Transcript: The Edges in the Middle, II: Bayo Akomolafe and V
V It's not holding a hand out anymore. It's not it's not a place of begging. Right? It's a place of turning to each other and becoming. It's not asking to be let in, but demanding to be let out. Right?
Ayana Young For The wild is honored to present The Edges in the Middle, a series of conversations between Bayo Akomolafe and thought companions like john a. powell, V, Naomi Klein, and more. These limited episodes have been adapted from Bayo's work as the global Senior Fellow at UC Berkeley's Othering and Belonging Institute. In this role, Bayo has been holding a series of public conversations on issues of justice and belonging for the institute's Democracy and Belonging Forum, which connects and resources civic leaders in Europe and the US who are committed to bridging across differences to strengthen democracy and advanced belonging in both regions and around the world. Bayo's conversations encourage us to rethink justice, hope, and belonging by sitting amidst the noise, not trying to cover it up with pleasant rhythms. To learn more about the Democracy and Belonging Forum, visit DemocracyandBelongingForum.org. This recording features Bayo's conversations with V, the artist formerly known as Eve Ensler. V is a the Tony Award winning playwright, activist, performer and author of the theatrical phenomenon The Vagina Monologues, her new book Reckoning explores how we can love and survive love, hold people and states accountable, reckon with demons and honor the dead, and see ourselves connected to a greater purpose, Bayo and V dance with restitution, repair, trauma, and safety.
Bayo Akomolafe I want to welcome everyone here to this experimental playground at the edges of things. As we dance with possibility and impossibility. I'm so excited about the team at DBF and OBI is making this possible. I'm so grateful. And I'm doubly excited to be having this conversation with Mama V today. And just a few words to make welcome, everyone here. Welcoming is place-making ritual. So I offer these words as a libation. This is the edges in the middle. And it's convened around the concept of an own body.
And I just I have a story, one of my favorites that I like to tell I want to share with you as a, as a ritual of making you welcome and making you feel expanded, if you will, to explore what we're doing here. I'll tell you the story. You probably know it already. It's from 1803. It's the legend of the Flying Africans, the Ibo men, women and children, I think, 75 or 76 black bodies stolen from Africa. The Bight of Benin from present day Nigeria, which is where I come from, and taken across the Atlantic to the state of Georgia. Where at Dunbar Creek, some kind of mutiny took place and the slaves were able to take control of the ship the vessel, I think it was called a York or something, and chase their slavers inland. They came back with reinforcements to capture or recapture the slaves. And those Ibo men, women and children refused labor, they refuse to be captured. They would rather die than to see themselves as organs of a plantation. So what they did was just form a single file and march into the waters singing an ancestral song to to cook who is a great spirit in Ibo cosmology, right? Why the story is very important to what we're doing here is what happened later. Because the official account of that event, the formal account of that event, the written one was penned in a journal by one Roswell King, right, who was a manager of several plantations. And he wrote a very sterile, single, stoic line in his journal. It was, they took to the swamp, right. They took to the swamp. It was facts just the facts, man, right is that the Americanism? Just the facts. But you see alongside that strike, recitation or representation of what supposedly happened was an ecosystem of embellishments of woundings of rumors ,of whispers that developed and emerged like a ferment alongside that stoic narrative. And that story was, well, those Africans actually sprouted black wings, and flew back to Africa. That is, what an mbari is... the mbari is an aesthetic of storytelling, of speculative experimentation.
Our work here is not to, in a very trickstery way, tell the truth or speak truth to power. Our work here is not to arrive at consensus. Our work here is to play with possibility, and to offer our dance away from the convergence – the colonial convergence of safety into new ways of thinking about the world... is to upset the established order, the normative ways of speaking and thinking about ourselves just long enough for other intelligences to be noticed. I hope that makes you feel welcome to what we're doing here today. And to this beautiful, playful assemblage that is centered on the heuristic, the metaphysical basket, or metaphorical baskets that is called Congo. And this is where Mama V, as I like to call her, comes in.
