Ayana Young Hello and welcome to For the Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today we are speaking with Dr. Bayo Akomolafe.

 Dr. Bayo Akomolafe In a sense, the fugitive answers the question that is hidden within the words of my Elders when they say: in order to find your way, you must become lost.

Ayana Young Bayo Akomolafe (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 [‘EJ], 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, Bayo Akomolafe is the Visionary Founder of The Emergence Network and host of the online post-activist course, ‘We Will Dance with Mountains.’

Oh, Bayo, I am just so darn excited to be with you again, exploring the edges and connecting. I just appreciate you and our last conversation on the podcast was so moving, it definitely left me shook and I know so many of our listeners were too so I'm really looking forward to this.

Dr. Bayo Akomolafe It's wonderful to be with you again, looking forward to this time. The second time's a charm.

Ayana Young So I want to start off by reading a quote from your multiform essay “Coming Down to Earth”. And it goes like this, “We now live in fugitive times, and fugitive times require fugitive epistemologies or ways of knowing. Deploying the settler epistemologies that contributed to the geo-ecological hostilities of the present risks reinforces the dynamics we want to address. The promise of fugitivity, as we shall see, is that in a sense it helps resacralize the world, ministering to our weary bones by drawing ‘god’ closer – so intimately close, in fact, that we lose some of the categorical independence modernity burdened us with.” I know I'm starting off with a deep one. But there is so much in that quote, that I want to explore more, one being what is it to live in fugitive times that require fugitive epistemologies. You know, I've heard you speak the word fugitive many times and I feel so drawn to it but I'm not really sure that I understand it more than, like body understanding, like an intuitive, maybe understanding, but I'd love to hear you speak to that.

Dr. Bayo Akomolafe Well, you can think about the fugitive as a mode of navigating the world: a way of knowing. Modern epistemologies are forward-facing; they centralize the knower. And they often thrive on what some philosophers would call representation nihilism. That is, the presumption that the world is outside, external. And our work is to adequately represent it, right? In our ideas, in our language, and our concepts, to bring it in, so to speak, to traverse the ontological gap between our skins and the environment. And that's the task of modernity. That way of knowing is costly. 

And this is the idea then, that if you perform knowing (and notice I said, perform), and knowing is always a corporal, embodied, tactile relating with the world - that is always risky. That is always speculative. That is always experimental. And it's always political. When we know the world in ways that centralized us as prime knowers, one of the speculative costs of that is that we tend to see the environment as instrumental, as dumb, and mute, and only there for our use. And that is why some writers and authors and speakers bring that kind of thinking in as complicit in the production of the troubles we're experiencing as a civilization today, the Anthropocene. 

So to know fugitively is to come alive to other senses. It's to - I hesitate to use the word awakening because it also presumes a binary between wakefulness and sleepfullness - but it is to navigate the world differently. There's a sense called proprioception, in which our muscles, the way we move in the world, and the way we situate ourselves in space-time are what's at stake. That sense of proprioception, I like to think of knowing as proprioceptive: that how you move through the world makes the world and makes knowledge. Knowledge is not just a stable, objective thing out there. At the end of a scientifically rigorous exercise, knowledge is how we meet the world and how the world meets us in return. 

So fugivitity is really this political project, or maybe political on-project that is about a call or conjuring an invitation to lose our way from the Human, Ayana, the Human, and I'm capitalizing the Human here, the way Hortense Spillers might do it, the way Sylvia Wynter might do it, the way CLR James might do it, those Caribbean philosophers: it's the idea that the human itself is not the anthropomorphic figures we're used to, the figures and shapes we're used to: the human is a territory. It's a way of acting and thinking and believing. It's a mode of individuation. It's a way of desiring. It's an imaginative economy. It's a political imaginary, right? And this political imaginary is becoming toxic. It's a way of knowing, it's a colonial imperial order. It has its legacies in the Atlantic middle, in the slave ship. What fugitivity is inviting is projects of exile that move us away from the dissociative escape, or transcendence of the modern, and closer, as I write in that passage to God, where God is not Gandalf or some bearded white dude on a throne in some distant Fairyland, but God speculatively becomes the unbecoming, the becomingness of things, the unraveling, the teenage promiscuity of things, that this promiscuity is so severe and powerful, and potent and vibrant, that we can no longer even speak about a universe: that presupposes one thing. We can't even speak about a multiverse because that presupposes that numbers are stable categories. So I like to think of it as an indeterminate-verse, that the world, or the universe, or something, the word would fail at this point, crumble entirely, that the world or the universe is still figuring itself out. And so the fugitive is the figure of the Anthropocene, a political invitation to unlearn “mastery,” to fall to the Earth, to learn how to commune with soil, to disturb our social analytics that tends to centralize justice, to move beyond critique, to notice how even protest could be a department in the slave plantation. And to travel to get lost. In a sense, the fugitive answers the question that is hidden within the words of my Elders, when they say: in order to find your way, you must become lost.

