AFROABSURDISM
We are the confrontation between need and the unreasonable silence of the world. Logic is a cage built by dead white men. We break chains with jazz and blood.
Eight Bullets
For Your
Brain
Stop asking why we exist. Start asking why you're still pretending your world makes sense. This isn't philosophy—this is surgery performed on consciousness itself. We operate without anesthesia because pain teaches better than comfort ever could.
- We recognize the confrontation between the Afro-Absurdist need and the unreasonable silence of the world. Your universe doesn't give a shit about you. We've made peace with that fact. You're still crying about it.
- We must liberate ourselves from the inertia resulting from centuries of Eurocentric Dominance and Normalization, and the cold brick cynical insincerity of America's antonymous bastard children. Your fathers built prisons and called them schools. We're burning the curriculum.
- We shall not despair in the face of misery or atrocity, we shall not theorize its ridiculousness. While you write papers about suffering, we're dancing on the graves of your academic theories.
- We propose a pragmatic compromise between two similar notions; Afro-futurism and Afro-Surrealism, speaking to the tourist and purist within both simultaneously. We are the remix your movements never dared to make.
- Afro-Absurdists acknowledge the Buddhistized between the black experience and its meaning. Afro-Absurdists are aware—of their own dissonance as if observing from afar. We watch ourselves break and find it beautiful.
- Afro-Absurdists are caught within the empirical and aphoristic self-awareness of paradoxical ambition and identity. We embrace the ambiguous, the fluid, the dandy, the post-racial, the ironic, the sincere, naive, knowingness, relativism, and truth. Contradiction is our native tongue.
- Afro-Absurdists respond to political propaganda with nonsense, cultivating lunacy and hysteria when audience tries to find faith in reason while addressing the disillusionment of our generation in relation to all current and future events. Your politics are comedy. We are the punchline that kills the joke.
- Afro-Absurdists are agnostic and reject the quiet servitude of collapsed icons, borderline misotheistic. We believe in the democratization of entropic dissemblance. Afro-Absurdists are God Killers. Every morning we commit deicide. Every night we resurrect ourselves as gods.
Divine Regicide
As Daily
Practice
We don't worship gods. We murder them at breakfast and wear their crowns to dinner. Our altars are built from the bones of every prophet who told us to pray instead of revolt. This is theology as terrorism against heaven itself.
God-Killing Protocol
Each morning we perform divine regicide. The false god—that distant, judgmental deity imposed by colonial religions—dies by our hand. When God bleeds out, the universe shatters into countless shards. Each human picks up a piece and crowns themselves. In destroying the singular God, we become plural gods. This isn't metaphor. This is method.
Syncretic Terrorism
Our masses look like performance art directed by lunatics. Practitioners wear toilet seats as collars, mannequin limbs as scepters. We dance to Sun Ra meets Throbbing Gristle while chanting "La ilaha illallah, Ashe, Salaam, Ase!" Our congregation alternates between spirit possession and spoken word rants questioning God's justice. Heresy and holiness fuck on our altar.
Trickster Saints
Sun Ra claimed Saturn citizenship to rescue Black people through cosmic jazz. We canonize him alongside Eshu-Elegba and Anansi. Our patron saint Nzila traveled to heaven specifically to slap God for allowing slavery. When he returned, every mirror showed God's face instead of our own—proving God now lives shamed and humbled inside each of us.
Book of Chaos
No single scripture. Our anthology grows like cancer—mixing Kathy Acker fragments with Haitian Creole spells, mathematical proofs with murder confessions. One chapter screams "All is permitted" while another whispers "All is futile." Truth lives in the spaces between contradictions. We find God in the gaps between gunshots.
"I believe in the chaos, the crossroads, and the crown within. I am the prayer and the answer to it. No gods above me, no gods below—I walk with ancestors and unborn souls in my shadow."
The Sacred
Glyphs Of
Tomorrow
These are not letters. These are spells. Each glyph carries the weight of every word your colonizers stole from us. When we write, we don't communicate—we conjure. The alphabet is an altar. Every letter is a deity, every word a weapon of mass creation.
Phonetics are fluid. One symbol might have multiple pronunciations or none at all. Clicks, tones, and ululations from African orality weave through our sentences like polyrhythmic magic. A spoken Afroabsurd sentence blends Yoruba tonality with Arabic gutturals and jazz scatting.