I met Mama V. not too long ago. And we connected deeply on the story of the Congo. I mean, I was born in Nigeria, right, I grew up in Nigeria, and migrated to what was then called the democratic of I mean, Zaire, right. In Central Africa, now called the Democratic Republic of Congo. I lived there. I enjoyed it... the food schools, the dance, the people. V will tell you more about that. It was a place of joy, and, and play, and I have great and fond memories about living there. Eventually, a war broke out. And we had to return to Nigeria. Ultimately, my father died there. So the country of Congo holds this place for me of loss. It has become a figure of loss, and strife, and a quest for my father. This ongoing quest to reconnect with ancestrality. When I met V, she told the story of joy, and celebration, and dance in spite of abuse and deep loss. And we will get into that together. What we're doing here is we're holding this duplicity, this notion of Congo as celebration and loss, at the same time... this invitation to enter into places that we're not used to, and maybe a good place to begin, as I make you feel welcome, I hope Mama V, is to, is to stay with that provocation from our dear sister, Sarah, about what it means to you, what it what it means for you to sit with Congo, if you will.
V Well, first of all, thank you so much, and thanks to everyone who organized this beautiful conversation and you Bayo, for that gorgeous, opening story because it speaks so deeply to me on so many levels. But I think it's funny, because sometimes what you were talking about the play with possibility, right? The Congo, you know, and and, and what we've created, there, in some ways, is actually a portal of possibility, right? In the midst of the impossible, right, in the midst of the seemingly impossible, right, and I think Congo for me is kind of the apex, or the intensification of that paradox of incredible violence, incredible suffering, and incredible possibility and celebration. Right. And, and I think, finding out that you were, your early years were spent there and the loss of your father there was very profound to me, because the Congo occupies my heart like no other place in the world. It had been, I have been changed by it. I have been educated by it. I have been transformed and taken to other places. And the women there particularly live in my dreams and my pores in my system for the many years that I've spent there and what people would call working there, but it isn't work. It's loving there. It's connecting there. It's being in solidarity there. And I think, I think in many ways, you know, that story you told of people, refusing the slaves, refusing their bodies, being of slave labor, and rather walk into the waters is so telling in terms of the Congo because I think many people in the Congo, particularly in the east, are now living outside any structures that really exist in the world, you know, when people have been so systemically suffering in such a malignant and internally ignored way by the world for so long, right? And even when suppose it agents of help and change, make nothing but kind of shambolic offerings further insulting and humiliating. And when that's suffering and deprivation has gone on, for so long, it's become calcified.
Right? When there's no reliable outside force to turn to, people have created their own nirvanas their own realities outside those structures of oppression. Right. And I think it is, so it is, it is so gorgeous, to see what people have created, and all kinds of ways, but City of Joy is a particular, because I would say it is a palace of possibility. It's an opening that has grown out of people's non-reliability on those structures, but turning inward to themselves and to each other, to create a new paradise, a new world, in the midst of what has collapsed, you know. So Congo, for me represents that. And, and, and the beauty of that, and, and the struggle of that. And, and actually, it's taught me in so many ways that, you know. I love the image of the lotus, so much, because it's the only flower that blossoms and seeds simultaneous, and it's the flower that blooms from the mud. And joy is this lotus that has risen out of... you know, I can't tell you how many people said to us at the beginning, this will never work, this can happen, this will never happen. And it's holy. It's holy because it's not holding a hand out anymore. It's not it's not a place of begging, right? It's a place of turning to each other and becoming, it's not asking to be let in, but demanding to be let out. Right? Not waiting for that day to come. But seizing that moment now. Right? And believing that moment is enough and essential in spite of everything that is being told, or, or even what's around it. Right. And so that's to me what miracle means, right? A collective decision and energy and a field of possibility that has been imagined.
