Transcript: Dr. BÁYÒ AKÓMOLÁFÉ on Ontological Mutiny /338
Ayana Young Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today we are speaking with Dr. Bayo Akomolafe.
Bayo Akomolafe We're faced with an invitation for new and powerfully potent frameworks that might invite us to shape shift. What's called into question here is our rectilinear posture– is how our bodies are embodied, is how our paradigms have coddled us and kept us safe. And we've been invited to story new ideas, to story new tensions, to libate those vexed grounds and to ask new questions about what it means to be alive now.
Ayana Young Báyò Akómoláfé (Ph.D.), rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, is the father to Alethea and Kyah, the grateful life-partner to Ije, son and brother. A widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, public intellectual, essayist, and author of two books, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books) and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak, Báyò Akómoláfé is the Founder of The Emergence Network and host of the postactivist course/festival/event, ‘We Will Dance with Mountains’. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California. He sits on the Board of many organizations including Science and Non-Duality (US) and Ancient Futures (Australia). In July 2022, Dr. Akómoláfé was appointed the inaugural Global Senior Fellow of University of California’s (Berkeley) Othering and Belonging Institute. He has also been appointed Fellow for The New Institute in Hamburg, Germany, and Visiting Critic-in-Residence for the Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles (2023). He is the recipient of the New Thought Leadership Award 2021 and the Excellence in Ethnocultural Psychotherapy Award by the African Mental Health Summit 2022.
Ayana Young Bayo, I'm so happy to have this time with you. I'm always happy to have time with you. I know I'm in for a wild ride. [Laughing] So thanks for being here and sharing with us.
Bayo Akomolafe It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me again.
Ayana Young Well, there's so many ways to start off and so much we could untangle and re-tangled together, but I think I want to start with diving into exploring crisis and narratives around crisis because they seem to consume the modern mind and perhaps even freeze us within this crisis mode. So I'm wondering might the idea that we are in crisis be getting in the way of making meaningful change?
Bayo Akomolafe Thank you for that, Ayana. I think there is a very powerful, at least for me, a powerful sense in which one might say, one might theorize that moral fields, ethical landscapes, what they do is they produce crisis, they produce problems, that to be embodied is to have excluded something...right...is to have lost something in some sense. I'm speaking about what Karen Barad might think of as a complementarity. Like, if you materialize with a machine, light as particulate, as a bunch of particles, then you've lost... you've constitutionally excluded the phenomenon of light as wave. And if you produce light as wave, then you exclude light as particle. So in a sense, to live to breathe, is to exclude something. Something is lost, in a sense, if you will.
Modernity is the production of the individual. It's the production of the separate self. Speculate that... its most feverish production. Its desire is to encircle, reinforce and nourish the idea of the citizen. The citizen subject, as a thing unto itself, as an essential fundamental thing. What that leaves out is the possibility, the performance of our world, not just a theoretical abstraction, but the performance of our world, and our relations with it. A world that is alive and intelligent, and agential, and active, and thoughtful, and risky, and more-than-human.
I think the crises that we are producing as a civilization is embedded in the tensions of modernity, it's how we're making do with being alive. It's virtually stitched into the fabric of our everyday. So in a sense, you might say that, even if we found a solution to a problem, like a wicked problem, say climate chaos. But even if we found a solution, this particular nature-culture that we are co-performing, we'll find some way to reinvent the challenge. So, the solutions are not enough, because solutions are just as much part and parcel of the economy of intelligibility of modernity. Now, that's an unwieldy statement. But there you go, solutions are part of how problems are reinforced. So what we need then is not just solutions, and not to dismiss precious work around the wicked problem of climate chaos. What we need is more than just solutions. What we need is some kind of an ontological mutiny, I like to say, a break away from the sensorial monoculture that leaves us intact as citizen subjects.
Ayana Young I love exploring this because I find myself frustrated, even a bit angry, exhausted, dismissive of solutions that are popping up all over the place in regards to climate change. So I do want to tease out a bit more of what we do need in a, you know, what would that look like? If we could speak to? Maybe it's not tangible? Maybe we can't speak to practices. But if we could, if you could, how does one start to embody something other than the formula that's given to us to work through this crisis?
Bayo Akomolafe I think we would need formulas that are not formulaic. If that makes sense. One wouldn't want to drop into a trap of repeatability. The world is too promiscuous for final answers. And yet, having said that, we are a cartographical species. We would need to find our way and we would need patterns. We would need abstractions. We would need theories. We would need to speak with each other; we would need to keep silent. We would need to fall apart together.
