The next experience that opened up a whole array of subject matter to me—subject matter which I’ve mentioned already: The manner in which Negro blues songs juxtapose unrelated images—was the advent of surrealism on the American scene. I know, of course, that to mention surrealism in terms of Negro life in America will strike some people like trying to mix oil and water; but the two things are not so widely separated as one might suppose at first glance. It seems that there has grown up in people’s minds a concept of just what the Negro is, and anything that smacks of something which they do not want to associate with the Negro, for one reason or another, they will brand as alien. There is an unjustified but powerful tendency to regard the Negro as simple, unspoiled, childish, distantly removed from the debilitating experiences or art products of the city sophisticate, so says one school of the “friends” of the Negro. Therefore, they say, do not mix the Negro with any such thing as surrealism. There is no such connection, they assert, and if you insist that there is, then it exists only in your own mind, meaning, of course, the mind of the fellow who declares the contrary.

One might argue that if surrealism, product of decadent Paris, is degenerate, then the Negro is degenerate, for there are many evidences of surrealism in the art of the American Negro. This, of course, is a blind alley and gets one nowhere. Negroes are not degenerate and neither is surrealism, Dalí’s crazy antics to the contrary.

Surrealism is a manner of looking at the world, a way of feeling and thinking, a method of discovering relationships between things; it is a phase of the creative process. And in folk art, where evidences of it are strong, it need not be called surrealism at all, if the word is objectionable. The Negroes of Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas have never heard, perhaps, of surrealism; but that does not negate the strong surrealistic structure and function of many of their folk utterances in song and music. Therefore, if the meaning of surrealism can be wrenched from its association—that is, in people’s minds—with “crazy Paris artists” and viewed as a way of seeing relations between things, perhaps the idea of degeneracy can be dispensed with, to the greater understanding of the function of the creative process.

As I see it, surrealism is not an art form or an art movement manufactured by individuals or sets of individuals; I believe it makes its appearance when certain social relations are manifested in society, social relations that separate men from the context of productive process in a vital sense. This may occur at the “top” of the social structure as well as at the “bottom,” among the sons of the rich as well as among the sons of the poor. One of the marked characteristics of surrealism is a certain psychological distance—even when it deals with realistic subject matter—from the functional meanings of society. This distance may derive from excessive wealth which enables one to live psychologically distant from the realistic processes of society, or it may come through an enforced severance—through unemployment, oppression, etc.—from the functional meanings of society. How does this psychological distance manifest itself? Primarily, I think, in the oblique vision which finds relations between objects which are seemingly unrelated. Hence, though qualitatively different, there are elements of surrealism in “Dink’s Blues” that link them with the wild canvasses of Dalí. . . .