Bayo Akomolafe It's it really is a planetary tale, isn't it? It's the it's the story of we've been pressed down. This seems to be no place to go. We are living in the Baldwinian The Fire Next Time moment, right? The Fire This Time, right? There's no more water. Water has been extinguished long time. We're in the fire now, but even in that place of being burned and pressed down. There remains this persistent, almost fugitive glimmer of, dare I call it hope. I think hope is too impoverished, a term that something so ravishing, celebratory, maybe even festive, lives in the deep places of, what have you trauma, or repression or oppression.
You know, Mama V I think I told when we had our conversation that my son's name is Abayomi, which also happens to be the name of my father. Abayomi is the Yoruba word for well, we don't have words per se we have stories, orikis. We tell legends in the names we give ourselves, we kind of shorten it because it's not practical to sing stories when you're calling out someone, calling someone rather. But the full name of my father who's also my son in a sense is Ota ibà yomi sugbon Ọlọ́run òjé, short into Abayomi. It means, "The Devil or the enemy would have won but God did not allow it." It also means, "They they buried me in the soil, but they did not realize that I'm a seed." Right? It's this idea of what psychologists are struggling with when they say post traumatic growth. Right. Yeah, I mean, and you have never been shy. I mean, your book, The Apology, is this struggle with forgiveness, with with restitution, with restoration. I dare say, and it's really an invitation to do something else with forgiveness. Do you want to say something about that, you know, to think Congo through this dynamic of coming back to the so called flattened destitution.
V I love what you're saying, and I love the name of your son. I love that whole idea. Because I think I mean, just going back to City of Joy for a minute and wounds and wounds, you know, wounds, wounds are portals, wounds are portals, and, and I think it's all degrees to which we are traumatized on this planet, all of us are traumatized. Birth, is trauma, right, coming into this world as a trauma, leaving that delicious, yummy, warm, safe womb and being pulled out in this mad thing. Right. That is trauma. I think one of the things I've had and it's a weird thing to say, but I've had a life of of intense trauma, intense violence, intense invasion, intense disruption of of the path that I might have been on, had someone not come into my body, and splintered and fragmented that. And I think that what I learned at an early age is that if you keep going with that trauma, you keep going with it. There is something on the other side that is quite astonishing.
And I, I see this so often at City of Joy, which is women who come you know, girls who come are between 14 and 24. And all of them have been seriously seriously sexually abused. I mean, in ways that I don't even talk about publicly, because it's retraumatizing to people. And it feels like it's some grotesque, I don't know, punishment, just to keep repeating it. But what I do know is that if we look at it, if we don't avert our eyes, if we don't deny it, if we don't push it away, if we let ourselves and ask ourselves, to see that trauma. There is pain there is ah, there is a there is there is a but there is a doorway, there is doorway. And writing The Apology, which was me essentially writing my father's apology to me for sexual abuse and his physical abuse of me, was excruciating. To climb into my perpetrator to climb into this person who I did not want to have compassion for I did not want to understand what made him do what he did. For so many years, it was just so much easier to create a narrative of him as monster, me as victim...me as you know. And to be honest with you, I was living fully in his story because he was the architect of that story. And I was the reactor in that story, right? And write that book and to climb into, I suddenly was no longer in his story. Right? I was in my notion and my understanding, not justification, but understanding of who he with, was that made that story.
And I was able to actually break that narrative and leave that narrative and not be a consequence, not be in reaction to not be always in response to that traumatic event. And that that traumatizing person, right. I think, I think what it's taught me is that for me, at any rate, my attachment to that narrative, it was a home in fact. It I knew it, it was familiar, I rested there, I I built, I moved in couches, you don't I mean, I I made I made I made a life of it. But it kept me in one single room. And I wasn't exploring all of the reality around me. And I think that one of the things I see that happens at City of Joy is that these young, beautiful, astonishing women come in, they're broken and they don't believe they have a right to be on the earth. And they don't, they can't imagine why anyone in the world would care for them because they've been so exiled and humiliated and so shamed and so damaged. But within six months, after being cared for and loved and seen and actually pushed to confront, and walk through that portal. Like what happens is so glorious and magnificent. And we, we in this country, I think, particularly in America, we are so terrified to look at, to look back at, to touch to know, all of what the that has bought us here. And so we just keep repeating it and repeating it and living in that narrative I was talking about. Because we've, we've you know, we we've now built fortresses around it, we have four multimillion guns to defend that narrative, right? We have are constantly, you know, and I think the work is how do we really be brave enough to go inside it, to to feel it, to know it, to understand it, so we can break out of it?