In my sense of things, given that our bodies are not isolated, Newtonian-Cartesian machines; given that the story of the individual is heavily burdened, stressed, and haunted by the idea that we've never really been individuals, per se. We are concretization of multiple influences of agencies criss crossing each other. We are crossroads. So there isn't some getting it all together. Even our view of politics as enshrined in the voter or the idea that if only we can get people to get their act together by giving them more and more data about what's wrong. Those practices seem to leave out the idea that individuals are not atomic. It is not a question of ignorance here. Our politics has to be a lot more generous than an information spilling machine, right? It has to be a lot more practical than going to the voting booth. It has to be a lot more generous and hospitable and spatial. The aesthetic of it must go beyond speaking truth to power. And my sense of things is that it begins with loss. Loss is the most prolific and most fervent creation of the universe. The universe is too... You can say the constant thing in the universe of change that it produces is movement, is loss, bodies spill into these frames, composted paradigms, enjoy demise. Our cells fall to the ground, we spill into dust, so that we are murmurations of becoming.
I had a dream recently. And I came out of the dream with a sentence, I don't want to bore you with the other details of the dream. But I remember before I went to sleep, I had a question that I posed to whatever forces, whatever polyamines of hands, and hearts and heads and limbs are responsible for stitching dreams together. I said, Help me ask new questions, help me gain new insights, let's have a conversation. And I'm not exactly sure who I was intending that communication for, but I said it anyway. And I went to sleep, and then caught right to the part where I woke up and I heard distinctly, in my mind, the formulation of a sentence and it was, 'In the geometry of the exquisite, loss is important.' Something like that, you know, or yes, this is exactly what it says, 'In the geometry of the exquisite, the lines never connect.' And my interpretation of that was that loss is what I'm saying about loss. Now, the idea that everything is only partial, that politics is partial, that we can only think of a partial response to a world that can never be revealed, so to speak, or can never show up fully seems to be the insight in that sentence. And so back to my configuration of things, I think it begins with loss. I think it begins with disability, that if we take it for granted, that our bodies are landscape-making assemblages, then it's possible for us to get stuck in that landscaping ritual. It's possible for ants to go around in a pheramonic trance and die in exhaustion, believing that they're making progress, right? So the thing to look out for are breaks. Breaks are signified or figured in the spaces or the sites, the crippled places. What some scholars would call cripistemology, ways of knowing that is not yet trapped in ableist circles of knowing. So I think of disability as a site of access, as a site of possibility, especially your politics of the exquisite, of the transformation of the transversal as a surrounding of that mark, of that break, of that crack in the surface, a surrounding, a sitting with, a sharing with. So just to cop the spiel shorter than usual. I would say that I think it begins with ornamenting and libating cracks, it begins with that. And somehow I sense that when we do that long enough. When we share new cartographical possibilities instigated by cracks, then new directions are rendered possible or made available.
Ayana Young Yeah. I love that theme throughout your work. And I also want to recognize for probably most of us listening that the construction of narratives around climate change are often distinctly Western and even specifically of a US-based context. And so I'm thinking about your experience living in India, and how might we turn to other ways of understanding what is called Climate Change outside of the dominant Western, even US narrative?
Bayo Akomolafe Climate change –whatever term – it's often difficult to even choose what term one would adopt what day of the week. But climate change is white stability. It's not just weather patterns gone awol. You know, it's, it's not just errancy. This is a relational phenomenon. Let me put it this way– that the inrush of an ocean wave, the crashing of a wave on the shore, on perhaps a sandcastle that one has built is a rather different phenomenon from an ocean wave crashing on a phallic steel tower. In the former image, sand castles are meant to be composted. They're meant to fade away. Part of the joy of building it is to see it crumble, but to a steel tower, and its performance is of permanence––anything that comes from without is a possible threat. And yet the ocean waves are the same. Without trying to diminish the escalating consequences of industrial activity. What I want to stress here is climate change is, in the words of Frédérique Apffel-Marglin, climate change is equi-metaphysically true. It is true and effectual within an assemblage within a particular way of noticing and seeing the world, which is white stability. The reason why climate change is spreading fast is because whiteness is globally relevant, it's escalating as well. And so we're faced with a crisis, not just of weather patterns, we're faced with a deeper ontol-epistemological crisis. By ontol-epistemological, I mean, a crisis of becoming, a crisis of being. What does it mean to be human? How do we know things? What does our knowing enact? What worlds die as a result of our rituals of coming to know the world? All of these are called into question as storms dance outside of our windows, and sometimes through our buildings. We have been invited to ask questions about how we build our lives, how we build the city. Everything is called into question here.
