The marvellous is a question of perspective and is ‘always beautiful’ for a reason much more urgent than what it is. Lucy Jones finds marvel in the ephemerality of slime moulds. Andreas Weber feels it in the relationship between the tide and the moon. To my niece and nephew, many marvels glimmer in only a moment. The marvellous is beautiful because of its demand for our presence and attentiveness: the marvellous is testament to our aliveness.

Aliveness is more than being not-dead. It is the state of being alive—and exuberantly so. It’s aliveness that adrienne maree brown calls us to pursue through pleasure activism. Kevin Quashie shows how Black feminist philosophies can energise our aliveness. It’s a synergetic aliveness that animates our obsessions with animals. I am rabid with aliveness when I’m in the presence of white lilies (they are one of my spiritual talismans).

Andre Breton opens his Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) with a gut-punching insight into the marvellous as a provocation for his own aliveness:

‘If there remains enough for me to immerse myself in, there will nonetheless never be enough to make me what I would like to be, no matter how indulgent I am about myself. And yet I am living, I have even discovered that I care about life. The more I have sometimes found reasons for putting an end to it, the more I have caught myself admiring some random square of parquet floor: it was really like silk. I liked this lucid pain, as though the entire universal drama of it had then passed through me and I was suddenly worth the trouble. But I liked [this lucid pain] in the light of new things that I had never seen glow before.’

I, too, like the lucid pain of being alive in the light of new things I have never seen glow before. I chase the lucid pain of being alive in poetry and art. I am rocked by the lucid pain of being alive when I observe my niece and nephew laughing. My recurring practice of sobriety orients me back towards the lucid pain of being alive—especially when I feel I’m not worth the trouble.

Notice how lucid pain punches from within the mundane: slime mould, parquet flooring, a bouquet of lilies babied in my arms. The marvellous is also already here.

Some 80-odd years after Breton argued that our dream world is a reality deserving of the same fidelity given to our waking reality, D Scot Miller’s Afro-Surrealist Manifesto (2009) surfaced to offer an earth-bound, embodied and ‘third world’ grounding—which he does with afrofuturism and surrealism as his coordinates:

‘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. What is the future? […] Afro-Surreal presupposes that beyond this visible world, there is an invisible world striving to manifest, and it is our job to uncover it […] We re-introduce "madness" as visitations from the gods, and acknowledge the possibility of magic. We take up the obsessions of the ancients and kindle the dis-ease, clearing the murk of the collective unconsciousness as it manifests in these dreams called culture […] Afro-Surrealism is intersexed, Afro-Asiatic, Afro-Cuban, mystic, silly, and profound.’

I find in Miller’s afrosurrealism a more muscular framework for the poetic impulses that too often render me useless to myself and others (all gifts have teeth). The afrosurreal helps me recognise and gather kin and notice my blessings, as a kind of way-finding: ‘you belong here on earth, stop looking beyond where you are’. I sense the afrosurreal in the poetry of Essex Hemphill, the theomorphic sculptures of Wangechi Mutu and the ‘sensuous gods’ my sister named Max and Freya.

It’s clear to me now that from seed to bud and bloom, Busy Being Black is flagrantly and fragrantly (afro)surrealist, and it’s how I’ve learned that this consistent confrontation with the unseen and the impossible is an inheritance. The Black Marvellous gathers together conversations that help us uncover the worlds we already belong to and find our way back to each other—with more grace, rage and tenderness, but especially more imagination.

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