Ayana Young Thank you for taking us there. From the very beginning, I was definitely getting lost in your words. And I imagined myself falling to Earth, and feeling so held by the ground in this longing, this yearning, like crying out to be held in a fugitive way. And I'm thinking about you speaking about God, and what it is to draw God closer. And I think this is an interesting topic for me, right now, especially because I think about God and spirituality. And of course, at different times in human history, God was a lot more important seemingly than they are now. And I think that this type of post-modernity, post-spirituality, post-God world is not good for us in a lot of ways. Without God, what holds us accountable? Without God, how do we live in right relationship? When I say God, it can mean so many things. But I want to pause there and just ask for you to speak about God more, and maybe reflect on what it has been for us humans to lose that intimate connection with God. And how do we come back or find new ways of relating to that type of life force or source to belonging?

 Dr. Bayo Akomolafe I think I would source my response from Catherine Keller, who is a theologian and a brilliant thinker that I really deeply respect, when she speaks about the traditions. I could never speak about these matters in the same vein as she does, but she speaks about the ‘apophatic’ and the ‘kataphatic’. These were our traditions of coming to understand the notion of God, where the kataphatic is the, you might call it the ancient acknowledgment of God that is populated by statements that are about what God is, right? So you can say, “God is good. God is great. God is huge. God is kind, God is wonderful, God is infinite.” And all these are positive statements, right? Even to say God is evil, in this sense of a positive statement, you have something to say about God, something definite, that is about God's attributes, and I use “his” most of the time because I grew up in a tradition that was more comfortable thinking about God as a male. Even though I had my seditious moments, and it's not even sedition, right, because there are many places in the Christian texts where God speaks about feeding breasts to his children, or to her children, like a mother. And I really loved that. Anyway, I digress. So those are kataphatic statements. 

And then there's a different, ancient tradition that is apophatic, that is situated in this idea that the more we say things about God, the more we lose the sense of Godness, right? Because God is infinite, and God is beyond saying. Right? The moment you try to say God is something or God isn't something, or rather, God is something that isn't, in this sense, you postpone God, you kind of lose the sense of potency that comes with the negative theologies. So apophatic theology is negative theologies, they're more like “God isn't.” And the idea is to withdraw more and more and more away from any positive statement that can be made about God in the hope that by and by, we might be engulfed by this Godhood. We might be taken aback by this infinite nothingness that is also infinite somethingness, but that escapes language so thoroughly as to discipline our attempts to name God. 

And what Catherine Keller does with this concept is to rework it, so she calls it apophatic entanglement. And what she wants to do is to put God to work in a different way. So that it's not just sailing into a Socratic or Platonic nothingness. Instead, what you want to do is to bring God down to Earth, to make God in some sense synonymous with the loss of image, the loss of the familiar, the fugitive breakthroughs that tantalize us from the wild edges, that God is not so much the temple as he is the mad man outside the temple conjuring, and babbling, and inviting us to seditious playgrounds: that God is the breakthrough. God is the crack, right? 

So I often think about God together with Catharine Keller as a God-ing. I put a girond after God, that God is not just some stable figure that holds the objective moral universe in place. To think about God in that way is to risk Imperial narratives and Imperial dynamics, to think that one needs to appease an external figure that is outside of our bodily entanglements, that is outside of lichen, and microbial and mycorrhizal and rhizomatic becomings. That is, in a sense to capture God, in a noble way. So the Kellerian idea of an unknowable God really appeals to me is the idea that God is still figuring itself, herself, himself, themselves out. God is still being worked out. God is not just an essence, God is a becoming, God is a dying, God is a living. God is the animacy of a mushroom world. God is the weather. God is geology. And this is not just to say in a glib way that God is everything, because there is no such thing as everything. That's just a convenience of language. And there's no umbrella term to capture things that are happening in their happenings. There is only this convenience of speaking and words. So I like to think about God in this way, as fugitive, as the crack in things that disciplines our attempts to name with any sense of finality.

Ayana Young Yeah, I appreciate the uncapture-ability, just like we can't hold God, I'm just seeing God fall through my fingers as you're speaking. And there's some relief in that. And there's some nervousness in that as well for me. But I guess there's this question that keeps coming to me, which is something around accountability, justice, right relationship, or what holds us humans. What holds us, what contains us? How do we hold ourselves accountable? Who do we serve if not God? And wanting to bring up that justice, accountability, being good at this point in our postmodernity who holds us?