So the Anthropocene is often articulated as this global narrative, this planetary-cautionary tale, warning everyone to have their hands on deck, or we might lose our lives. Of course, what that leaves out is that the world is uneven. Not just uneven in its in terms of how we are producing the conditions for this crisis, not just on even in how this crisis is blowing like smoke across the planet. But also on even in how we see it and so you're right there. We're faced with more than just a simple request for technical bureaucratic responses. We're faced with an invitation for new and powerfully potent frameworks that might invite us to shape shift. What's called into question here is our rectilinear posture– it's how our bodies are embodied, it's how our paradigms have coddled us and kept us safe. Now that safety, you know, has had its endorsement withdrawn by the planet, so to speak, and we've been invited to story new ideas, to story new tensions, to libate those vexed grounds and to ask new questions about what it means to be alive now. The Yoruba people have wonderful... I live in India but you know I'm deeply in touch with the Yoruba lessons… and the Yoruba stories that have transmuted into Black scholarship and Afro-diasporic, spiritualities and slave narratives, and how they're inviting us to behave in the midst of capture. How the inviting us to behave when a God, a wild God, comes visiting. And I think that's the story that I tell around the world, especially to climate scientists, especially those who write IPCC reports. And I'm not exactly sure how to frame hope, or hopelessness in a time when the nation state paradigm doesn't seem able to rise to the challenge. I think a descending is more appropriate as a response, a bold thing to do now.
[musical break]
Ayana Young That was, I don't know how to describe it, but I really felt attached to the words you were speaking. And I do see this clinging that whiteness brings. Even when I think about building materials, the metaphor of the sand castle really sparked in me. The poisons we use, here especially in the United States to keep our buildings from rotting, the formaldehyde in our bodies to keep our bodies from rotting. We don't want to let go. And the desperation to cling shifts the whole way we experience the world and of course, climate change and change in general. And so I want to ask about how we nurture through the rupture. And in “Welcome to the Wandering, Winding Way of the Wound” for Science and Nonduality, you discuss just how difficult it is to live with rupture, how difficult it is to have your world upended. And so I'm wondering how do we provide care and nurturing through ruptures so that we can bear them and embrace shifts rather than just running back to the concrete and not allowing the rupture to grow and change us?
Bayo Akomolafe Wonderful. Recently, at the University of Massachusetts, I was speaking with architects and urban planners. I said, blackness is dis-architecture, or other blackness is the end of architecture. And I had to quickly add that it's alright though, you can relax because their bodies immediately become stiff. And I needed to explain what I meant by blackness as the end of architecture. Architects hate decay. Right? The pride of an architect is to see one's art thriving, Is to see it last longer, right, is to have the integrity of the building or the structure praised for decades to come. And so they try to build in a way that protects the integrity of the structure, so it doesn't decay. In a sense, architecture is a conversation with loss. It's a conversation with decay, and with flailing edges. It's an ongoing conversation about what do we give up? And what do we let live or stay or abide permanently? If we can manage that prospect. And architecture is not just building. Architecture is how experience is designed. To think about the architecture of cities, think about what certain buildings want us to feel. Like what kind of feeling is evoked when you see the White House? What does it arouse? Right. What does a mountain arouse? What is what does the White House arouse? What does the Pentagon arouse? What does the Statue of Liberty arouse? So, we're not just little dots moving through Euclidean empty spaces. We are arousals, we are meeting concatenations of arousals. We are subjects of unspeakable arousals, erotic crossroads. And architecture is part of that partially, it coproduces these experiences. We might not understand why we feel happy, all of a sudden when we're surrounded by certain furniture, but there is some support. I don't want to say evidence, it seems more anecdotal at this point. But there is some compelling narrative that suggests that our feelings, our capacity to respond, which is affect, is not domiciled in our bodies. It's a question of ecological transferences. It's a matter of atmospheric exchanges. So, we are not separate from architecture.
What do I mean then when I say blackness is the loss of or the death of architecture? I think of blackness, not just as the identitarian thing, not just as how certain bodies appear, which veers closely and coincides closely with colonial imaginations of identity. I'm not just thinking of blackness as a form of capture, as a passenger concept in the paradigm of whiteness, constantly at odds, constantly seeking diversity, are constantly seeking a space at the table, constantly prosthetic, but constantly seeking to be a real boy, like Pinocchio. I'm not speaking about that Blackness. I'm speaking about a different blackness. I call that a small 'b' blackness, right? It's ungrammatical. It's fugitive, it's geological. It's how things become... Yoruba people might call it Ase. It's the ongoing flowing disruption of any claims to stability. It's how things lose their edges. Its loss. Right? It's the maternal matrix spill. It's spillage. And this blackness I speak of as spillage is constantly haunting every claim to stability. It's constantly pulling at the threads so that we might become something different. It denies us any claim to eternity. It says, 'Here's where you fall down.'
