death

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!

a sea of skulls each one different from the next

| Sheree

after Ron Mueck


“Mass” by Ron Mueck at NGV Triennial

Here is a mass

of white upon white

skulls, tumbling

everywhere upon the galleries’ floor

a turning sea, resting

biting into another

black holes

shadowed sockets

promising questions without answers

a warning? a threat?

what remains long after our bodies have decayed

an impressive 100 skulls,

dwarfing visitors as they loom

here and here, cool, corridors

as catacombs above ground

forcing us to face our mortality, yes,

but also a certain care is needed in life for each other. Yes?

I was thinking today …

| Sheree
Past Visual Journal Spread

While completing my visual journaling this morning, at my old wooden table moved in front of my bedroom bay window looking out onto my rainy, foggy street, I had the thought that I’ve lived most of my life already.

This year I’ll turn 55 in October and it just struck me how the majority of my life/ living is behind me.

Then it got me thinking about how many years do I have left. I played with the idea of thinking, what if I’m just reaching the mid-point of my life? What if I have another 55 years of living ahead of me?

How would I feel about that? What would I need to do now to make that happen? Do I want to live to 110 years?

It has been done. It can be done even though those ‘blue zones’ where the majority ofcentenarians live are shrinking.

I feel I’d have to change a few habits first to give it a good shot at living until 110.

I know I could have been looking after my body better up until this point. But it’s never too late right, to start using food as medicine and to stop punishing my body for being black fat and ageing.

There’s still time right? There’s still a lot of twists and turns and bumps in this road left of this journey, right?

I’m not sure as nothings certain. But what if …

Starved to death

| Sheree

Telling myself I’m starving, I went into a supermarket. Came out half an hour later weighed down with food and toilettes.

I said ‘starving’ but I’m not really. I had lunch about couple of hours ago. Really I don’t know what it feels like to starve as I’m always a couple of hours, footsteps or miles away from gaining access to an abundance of food. I know I will never have to go without.

Unlike the people in Gaza now.

We are in an historic catastrophe. I use ‘we’ as I stand as a witness to what is happening in Gaza, to Palestinian people now.

61% of Everyone Who’s Starved to Death in Gaza Over the Past 22 Months Died in the Past Three Weeks

This means up until 20th July, 86 people had died of starvation in Gaza since the genocide began in October 2023. In the three weeks since, up until 11th August, that number of people dying of starvation in Gaza has risen to 222.

These are the numbers we know about. No doubt this number is rising daily.

I’ve just read this now. While I’m stuffing my face with food, man-made starvation and famine is happening in Gaza and it’s gotten to the point of being irreversible for the vast majority of people. They are so far gone without nourishment that even if they could access food now, it would make no difference to their bodies and minds and nervous systems. They are starving to death by a US backed Israeli genocide. This is happening on purpose and there are still people who are denying it’s happening or who are justifying it.

I got the information from Zeteo media. Go check it out and witness the devastation of life. I’m trying to figure out the next best thing I can do to change this situation in Gaza. Sharing this information, raising awareness is part of this action.

continuing to live and learn

| Sheree
Studio Practice Journal, 2023-4

“On the afternoon of May 16, 2020, about a week before George Floyd was killed by the police, twenty-one-year-old Tye Anders was accused by the Midland, Texas, police of running a stop sign. He pulled over in front of his ninety-year-old grandmother’s house.”

Excerpt From
We Refuse
Kellie Carter Jackson

There’s Anders pleading for his life. There’s many policemen with guns drawn pointed at him and there’s bystanders filming it all. One woman who’s filming this is also pleading for the police to not shot Anders saying he’s scared. Hasn’t there been enough killing of unarmed black people, killed just because of the colour of their skin?

Still no guns are lowered and Anders is on the ground clearly empty handed but the situation is just escalating as the police continue to train their guns on his body.

Anders’ ninety-years-old grandmother steps out of her house praying. With cane in hand she walks towards her grandson even though guns are trained in her direction.

There was still panic still bystanders screaming for the police to put their guns up. Some do but still one cop is walking towards Anders with his gun raised. Trying to move and push her out of the way, his grandmother doesn’t believe that her grandson won’t still be shot so she falls onto her grandson, protecting his body with her own body. Not longer after this with the police and crowd pushing and pulsating around her , she loses consciousness.

Anders is arrested for fleeing the police. His grandmother is taken to hospital.