Dr. Bayo Akomolafe Let me tell you a story. I think I'll answer this way. There's a story and it's not entirely apophraphil and it’s not entirely archetypal - there's something experimental about it. And I might have a little something to do with that. But there's a story about the arrival of the slave ships to the African continent and the stealing of Africans: women, children, men, to those cargo ships. One story is in response to the question, “Well, where were our Gods? Why didn't they do something about this?” One response is that well, one God tried to do something, his name, Ògún, the God of metal, iron, he's the God of victory. 

And it is said that Ògún marshaled and galvanized and brought together an army to chase down these slavers, to chase them away. But as he headed to the beach, he was met by his brother Èṣù. And Èṣù is a trickster issue, is mischievous. When one prays, you pray Èṣù to come close, but not too close. So that sense of intimacy and distance and irony and paradox and complexity is sensed in this engagement with archetypal flows and what the Yoruba people figure as Èṣù. It is said that Ògún met Èṣù and regaled him with stories and stuff and served him palm wine, and eventually succeeded at putting him in to sleep, his brother, putting Ògún to sleep. And then he brought in the ships even closer, stole into those ships, and traveled across the Atlantic with the slaves, which doesn't make for a happy ending, right? If you're to say that within a traditional social justice forum because it's the story of complicity, it's a troubling account of our own Gods doing us in. 

But there's a thing about Tricksters and how they defy moral stabilities. In some sense, moral stability emerges in the wake of the Trickster's adventures. And that's one way of seeing the world as open and experimental, but not so open that anything goes. That in moving and navigating through the world, and not just humans, other things as well, the more-than-human, we co-produce moral architecture, moral stabilities. Some of them we have named for, you just named a few ‘good’, ‘accountable’, ‘evil’, you know, turning away, a bypass, and in naming and in inhabiting and in performing those neural architectures, we place-make the world. We terraform the world as we are terraformed ourselves, as we learn to acculturate ourselves to the psychic demands of these moral stabilities. 

But moral stabilities are also indebted to larger territorial flows. So even the concept of good and accountability and evil is also indebted to other things, the river, the libidinal flows, and the archetypal algorithms that make us are constantly migrating, and in those moments good could become incarcerating. The very idea of good could become troubling, right? And there are many stories I can tell you. But the most famous familiar one is the story where things fall apart, and how this culturally stable setting with your coherence and just the attempt of the protagonist trying to live true to those moral demands on his person creates trouble, which tells me, and I think, to any other reader, that the world is imbued with irony and paradox and complexity that is not reducible to the ways we speak about things in terms of ‘good’ versus ‘evil’, in terms of ‘accountability’. 

So this is not to dismiss any of that, it is to notice that those moralities are indebted to ethical flows. So this is differentiating between ethics and morality. Morality might pose the question of “what should we do?” but ethics is about “what comes to matter?” And what comes to be excluded in a mattering of what comes to matter. I hope I'm still making some sense. So, the question about, “who do we answer to? Who are we accountable to?” must be framed within the cosmovision that gave it life. If you're asking within postmodernism, or modernism, which must postpone God indefinitely in order for the human to thrive, then that question becomes urgent. But if you're dealing with a different cosmovision, where good is just one of a number of moral archetypes that are available and is not always promising for the project of thriving on the planet, then other questions come into being. Then we have to situate the Trickster and ask, “what is the Trickster doing? How are we shifting today? What are the demands that are being placed upon us in order to be alive to the essential flows of the world?”

Let me put it this way, and I ask this question all the time: “In what way does justice stand in the way of transformation? In what way does being good actually become an obstacle to being sensuous? In what way does it become an exoskeleton that chains us to the ground, with a presumption that the universe is morally coherent?” Or to repeat the age-old saying of Martin Luther King, that the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice, right? In what sense is that true? And in what sense does the universe exceed that sentiment? 

And so, I don't think that if we think about God as an external being we can escape the trap of good versus evil. And I call it a trap within that setting within the cosmovision I'm speaking from, but if we think about God as this ecology of Trickster, of archetype, of cybernetic flows, of technologies, of monsters, of ghosts, and becomings of scabbed over oceans, of moanings, of songs, of murmurations, of rhizomes that are still figuring themselves out, then other questions become possible. Then we're no longer asking simply, “who do we kowtow to, or who do we bow to?” We're asking how we are co-producing those realities, those moral realities, and we're asking what other questions are inviting us to pay attention at this point in time. 

