^{Adraint Khadafhi Bereal, Homecoming. 2019. 40.5″ x 27″ Photograph. Black Homecoming is an annual celebration and tradition hosted by Black students and alumni at the University of Texas at Austin. Black students make up less than 5% of the 52,000-person student body. Pictured on Main Mall, at the center of campus in front of the UT Tower, diagonal from the Painter building—named after Theophilus Painter, former UT Austin president and defendant of segregation policies at UT Austin—students are seen celebrating. In the regressive climate down south, these school-sponsored celebrations of Black life are under threat from new legislation such as SB37. What was once supported by the university is now left to the work of the Black Alumni Network. The regressive climates of college campuses across America threaten the beginnings of institutional growth marked over seventy years of integration post Brown v. Board of Education.}

I. Conversation

Moderator: Milton S. F. Curry, Editor

Participant: Adraint Khadafhi Bereal, Photographer/Artist

Milton S. F. Curry: Given the theme of this issue, Non-Space / Resistance, I wonder if you could speak about how your approach and your work resonates with the theme. 

Adraint Bereal: I’ll start by describing sort of how I came into image-making and then I’ll speak about my work as it relates to non-space and resistance. I’m originally from Waco, Texas, was born and raised there. I moved around the South quite a bit between Hattiesburg, Mississippi, Louisville, Kentucky, and Waco, Texas, which are three cities that shaped my upbringing. They are also cities that don’t get a ton of attention with most audiences. They are all very rural areas, with relatively small populations of people, and people that I think are often thought less of and are often overlooked. When I decided that I was going to attend the University of Texas at Austin, I had no idea what sort of challenge that I would face in terms of adapting to new ways of being and new forms of understanding other individuals. I got my BFA in design from UT Austin, and was there from 2016 to 2020. I graduated right around the time that the Covid pandemic was in full swing. And so a lot of what had been taught to me growing up and even through my undergraduate years was . . . you go to school, you get the internship, you get the full-time job—and this pathway will lead you to success or whatever sort of future that you might have outlined for yourself. I found that I had to be really inventive with my process and my approach to my career path. Most of my career so far has been fairly unconventional. What people might consider odd jobs or unexpected opportunities have, for me, been opportunities to really nurture my craft and grow as an individual. 

While I was at UT Austin, I started studying photography towards the end of my program, particularly focused on design. My work eventually matured into a photography and image-making practice, and I got really interested in the Black male population on campus and wanted to better understand our relationship with femininity. In doing some research I found out that only 925 Black men were enrolled at UT Austin at the time, in a university with a student population of about 52,000 undergraduate and graduate students. I remember sitting in the multicultural engagement center and someone said, “You could fit all of the Black men in Hogg Auditorium and still have seats left over.” This was jarring because the auditorium is a space of memories made as a freshman, where they hold first year orientation, and is also a place to go for support. This made me curious about what each of us, as Black men, were experiencing. I ended up interviewing a handful of Black students about their experiences, and that project became what is known today as 1.7, mimicking the percentage of Black men at UT Austin at the time.         

I showed that work at the George Washington Carver Museum in East Austin and then, at some point, a handful of students were like, “Hey, I want to be part of this. Is this open to women? Is this open to nonbinary students?” At the urging of my peers, I decided that I would do a project called the Black Yearbook, which most people believed to be an actual yearbook, but it’s not a yearbook. Some of the response I got from the general public was jarring and ironic at the same time. From there I made the Black Yearbook. I worked with a handful of peers on that, and we interviewed 114 students, not all of which are featured in the book. The book is this collection of documented stories, interviews, poetry, and written statements—things that sort of intermix our narratives and themes to weave a larger story that I think normalizes the Black student experience in a way and really kind of gives people an introspective, bird’s eye view of our collective experiences. From this, outsiders begin to understand and realize other Black kids aren’t monolithic, because you have different nationalities, mixed-race students, students that carry many identities, et cetera. I ended up publishing a book last year, also titled The Black Yearbook (Penguin Random House, 2024). For that book, I traveled across the United States interviewing students about their experiences—working with students at public schools, private trade schools, community colleges, and HBCUs [Historically Black Colleges and Universities]—it’s honestly one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had. The differences between HBCUs and PWIs [Predominantly White Institutions] creates this sort of tension about who’s better, who’s getting the better experience. I often find that the tension in that discussion does a bit of a disservice to students once they have graduated and have moved on to become alumni. Once you get into the workforce we’re all just Black! 