Reading this story this morning made me cry. Not because of the police brutality or the disregard for human life, black life. But because of what the grandmother in the story did. She’s ninety-years-old, frail and only has her prays and body, but used both in protection, in an act of love.

“Her collapse was not a coincidence. Protection is powerful, beautiful, and sacrificial because protection is love. But she should not have needed to put her body between the police and her grandson to protect him.”

Excerpt From
We Refuse
Kellie Carter Jackson.

Protection. She should not have needed to, but she did put her body between the police and grandson to protect him. This act of courage broke my heart this morning. Had me weeping. Maybe it was the last straw that pushed me over the edge into the breakdown. Maybe it was my imagination seeing this playing out.

Maybe I’m just sick and tired of living in a world where white violence is justified and black violence is really self-defence but is never judged that way.

I’ve always been a supporter of care work but even more so now. As care work, along with rest are forms of protection. Through the way I {BE} with myself and others, and the work that I do for self and others, I’m tending daily to the mental, emotional, and physical needs and health of black people, so we are better equipped to survive and thrive within a hostile, brutal, grinning world.

Witnessing the Killing Fields

| Sheree
Bob Vylan

The political and media furore over chants at Glastonbury by Bob Vylan, a British punk duo has me reeling at the moment. I couldn’t get my head around it at first, why I was feeling such anger at this condemnation of their chant? At first I was thinking it was because this group are black and I felt it was racism again raising its ugly head. But then Kneecap is getting condemnation as well for ‘hate speech’, ‘inciting violence’, an Irish hip-hop trio from Belfast. I’m not saying that the Irish has not experienced their own form of racism, prejudice and discrimination either.

But then when I saw the newspaper headlines, and then the Prime Minister coming out say it was ”appalling hate speech’ wanting an investigation in the BBC and how they could allow this to happen, with criminal investigations being filed against both Bob Vylan and Kneecap, I realised why I was getting angry and really enraged. It was because there was all this disgust and moral hand whinging and condemnation of a chant, but not the same level of condemnation and rage and move to stop it for the genocide happening in Gaza, right now, or for the last 1 year, 8 months, 3 weeks and 4 days. As the Palestinians continue to be exterminated by Israel Defense Forces (IDF), there is no condemnation, not opposition from the UK government, the media, those in business, those who are showing again and again that they are controlled, owned by the Israeli Government and State. Proving that they actually have vested interests in Israel and continuing the genocide.

It is ludicrous to witness, the political and media condemnation of a few words chanted at a music festival while Palestinians waiting in a line for aid, starving people who’ve been herded into this state of the queuing dead, are massacred by IDF. These people dead on their feet, seeking aid, did not pose a threat, and yet the IDF, an armed force just opened fire on them because they could. Because they know, no one is trying to stop them. No one is condemning their actions. The world is turning a blind eye to their war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Anyone opposing their horrendous crimes are called anti-semitic and are cancelled, condemned, silenced.

Bob Vylan, facing a criminal investigation have also been dropped but their record company and are on a travel ban to USA. Swift and sharp punishment for expressing their desire to see a free Palestine, from the river to the sea. Mass disgust across the country and further afield about a chant, but where is the mass disgust and action against the mass extermination of a people? The Palestinians, the people of Gaza.

“It’s a Killing Field”, reported by Nir Hasson, Yaniv Kubovich and Bar Peleg within Haaretz, details how IDF soldiers were ordered to shoot deliberately at unarmed Gazans waiting for humanitarian aid. Unarmed people are treated like a hostile force and just shot and killed. Deliberately. Bullets is the IDF form of communication. Not chants, bullets. Where is the condemnation of this? Where is the Parliamentary emergency meeting to discuss this deliberate killing of human life, that is genocide, that are war crimes? None but there is one about Bob Vylan, and Lisa Nandy, British Labour Party politician serving as Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport since 2024, standing up in Parliament, in solemn tones criticising the BBC the Glastonbury broadcast and Bob Vylan for the chanting. Claiming her moment in the limelight, making a performance, Nandy condemned the “appalling and unacceptable scenes” at Glastonbury and said the government would not tolerate antisemitism. But the government tolerates genocide. FACT.

