surreal summer
You can’t make this shit up any more. The president of the United States sending out messages to the world IN ALL CAPS AND WITH GLARRING SPELLING MISTAKES. A cabal of human traffickers conducting international espionage. Men who we should be looking up to as elders argue with teenagers trying to convince them that slavery never happened and that Foundational Black Americans are the true Natives of this land. Every recruitment ad for the United States of America could double as a eugenics poster. A computer program that imitates human languages, targets brown and black people for imprisonment and mass murder, and threatens to eliminate millions of jobs. And that program is a best seller with millions signing up to use it each week. And people want to marry it and fuck it too! Iran posts Instagram videos honoring Malcolm X and Nipsey Hussle while Black Detroit elected officials and police chiefs celebrate shooting a Black father in the ass and arresting 180 kids at “Ford Fireworks Day.” The annual celebration was renamed from “Freedom Fireworks Day” in order to celebrate the local industrial magnate Henry Ford, 1938 winner of the Nazi Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the German Eagle. The United States is getting its ass handed to it by Iranian defense forces. The world cup is in the USA and the internet is full of videos of tourists falling in love with Walmart and fast food, Youtube is full with love letters to Amerikka. No matter how much its President blusters, that empire has lost control of one of the world’s major shipping channels and we have no idea if this will result in escalating increases in the cost of living, empty store shelves, or a bit of both.
There’s too much information, and few people know where to get news from. So we mostly listen to each other. All the conspiracy theories I knew from my childhood are now making it into the news cycles headlines, yet they don’t emphasize believing or supporting survivors. It’s up to us to fill in the gaps. The last two presidents have gotten old, senile, swollen, and worse than rusty before our eyes, and under our noses. The first, the Democrat caused a widespread public outrage challenging his fitness to be President. The second, the Republican, tries to hide behind digitally altered pictures of him with bulging biceps and a cowboy hat.
Gittee Up, cowboys he yells as masked men who claim to be federal agenda abduct people from the streets, sometimes shooting a few. We watch Minneapolis circle around armed goons, praying and whistle blowing. We watch Somali citizens storm a parking lot with raised arms and chase predators and troopers out of their neighborhood. We watch it all and measure our own courage and connectedness.
It’s a surreal summer.
I’ve no need to become a fiction writer, coz the shit that’s actually happening makes me laugh and cry about as much as I can handle.
One of my favorite surreal summer memory is driving to Southwest Detroit with my boy Peace Be Free, blasting Stevie Wonder in the Toyota. The sky was grey, toxic, flat filled with the chemical stench of corporate greed. What else is new? Southwest already was an industrial overload, but this night the entire city was under the weight of something we didn’t have words for. The sky glowed the wrong colors and the pollution assailed our senses in unfamiliar ways.
This new fog had just settled on us thirty minutes ago. We were having dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant in Ferndale, you know, the detroit suburb where Black men lie on the sidewalk passed out in front of storefronts with rainbow signs and Black Lives Matter stickers. When we walked out of the restaurant, we were attacked by a malevolent fog that clawed at our eyes. We speed walked three blocks back to my car. A short brother in a Bad Boys Pistons jacket stood casually in front of a record store, puffed on a cigarette, and shrugged his shoulders as we hurried past.
As we drove, rural indigenous communities were fleeing fires bigger than we can probably imagine, down dirt trails, across rivers. As we drove, forests larger than most states were burning. My eyes watered. Stevie Wonder asked:
When will there be?
When will there be
a time to love?
Peace Be Free knew the single and had been jamming it for years, but he didn’t know that there was an entire album. I had been listening to it for years but didn’t know India.Arie was featured on it. He put me on to that. I played Stevie ritually on Obatala days, which of course this was. I was wearing all white. We drove down a stretch of I-75 where industrial factories, cement bridges, and infrastructure towered over us. The sky glowed and pulsed. Stevie sang:
We have time to cause pollution We have time to cause confusion All wrapped up in our own illusions When will there be a time to love? We have time to conquer nations Time for oil excavation Hatred, violence and terrorism When will there be a time to love?
We jammed to that one song where Stevie Wonder and Prince collaborated as I pulled up to the house where he was staying. For a moment we were twenty again, Long Hairz Collective again, on stages again, nodding our heads again, Blind Pig again, on tour again, coffee house with microphones and music stands again. Then we dapped each other up and he made his way through the smoke, smog, the shattered particles and byproducts into the home of the third Long Hairz member.
If you’re in Detroit and want to continue the surreal summer in creativity join us at Book Suey on Saturday August 1st.
