Imperium in Imperio.
So part of the reason I wanted to do this blog is because in my PhD, I’m encountering all this bizarre and strange and beautiful and smart Black art that I’d never heard of before.
For example: Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, which I’d love to get around to writing about eventually (and if you were around in the 70s, this probably wasn’t something you just stumbled upon like I did). When I started watching it, my jaw dropped and did not go back in place until the credits rolled. It is such a strange movie, and hopeful during a time where maybe you could not quite look hope in the eye.
I’m not going to talk about Sweet Sweetback right now, but something in a similar vein, at least when it comes to hope and ridiculousness.
For this class I’m taking, we read this book called Imperium in Imperio by Sutton E. Griggs. Have you heard of it? Have you heard of him? Because he wrote this book in 1899, but I swear, it could have been written today (or better yet, could be a TV show, a movie, we would all watch and be like, Wait what? And at the same time be like, Exactly.)
Like Wakanda, it’s about a secret Black government trying to decide how and if it should reveal itself to the world when the world clearly does not know how to handle Black success.
Like Atlanta, it is wildly surreal in moments, something I found delightful. At one point, they’re at church, and this Black woman throws a White baby in the air in her excitement about the preacher’s words. At another point, a man leaves his wife because she gives birth to a White baby, but that baby gets darker over time, proving everyone wrong—the child is his!
One of the main characters does not die even though he is hanged, shot in the head, and a mortician cuts open his skull.
Another character proposes to his girlfriend who screams in response because they—as two biracial people—could not get married! They could not have a baby! What about perpetuating the race?
It is one of the strangest books I’ve ever read—similar in its satirical style to Paul Beatty’s The Sellout—and yet at the same time so smartly written and so weirdly hopeful for a time where it must’ve been hard to be hopeful outright.
The characters in this old school Wakanda want to know how to move forward, how to deal with White people who refuse to deal with them in any healthy way. Should the Black people of Imperium try to fit into White society better? Should they go to war with White society? Should they get all Black people to move—Marcus Garvey-style—and create their own nation in what was still the Wild West of Texas?
I love this book because when everything was uncertain, instead of shutting down, Griggs created art where anything was possible. In another time where maybe it is again difficult to look hope in the eyes, what kind of art might we create?
Note: I think this book is in the Public Domain because it was written so long ago. I found it here: https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/africanamericanlit2023/files/2023/01/Imperium-in-Imperio-Sutton-E.-Griggs.pdf.
Image: New York Times
