P.C. Verrone Recommends Essential Texts of Afro-Surrealism

I was introduced to the term “Afro-Surrealism” through an interview in which Phillip B. Williams called it his preferred way to describe his novel Ours. The phrase was coined by Amiri Baraka in 1974 and expanded upon by D. Scott Miller in his 2009 “The Afro-surreal Manifesto.” Afro-Surrealism emerges from folklore, cosmologies, ancestries, spiritualities, humor, knowledge systems, and ways of being specific to the African continent and diaspora. Like magical realism, it allows the real world to co-exist with the uncanny and impossible. Miller distinguishes Afro-Surrealism from both European Surrealism and Afrofuturism, which imagines science and technologies to speculate on Black futures.

I find it difficult to describe the genre of my novel Rabbit, Fox, Tar. Though undeniably speculative, its supernatural elements don’t quite push it into the realm of fantasy or science fiction. Very real historical injustices and modern political tensions birth something phantasmic. Magical Realism might be a more accurate categorization, but even that feels both too broad and too specific to call it a match. Many authors who have influenced my work say that this is simply how Black folk have always told stories.

As Namwali Serpell notes in On Morrison, “This co-presence of folklore and the gospels, the supernatural and the real world, practicality and superstition, is simply a fact of the African diaspora.” But given that Black authors can and do write in a variety of styles across all genres, the question remains: how to characterize this kind of literature to a would-be reader? Afro-Surrealism makes sense.

Afro-Surrealism concerns the now. Like the Afrodiaspora itself, it incorporates and remixes various cultures across the globe through an Afrocentric lens. It reimagines African and Afrodiasporic deities, riffs on folk beliefs from slavery, and lampoons narratives imposed by oppressors. Masks, invisibility and hyper-visibility, the living intermingling with the dead, and lush, baroque language are all staples of the Afro-Surreal. As a genre, it investigates the bizarre, otherworldly, and magical realities of Black personhood. Perhaps the best way to describe it is through some examples.

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Henry Dumas, Ark of Bones and Other Stories

The original inspiration for the term “Afro-Surreal,” this collection of Dumas’s work was posthumously published following his murder. In the titular story, friends Headeye and Fish-hound argue over Headeye’s insistence that he has magic powers bestowed by a mojo bone. The story intermingles Hoodoo with Christianity, AAVE with “foreign talk,” and a startling visual image that at once evokes Noah’s Ark, Charon’s boat, and a slave ship. From here, the stories fly from rural Arkansas to Harlem, each exemplifying Dumas’s unique perspective on the Black American experience and the poetic language that prompted Toni Morrison to call him “an absolute genius.”

Victor LaValle, Big Machine

Ricky, a recovering addict and survivor of a suicide cult, journeys to Vermont’s Northern Kingdom to join a group of all-Black paranormal investigators known as the Unlikely Scholars who are seeking out the source of a mysterious Voice. As the Scholars connect paranormal phenomena to historical atrocities, Ricky’s search leads him backward into the sins of his past and forward to a radical revolutionary in San Francisco. At a moment when paranormal investigation and conspiracy theories are only growing in popularity, this novel offers a complex world in which monsters are very real, but nothing else is certain.

Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird

Inspired by “Snow White,” this novel and its characters are preoccupied with mirrors. Reflections move on their own accord or don’t appear at all. At the start, a young white woman named Boy escapes from her abusive father in New York to a small Massachusetts town. She becomes intent on wooing a charming local named Arturo but cannot get to him without first winning over his angelic daughter, Snow. Without giving away too much of the plot, suffice to say that most of this novel explores people who are not what they appear.

Morgan Jerkins, Caul Baby

Jerkins’s novel begins with Laila, a woman desperate to be a mother whose previous pregnancies have all resulted in miscarriages. She turns to the formidable Melancons, an old and powerful Harlem family famed for their caul, an amniotic skin with a preternatural healing power. The novel swirls around the Melancon family’s hunger to maintain their status from their crumbling brownstone, while forces from both without and within the family threaten their position. Jerkins highlights issues ranging from the gentrification of Harlem to how the U.S. healthcare system fails Black mothers while incorporating the otherworldly joys and horrors of birth and motherhood.

August Wilson, Gem of the Ocean

Chronologically the earliest play in Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle, it begins in 1904 at the home of 285-year-old Aunt Esther. When a Southerner named Citizen Barlow arrives asking Aunt Esther to absolve him of his guilt over a crime he committed, she sends him on a mystical sojourn on the slave ship, Gem of the Ocean, to the City of Bones. In the meantime, a very real drama arrives at Aunt Esther’s door when a Black man is accused of robbing a local mill. Wilson dramatizes a twofold tension throughout the play: the history of slavery clinging to these characters’ spirits, and the future of freedom that they are fighting to define.

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

In this undeniable classic, Ellison leans into the absurdity and outlandishness of life as a Black man in America. The novel follows its protagonist from his ejection from a Southern all-Black college through a variety of bizarre confrontations in New York. Much of the book hovers on the edge of reality before diving into moments of Kafkaesque disorder. The central premise of the protagonist’s social invisibility, which results in him being easily projected onto and mistaken for other people, gives the entire narrative an unmoored feeling.

Phillip B. Williams, Ours

There is literal magic in Ours, mostly practiced by the central figure of Saint, a conjurewoman who founds an all-Black town in 1830’s Missouri that she hides from the rest of the world. However, Saint’s conjuring is not the only way magic manifests in this epic novel. Other characters exhibit incredible powers of invisibility or invincibility. Ancestral ties can lead to bodily possession. Even the land itself acts otherworldly, sometimes spurred by rifts open to the spirit world. Yet, at no point do this myriad of supernatural approaches feel at odds with one another, or with the very real history woven through the novel. In fact, each illuminates the other, creating an imaginative portrait of this town.

Toni Morrison, Paradise

While Beloved, and, in fact, most of Morrison’s novels, would fit neatly on this list, I find Paradise particularly surreal. Morrison juxtaposes the religious zealots of a dying Exoduster town in the 1970’s with a nearby interracial “convent” of women who come and go, exhibiting a kind of freedom that disturbs the men of the town. Morrison’s violent confrontation of the Black church with an unconventionally organized matriarchal spiritual community produces thrilling questions around religion’s influence over us. While Beloved may be her ghost story, the border between Life and Afterlife is even less distinguishable in Paradise.

Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads

This novel follows three women: Mer, an enslaved healer in 17th century St. Domingue, Jeanne Duval, a Haitian actress who becomes the mistress of Charles Baudelaire in 1840’s Paris, and Thais, an enslaved Nubian in Alexandria, Egypt in the year 345 C.E. These three women are connected through the fertility goddess Lasirén, who moves fluidly across time between the astral plane of the Loa and the physical world of humans, at various times possessing each of these women. Through Lasirén and recurring motifs of water and salt, Hopkinson emphasizes the integration of ancestry, tradition, and spiritual healing in each of these women’s searches for freedom.

Lesley Nneka Arimah, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky

I was initially introduced to this collection through the story “Who Will Greet You at Home,” in which a Nigerian woman weaves a child out of hair, which does not produce the sort of child she hoped for (does it ever, in these kinds of stories?) In other stories, multiple generations of women are haunted by ghosts of war, the goddess of rivers feuds with the god of ants, and a mathematical equation allows people to perform unbelievable feats, until it doesn’t. In each story, Arimah explores very real dynamics between family members, friends, and lovers while giving each a surreal twist that brings out their truths even more.

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Rabbit, Fox, Tar by P.C. Verrone is available from Catapult.