A Hypothetic Interview: When the Artist Considers Himself James B. Haile III
James B. Haile III

The Dark Delight of Being Strange is an experimental work combining the elements of Black speculative fiction, Afro-surrealism, Black philosophy, and Black studies to think through the meaning and implications of Black freedom. Dark Delight invites us to imagine and reimagine time, space, and place. In doing so, Dark Delight also invites us to imagine and reimagine history and memory and how (the process through which) we remember, understand, and deal with the past for the present and future. In this Q&A, James B. Haile III (Artist) goes into more detail about what Black speculative fiction is, how he came to the project, and what he hopes will come from it.
Q: Can you tell us about this project?
Artist: Sure. This is a project about possibility, about the imagination, about speculation. It is about freedom and the subject of Black freedom. It is, really about how we think about Black freedom and because of that it is largely a project about the imagination.
Q: Where did this project begin?
Artist: It began, and it may sound strange, with a dream—a kind of daydream when I was younger, in high school, and came across Erich Von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods. When I found Von Däniken’s book, I asked myself two questions: What if what we’ve thought about the past is all wrong? And if it is all wrong, what is needed to correct our mistaken views? The answer seemed obvious, mythology and folklore—we need to tell new stories, real stories that will at first seem impossible and outlandish (because they are so different from the ones we know and love) until they become ordinary and everyday. This seemed to be the challenge, and my imagination expanded from this point going forward.
Q: Can you say more about this “dream”?
Artist: [Laughs to himself.] Sure. I had this dream—really, I had this dream—that Amiri Baraka, David Icke, Zachariah Sitchin, and Elijah Muhammad met and discussed theories of being and modes of doing and what it meant throughout human history to talk about the divine and whom was being discussed and the sorts of scientific advancements possible without technological—that is, mastery—know-how. They laughed and talked about the sorts of beings that are littered throughout our universe and within different dimensional spaces and the sorts of surreal landscapes that are imagined and possible from within these worlds and these dimensions, and I thought about, dreamed about, and imagined what this would mean.
In my dream, I thought about Andre 3000 and what he had to say in, “Return of the G,” no less than, “Let’s talk about time travelin’, rhyme javelin / Somethin’ mind unravelin’, get down,” and I thought about the context of the song—the education of the imagination to pass along generation to generation and the sorts of maladies that carry forth when the imagination dies or is constrained, and I thought about these folkloric moments of the mundane throughout the history of human consciousness as it comes to find then lose then find itself again in all its various machinations, and I thought about my own project—this project—as the fruition of Black studies and Ufology, and then I woke up with a feeling and hope: that Black studies and Ufology find one another and see what they have in common.
Q: That is some dream!
Artist: I know. It took me some time to figure it out.
Q: That was going to be my next question. When did you figure out what it all meant?
Artist: Some years later . . . much later. But, to be honest, I think I always knew what it meant but was afraid—of what, I’m not really sure—of claiming it out loud.
Q: It is definitely an interesting dream. I would have never thought to put together Black studies with Ufology. Black studies seems to be about what is real or true about the world and Ufology, well, it seems to be about . . .
Artist: Kooks?
Q: I didn’t want to say that but yes. About everything that can’t be proven about the world. Like an escape from reality rather than something to base reality on. So how do you bring them together?
Artist: I had always been deeply enmeshed in Black history, especially Black counter-history, like Ivan Gladstone Van Sertima’s book, They Came Before Columbus, and knew, intuitively that what we thought about Black people in the past and in the present is largely incorrect or inaccurate and sometimes without the proper context of the imagination. But why? Is this a problem of history and historical accuracy? Is this simply about telling the right story—that is, about correcting the historical record? Or is it about something else?
Q: What else?
Artist: The imagination. How we render something real or not-real. And Blackness . . .
Q: Has been rendered not-real? Sorry for interrupting, I was speaking my thoughts out loud.
Artist: No problem. And yes. Within our imagination, Blackness is simply not-real or better put unreal—what is outside of reality that makes what is real real.
Q: Can you say more?
Artist: When we think of Black people, we think of specific historical realities that, of course, begin with transatlantic slavery. And we tell a rather linear story from that point to where we are now, and we imagine it to be tale of overcoming rather than a story of innovation.
Q: Innovation?
Artist: We think of it as a tale about surviving and enduring and waiting on the world to change. Or we tell a story of the world taking too long to change, and/or we tell a story of victory and triumph over circumstances. No matter which story we tell, it is framed within these boundaries—even if we tell a story outside of these, it is a story of what was before the transatlantic moment. It is as if the modern calendar began here, and we are in either a pre or post-transatlantic moment.
Q: What’s wrong with this?
Artist: Nothing. The issue is the framing, not the material facts. Within the framing, we often miss or misidentify the creative and technological . . .
Q: You keep using this word, “technological,” why?
Artist: I just mean “techne” in terms of a set of skills developed to think through and manipulate the world around you, both material and nonmaterial. Rather than simply responding to the world, I think of the ways in which we move with and in the world, to use its force as a way of understanding and reimagining our existence.
Q: What is the upshot of that?
Artist: It allows us to rethink Blackness itself as not just something to be overcome or the story of the ways we have overcome but the stunning and impossible and real histories in which this has actually happened. When I was in college—
Q: At Morehouse, right?
Artist: Yeah. It was then that I began to think seriously about combining these two ideas: What if we rethought Blackness by rethinking mythology? At first, this began by creating a new folklore—like Wakanda for Black Panther in which you create a new reality outside of the given reality. I didn’t find this satisfactory, though, because it seemed more like fantasy than reality. What I wanted was a new reality based in fact not a fantastical one devoid of facts.
I wanted to somehow combine Von Däniken and Zacharia Sitchin with Elijah Muhammad and Lerone Bennett to imagine, really reimagine the past, materially, and discover what was thought to be impossible. This imagination has structured everything that I’ve done going forward but has only become materialized and realized in Dark Delight. In the book, I dig through archival records to discover what has not been considered. I use an imagination about the impossible to reconsider what is possible and what was possible. I began to think of Blackness not as a social and political fact or even an aesthetic expression and more of a technological innovation—what can be done materially in the world when we think differently about the materiality of the world.
Q: What impact do you think this will have? Better: what impact do you hope it will have?
Artist: Dark Delight is the result of this long dream, to bring together strange fellows: Black studies, Ufology, Black ecology, spiritualism, naturalism; literature, philosophy, art, theology, and cosmology to reimagine the world as it was and as it will be. I believe that this imagination is crucial for changing the world.
This, for me, is a new beginning. What if we thought of Blackness as mythological? As its own folkloric possibility? As its own thought system and way of knowing rather than what is or can be known? We will begin to think of Black people on a different scale, not one where they are retrofitted into either civilized or savage categories but one where we begin to think about life in a different manner all together—like the seismic shift of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. I want us to think this way about Fanon’s sociogeny as much as I want us to take serious Von Däniken’s hypothesis or Elijah Muhammad’s sense of self-reliance.
Q: Wow, that’s a lot.
Artist: [laughs to himself] I know.
Q: Well, I wish you the best of luck.
Artist: Thanks.