Freedom dreams - The Other America/Race - adapted from 'Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination'

New Internationalist, Nov, 2002 by Robin Kelley

The search for liberation has taken Robin Kelley from battered Harlem to William Morris, the Surrealists, radical feminists of color and young activists for global justice--but he still wants Bootsy.

My mother has a tendency to dream out loud. I think it has something to do with her regular morning meditation. In the quiet darkness of her bedroom, her third eye opens on to a new world, a beautiful, light-filled place as peaceful as her state of mind. When I was growing up, she never had to utter a word to describe her inner peace; like morning sunlight, it radiated out to everyone in her presence. Her other two eyes never let her forget where we lived. The cops, drug dealers, social workers, the rusty tap water, the roaches and rodents, the urine-scented hallways and the piles of garbage were constant reminders that our world began and ended in a battered Harlem/Washington Heights tenement apartment on 157th and Amsterdam.

Yet she would not allow us to live as victims. Instead, we were a family of caretakers who inherited this earth. We were expected to help any living creature in need, even if that meant giving up our last piece of bread. Strange, needy people always passed through our house, occasionally staying for long stretches of time. We were expected to stand apart from the crowd and befriend the misfits, to embrace the kids who stuttered, smelled bad or had holes in their clothes.

She simply wanted us to live through our third eyes, to see life as possibility. She wanted us to imagine a world where gender and sexual relations could be reconstructed. She wanted us to see the poetic and prophetic in the richness of our daily lives. She wanted us to visualize a more expansive, fluid, 'cosmospolitan' definition of blackness, to teach us that we are not merely inheritors of a culture but its makers.

I came to black nationalism filled with idealistic dreams of a communal society free of all oppressions, a world where we owned the land and shared the wealth, and white folks were out of sight and out of mind. It was what I imagined precolonial Africa to be. Sure, I was naive, still in my teens, but my imaginary portrait, derived from the writings of Cheikh Anta Diop, Chancellor Williams, Julius Nyerere, Kwame Nkrumah, Kwame Ture, gave me a sense of hope and possibility about what a post-colonial Africa could look like.

Very quickly, I learned that the old past wasn't as glorious as I had thought--though I still believe that it was many times better than what we found when we got to the Americas. The stories from the former colonies--whether Mobutu Sese Seko's Zaire, Idi Amin's Uganda or Forbes Burnham's Guyana--dashed most of my expectations about what it would take to achieve real freedom.

In college, like all the other neophyte revolutionaries influenced by events in southern Africa, El-Salvador and Nicaragua, Cuba and Grenada, I studied third-world liberation movements and post-emancipation societies in the hope of discovering different visions of freedom born out of the circumstances of struggle. I looked in vain for glimmers of a new society, in the 'liberated zones' of Portugal's African colonies during the wars of independence, in Maurice Bishop's 'New Jewel' movement in Grenada, in Guyana's tragically short-lived 19th-century communal villages, in the brief moment when striking workers of Congo-Brazzaville seized state power and were poised to establish Africa's first workers' state. Granted, all those movements crashed against the rocks, wrecked by various internal and external forces, but they left behind at least some kind of vision, however fragmented or incomplete, of what they wanted the world to look like.

I fell in love with the young Marx of The German Ideology and The Communist Manifesto, the visionary Marx who predicted the abolition of all exploitative institutions. I followed young Marx, via the late English historian Edward Thompson, to those romantic renegade socialists like William Morris, who wanted to break with all vestiges of capitalist production and rationalization. Morris was less concerned with socialist efficiency than with transforming social relations and constructing new, free, democratic communities built on, as Thompson put it, 'the ethic of co-operation, the energies of love'.

Little to say

The socialists--utopian and scientific--had little to say about that, so my search for an even more elaborate, complete dream of freedom forced me to take a more imaginative turn. Thanks to many wonderful chance encounters, I discovered Surrealism, not so much in the writings and doings of Andre Breton or Louis Aragon or other leaders of the Surrealist movement that emerged in Paris after World War One, but under my nose, so to speak, buried in the rich, black soil of Afro-diasporic culture.

In it I found a most miraculous weapon with no birth date, no expiration date, no trademark. I traced it from the ancient practices of maroon societies and shamanism to the metropoles of Europe, to the blues people of North America, to the colonized and semi-colonized world that produced the likes of Aime and Suzanne Cesaire and Wifredo Lam. The Surrealists not only taught me that any serious motion toward freedom must begin in the mind, but they also have given us some of the most imaginative, expansive and playful dreams of a new world I have ever known.