Readiness for the Marvelous

The revolution will be poetic. While consciousness may be growing and we begin to see the interconnectedness of atrocities inflicted on people and our ways of life, we are still relying on reason and hoping that voicing our anger will lead to change. Moving beyond that requires us to understand what freedom and liberation mean on a deeper level. For that, we might take a leaf out of the surrealists’ handbook: theirs was an unleashing of the mind from reason, a practice of radical freedom. 

When we think about surrealism, most of us may bring to mind melting clocks, distorted dripping faces, or pipes that are on hold. What many regard as an art movement that emerged after the first world war and took inspiration from psychoanalysis, interpretations of dreams and our inner subconscious, surrealism was in fact, Walter Benjamin said, much more than an art movement. Surrealists, he wrote, had a radical concept of freedom, which Europe lacked. 

At their core, surrealists were driven by their absolute rejection of all forms of authoritarianism and fascism, they were deeply anti-racist, and eventually, supported anti-colonial struggles (starting with the resistance movement in Morocco against France and to a lesser extent Spain, who controlled most of the country). More than a historical movement, it was an attitude.

André Breton, who was considered one of the founders of surrealism, wrote the first  Surrealist Manifesto in 1924 which called for the principles of surrealism to apply beyond the art world; it was a call to reject and break down oppressive systems through creative thinking. To do that we had to unify the interior reality with the external reality.

In Murderous Humanitarianism, published in 1932, a group of surrealists called out imperial wars and colonisation and declared that they put themselves at the disposal of the revolution and its struggles, highlighting the hypocrisy of the colonisers: “[t]he white man preaches, doses, vaccinates, assassinates and (from himself) receives absolution. With his psalms, his speeches, his guarantees of liberty, equality and fraternity, he seeks to drown the noise of his machine guns.”

While Paris was considered the centre of the surrealist movement, historian Robin D.G. Kelley suggests that the roots of the movement were assertively African, revolutionary and anti-colonialist. Many of the ideas and values that found themselves in surrealism can be traced to African as well as Caribbean traditions, in particular in art, in poetry and in music.

Suzanne Césaire, who together with her husband Aimé, founded the radical surrealist literary magazine Tropiques, believed that surrealism was not an ideology but a state of mind, a “permanent readiness for the Marvelous.” 

For her, surrealism could be a liberatory movement, it was about making a new life and freeing the mind from the shackles of absurd logic and so-called Western Reason. It could help lessen the contradiction between everyday life and our wildest dreams. Its cause was the cause of freedom, like art and like life. “Surrealism is living, intensely, magnificently, having found and perfected a method of inquiry of immeasurable efficacy,” she wrote.

For the Césaires, Kelley writes, theirs was a conception of freedom that drew on modernism and a deep appreciation for precolonial African modes of thought and practice; it drew on surrealism as the strategy of revolution of the mind.

The idea of a revolution of the mind has always been central to surrealism as well as to black conceptions of liberation. A revolution of the mind is not merely a refusal of victim status, Kelley writes, it’s about an unleashing of the mind’s most creative capacities, catalysed by participation in struggles for change, where love, poetry and the imagination are powerful revolutionary forces. And if we believe in revolution, he concludes, we need to move beyond the real and make it surreal.

These strategies should not replace organised protest, marches, sit-ins, strikes and slow-downs, matches or spray paint, he says, “surrealism recognises that any revolution must begin with thought, with how we imagine a New World, with how we reconstruct our social and individual relationships, with unleashing our desire and building a new future on the basis of love and creativity rather than rationality.” 

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Words, Veronica Yates and illustration, Miriam Sugranyes

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References

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‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,’ Walter Benjamin, 1929. Download the pdf here.

‍Manifestoes of Surrealism, André Breton, 1924. 

‘Murderous Humanitarianism.’ Translated by Samuel Beckett. Authors: André Breton, Roger Caillois, René Char, René Crevel, Paul Eluard, J-M Monnerot, Benjamin Péret, Yves Tanguy, André Thirion, Pierre Unik, Pierre Yoyotte, 1932. Read here.

‍‘Keeping it (Sur)Real: Dreams of the Marvelous.’ in Freedom Dreams: the Black Radical Imagination, Robin D.G. Kelley.

‘Surrealism and Us.” Suzanne Césaire.

‘A Poetics of Anticolonialism,’ Robin D.G. Kelley, introduction to Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism. 

‘Post-War Surrealism and Anti-Authoritarianism,’ Minor Compositions Podcast, E38, 16 September 2025. Listen here.

‘Surrealism lives – and it is black, female and revolutionary,’ Robin D.G. Kelley, Sisgwen, 2 July 2017. Read here.

‘Robin D.G. Kelley on the Importance of Utopian Visions for Social Movements.’ Interview, Current Affairs, 29 September 2022. Read here.

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Further Resources

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Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire.

"The ground zero of a liberated world is Palestine, "Makdisi Street Podcast, with Robin D.G. Kelley, 30 January 2024. Watch/listen: here.

“The Surrealists' Anti-Colonialism.” Albers, Irene. In: Anselm Franke / Tom Holert, Eds., Neolithic Childhood – Art in a False Present, c. 1930, HKW/Diaphanes, p. 244-247, 2018. Read here.

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