I think in such a time where the materials of our ritualizing flatness have amassed or come together in such a way that it's now almost inescapable to push the dust under the carpet. Like the dust under the carpet is now on a mountain. And so there's no place to hide now. So you know, we're witnessing, withnessing, this ongoing decay is like decay on steroids. And we're going to experience that not just in a loss of ecological integrity, not just in the loss of trust in governance. We're in such a time where trust in democratic institutions is at an all time low. We're going to witness that not just in that institutional decadence, not just in what we have pathologized as corruption. We're also going to witness how we are showing up experientially. I think we're not just in a global pandemic of viruses. I think we're also in a pandemic of depression, of despair. And this despair will push us to do things. It will push us to ask new questions to push us to the streets. It would enhance our... it will burden our voices with a different pathos. And we would wonder, isn't there something more?
So this is where your question comes in after offering that framework, that conceptual scaffolding. That as white stability fades, as the integrity, the architectural integrity of white stability fades, we will need a politics that does more than just help people get back into productive cycles. We will need something like a midwiving. We will need to catch people where they fall. This is what I call making sanctuary. You know, even white people.. I often say whiteness is not white people, whiteness also captured white people. But even the hallways of privilege will seem emptier and hollower and hollower. And it would seem like what's there to this after all? So whiteness isn't even stable itself. Whiteness is like an amoeba. It's organic, it's spilling, and it's also becoming something else, right? It's not a property, white identified people don't own whiteness, right? Whiteness is an arrangement. And it's an arrangement that can change. It's an arrangement that can also migrate and travel. Right, like a murmuration.
So, as that happens... as cracks emerge as monsters sprout through flat surfaces, and in sterilized places, as the enemy creeps up within, so to speak, as the wilds show up in our living rooms, we would need something more than chasing them away. We would not need psychotherapy. I think we would need abtherapy. And for me, abtherapy, just my construction, is away from therapy. I'm not speaking about healing or justice. And those are specific concerns. I cannot universalize or generalize the need for that. But I think collectively, we might need something that looks like walking away from the couch. We might need something more than healing. We might need a collective communitas– an enterprise, an assemblage that allows people to lean into these spaces of rupture, that supports people as they go through this. And this is what I call making sanctuary.
Ayana Young Gosh, so much there to tease out. But I am thinking about and I feel like I've heard you say this, hopefully I'm not making this up, but that where we're headed is not safe, psychologically or otherwise. And I'm thinking about, you know, of course rupture in a lot of ways doesn't feel safe. But how might love not be safe? And that kind of brings me to this other theme that I wanted to work with you on which is, you know, on the note of love and care, what role does parenting have within your ideas of post activism and maybe you could share how your own parenting experience shaped your approach to these concepts.
Bayo Akomolafe Postactivism is–at the risk of defining it–is an arrangement of lines of continuity, an arrangement, an arrange-disarrangement. It's a flashing up of the unnamed and how that impedes regular continuity. How that impedes just unbothered, convenient, forward movement. So the post- there is doing the work of noticing how activism can actually reinforce the very things we're trying to work against. Like even struggle... struggle against structures of oppression can give credence and legitimacy to those structures of oppression. Right? Structures can secrete the moral imperative to struggle and then it becomes this impossible cycle. This might not be a thing that Marxists might want to hear that the struggle against capitalism can be capitalism's greatest treasure. But I digress.
I speak of postactivism as this flaring up of a transversal quality that makes forward movement, usual action, usual agency and usual subjects, it disrupts those figures and those figurations and individuations. And it brings new things to the room, the table, it brings the monster to the room. And that creates this molecular possibility for new kinds of gestures. By the showing up of a virus, suddenly we’re asking new questions about schooling, or we asked new questions about who should be granted access to health care? Or why do we need to go to work? Why is work failing as a matter of distance? Why not just have it in your living room? So questions like that come up, that would have been, perhaps impossible to ask, prior to the flaring up.
