Experiencing the Surreal

Last month I read a powerful book called Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. It marked the beginning in my curiosity about the long-time revolutionary dream and my renewed interest in reading the radical theory canon. I learned a lot from this book--about Black futurism, Black nationalism, Black reparations movement--but what deeply impressed me the most was what most affected the author--the Black Surrealist movement. It's hella cool to learn that beyond the myth that surrealism was an artistic cousin of Cubanism, surrealism was actually a socio-political creative way of being that grew in Europe but was sown by seeds in Latin America and Black North American, particularly in jazz. Richard Wright, apparently, self-identified as a surrealist, whose voice replaced my own when he said that surrealism is the Black American experience...I swear as that very thought formed in my head, I read it in his own words on the next page...I'm into it. I finished Freedom Dreams feeling satisfied that the book achieved the purpose that it sought, as my imagination danced with dreams, longings, desires, possibilities, and visions from ancestors and contemporaries, here and across the world.

And what usually happens when a book opens up your world is that life likes to demonstrate for you. Not long after reading about the Black inflection on the Surrealist movement, I had my own experience that felt (nodding sideways to find the right word)...I guess, surreal. I don't mean that I had some otherworldly, out-of-body experience or to just a plain bizarre, unexpected experience--I mean that it didn't feel real. I was fully present and aware; I breathed and lived through it; it happened in the physical world; and yet, it didn't feel as it happened. The only way to describe it was so shallowly felt that it almost seems as if it wasn't real.

I can definitely say what it was not. It wasn't a traumatic experience where I felt beyond myself, looking onto the unfolding event with confusion, anxiety, and decisiveness. It wasn't a fast, indispensable euphoric event that flashed before me, and was over before I could make anything of it, and left a lingering humor about it, like a ticklish feeling. And it wasn't a slow-motion, underwater experience where I could feel every cell in my body from excitement or fear, and watch a razor-sharp self-consciousness cut through the world which surrounded at that moment. Nah, this was something else.

It was loose and unfamiliar, fun but unknown, open but messy. It certainly took the form of what freedom looks like but I guarantee it wasn't what freedom felt. The way I was experiencing surrealism, here, wasn't true. It is the sort of freedom that you know by exploring but not the sort that you know because it unleashes things within you that you hadn't realized. Discovery, for sure, but not much more.

So, looking back, I am reinforcing ideas about my core self, which I understand is delusional in itself. I love being curious but in the end, I am not an explorer, I am a planter. The most interesting part, though, is learning that I could confidently challenge myself to explore the completely unknown--and return home ever more content with home.