I have been particularly interested in this idea of daydreaming. I’ve been sitting on this narrative and picture in my head for maybe almost two years now, and I happened to be at home reading Sister Outsider by the Black female author Audre Lorde.¹ There’s an essay in the volume titled “Trip to Russia,” and in reading this essay, at some point I stopped and I was visualizing Toni Morrison while I was reading it. I immediately got shot up out of bed and thought, well, that’s interesting, because I’ve never seen these two authors in the same space together. They share the same birthday; they both published their first works in the same year; they’re three years apart from one another in age; they were both in the same women writers group in Harlem, New York, and yet I’ve never seen them in conversation with one another. I visited the Princeton University Toni Morrison Archives and also consulted with Holly A. Smith, archivist at Spelman College. Through Holly I was able to find a letter that Audre Lorde had written to Toni Morrison, stating that she had written a review of Morrison’s novel Sula and that it would be published in Ms. Magazine (she ended up deciding to publish it in a different magazine, Amazon Quarterly).² It’s a beautiful review—from there I was able to understand a little bit of how Audre Lorde perceived Toni Morrison’s work. I was scanning The New York Times archives and was able to find an event that they both were at in 1981. And there is a professor at Colgate College, Dr. Graham Hodges, who would do a speaker series with writers at the school. I reached out to him, and found one event that featured Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Audre Lorde. And so I was like, finally, I was able to place them together in a space and time!

I obtained the recorded digitized version of the video of the event from Colgate College and also got one from Princeton University. Both versions are fairly inaudible. I can hear the beginnings of Morrison reading from Tar Baby, which was published the same year as the event.³ I got chills just listening to it. And so in my accompanying essay for this issue, I speak about daydreaming as a form of non-space and resistance, and how amnesia can also function like a form of imagining—the mind’s way of returning dark matter to a non-space. I write about dark space or dark matter as being the essence of imagination in its most pure form—this unimagined and unimaginable end sort of placed on our psyche, through popular media apps short-handing any physical means of connection. And that is sort of the power of imagining that I find important, and we should fight for it because it’s how we sort of develop our own intuition. What world do we want to build? What worlds do we want to live in? Who do we see ourselves collaborating with? A lot of the AI tools that are coming out today are meant to help us do that world building—in a synthetic way, but there is another mode of imagining that is a lot more native to our human nature, that is being sort of threatened by this alternate reality. AI is numbing us, reducing down our senses, reducing down the things that make us human. 

MSFC: Your perspective on being human and the importance of retaining humanness in the face of emerging technologies is compelling. I want to pivot to how you conceptualize collectivities,  around Blackness, around Black joy, and around this notion that we have to be the “architects of our own narrative,” using your own words. Within your opening articulation, who is the “we”? What is or what are the impediments to spatializing the imaginary, the place and space of daydreaming? 

AB: We means anybody that is trying to break out of the algorithm to free their mind! Step into a world where they are not controlled by their devices. There are moments in my writing when I say we that I am more particularly speaking to Black people. There is a moment in the accompanying essay where I also say “remember first they bought our bodies” and that’s the moment where I’m speaking directly to Black people, especially Black Americans that are descendants of enslaved people in the United States. 

MSFC: The practices that you describe in seeking to understand the relationship between Audre Lorde and Toni Morrison and the Black Yearbook all seem to be about archiving Black life. What is it that you see is worthy of not only archiving but foregrounding in a new way, visually or spatially?  

AB: I’ve been studying Saidiya Hartman and she speaks about “critical fabulation” and I find that exciting.⁴ I find that concept compelling, as we haven’t seen that narrative be constructed in a way that we’re quite satisfied with yet. A lot of this has to do with who’s writing the narrative. Often the person who’s being interviewed is on display as sort of a powerless character. What’s different about my practice is that within these interviews we co-author this narrative together. I go where they want to go. The co-authoring is something that feels really unique to my practices. There is a taking back of one’s sense of agency, like Frederick Douglass did as one of these seminal Black Americans who used photography in extraordinary ways to kind of project a self-imaging to the public, marrying multiple narratives that he was articulating and straddling. 

MSFC: I became familiar with your work when you were operating as a brand designer and contract photographer, when you worked on a book project for curator Christine Y. Kim. Can you speak about how the work that you are doing is influencing other cultural production—you’re working both sides of the divides between commercial, fashion, contemporary art, archival, sociological, and poetic projects.