I think parenting is this flaring up as well. Just a while ago, you know, we were speaking about the ordinariness and the extraordinariness involved in parenting, it seems that parenting is not just a matter of what we're giving to the generation to come. It's also a matter of how we are shaping subjects, how we are shaping that next generation and how we are shaped in the shaping. The baker who needs the dough is also made by the dough. So how we have learned to dampen the flare, the risk, the risk of birth, the ontological risk of a child, how we have managed that ontological flaring up–the duplicity of a child emerging from the cracks, how we have learned to do that is through schooling, right? Because we need to go to work, because we need to be productive, because we've learned to see children through the prisms of performance, academic performance, for instance, because they need to be good citizens. And so we've created this cycle that diminishes the potential for rupture that a child presents with. And we have channeled this rupture through the canyon, the canyon of continuity, through patrilineal continuity, through putting others in the family way. So we've reinforced our own civilization that way.
My practice and my wife's has been to ask new questions about that. My wife is a biologist and name is Ije. And she formulated a concept called transparenting, a couple of years ago, and it was how she named the biological phenomenon. It was how she responded to the biological phenomenon of microchimerism, which is the very beautiful, surprising and ironic observation that the child is the mother or the child is the father of the mother. That in a sense, the cells don't just propagate from the mother, in neutral to the child. Cells also propagate from the child to the mother. And so the child also comakes and co-produces the mother. It's not a one way street. I think that's the American expression. It's not a one way street. It's very, very two way but it's more than just two ways it's very crossroad and it becomes really erotic and confusing, because the cells that the first child leaves behind in the mother's womb, goes along to co0make and co-produce a sibling to come. So that in a sense, the sibling is also the mother, the first child is mother or father to the sibling to come. So it becomes the hence the biological term microchimerism. At a molecular level, we are not singularly this or that we are becoming other. We are constantly sharing and trafficking edges. And this kind of influenced her take on transparenting that we need to revisit the ritual of parenting the next generation by treating the child as a crack, by treating the child as this speculative eruption of possibility. And so our practice has been to stay with this trouble, the child has trouble, trouble to our names, trouble to our rituals, trouble, to our expectations, trouble to our traditions, to stay with it. And to, especially in these times, right, there are times of building tradition, we need resilience. But there are also times when a supplementary politics is needed, that leans into the exquisite, and I think what we're doing, what we often name unschooling, or deschooling, or [unknown] education, or play or spontaneity is what we're trying and struggling and attempting to do along with others is to listen with our children, is to treat them as philosophers in their own right, is to not be so quick to speak about what our own parents did. It's to work with the ongoing gifts and poisons that we've received from the other generation, the generation that birthed us. And I think somewhere between to recognize that we're not going to get it together, we're not going to pass on some final imperative to the next generation. We're not going to imprint ourselves in an absolute way. And that's a gift actually, we're not going to do that. And maybe the best we can offer is to gift our failures to our children, to invite them to play with it, and to see differently, to permit them to see differently even when we don't get it ourselves.
[musical break]
Ayana Young Beautiful. I would now like to turn our conversation to your recent essay. "Black Lives Matter But to Whom" we need a politics of exile and a time of troubling stuckness. And in the essay you write quote, "I'm writing to say that while Black Lives Matter deploys an identitarian approach to make its demands and claims about black experience legible to the public. It inadvertently contributes to the ongoing manufacturing of the black subject an imprint of white logic. Its method of intersectionality and iteration of what seems popular beyond a studied and careful appreciation of Kimberle Crenshaw's more nuanced thesis contributes to the discretization of bodies as fully articulable subjects of meeting," end quote. Whew, so I would love to hear more about this trap of identity and the creation of subjects.
Bayo Akomolafe Yes, it's like a full circle thing we're doing here. We're coming right back to the idea of the individual. I think I would never ever forget the words of Professor Marisol de la Cadena in conversation conspiratorial conversation with me when she told me, that Bayo, I think that the vessel of capture wasn't just the slave ship, it was the concept of the human. Bodies were imported into the growing enterprise of the human, the human ot the Anthropocene. Bodies were imported into it as prosthetic contributors to the emergence of the Anthropocene. So Black bodies were placed on a spectrum, one might argue the spectrum was not quite human, less than human. Our, and I use our, with some hesitation here. But our approach, approach of the minority-iterian has been to aspire to leave behind the prosthetics of being a minority, and arrive summarily at the halls of power, to leave the hallways and enter the room, so to speak. To stop standing at the gates and to gain entrance into the city. And the strategy for that has been to adopt the same ontological tools of the city, which is identity. Modernity's strategy for creating individuals is to settle them into suburbian identities. To stabilize them, to say: I will cut off the wilds like a procrustean bed. And to the thief, or to the visitor, or to the traveler at night: I will cut off your limbs. I will cut off your tendrils, and I will with exacting precision. I will place you within a room and this is where you will have power. This is how you will sink. This is how you will thrive. But you must be identified. You must be intelligible, you must be legible, you must be surveilled, you must be useful to my purposes.