Bayo Akomolafe There's so much to just sit with there, I think we can just the cast, you know, it can just start to go up right now. There is there is a sense of dare I say, when I listened to you, Mama V. I hear you say that forgiveness needs a different cosmology. Right? There's a sense in which we've gotten used to saying sorry, and this is maybe what I might mean by the limits of restitution, that still preserves the roles and still carries with it an implicit ideological commitment to our separation. Right. It's, it's, it's like you are there. And I'm here, you speaking about climbing into the body. There's something very fleshy and creaturely and maybe even viral, speaking about pandemics about climbing into the role of the perpetrator, eating of the body, and finding yourself in this strange expansiveness that breaks down those almost neoliberal dissociative, you know, is separations that inhabited both of you. And there's something that feels ancestral. Absolutely. Right. Right. It feels like slushy time. Like you're dismantling the notion that you're dealing with a pasture that is already done with and most of our notions of trauma, emerge from a very colonial cartography, right? The pastures done list has nothing to do there. But you climbing into the body of your father is like, no, he's here, right now. We are all in this together. There's nothing more radical than saying even birth is trauma. You've unraveled it in a beautiful way. Maybe something for us to eat together, just a meal.
The United Kingdom recently announced that they were going to restore to, especially Nigeria, stolen artifacts, meaning bronzes, you've probably read about that. And this idea of restitution, it feels recolonizing right? Totally. Here it is, or as if an original can be reclaimed. Right. We just get back to the way things were. But, you know, there is a beautiful story about forgiveness that is told, you know, in 1897, one of the British soldiers took one of those that that killed Benin people from the kingdom of Benin and took those Benin bronzes took one of them, took it to his home and use it as a door stopper. Right, just these are the memories, the secret, I just use it. And then when the movement picked up of restoring these things to us, like bring it back to us from Nigeria and activist and African activists. This gentleman who is now old, who is the grandson of that soldier said, "I think I should return this." And so he came back with that tiny, but incredibly weight and ontological object and came back with it. And he expected to be mobbed and to be to be beaten, you know, in the villages in Nigeria. Instead, Mama, we gave him more. The people came out and said, "Hey, take more back with you." Think about that. It's like what you did with your father? It's like turning the script.
V Totally, totally. And I want to speak, I want to speak to forgiveness, because I'm highly suspect of forgiveness. Okay. I feel like it's one of those notions that kind of got pushed on us through those colonial.
Bayo Akomolafe Christocentric.
V Cristo... Exactly. And I think what I would rather talk about is the alchemy of apology. Biological, psychological.. Physical alchemy of apology. Because one of the things I think, that happened for me in this book is that in writing, it wasn't even a book, it was it was in the making a decision.
Bayo Akomolafe Ritual.
V It was a ritual. It was calling in my father, who came, who was here, who was present through the whole writing of this book, who would wake me up at four in the morning and say, "Come, I'm going to tell you a story." Stories, stories I had never known and he would just tell me things. But one of the things I realized is when you go into that bodily place, when you actually experience and feel and know and understand your perpetrator and what they were doing. And when that person is willing to climb inside you and understand the impact of what they did. It's like when the Pope made restitution to the Indigenous people for the horrible cruelty. Did he climbed into their beings? Did he try to know in his body, in his, in his in his spiritual makeup and what that experience felt like what what what were the all of the short term, long term impacts of that violation that was led and orchestrated by the church? Did he take months, knowing and feeling and going there because that, that alchemy, frees, frees resentment, frees rancor, frees, frees, frees anger, frees the alchemy. That is what we call forgiveness, right. But it's not something you can do, because it's not up to us to forgive. That's right. Do you really mean it? Like, that's a hierarchical notion that I forgive you. It's not something we are engaged in together. It's not, it's not a process we are doing that relieves the suffering of the person who has been violated but also relieves the horror that lives in the perpetrator. Which is is is vast and multiplying, if it isn't freed, right?