The New Innards reading series continues with another seasonal offering.
The seeds of New Innards were planted in November 2025. I was invited to be a featured reader at Leigh Sugar ’s SYMBOL FUCKERS reading celebrating the release of her poetry book FREELAND. The only catch was that on November 9, I had been called down to Ann Arbor to receive a kidney transplant. I told those medical mother fuckers that I am glad to have the new kidney and all but I needed to get down to Book Suey so they better not fuck with my healing. I got out a week later, on the 14th I think and headed to the book store the next night. I limped my rusty ass to the microphone and read a few new poems that I had written to my darling new kidney, who still didn’t really trust me and was reluctant to make urine in this new body.
poem for my new kidney When will you wake up, my shy friend? When will we stop being broke and failure? When will I experience the thrill of urination I was promised? When will you see who I am and leave me, drowned again? When will I be at ease in my body, now I’m stuck in an intense care when will power cannot fix anything, we sit drenched in a fog waiting for the flow to return. Who is this strange bloated mess my wife keeps cleaning after?
~a tide poem, after Brennan Lucas Staffieri
Cat from Book Suey hosted the event. She said that next time we could do a reading for my new kidney. At the time, I kinda thought she was joking, but we’re three readings into New Innards so I guess it’s really happening.
This month I’ll be joined by:
Cherise Morris, writer, interdisciplinary artist, ritualist, spiritual worker- I’ve yet to meet her in person but I love what she does with public ritual and calling liberation into the present moment
Are See- intuitive word curator, political prose poet. A relentless cultural organizer, she writes Detroit towards liberation from the micro to the macro.
Kim Hunter- poet, fiction writer, member of the Ron Allen Project. A hilarious and politically observant author. The first person I wanted by my side when I envisioned this surrealist story telling event.
Zoë Villegas- fortune teller and poet- one of my favorite real-life Detroit story tellers, bar none. I won’t even call it something fancy like “non fiction” she spits real spill, that sidewalk scuff shoe shit.
I am digging getting deeper, deeper into surrealism. Slowly and quietly I’m in conversation with writers and visual artists locally and around the Empire who are finding value in connecting with this movement, which some think to be extinct and historical. Many people think of surrealism as being imaginary, or somehow unreal. Surrealists like to consider their work as excessive realism or surpassing the mundanity and brutality that is considered normal by the dominant society.
Interacting with Ancestor Ron Allen
D Scot Miller in the Afrosurreal Manifesto writes “Afro-Surrealism is drifting into contemporary culture on a rowboat with no oars, entering the city to hunt down clues for the cure to this ancient, incurable disease called “western civilization.” Or, as Ishmael Reed states, “We are mystical detectives about to make an arrest.”
I love the leisurely pace of floating into the present. Not being from this contemporary culture, oh no, but floating into it with a mission. My working is the hunt for the clues, and we pray that my work is a clue itself. Or the reader’s reaction and interaction with my work –the conversation between us– will be the clue that unlocks mysteries of this moment, arrests the inevitability that the artificial correspondents of the day try to sell us on.
In a day when celebrities are fired and “black” listed for taking a stance on genocide. When artists hold their tongue for fear of pissing off sponsors, gallerists and funders. When people look at what is happening around the world, in their city, and in their homes and weep to themselves. Surrealism—always wrestling with the colonial imagination, showing its limits, rubbing its face in the dirt, rubbing the dirt on our own face, tears streaking our cheeks- is one of the movements being called forth.
as Luke says we
DEF(Y) WORLD MAKING. WORLDMAKING IS FOR THE AFRO-FUTURISTS, THE AUTHORITARIANS AND THE STUDENTS OF REALISM. THE afro surrealist has little desire to make a world as THE AFRO SURREAL flows and dances through the world as it exists now. THE AFRO SURREAL IS Like THE WAVES AS PEOPLE WADE IN THE WATER LIKE THAT OLD SONG.
lately the air is so thick, we cover our noses and swim through it, wade in it, some times we look across to the other side, other times we splash and appreciate those immersed in this deadly air alongside us. we hold on.
some Resources
Afrosurreal Manifesto by D. Scott Miller
Transmission from the Afrosurreal by Luke McGowan-Arnold
Echo Tree: collected short fiction by Henry Dumas
Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed
Black Brown and Beige: surrealist writings from Africa and the diaspora, ed. Franklin Rosemont and Robin Kelley
Why Surrealism Matters by Mark Polizzotti
dope personal essay brother