And so Blackness, this big 'B' Blackness has been this yearning to be seen, to be recognized, right to have a seat at the table, to speak truth to power. To be visible. With visibility, however, comes the trap of being useful. And with the trap of being useful, comes incarceration. Because if you're surveilled, if you're legible to the nation state, then you're available. Then you are numbered. And then I can incarcerate you. So Black excellence is this narrative, this yearning, this presumption, that the way for Blackness to go, is from the shores of violent capture, to migrate from the edges to the center of the city, from the borderlands to the hinterland of capture and to occupy power there. To be more visible, to be seen, to be celebrated, to rise to fame, to have a private jet, to do all of that. It's a world-building process. In this way, Blackness is a form of white capture. Now, this is not to say this is bad, or this is evil. I don't think in those terms, but this is to say that if Blackness is comorbid, with the Anthropocene, are there other ways to frame Blackness? You know, this minoritarian capture that might allow us to go in different directions other than one we're all headed to right now? Is there a way to think of the minority that isn't this ticket, this one way highway to this city set up on a hill, right? Is there a way to think about all of that without capitulating to Modernity's algorithms of capture? So that's what I'm saying here. We need other ways to spill. We need other ways, perhaps and this is why I use subterranean because it's quite difficult for surveillance cameras to pick what is beneath the ground. So we need beneath the ground politics, a supplementary politics if you will, which is not a dismissal or pathologization of identity politics, but a way of holding different questions and different energies and orientations, or rather disorientations. As we come up against a time in which the crisis of loss is becoming escalated.
Ayana Young I'd love to hear more about the concept of Black exile. And its relation to the Afrocene, and what points of our current era gestured towards different ways of being.
Bayo Akomolafe Right. When something flashes up, when something flares up, and burns through the algorithms of continuity, going into the shopping mall, going to City Hall, seeking recognition when something bursts through that. The landscape that is made visible through that new parallax division is the Afrocene. It's not after the Anthropocene is not a replacement concept. It's not a substitute for the Anthropocene. It is a stowaway concept. The Afrocene lives within capture. And this story of capture here is the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is capture. The Afrocene is the sideline logic, the logic that sidles the non legible logic that sidles the materials of capture. Its issue–traveling with the slaves across the Atlantic, the trickster, traveling with the slave across the Atlantic, that's what the Afrocene is. And what it encourages, is a different posture altogether, is to listen to a world that is wilder than the materials of the Anthropocene might invite us to notice, to appreciate. It is thoughts traveling with bodies melting into each other. It is ancestors living and breathing. It is spirits with three heads skating the surfaces of the Atlantic Ocean. It is all these things that live with us, and speak with us and dream with us that we don't know how to voice or language.
So the Afrocene becomes this carnivalesque, festive, radically hospitable concept that invites experimentation with embodiment. Beyond just the binary of healing versus injury, victim versus perpetrator, justice versus injustice, black versus white here versus there. It skirts the lines. It straddles the binary. It exists in the cracks between the binary. So Black exile becomes this performance of queer relationality. Instead of speaking to my senator, and I'm not diminishing speaking to one's senators or legislators, but instead of just speaking to my senator, I might as well communicate with furniture. I might as well find ways to trace connections that my body is already practicing with ancestral becomings. I might as well lose my way. And in becoming lost, be alive to other spaces of power. Black exile is the invitation to occupy the monster.
And I remember in that essay, I stay with this idea of occupying the monster, exploring the story of Badejo, the Nigerian actor who inhabited the body of the xenomorph in Ridley Scott's "Alien" in the 70s. He entered the monster, he became the monster. And it's a rich story, I invite anyone who doesn't know about Badejo tricks to explore his story. I think Badejo becomes a figure for Black exile. Invitation to experiment with embodiment, just as issue, this invitation to experiment with embodiment is a disappointment of those enlightenment precepts, concepts about politics, being either utilitarian, industrial, or natural or any of those things is not Lockean or Hobbesian that politics is premised on a singular notion of nature can be a form of a trap. That what we want to do right now is experiment with new nature culture, and render them more resilient as we perform with them.