Bayo Akomolafe It reminds me of indulgences. Right. The the old Catholic have just just asked for forgiveness and when the sound of the coin hitting the bottom of the box of soul was released from hell. This hierarchical notion of forgiveness is is undone with this near animist, you know this invitation to stay with the body and to disappoint the rules that were committed to, right. The rules that we've been incarcerated in. I just love that. Let's let's talk about this dance with the notion of trauma a bit and maybe connected in our playful experiment and alchemy with thought and speculation and fiction. Let's, let's connect it with politics. We've had a conversation about the largest stuckness of politics today. And it feels like trauma as politics, not trauma as a thing in politics, but trauma as a politics today. Just to quickly remind those of us listening. The word trauma seems to be the most popular term of the decade. I think some publications have named the word of the decade. Why do you think that is, Mama V?
V It's funny because I was just reading yesterday that the most popular world this year in America is gaslight. Which I thought.. Well, first of all, I think trauma is so vast, there are so many ways in which people feel traumatized. But I also think it's a framework that allows us in some ways to be thinking about the past and the present simultaneously. Right? That what one of the astonishing things about trauma is, as a person who had experiences a lot of what people refer to as PTSD, right, where I can be in a situation and something triggers, you know, because I was I was, I was physically beaten a lot, you know.. It was constant, and for years, when it happens, you are actually in the present, but you're not in the present. You're in the past, but you're not in the past. It's a timeless continuum of happening. And I think we are in a period of global reckoning. I think it's happening. And I think trauma has been the kind of pathway that has pushed us to this reckoning. Right. And I think there is a great push back against that reckoning, of course, because people are terrified of what that reckoning could lead to in the way of actually transforming consciousness in, I think, a very significant way.
But I, I think, I think people are beginning to wake up from this kind of deep sleep that trauma induced in so many places. And beginning to articulate the impacts of that trauma, the history of that trauma, that the time confusion of that trauma. And I think it's also a call for.. I don't ..for me, at any rate, it's a call for a new form of compassion, a new form of solidarity, a new form of stepping inside each other and understanding each other in ways that we have never been able to do before. And I think traumas open those potential doorways to that.
Bayo Akomolafe Yeah, It might seem, very politically incorrect to speak about trauma as a portal. But but that is what indigenous elders, African cosmologies and ways of knowing have been sayinh for so long that the trickster abides at the crossroads. That's the tricksters, you know, home, you know, and trauma is that home. You know, you just spoke about trauma as time travel. This is what I was hearing. It's like a reconvening of time. And the past isn't dominate, the future is yet to come, or the past is yet to come as well. It's, it's almost like we're being invited to lose form. And there's a crisis of form. So that trauma is not just this external thing that happens to us. Trauma is also our ideological commitment to reproducing the forms we're used to. It's a politics. It's a way of stamping out authority and mastery of where we are. And maybe this is why politics is so stuck. I mean, United States being an exemplar of that.. it's the left will never meet the right, because you're right, and the right will never meet the left, because you're correct. And when we're both correct, we will we're going to be eternal 'others' to each other, there is no belonging in being correct. Because being correct is also another form of colonial entrapment.
V Exactly. I want to tell you the story that's related to that. I don't know why I'm just.. So I'm just gonna grab it. You know, I for many years, I spent time in a correctional facility in upstate New York working. I ran a beautiful, beautiful group with, you know, people who have been in prison for long times for violent crimes. And it was a writing workshop where they really went deep, deep inside their crimes, what led them to their crimes, what they felt about their crimes, just the most, the holiest examination, the bravest examination.