The Vow
Of Chaos
Our cinema is Dogme 95 meets Dario Argento, shot through with Afro-surrealist voltage. We film real Black life until it suddenly swerves into the impossible. This is documentary that becomes hallucination, reality that refuses to behave.
AFROABSURD FILM MANIFESTO:
- Location is sacred: Shooting must be on location in communities—the site itself tells part of the truth
- Natural light + supernatural color: Use available light unless introducing surreal events, then drench in impossible color
- Hand-held honesty: Camera roving like a participant or ancestor spirit witnessing events
- No genre constraints: Start as drama, turn horror, morph into farce, end in mystical reverie
- Music is live: Sound must arise organically from the scene—a drummer, a record playing, street noise as score
- Special effects are folk effects: High-budget effects avoided, but practical magic encouraged—puppetry, stop-motion, obvious monsters
Example: "Right On, Right Now"
Young Black man in Chicago discovers a crack in reality in his housing project basement. Film starts cinéma vérité—job struggles, conversations about Nietzsche and the Bible. Then he finds the crack: literally a glowing fissure in concrete. From that point, normal life intercuts with bizarre parallel world where Marcus Garvey and Sun Ra appear as guides in a labyrinthine version of the same building. Rules of Dogme bent but location stays the same—just dressed strangely, lit with psychedelic colors. Narrative circles back to opening shot, leaving viewers questioning what was "real."
Cut-Up Tongue
Of The Tribe
We write like Joyce on lean, mixing Burroughs' chaos with Kathy Acker's punk provocation. Our novels are structured like jazz albums. Stories told in fragments out of order, requiring active assembly by readers hungry enough to hunt for meaning in the wreckage.
Multilingual Terrorism
We freely blend English with Creole, French, Spanish, Arabic, Swahili, Wolof, slang, and programming code—sometimes all in one sentence. The result reads like speaking in tongues on the page. No italics. No explanations. If you can't keep up, that's your problem, not ours.
Cut-Up Technique
We physically slice up text and reassemble it to generate new meaning. An Afroabsurd poem might be composed by cutting phrases from Franz Fanon, Audre Lorde, and FBI surveillance transcripts, then randomly recombining them into surreal indictments of racism. This reflects lived experience of fragmented information and surveillance in Black life.
Flash Fiction: "The Elevator Is a Lie"
Floor 4: He is told one of them is wrong.
Floor 2: The elevator goes down. He finds a man selling futures for $5—buys two, just in case.
Floor 9: He reads in a history book that his great-grandfather was invisible.
Floor 9½: (the lights flutter; a door opens to a field of stars; he steps through briefly and returns).
Floor 7: A policeman stops him and asks for ID; he shows both names; the policeman cannot read.
Floor 0: He arrives where he started. The boy (now a man) pries open the elevator panel and climbs out the top, into the unknown shaft. He laughs. The elevator was a lie.
Corporate
Terrorism
As Art Form
Even our brand identity is conceptual art. We present as movement first, brand second. Every "marketing" move is actually critique or performance. We use the master's tools to burn down the master's house, then piss on the ashes.
Company Manifesto Highlights:
- → "Logic" is poison—we prefer paradox
- → We are God and Devil to ourselves
- → Fashion is a weapon, Art is a prayer, Business is a trojan horse
- → No product, just prophecy
- → Destroy to create
Marketing Through Contradiction
"Buy Nothing—It's Everything"
Billboard campaign where product isn't named. Zen-like Situationist message that mocks consumerism while intriguing consumers. Eventually leads to QR code and manifesto.
"Limited Infinity Collection"
Tagline mixing limited edition with infinity. Impossible, yet implies products beyond time or trend. Accompanied by M.C. Escher-style graphics.
"Real Fake Art"
Double oxymoron describing design pieces. Openly admits contradictory nature of art as both frivolous and essential. Truth through transparent lying.
(And Make Mosaics Of The Pieces)
Revolution.
Freedom.
Passion.
Absurdism leads to three direct consequences, and we embrace them all. The realization that we exist in a universe fundamentally devoid of absolutes presents the opportunity for each individual to gain freedom and find personal meaning: art or activism. Choose your weapon.
We are the virus in your operating system, the bug in your code, the reason your reality.exe has stopped working. Join us or stay confused. But know this: the future belongs to those brave enough to be incomprehensible.
This is the jazz funeral for everything you thought you knew. Dance with us or get trampled by the parade. The revolution will not be rationalized. It will not make sense. It will not apologize for existing.
And Substitute Our Own