Ayana Young Oh, gosh, I'm just sitting and the complexity and the beauty and the expansion of it all. And there's so much in the article, or you know, what you write in "Black Lives Matter, But to Whom": We need a politics of exile in a time of troubling stuckness. And I want to read another quote, because there's so much. There's so much in here and you write, quote, "The irony of attempting to create safe zones to nullify the offending body and to postpone fascism indefinitely, is that it is often in the effort to guarantee this immunity to the corrupting influences of the folks across the aisle that we become the very thing we resist," end quote. I'm thinking back to a number of moments in our conversation, but definitely on parenting. And I'm wondering how the idea of nurturing plays into embracing the dangers as well. And we cannot keep our children or ourselves or our loved ones from the dangers of the world. But perhaps we can give them and ourselves the space and care that will allow us to embrace the dangers in a way that stimulates growth. And so I wonder how might we come to see danger and the quote "unsafe" as places for challenge and expansion? Yeah, just the idea of making home with discomfort.
Bayo Akomolafe Right. We don't know how to think for or anticipate these things because the world is emergent. We will often need to build walls. I'm not against walls. We will need walls. We will need... let me just hyperfixate on the notion of walls for a moment. And say, maybe we might even build barbed wire fences with guns. Right? Who knows? Right? What are the conditions that would make those kinds of structures not just possible, but required? Right? You could imagine a sci-fi scenario of zombie apocalypse. I guess if we're in such a scenario, most of us will be behind those fences and we'll do our best to justify the need to gun down all the zombies beleaguering and haunting our gates. But then there are moments when something crosses something transversal, something molecular and it upends, the structures and the positions that we've adopted. And it shifts things ever so slightly so that we are suddenly at odds with our safety, we're suddenly at odds with our permanence was suddenly at odds with the very arrangement that seemed to ensure our survival, our survivability. And then someone asks a question. And the question is, what if we let the zombies bite us? Maybe the zombies biting isn't so bad? I don't know if anyone has explored ... No, I think someone did. I think a cartoon, I can't remember the name now... explored the idea of okay, maybe what if we stopped and let these zombies actually bite us. And it led to, you know, quite fascinating story concepts and narratives. There is one going on now called The Last of Us. And it's a zombie flick, probably the most intelligent take on the zombie. Of course, the most intelligent take on the zombie, for me would somehow bring in its African roots, and that cosmology, maybe the zombie as fugitivity from imperialism. That take haunts me, The Last of Us, this fungal infection that takes over the human and in so doing creates art. I think that what we want to do is, I often think of it as infection, to allow ourselves to explore the duplicity of safety.
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Bayo Akomolafe Ayana, I'm not sure. I don't know if you know the story of an extinction event that happened in our guts. This is what the researchers exploring this called it, call it an extinction event. They noticed that in Paleo feces, that is feces that has lasted 1000 years and is available for scrutiny. These archaeological digs, they notice dried up feces with remnants of microbial communities and they studied a diversity of these communities and notice that it differs significantly with our own microbial communities now, our gut microbes. One might say, and I think they do make this point, that paleo feces that they studied at diversity, we don't have diversity. We don't have as many microbes as they did 1000 years ago. For instance, my question has always been when after reading that, what does that allow us to notice? What has this loss of microbial diversity taken away from us? These researchers suppose that in losing the diversity, we became a microbial monolithian inter species defined by a monolith.
How has this last shaped our experience, shaped our activism, shaped our politics, shapes our visions and our possibility for imagination? How is this effectively significant? But to gain new microbes is to risk exposure. To see the world differently, is to take risky steps outside of our walls and ramparts to let ourselves get beaten by zombies is to risk entertaining one, at least just one. And I know that's a horrible prospect, because Hollywood has so bastardized the image of the zombie, that no one would be attracted to the idea, I wouldn't be attracted to the idea myself. Well, maybe the things that we recoil from, have a promise to them. Right. And that's the irony of safety. The very thing we suppose we're keeping without, is exactly performed within, in our very efforts to keep the enemy without thinking of all the ways climate justice, or our responses to climate matters, performs itself as a recoiling from death to come. Right, we can see death down the line. And so we go round in circles, we go round and round in circles, anything to stop ourselves from marching forward. But in performing our bodies that way, we kind of secrete death. So that [inaudible] our tautological economies and politics seems to be the very exemplification of death, animated death. We're trying to avoid it, but we recreate it in avoiding it. So I think we've crossed some kind of material inflection point, where safety is not producing the phenomena that we suppose it would, or we expected it to. Safety is coddling us and safety is banishing the visitors, the ontological guests that travel and take some of some parts of our bodies wisdom, safety is pushing them away. Our body guards are taking away the nourishment that we need to become different. So we need to risk. We need a politics of risk and play. And this is not something new. I mean, I think some researchers noticed that children in favelas, in slum, were less likely to get ill from COVID than those well protected children in the cities.