But when I first started, I ran this group where every week, everyone would go around and they would talk about one central experience from the age of one to nine, and then nine to 18. Like thing and all the women in the group, I just had such a deep connection and but there was one woman who I really didn't like, and she gave me the creeps. And I wanted her to go away and I didn't like her and I was judging her and like I just and and it was... I had so much this was years ago and so much judgment for her and, and the second group, she sat down next to me and I was like, Oh, I don't like this woman. She scares me and, and then she started to tell her story. And her story was that when she was a child, her parents had basically used her as a sex toy. And they sold her out to people and people had chained her to beds and put things inside her and had sex with her. From the time she was like five years old. And when her mother died, her father then married her, and made her his person who would go and find other kids to bring into their lives. And they would then sexually abuse them and sell them out. And eventually somebody died. And when she came to prison, she didn't know why she was there. She had no idea what she had done wrong, because the moral reality that she had grown up in was one reality that had never shown her that another thing that could be different than that. She told the story in the midst of 20 women who had all been radically self-abused, and many had been sexually abused as children. And I sat there just weeping, weeping because I had made the determination about her based on, based on my feelings, my judgment, my whatever, but not climbing into her story, to understand what had bought her to where she had been.. To understand that I have no right to do that any place I ever am in this planet until I know, the seeds are where things begin to get where we're going. Right.
And I think, in a way, that's what you're talking about. It's like if we don't understand what brings people to who they are, how they think, how they behave, how do we begin to even think of changing or rearranging or transforming our consciousness, because people are stuck in time. People are stuck in history, people are stuck in pain. People are stuck in, in story, in story. And to puncture story, to unravel story to disentangle story requires time, and attention, and care and love. And this world is moving so fast. It's moving so fast. We don't have time for that. Right.
Bayo Akomolafe This is then an invitation to slow down. Speaking of going fast and slowing down is not, as I like to say reducing speed. It's about meeting the others, the radical others without which we are not possible. Right. It's about touching and being touched by the others. And the story of the apology, just feels it just feels like a shamanic encounter. What you did there the alchemy of apology, I just love that. And it dislodges again, the hierarchical framing of forgiveness as establishing some kind of holiness. And I think we're too holy, over our quest for holiness, or arrival, or completeness, or wholeness you with some specificity here is, is what's getting in the way. And maybe this is what slow down is how do we fall apart together? Each other? How do we stay in the middle, the edges in the middle? That feels like a good question to hold with some tension?
V That I love that so much. And maybe there's maybe there's pagan holiness, which is a different kind of, right. Maybe pagan holiness is, is is fragmented holiness, messy holiness. That's the word that comes to me whenever I'm in City of Joy is holy, and I think but it's holes, its holes, it's full of holes, absences, right. It's, it's full of possibility. It's full of what can be. And it's also full of the intention, the intention to live with care, to live with care. So that, for example, a lot of the women who work at City of Joy as social workers or as the mamas who cook and take care of, of the girls, all of them are traumatized. All of them have been through many similar experiences to what the girls have been through. So they are constantly as the girls are going through it, they're going through it. So it's a community of holes inside holes inside holes, which are all emerging as the community is emerging. And there's not anyone at top saying, I forgive you. We're all in this story. I just have a little more skill or maybe a little more distance or a little more time under my belt, experience, to help you move through what you're moving through at this moment. Right.
Bayo Akomolafe Have we have we... have we ever been not broken, then?
V I don't think so. No, no. I mean, maybe in the ultimate, ultimate, divine, divine, divine divine beginning. It was what this and then got blown apart. Do you know what I mean?
Bayo AkomolafeYeah.
V You know?
Bayo Akomolafe Well being blown apart is how creativity happens, right? It's how we are here. There's this biblical verse. So growing up in the Christian world in Nigeria, there are stories that were told to me, of course. I bought into this top down notion of forgiveness. But there is this very particular soft and beautiful story of Paul. St. Paul, do you know which one I'm talking about? You're smiling, okay. It's
V Just, I love it when you tell stories feel like..