AB: I designed the Black American Portraits exhibition at LACMA [Los Angeles County Museum of Art], and the exhibition catalogue. That exhibition was curated by Christine Y. Kim. It was an incredible exhibition, and it was great to work with her on the publication. I also think about W.E.B. Du Bois and how not only was he a sociologist and intellectual, but he was also a graphic designer! I find my practice to be very genre-bending in that I design books, I make commercial portraits, I do brand identity and system design. I think that my background and my ability to reach into so many different worlds gives me permission to do those things and it gives me a broader understanding of life and people. I have really pushed myself to explore those different areas, and I don’t think I’ve ever envisioned my life as a singular artist working in a singular medium, even when I was in design school. I still see designing art as these things that solve problems and make people feel things that, when they come together, you get—you get an emotional response. And that’s where the world begins to be built—when those two things are merged as one. 

MSFC: Are you more optimistic or more cynical about how corporations and institutions deal with issues of racial justice? 

AB: I don’t enjoy this commercialized form of Black joy because I find it to be inauthentic and a very narrow form of joy. In the commercial space there is a really specific depiction of Black life that is also class-based, that tends to fixate more on upper-middle class and upper-class Black life than on Black joy across the entire socioeconomic spectrum. We shouldn’t fear that the representation of Black joy may be very different, given the diversity and complexities of Black life. I think that the Ralph Lauren retail campaign featuring a fashion collection designed around Spelman College and Morehouse College was an interesting campaign in terms of the depiction of Black life through the lens of commercial photography—inner-city kids that wear polos that are dressed coded. And there is another mode which I also think is strongly related to class, in terms of who wears school uniforms, and who doesn’t wear school uniforms, and there often is this overlap as well because private school kids also wear uniforms. And so I’m often questioning why I can’t get the version of this campaign that also presents this other mode of existing, and why I have to continuously get the version that is upper-class country club, very dapper. I guess I’m still waiting for the campaign that shows the primary school kids, inner-city kids, or rural kids—I’m waiting on those other worlds to be born. Ralph Lauren is a brand that particularly has been successful for so long because they have remained consistent with how they project imagery. We can go back to their print campaigns from the 1980s, where they chose Black models such as Naomi Campbell and Tyson Beckford to be some of the first Black talent to be featured in a one of their campaigns. You see this influencing brands like Phat Farm and their fashion photography, advertising, and marketing. I grew up on that! That’s all I wore as a kid. I feel like Tommy Hilfiger is a brand that did it in a way where I thought, oh, yeah, I like that! I think that perfectly mimics this other side of my life, that when I go home, these are the people that I spend my time with. I think a question someone proposed at some point was, you know, “Are you being represented or are you just simply being marketed to?” And I believe my frustration is often borne of really not being marketed to at all. 

I think this Ralph Lauren Spelman/Morehouse campaign is beautiful, but I want to see, like, what else could be. What could be depicted that is not a commercial campaign, but a ground-up movement of cultural influencers who have connected with this notion of mid-century modern architecture, as an example. Neighborhoods that have indigenously been Black have been located in places where mid-century modern architecture was already there. There’s an entity called Hood Century Modern which is using photography in interesting ways to connect Blackness with mid-century modernism, which is typically aligned with kind of upper-middle-class white residential architecture and/or corporate architecture, à la Mad Men. Their work kind of democratizes the art of curation and narrative around these communities and peoples, transposing curation from something relegated to people with institutional titles, and enabling it to construct new narratives.

MSFC: It raises the question of whether the depiction of modernism was always for the inclusion of Black people. I want to ask how you envision the inclusion of an audience in your work—imagining the white gaze, the Black gaze, the global gaze, the viewership of the work within gallery and museum contexts. 