Ayana Young Well, there's so much more to ask and explore together, but I will begin to close with this last inquiry. And it's about creating new worlds, which I think is a good way to close for today and in “Welcome to the The Wandering, Winding Way of the Wound” for Science and Nonduality, you discuss the idea that when we get into an utopian state, we forget about the circumstances that brought us there and we began the cycles again. And so I'm wondering, how might we create new worlds that emphasize constant shifting and growing rather than seeking a stabilizing our stuck idea of perfection. And I'm also wondering how that ties into tangibly engaging with disruption. And maybe you could offer some places where you've offered disruption.
Bayo Akomolafe I think utopia is a political imaginary, secreted by the affordances of modern stability. We're able to think that way, in terms of finality in terms of heaven. Speculatively, modern concepts have lived for, for longer than what we now call modern modernity. Strands of which still animate our discourses and conversations about change and social transformation. And yet there's something troubling about utopian imaginations. I'm sure many scholars work with utopia, as a virtuality, as a possibility. At least to the extent that it reveals something about us and our own operations and our own assumptions. What's troubling for me about it is the hidden curriculum of finality, that innovates its operations, but it's like we've arrived, there's no movement from here. So your question about how do we keep building and not assume finality? I think we will always risk stability. And I think to be embodied in the way that we are, I do not know how to think outside of plateaus, outside of, emergencies, not just eternal flow emergencies, also the creation of stabilities. We will need stabilities. We will need names. I mean, today's revolution is tomorrow's industry. So there isn't, I don't know that there is a way to live in flow. To live in itself is to presume stability of some kind. Bodies are not switch-on-switch-off things. We would need to eat, we would need to ritualize eating, we will need to name ourselves and we will then need to ritualize, build traditions around that, and need to sustain those traditions. Some of us will be enlisted and deployed to the gates that we eventually build around our revolutionary concepts. And then by and by sooner than later, what those stabilities produce would be ironic desires for rupture. Cracks will emerge in the very attempt to create stability, such as the nature of emergence. I might say that we will, in the very attempt to build home, find the wilds we exclude, springing in the gardens of our new homes, and then some wonderful person, maybe a descendant of Ayana would have a conversation with a descendant of Bayo in the year 3000. And then they would have a conversation about revolutions. And maybe whatever postactivism is called then might re-emerge as a consideration of how we lose our way and do something different.
And I think my work is to do this for now, is to settle with disruption. My work is highly theoretical. But it is not exclusively theoretical. Do a lot of work, thinking and reading around these concepts and then invite inquiry--that has been the majority of my work. And then leading organizations, building alliances around the world to not just explore with me, but to see if there is some pragmatism here. By pragmatism, of pragmatic politics here, by politics, it has to be practiced in some way. So what I named post activism as an instantiation of a new politics, I am speaking about the very exciting prospect of inviting people around the world, to create around this, to join others in thinking through and practicing through these ideas. If you asked me, How I see this playing out more intimately, it's again, in my relationship with my son, my children. What you might poetically call ultimate disruptors. Like children invite, especially my son invites me to let go of the usual, the expected and invite me to build around him, with him to settle into the field of his intensity. And to stay there, stay with the trouble of that. That is my most intimate postactivism. That is my most intimate calling. Yes. And I think that's how new worlds emerge.
Ayana Young Thank you, Bayo, for sharing the theoretical to the personal. And I'm definitely wandering into the image of our descendants in year 3000 talking about revolution. I see it, you're definitely going to imagine that. Really clearly I'm imagining where they are and what the world looks like at that point. But yeah, I just appreciate you and the poetics that you bring, and wrestling with these concepts that so many people try to keep tidy and easily digestible and I'm so tired of that. And I don't trust that and I'm grateful for all that it is that you must have to put into all of this. Yeah, it is like a murmuration actually, I've been watching the birds lately and that's what I feel like this conversation was. So thank you Bayo.
Bayo Akomolafe Thank you so much. Thank you, Ayana. Wonderful speaking with you.
Jose Alejandro Rivera Thank you for listening to this episode of For The Wild. The music you've heard today is Julio Kintu, Jahnavi Veronica, Leyla McCalla, and Los Hombres Calientes. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Julia Jackson, Jackson Kroopf, Evan Tenenbaum, and Jose Alejandro Rivera.