Surrealism\'s Other Side Ratnam, Niru.

Surrealism's Other Side

Ratnam, Niru. "Surrealism's other side." Varieties of Modernism. Ed. Paul Wood. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. 53-70. Ratnam, an art historian, provides information on the little-covered Caribbean Surrealists in the mid-1940s, with input from art historians Robert Linsley and Michael Richardson who had first-hand knowledge of what was taking place at the time. Ratnam expresses that he placed his emphasis on "Surrealism's encounter with 'otherness'" (54) and the artists' anti-colonial stance, rather than on the well-documented Surrealist interest in primitive art. Of considerable interest is the beginning of the chapter that introduced the interaction between Europe and Haiti Surrealists, with Andre Breton perhaps setting off the final spark that led to the revolution. In 1945 Breton spoke at a dinner in his honor. Haitian intellectuals, President Lescot and offcials expected a speech on the role of Latinity in the Americas. Instead, Breton addressed the history of Surrealism and its encounter with Marxism, and what he conceptualized as the natural latent Surrealism in Haiti's culture and people. He added insult to injury by not paying his respects to Lescot. The reactionary Haitian journal, La Ruche ('the Beehive'), used Breton's speech as "a pure and simple call to national insurrection" against Lescot (53). This led to a full-scale general strike, and the military overthrowing the dictatorship. Ratnam then reviews Ethnographic Surrealism in Europe, whose members Breton ousted out of the Parisian Surrealists in 1929, for blatant racism in their journal Documents. The chapter then segways into the Surrealists in Paris and finally to the anti-colonist mentality in the Caribbean.

Once again, the political side of the Surrealists was of personal interest. In 1931, the Parisian Surrealists banned France's International Colonial Exhibition held to "promote the economic mise en valeur (value) of its colonies" (62). Breton saw it as exploitative and destructive capitalism destroying its colonies. Meanwhile, the Caribbean Surrealists were also taking a look at the impact of Imperialism on the cultures being colonized. Richardson said the young Martinique artists turned to Surrealism because it gave them a point of departure for criticizing colonial society and a "Trojan Horse" to "enter the previously impregnable white citadel" (66). They were able to hear white masters with new voices renouncing this mastery. The Caribbean artists "were not only digesting Surrealism; they were, in fact, making it Caribbean" (68). Wilfred Lam's "The Jungle" includes both Surrealist and Picasso's flavor and also a unique Caribbean quality that displays "the interdependence of people, ancestors, spirits and natural elements" (68), mixed with undercurrents of colonialism and slavery, such as the symbolism of the tobacco leaves and sugar cane. Breton said Surrealism offered artists a mode of revolutionary thinking to "leap into the unknown" (70). The Aime Cesaire poem (67) "Notebook of a return to my native land," was considered by Breton to be one of the great prose-poetry works of the 20th century, parented by the three literary movements of the negritude, Harlem Renaissance, and French Surrealism.

p. 68 Mabille reads Lam's work with voodoo reference. Compares it to Hitler's cohorts in Europe.

"Mabille's reading is not simple primitivising, despite his running together of Santeria and voodoo." it's possible to see Lam's symbolism as being interested in Santeria. Mabille is analyzing this correctly in relationship to Tropique's goal to express a distinct Caribbean cultural and artistic "spirit."

p. 69 Lam goes beyond what would be the considered Surrealist approach

"Although Lam did occasionally paint specific deities like Ogoun Ferraille, horned and with an iron horseshoe as a head…his figures are more often generalized horned or masked, set with a tropical world." Lam, in Idol and Reunion. It looks Surrealist, but also has a local flavor…local circumstances embodied his work.