AB: Yeah, my audience is definitely mixed. There are moments where a white reader/viewer has said to me, or through someone else, “You know, I read The Black Yearbook and I still don’t understand how white people are the problem.” I didn’t even respond to it, but I just thought, like, wow, I can’t believe you made it through the whole thing, and couldn’t infer or take away anything that would point to anyone white being complicit in an uncomfortableness that exists within Black existence at these institutions? And so I find that my audience is often very much mixed, and then with the white gaze I sometimes wonder if we can, if we can really ever escape it. And when I envisioned the Black image, it seems that every time we shape the thing and form the thing, it is constantly slipping away from us, and I find that it’s really, really hard to escape the white gaze as Black people. That white gaze has become such a natural part of our existence here, especially in America, and most of the people that either come to me at exhibitions or talks, that are white, you know, they kind of get this like twinkle in their eye about, you know, me speaking about Black life, and I see a lot of deep fascination and admiration as well for the time I put into the work, but also this empathy that they want to have with the work or the subject matter, that they’re not able to achieve somehow. And so I think for a lot of non-Black people, I believe there to be this desire to get closer to Blackness, to understand it better, and I think the reality oftentimes is that that’s just not your reality. And I don’t find that to be a problem either. I remember being very frustrated years ago with the question of “Who is your audience,” because I couldn’t quite reduce it down to one singular person, because the truth was the audience is a melting pot. Especially being from Texas, I have been gathering a very wide spectrum of people that enjoy the work and want to know more about it. And so I’ve released myself from that sort of desire to have control over who sees the work.  

And I think, I think you’re right that with increased visibility comes an increase in exchange value, which is the market-based transactional state that those pieces and those works and those artists are a part of. The optimism of art and politics is that it transcends the identity of the receivers to some degree; it doesn’t necessarily mean that everybody receives it the same way, but that there might be a triggering and a kind of series of layers of understanding. 

MSFC: Thanks, Adraint, for sharing your insights and perspectives on your work! It’s been great to speak with you. 

_{1. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press, 1984).} 

_{2. Toni Morrison, Sula (Knopf, 1973); Audre Lorde, “Sula/A Review,” Amazon Quarterly 2, no. 3 (1974): 28–30.} 

_{3. Toni Morrison, Tar Baby (Knopf, 1981).}

_{4. Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 26 (2008): 1–14.}

II. Essay

Adraint Khadafhi Bereal

Before I could reach the microwave atop the refrigerator at my grandparents’ home, I would close my eyes and feel for the slightly elevated but flat buttons, until I found the one to “Add 30 seconds.” When I was finally tall enough to see into the microwave, my imagination was being born. Unconscious and unadulterated. Unconcerned with the food splattering across the microwave walls, I wandered many places in thirty seconds. Today the function is no different, but the intention necessary to hold a space in my mind for thirty seconds becomes more apparent. 

Cyra says, “We are born nosy.” And that truth never stopped me from rambling through my grandmother’s dresser. A few old photos, a worn gold necklace, a utility bill, a couple twenty dollar bills that would vanish into the slot machine later in the week, a few lighters, and other forgotten artifacts. What the hell was I looking for? Lord knows, if my granny Puddin caught me in her dresser my ears would be hot and my ass would be hotter. Being raised by so many women makes you curious about where they go when they’re not tending to your growing interior, or making sure you don’t freeze to death at night. When do you take care of the woman in your dresser? I wonder, but never ask out loud. I know better. 

“This is hooooooome she thought.” Toni Morrison’s voice stretches over a few decades, as the tape carries her voice to the present. Having read the familiar and lived gaze of Jadine, a beautiful and inventive young woman of Morrison’s novel Tar Baby, a familiar curiosity crept over me. I am readying myself for bed, reading the unfinishable Sister Outsiderby Audre Lorde. Many of the essays I’ve read before, but I find it unfinishable because Lorde’s voice seems to change every time I read it. Not only her voice, but her face as well. It is not her face I see in Russia. I see Toni Morrison at the counter, and break from this literary spell to check whose book I’m reading. I am confused and realize I have traveled across Russia and through conventions for women with the wrong writer. Surely they knew each other though! Surely there is a reason I have traveled decades with one’s voice and another’s face. It is late, but not too late to grab my computer and ask the ghosts in a machine to show me the two of them at the same time. Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde Talk. Audre Lorde on Toni Morrison. Toni Morrison on Audre Lorde. Audre Lorde in conversation with Toni Morrison. Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde. Audre Lorde Collection. Toni Morrison Collection. Toni Morrison Princeton Collection. C-SPAN. Spelman Collection. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Nothing. Not nothing, but not what I was looking for. How is it that two of a generation’s greatest authors living in the same city with the same circle of influence haven’t been placed together outside of a shared birthday article? Frustrated, I text Zaria El-Fil, Simona Harry, and Pelumi Ogunmuyiwa, and wait. Now I am not the only person carrying this confusion and curiosity. Now I am not the only person imagining. I dreamt of her that night, or rather I visited her in a waiting place. It was something like a reflection chamber. Toni Morrison in this grey waiting room staring at a painting of the sea. She turned and flashed a smile, a grin. Numbers, maybe a download of some sort followed by my wake. 

