The Brooklyn Rail

Have you heard of Faustin-Élie Soulouque? Known as Faustin I, he was born into slavery in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. After fighting in the successful Haitian Revolution at the turn of the nineteenth century, he became the last emperor of Haiti from 1849 to 1859. A revolutionary leader and a devotee of Vodou, he fought to convey an image of Black excellence to the world, not least in a collection of twelve lithographs he commissioned during his reign. Album Impérial d’Haïti (1852) illustrates his coronation and royal court, presenting portraits of Black leadership in the modern era: Black people with nobility, autonomy.

The images were created in response to campaigns waged by the United States and Europe over the course of his reign to diminish Faustin’s leadership and Haiti’s hard-won independence. Faustin and his wife, Empress Adelina, were depicted in newspapers as apes or savages in royal clothes, and Faustin described as “an imperial fool who could not represent a nation because Black bodies could not represent power, liberty, and equality.”¹ This racist and imperialist campaign argued, in essence, that Haitian people were unfit to govern themselves. The album depicting Faustin’s court and thereby Haiti’s political self-determination, was unreal: surreal.

Faustin and his album remain obscure figures in history. Yet his case establishes a link between Black self-determination and Surrealism which resonates into the present—and which opens several questions about the history of Surrealism as an artistic movement.

We typically trace the origin of Surrealism to a group of Western European radicals in the 1920s, and to ideas expressed in the competing Surrealist manifestos of 1924.² How might this history look if it was told, instead, from a different perspective—that of the Caribbean? How might the ideas privileged in Surrealism’s manifestos—dreams, the unconscious, irrationality, and an embrace of otherness—look if we see them as emerging from strategies among formerly enslaved peoples to imagine another reality, one in which Black and Brown people had control over their own destinies? What if this form of being, a surreal self-determination, inspired a chain of creative projects over the last century?

Such questions might allow us to trace, under the sign of Surrealism, Black diasporic creativity through the twentieth century and into the present. Black and Caribbean artists used irrational and dream-like strategies as means of questioning the conditions of everyday existence. Among the sharpest of such tools was the concept of “the marvelous” evolved among Surrealist circles in Martinique, Haiti, and Cuba in the 1940s. Its preeminent theorist was Suzanne Césaire, whose essay “The Great Camouflage” in the journal Tropiques (1941–45) encouraged colonized peoples to access their unconscious minds, and thereby question the realities of colonial domination. The concept aimed to connect individual liberation to collective movement: a transnational coalition formed by resistance to political, racial, and economic oppression. This vision of Surrealism, then, was not interested in fetishizing otherness, but rather in creating a space of mutual recognition for Caribbean and Black people, spurring them to collective self-determination.

Even when connections to Surrealism and the Caribbean went undeclared, Black artists in the US have likewise used Surrealist tools to explore the absurdity of Black American experience. The lineage is more explicitly embraced in connection to Négritude, navigated by the Black Arts Movement spearheaded by Amiri Baraka and others. Yet the lens of Surrealism allows us to see other familiar works in a new light: from the sculptural oeuvre of Melvin Edwards to Hugh Hayden’s 2020 sculpture, The Cosby’s; from Ana Mendietta’s body of work to Arthur Jafa’s video Love is the Message, the Message is Death, 2016.

The United States elected its first Black president in 2008. Despite attendant backlashes—including racist cartoons reminiscent of the attacks on Faustin I—Obama’s election might be seen as both an historic achievement and the conclusion of a long historical arc, which began, if not with the Haitian Revolution, then at least with the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Museums and the art market have likewise become more amenable to Black artists.

Yet the years following 2008 hardly ushered in wholesale equality. We instead witnessed the wide circulation and consumption of videos of Black people being shot by police officers, and government policies in Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere which remain paternalistic, contradictory, or hostile. We see everywhere the long shadow of histories of colonial domination. Forms of racism that many thought were extinct have come roaring back to life. Moments of glory compete with episodes of despair.

As I reflect on it, the situation seems absurd—nonsensical. This is rich soil in which Surrealism can grow—a Surrealism that helps us better see the situation we are in, and provokes us to imagine different ways of being. The flowers of Surrealism are perennials, it seems, for better or worse. They sprout when the situation demands it, when some new absurdity or system of domination needs to be pictured, navigated, imagined otherwise. These flowers answer to no-one; they follow their own needs and seek their own nourishment.