I could go on as I’m sick and tired of hearing when someone criticises IDF, and the Israeli state of murdering Palestinians and claiming Gaze, the whole state, from river to sea, that this is being anti-semitic. This is just another tactic used for shutting people up. As when people are criticising the genocide of Palestinians and the stealing of their homeland, they are not saying they hate Jews or the Jewish people. They are saying that the massacre of a people is wrong. The IDF as an armed force is committing genocide. That is what is being condemned, criticised and left to the general public around the world to fight against as the Western countries are doing nothing to stop it.

Conflating these criticisms with Jewish people , calling it anti-semitic is like using a get out of jail free card on repeat. It’s not the same thing. And I would argue that if the chant, ‘death, death to the IDF’, is anti-semitic and hate speech inciting violence, what/who is it killing IDF? A chant, some words at Glastonbury or the Israeli government sending the IDF into war, ordering them to kill unarmed people seeking aid? Tell me which one is a whitewashing of crimes against humanity? The chant is not a chant of hate for Jewish people. The chant is anger at the genocidal actions of a genocidal army, the IDF, who are beginning to ask themselves if this was is just, and what is the humanitarian price the Gazan population paying for this war?

Dear Future Self – Day 21

| Sheree

Dear Future Self

I hope you are well. Or as well as you can be, as I know you have a tendency to fall out of love with yourself. Waste time on not looking after yourself and beat yourself up for it too.

I just hope you’re learning because, at the moment, I think you’re doing remarkably well. You’re still here aren’t you? You’re still smiling? So you must be doing something good.

And even if you’re not, just remember that you are good. Good enough just the way you are. For reals.

And I know you have your current worries and concerns. No doubt worrying about where your next pay check is coming from and do you have to compromise your integrity to get it.

But listen, I know you and I know you always find a way. Because you are a fighter. You’re resourceful and determined and you love life far too much to just give up on it. To just give up on yourself.

I just love how you’re living your life on your own terms not being worried about what others think about you or what they might say.

I just love how you’re striving for what makes you happy to hell with everyone else. This is inspiring. This is you.

This year has seen you really lean into a morning routine to set you up for the rest of the day. And it’s been rewarding to see how this has helped you to move forward.

I say continue on this path of making sure your needs and wants are met each and every day first as this puts you in the best position to then help and support others.

Simple small things like enjoying that first cup of coffee. Listening to Love Devotion on repeat in Insight Timer. Small things that might seem insignificant but actually remind you that you are loved, loving and loveable by yourself, first and foremost.

And then look for that love from others as it is there. The love. It’s always there. Love.

Keep following those sparks that reveal joy. Which make you light up from the inside out. Solitude and quiet, just as much as company and music. Getting out in nature and moving that wonderful body of yours.

Someone said to you recently that life is long, instead of thinking of life being short, too short, so seize the moment now. And that still holds true but to think of life being long is to not only savour it now and to be grateful for it, it also means that we never really leave or die. We just transform and transcend into someone or something else in time. Over time. Through time.

This opens up whole new portals and possibilities and is exciting. Therefore, no need to panic or rush or run around like a chicken with no head. You’re okay resting, taking that afternoon nap, without fear of missing out.

Everything goes into the mix to make up this weird and wonderful life. You’ve just got to remain open, baby. You’ve just got to keep that beautiful heart of your open and welcome whatever comes your way. The good, the bad and the ugly.

Everything of this beautiful terrible life is welcome here because it is yours. Your terrifyingly beautiful life.

So go live it now hun. Go {BE}.

Love you

Sheree

Tender, Undoing Self Within Night’s Skin – Day 13

| Sheree

I say to myself : stop. Stop undoing yourself within night’s skin.

Tell myself a promise to sort out my living habits so I don’t die prematurely like my mum.

Imagine the tenderness: like soft beige rolls of fat, like soft pink tongues languishing in wet mouths, like soft woollen blankets tickling toes.

I may no longer be the second daughter, the misfit who could conjure a soul’s reflection through colourful art.

Please night as you stretch out your skin one more time, please be tender with my damaged, twisted stars.

Poetry is not a Luxury

| Sheree

As they become known and accepted to ourselves, our feelings, and the honest exploration of them, become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas, the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have once found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but the true meaning of “it feels right to me.” We can train ourselves to respect our feelings, and to discipline (transpose) them into a language that matches those feelings so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of
our lives. It lays the foundations for a future if change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.

Audre Lorde, ‘Poetry is not a Luxury’, on Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press, 1984), 37.