Literary Reading Review: McSweeney’s Variety Show featuring Boots Riley, Oct. 17, Z Space; “We Are Mystic Detectives About To Make An Arrest” hosted by D. Scot Miller, Oct. 18, Aldea Home.
O ctober 20, 2014 by Eric K. Arnold for Oakulture.com
The next night saw “We Are Mystic Detectives About to Make
An Arrest,” an Afro-Surrealist reading during Litcrawl, hosted by D.Scot
Miller, author of the “Afrosurrealist Manifesto.” In his manifesto, Miller
explains that Afro-Surrealism isn’t like the European Surrealism of Dada or
Dali, and it’s not the African Surrealism of Leopold Senghor’s negritude
movement, either. Nor should it be confused with Afro-futurism, which focuses
on science, technology and a timeline which hasn’t yet happened.
“Afro-Surrealism,” Miller writes, “is about the
present… Concentration camps, bombed-out
cities, famines, and enforced sterilization have already happened. To the
Afro-Surrealist, the Tasers are here. The Four Horsemen rode through too long
ago to recall.”
Some may see the origins of Afro-Surrealism in the novels of
Chester Himes, but as Miller pointed out Saturday night, the term was actually
coined by the late Amiri Baraka, and counts Ishmael Reed (who coined the phrase
which served as the reading’s title) as among its influences.
In addition to Miller, the lineup included my good friend
Malcolm Shabazz Hoover, Ayize Jama-Everett, Michael Warr, and Mike Sabb. All
were brilliant, whether reading short stories or poems, all of which spoke to
the black experience as it’s happening now. The event attracted a
standing-room-only crowd which filled every corner of Aldea Home, an
uber-upscale home furnishing store—call it Bed, Bling and Beyond—where, for a
$10,000 purchase, Design Consultants are available to help rich hipsters
fulfill their aesthetic needs, while the less-monied resort to one-star Yelp
reviews to vent about poor customer service and alleged racial discrimination.
Anyway, the ironic surrealism of an Afro-Surrealist reading
on Valencia St., the symbolic center of post-gentrification SF, a city whose
African American population has steadily been siphoned away to
next-to-nothingness, wasn’t lost on Miller. He joked that the event might have
temporarily raised the city’s black demographic numbers by a percentage point
or two, which is either a) not funny; or b) funny but sad, depending entirely
on your perspective.
It’s also ironic that it took a cadre of Oakland folks to
bring blackness to Litquake. Taken together, the two readings showed that
there’s plenty of life left in the Black Arts movement, and that Oakland has to
be considered a fertile incubator for the contemporary version of that movement.
While Riley and Miller’s readings added something Litquake was otherwise
missing, they represent just the tip of the iceberg: there’s much more (mostly
unheralded) literary talent in the Town, just waiting to be discovered. So
while Litquake generated more interest in the Afro-Surrealist movement, one
hopes its aftershocks will continue to reverberate and shine more light on
Oakland’s black authors.