Bayo Akomolafe ...have existed for a long time. And Paul, just Paul is writing. And his, his his speaking about something that upsets him, right? It's this pagan holiness. It's one of the few cracks, or maybe even multiple cracks in the Bible that that I like to dwell in because there's a strange pagan nest over there. So Paul is speaking about something that haunts and disturbs him and he's crying out to God, to take away this pain, this. He calls it a thorn in the flesh. Right? He calls it a thorn in the flesh, and people, theologians have, you know, they feel this is theoretically significant. And they've been trying to understand, What was Paul referring to? Was it a sickness? Was he secretly gay? Was he having affections of certain kinds that he could not reconcile with his Christocentric worldview? What was happening here? And the response is what I'm getting to the response from God is, I'm not taking this away. But My grace is sufficient for you, and I've been stained with those words. What does it mean for grace to be sufficient to a wound? What what what does grace do with a wound? That is beyond rehabilitation? Because what the divine was saying to Paul was, I'm not going to fix this, but I'm just going to stay with this trouble. I mean, what does that evoke for you? Let's deal with the trouble of the wound.
V That's so beautiful. That's so beautiful. I think. I think what it evokes for me is the notion that, that real quote, "We are guardians of each other solitude."
Bayo Akomolafe Right.
V That we are not meant to go inside and take away people's pain. But we are meant to sit by people while they do that process. So they know they're not alone. And it's taken me a long time to learn how to do that because I think my instinct when I was younger was like, I want to get in there and I want to be able to help people not be in pain and why?? My pain has been my greatest teacher my pain has been that doorway which I am constantly... it's that thing that Tennessee Williams says, "Without my demons, I won't have my angels." Right? Without your demons, you can't call for your angels and your angels won't come right? And I think I think part of what I see sometimes flip going back to City of Joy as an example of that is... What, what is what is the role of dance, right? Dance is grace. Dance is grace around our wounds. Dance is, like the practice of dance and, and the movement of dance is what moves through City of Joy. People dance from class to class, they dance at the end of the day. They dance to begin the day, they it is a way of putting salve around the wound. It is a way of soothing. It is a way of lifting the spirits of the Spirit can enter the wound. And I think I think our grace is really our willingness to be with each other in the global wound, and our individual wounds and have the patience. And have the time and the love to keep being with people so they can get through to the other side. So they can find their way through to the other side and not say get it done faster, get there quicker. People have their own story process, ways, to climb through that maze, and it's a maze. It's a maze. Once that fragmentation occurs. It's like, whoa, whoa, I thought I was here. Oh, no, you have to go. Oh, you know, but are we willing to have the grace, that patience, that love, that soothing to be with each other? As we walk through that? You know, what does it mean for you?
Bayo Akomolafe I mean, it means Congo. It's a good place to come back to again. There's probably, I mean, you know, this Congolese people dance like crazy.
V Nobody dances like the Congolese, no one.
Bayo Akomolafe Who does it better than?? I mean. I mean, I grew up watching. I mean, I don't I don't know that I will, I will fail to be a gentleman if I were to twerk, but...
V It's an experience, it's a mystical experience. It's..
Bayo Akomolafe It's a mystical experience. It's just fascinating to watch them. And I think, I think coming back to this heuristic, you know, it's not just this beautiful, tragic, terrifying, but yet resiliently poetic and beautiful thing that we call Congo. Which is a tensional intensity between loss and pain and freedom and festivity and the carnival, right? It seems dance is the politics of loss, right? It's like, where we are now as a planetary species. We need a form of politics that is dance. Because there's nothing more cartographically fugitive. There's nothing more tendrilic. You know, there's nothing more invitational than waltzing together. It's like, your body is my body. Let's do this together. We need a policy that goes beyond "No, no, no, you do all the work. No, no, no, I'm standing on the right." Because we're going to keep on repeating. I mean, the call of trauma seems to be like you need to leave here. You need to move here. I mean, there's no Fire Next Time. We need to move we need to...
