Blues People and the Poetic Spirit: Recovering Surrealism’s Revolutionary Politics

Abstract: In 1975, Paul Garon published Blues and the Poetic Spirit . Rejecting the nonsense about the blues’ lack of critical intelligence, he insisted that the blues is poetry, or more specifically, that the blues is the poetic expression of the Black working class. He argued that “the revolutionary nature of the blues” lay in “its fidelity to fantasy and desire,” generating “an irreducible and, so to speak, habit-forming demand for freedom and what Rimbaud called ‘true life.’ ” While I don’t disagree, Jayne Cortez reminds us of yet another characteristic of the blues and of Black music generally that is not rooted in fantasy but rather in truth-telling and critique. We often miss this quality because even surrealists tended to view the blues as a primitive form, locked in a particular time and place. Its lyrics were often coded, of necessity camouflaged under the iron fist of Jim Crow. I will reexamine (Afro)surrealism’s revolutionary politics through the blues by attempting to answer a question Amiri Baraka once posed to me many years ago: What if “The Internationale” were a blues? If we understand the blues not just as art but as a dialectic—a people in motion confronting catastrophe, deepening radical social consciousness, making revolution with all its contradictions laid bare, producing a new synthesis through the blues— then it stands to reason that a blues “Internationale” would be less an expression of the triumphalism of an imagined proletariat marching, linked arm-in-arm, preparing to overthrow the bourgeoisie, and more of an open-ended structure with its own imperative to improvise as many verses or statements as needed. It would be less mascu-linist, reveling instead in humor, raw honesty, a fearless embrace of pleasure, pain, sex, celebrating everybody—men and women, cis, trans, queer, toilers of all kinds while decentering toil. Also, to reimagine “The Internationale” as a blues is to rethink our conception of revolutionary time, a time away from linear time and teleology. Blues time stretches, is flexible and improvisatory, and is simultaneously in the present, the past, the future, and the timeless space of the imagination. Finally, blues time and (Afro)surrealism’s revolutionary politics embraces the “revolutionary pessimism” of surrealist thinker Pierre Naville, as expressed in his 1926 pamphlet, The Revolution and the Intellectuals . Revolutionary pessimism has nothing in common with Afropessimism; it is arguably its negation. Revolutionary pessimism was born out of a critique of optimism—specifically the optimism of Stalinist assertions about the inevitable triumph of socialism or Social Democratic beliefs that the socialist commonwealth could come about through parliamentary means. Revolutionary pessimism is aimed at preventing the onset of disaster by all possible means, interrupting those historical processes that lead to catastrophe. This is why the revolutionary pessimism of the blues is always accompanied by what André Breton termed “anticipatory optimism”—the commitment to struggle in dark times and through this, the preparation for victory.