After months of searching I found the following: A letter from Lorde to Morrison thanking her for Sula (1974), Lorde’s review of Sula in Amazon Quarterly (1974), a letter from Spike Lee to Morrison begging her to write about one of his films, a picture of Dr. Graham Hodges, Toni Cade Bambara, Audre Lorde, a distorted and inaudible audio tape from the event held by Princeton University as part of Morrision’s archives, and Toni Morrison, seated left to right, on a stage at The New School. 

Dr. Hodges remembers the night as an unprecedented one. Morrison, Lorde, and Cade Bambara, who was notably always very kind to Hodges, ignored him during the entire night. Pictured: Hodges is dejected. Morrison, Lorde, and Cade Bambara are mad. Their expressions are hard and full of certainty. They know what it is to be sure of themselves. They have something they want to say and they don’t need a moderator to tell them how and when to say it. We do as we wish. He recalls a driver took Morrison home, opting out of the post-talk dinner. The rest of the night is lost to time. Years later at a party, Dr. Hodges asked Morrison about the event of which she had no memory. The stray fireplace spark that burned her house down created a sense of amnesia for Morrison, unable to recall the night ever happening. 

Amnesia is a form of unimagining, the mind’s way of returning dark matter to a non-space. Dark matter is the essence of imagination, our becoming in its most pure form. Today we twist and we yearn to end the unimagining and the unimagining end, placed on our psyche through popular media, apps short-handing our physical means of connection, artificial intelligence, and lack of silence. I imagine it difficult to focus in the ’80s, when you have such little control of the devices which transport you to other realities. No headphones to choicely evade a new Rick James record. In a taxi back home a conversation must be had in order to change the radio station. You do not have the choice of entering the blank space which unimagines you from an active reality connecting you to the taxi you occupy, and the person you share that intimate space with. You must exist and you must survive being long enough to arrive at your destination. In a world where people are expected less and less to live and endure the inconvenience of reality, which shapes and allows us understanding to be more sympathetic and conscious humans, we have to question the meddling forces that are driving us further from our reality and humanity and closer to darkness absent of light. 

Day dreaming. The subconscious means of cleaning our rooms, making sense of the messes we make. It is the place from which our desires and realization of the unfairness of the world is born. Today we are overwhelmed with a chasm of sleep which prevents us from having thoughts of our own. A thought is just that until challenged or affirmed, and the tension it relies on is achieved through our subconscious. In Cade Bambara’s The Lesson, Miss Moore, teacher and stimulant for curiosity, tells the children in the story, through the narrator, “you never outgrow learning instruments.” Many young people my age and others as well are intuiting our collective desire to dream again, to “dream a dream that dreams back at us” (Morrison). We live so we experience, we experience so we feel, we feel therefore we process, and it is through this lifelong antidote that we resist darkness without light. We know there is light in darkness because the sun has yet to leave its post. 

I experienced my first earthquake in New York in 2024. Fear. My roommates and I laughed in relief when the uncertainty passed. Home in Waco, Texas, for a funeral last year, I was resting on the couch when a familiar sensation began shaking the house. A relative of fear, confusion. “It’s Elon,” my younger brother announces, “SpaceX. Happens all the time.” I am not suggesting we spend all day dreaming as a means of resistance while our esteemed auction bidders are rumbling our lives, plotting the course to nowhere and polluting the air we breathe. I am an artist, mentor, teacher, student, older/younger brother, uncle, son, grandchild, neighbor, lover, and friend to my universe. I want to protect and fight for the thing that fills my life and validates my humanity through the mess of conflict and love. We all live somewhere and we are all somebody to somebody albeit a stranger whom we have yet to meet. To daydream is to intuit your world, and incite a riot which will till the earth for a future you wish to live in. If it is worth enough to be sold and governed by corporations, it is worth fighting for. Remember, first, they bought our bodies. 

Lorde and Morrison were sisters, imagining world after world, standing at their microwaves, intuiting the moment the satisfactory chime would deliver them from stillness, birthing worlds again and again.