the Caribbean, Osun crossed an ocean, transforming herself into a more light-skinned goddess so her people would recognise her in these strange new lands, where they had been enslaved and all Africanness bred and/or whipped out of them. She crossed an ocean not just out of love for us, but to empower us. Who has not heard of the slave rebellions inspired and led by Black Madonna, by black women? Who do. you think Harriet Tubman’s North Star was?

Black Madonna. Shape-shifter. Black women. Shape-shifters.

Anyway, I thought I’d share my mapping of Black Madonna’s loving pursuit of me for the past 6 years on this blog this month as I’m in need of feeling that I am not alone.

I’m in need of feeling that I have a black divine presence in my life who’s got me. Who’s there to catch me when I fall.

I’m not religious more spiritual. And because of the white washing of religion,I would’t claim any religion as truth, as something to put my faith in. Never.

I’d much rather put my faith and trust and love into black women. God is a Blackwoman, right. And there is something about Black Madonna that keeps drawing me back to her. That gives me peace and joy when I sent eyes on her.

So who wouldn’t these feelings to continue? Who wouldn’t want to highlight and amplify these feels through difficult times?

Where am I at with Afro-Surreal?

| Sheree

Afro-Surreal was the word I chose for 2026. My guiding word of the year. I might not have posted a lot about it here, and yet, it has been a constant so far, bubbling away in the background. Shimmering away just beneath the surface, ready to boil to the top, or over when something happens to question or disrupt my reality.

I chose Afr0-Surreal as my word of the year because I was doing it already. I had finally found a word for what I was experiencing and I wanted to explore it further. Unpick it, hold it up to the light and examine it closely.

In a sense, it’s an attempt to go back to the beginning, go back to the source of this term and its meaning and how it does show up in my life and practice.

D. Scot Miller in 2009 wrote “The Afro-surreal Manifesto”. He is the source who coined the term. He could only find the term being used one time before this by Amiri Baraka, who used the term to describe the work of Henry Dumas. Miller went to Baraka asking him if he had any issue with him using Afro-Surreal and running with the term and concept. Miller asked permission and was granted it. Since then Afro-Surreal / Afro-Surrealism has gone on to be a genre or school of art and literature.

I’ll start my study with looking at what Miller has to say about Afro-Surreal and continue from there as since 2009, Miller came out in October 2024 to say that Afro-Surrealism is dead. And when I read this I was like, noooooo. I’ve just come to the party and it’s over? But then on further reading I totally get why Miller is saying this.

Go back re-read the paragraphs I have already written about the inception, the birth of Afro-Surrealism. And then imagine or consider this, predominately white institutions, universities, academics trying to erase the work, trying to erase the manifesto created by Miller in 2009 as the beginning of Afro-Surrealism, trying to change the history of Afro-Surrealism, sound familiar?

We’ll be exploring this and more but let’s get things straight from the start, the names we need to know and give credit to. Amiri Baraka and D. Scot Miller. Remember those names as we insert them back into history, into their rightful places of the founding fathers of Afro-surrealism. And as Miller has said lately, in 2024:

So what to do?

When Brooklyn Rail contacted me, I understood the impact and reach of the publication, and after some serious reflection, it came to me that if I brought Afrosurrealism to life, I was the only person to be able to announce its demise in order to divorce my vision from this white-led hostile takeover. So I killed Afrosurrealism in front of the very people who need it alive in order to feed off of it.

AFROSURREALISM IS DEAD! LONG LIVE AFROSURREALISM!