This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection is the perfect afro-existentialist film, not because of the existential interstice implied in its title, but because of how it paints mystical and metaphysical pictures about the different types of death.
‘European surrealism is empirical African surrealism is mystical and metaphysical,’ Léopold Sédar Senghor once wrote. Poet, African surrealist, and the first president of Senegal, Senghor was trying to say that the existence of African thought, expressed intellectually, countered Western tropes of reality. It also combined with the essence of African narratives, mystical and metaphysical, giving rise to the Afro-existential and the Afrosurreal.
Frida Kahlo, the legendary Mexican surrealist painter, echoed Senghor when she averred that, ‘Afro-surrealism sees that all “others” who create from their actual, lived experiences, are surrealist.’
I’m a bit more cautious than that. It’s 2023, and art by the ‘others’ are more Westernized than Frida could’ve predicted. But now and then my eyes are averted to the sort of work pioneers of Afro-surrealism championed...
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