Why is Atlanta So Weird & Beautiful?

Recently I wrapped up season 3 of Atlanta and there’s been a lot of conversation around why the show is so weird. It’s always been weird, but this season got weirder – so weird that you can’t help but laugh at the absurdity of it all. That’s the thing, Atlanta is a storytelling masterclass on the socio-political construct of identity. Identity itself is absurd. The show is a sprawling landscape of visual culture gone full throttle. It communicates the odd double consciousness of black reality. And you can feel it… a kind of mythical presence pervades the space. Emotions are twisted, revelations are implied, the fear is ambiguous and yet it’s magical.

Atlanta is inviting you to simultaneously observe the real and the surreal.

Atlanta is showing the new age of Afro-Surrealism.

Afro-Surrealism is a school of art and literature movement coined in 1974 by Amiri Bakara – an American writer, activist, and poet – to describe the work of another American writer Henri Dumas who had a powerful talent of creating mythical worlds that somehow connected to the very present. In 2009 D. Scot Miller penned the official manifesto… because every art movement needs a manifesto. It is not surrealism, and it is not Afro-futurism. It is Afro-surrealism. The distinction is important in that, Afro-futurism speculates on the possible futures for the black diaspora, where Afro-surrealism focuses on the present. Futurists speculate that the four horsemen are coming, whereas Afro-surrealists understand that they rode through a long time ago. It’s a combustion of past and future worlds into the present weirdness that is being lived right now.

Surrealism originated in the late 1910’s and early 20’s experimenting as a new mode of automatic writing and seances to transcend reality to produce something more surreal by releasing the unbridled imagination of the subconscious. In other words, there were lots of drugs in the surrealist period. Afro-surrealism doesn’t require outside mechanisms to access the absurd. Instead, it’s showing you (comedically) that by simply existing, marginalized people are consistently placed in surreal circumstances.

The plot of Atlanta is always loose, but the texture is rich. It is deliberately carving out a multi-sensorial world suspended in a location where everyone knows something is off. The characters have a constant feeling of being out of place which is a result of constantly having others define them by their race or class. Which brings me back to my earlier point – identity is absurd.

Marginalized people did not create their identities, their identities were constructed for them. It was decided what your race and class are and what they mean for existing in modern society. Black and brown, titles and status are constructs… but so is white. That’s the weird thing, that the people defining the characters don’t realise they too are constructed. And it’s this othering the characters are visibly uncomfortable with and yet, find themselves in the double bind of not being able to do anything about it.

What does it mean to live so unconsciously that you don’t realize your own existence relies on the very nature of your projection?

Atlanta offers a beautiful opportunity to consider that what you think is normal just isn't.

So, what if we could do something about it?

Who would you be if you suspended the labels that you identify with? Your race, class, status, nationality, religion? If you took off all those layers, who would you be then?

Would you still be kind? Would you still like yourself? Are you still a good person? Do you exist without projecting an absurd reality on to the other?

Atlanta is art imitating reality. An invitation into the double consciousness of marginalized folks, abiding in the space between O and K. The strangeness a familiar itch that can never quite be scratched. The performance, a lived experiment.

'til next Sunday!Z.