V Move. And I want to I want to share with you, I love that dance is the politics of loss. I think that is so genius. Okay, so I'm going to tell you this. So we started 1 Billion Rising ten years ago. Which was this attempt to open up the possibility that women and all people around the planet would rise and dance to end violence against women and girls, right? And, of course, dance is everything right? But I want to tell you the funny story. I was on this show in Britain, and I'm sure you know it. It's called Hard Talk.
Bayo Akomolafe Oh, that one..
V Whatever you want to call that show. And so he looks across at me and he says, "Tell me, Eve Ensler, tell me, what does dancing do?"
V What does it do?" Right? I just started laughing. And I said, "What doesn't it do? Right? What doesn't it do?" And I thought to myself, the fact that this needs to be explained, that dance the one space that is liminal and not liminal. That is bonding us and freeing us. That is associating us and disassociating us. That is lifting us and spinning us. That is allowing us to release our trauma in public without shame. It is the most genius form, and it is The Politics. It is The Pathway of Movement. I mean, what are we trying to build, we're trying to build movements move, moving, moving, we have to be moving... That, that is what is going to be this kind of spiraling evolution of our bodies, with our beings in that mix. You know. And the idea for OBR, came when I was there with 150 Congolese women in Dr. Mc[unknown]'s hospital, all of whom had been seriously raped, or most of whom were leaking from terrible damage to their bodies. And at one moment, they began to dance. And that dance was so beyond anything that was happening in their body in that moment, and of their body completely in that moment. Right? It and that's where we have to go to, like that transcendent place that is of the body, transcendent of the body to continue. It's like a continuum, right?
Bayo Akomolafe Good accent..
Bayo Akomolafe Mmmmm. Mmmmm. I think I want to ask us to do something, Mama V. And that is, I've never done this before. But this is a call to experimentation, right? I am being possessed right now by the story of a Yuroba goddess, who danced so hard that she became a river. That posthumanist becoming other, becoming nonhuman, becoming monster, becoming nature, becoming river. That, I feel, that the assemblage of pain and loss, and what we crudely call trauma is inviting us to attend to an accompaniment, not a rehabilitation. Not a cure, per se, a different politics altogether. So can we offer a prayer, if you will? Because skill is of no issue here. This is not a million people praying, just you and me in conversation and possibly, everyone listening. Let's, let's offer a prayer for this moment. To kind of call in and invite a dance to happen. As our mbari falls back to the Goddess Ala, where it came from, you know, without succumbing to the city politics of enshrining truth. We're not reaching for consensus. This was us speaking in the moment, and letting the university to wherever it wants to, can we offer a prayer I would like you to start with, with one.
V Oh, that's so beautiful. That makes me cry. Makes me feel. Now it really does. Because... Can we go back and forth?
Bayo Akomolafe Up? We can try that too... Yeah.
V May we call to the parts of ourselves and each other, that are buried in our cells, that long to be freed into what they desire to be.
Bayo Akomolafe May we decorate and find the spirits, the freeing emancipatory spirits to guide our hands, to decorate and adorn the thorns of flesh around us and in us and within us, as spaces of perverse freedom, dancing emancipation.
V May we see that which has been hurt inside us, those hurt portals as openings to worlds we need to travel to. In new forms, whether they be animal forms or spirit forms, so that we can touch into parts of ourselves that can guide our imagination.
Bayo Akomolafe May we be visited. May we be thoroughly visited. And in the wake of the traveling, ethical trickster, may we find new ways of becoming with the world and with each other. May our road be rough.
V May we use the word becoming, becoming, becoming as our central mantra and accept everything that it brings in its path.
Bayo Akomolafe Asé.
Mama V, we could have gone for two hours. This is a beautiful time with you. Thank you so much.
V So beautiful. Thank you.
Bayo Akomolafe Thank you. And thank you everyone for being here with us for co-creating this space of No Return together, this space of launching out into the deep. Thank you so much for being with us.
Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to this special episode of The Edges in the Middle. The music you heard today was by Sitka Sun graciously provided by the Long Road Society record label. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Francesca Glaspell, and Julia Jackson.