Ayana Young It's fascinating to hear you're just exploring the differences between ethics and morality. And as you were speaking, I was trying to imagine examples of that. And, gosh, also just really considering not just God, but truth, and how capital T truth also seems to have just flown out the window in postmodernity and in this time. I'm really holding God and truth side by side right now, trying to understand what is their relationship to each other at this point.

 Dr. Bayo Akomolafe Well, when I was a nerd, as an undergrad, I had this Latin phrase that I can't remember, I think is Magna est veritas, et praevalebit. It translates to truth is great and shall prevail. Right? And I had it inscribed on all my class notes, all my journals. And yes, you're hearing that right, I did not have a social life. I was about the library kind of life, and about the theology, and psychology, and Freud, and reading all of them through each other kind of life. And it was not at all difficult for me to notice that to speak truth, or to think about truth, this capital T truth (and I give you that appellation as well) is to think with, in very strong eschatological Christian terms (and I'm not saying this is the only way to make this connection or to think about truth) but there's something deeply Platonic about thinking about the world this way. 

And speaking about Platonic, right, this is what the French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari refer to as arborescent thinking or arboreal thinking. Arboreal or arborescent is to think like trees, or a tree line that comes from the roots and proceeds to the less important parts, which are the branches, so to speak. And they hated thinking like trees because what that signifies basically, is that arborescent thinking is representational thinking. It's this Platonic idea that the world around us is just this roving material mass of appearances. It's phenomenon, not noumenon. So this is just lesser secondary stuff. There's a world, an ideal world of forms behind the world we're used to. And this is why we need philosopher kings in a Platonic city. People who are trained and disciplined to see the world as it is, and not those ravenous masses that are animal in their senses, and do not have the fine tastes for discerning truth. So it's just a binary dualistic situation that sees a world of forms and a world of representations. This is arborescent in thinking. So you look at a cartoon, and a cartoon is a representation of a human being. Right? It's just an appearance. A shadow is a representation of a human being.

And those French philosophers I named were against that kind of thinking. They were asking, instead of thinking about the world in this dualistic way, what if we allowed cartoons to do things only cartoons can do instead of just being representatives of an ideal form? What if, instead of thinking of Pinocchio, as “less than a real boy,” we ask, “What can a wooden boy do? What can Pinocchio do?” So this turns the tree or dismisses the tree kind of thinking, arboreal or arborescent thinking, and then we are introduced to rhizomes, routes searching from different directions, where there is no origin point, where there is no destination point, where every point is originary, where every point is a destination. And every point is simultaneously a middle. It's performing different things at once, it's duplicitous, a strict story.

If we think of the world as rhizomatic, instead of arborescent, then the new has space to thrive, and we can understand differences. For instance, Black bodies not as approximations of white bodies, but as ontological gifts doing their own thing. We can understand different kinds of families that are being proliferated around the world right now. Not as unstable, shadowy reflections of the nuclear family as we understand it but as family itself exploring the meanings of family, right? It becomes rhizomatic, the world becomes abundant and promiscuous, and teenage. I forget your question, Ayana, because I just traipsed off into my politic.

Ayana Young I was with you, I was, I feel like I was on the ride with you sitting next to you and waving my arms as we would swoop down and go up. 

Dr. Bayo Akomolafe And I was really waving my hands here.

Ayana Young I was in this inquiry of truth, and God, and how they relate, and I think part of where I was going with that is, I guess, in my mind, when I think of capital T truth, or God, or right relationship, I think about the Earth. And I think, well, it only makes sense to serve our home. And we can look at home as Earth, as our ecosystems, as the waters that flow through where we live, the trees that give us oxygen, like we're serving our home. Instead, we're living at this point, kind of globally, that overculture is ecocidal, we're killing our home. And to me, that seems like Truth and God were put in a blender and what has happened to the clarity that maybe some of our ancestors had, that Truth and God live within the land that allows us to be alive, to become like all of this becoming. 

And even the ability to think, perform, imagine, and to be Trickster, all come from the Earth, allowing us to sustain life. So I would think that our morality and our ethics would all come back to how we protect that which allows us to live. I'm looking around this Earth, and the suffering, and the pain, and honestly, just the insanity of how we have ended up here. And I want to believe that there is some Trickster story that we're living through, and there will be some type of something on the other side, where we're like, “oh, this is why we went through this mental breakdown,” but I'm not sure. I’m definitely not sure. So yeah, I think that's the underpinnings of this question around God and truth.

Dr. Bayo Akomolafe You know, I really honor that. And I celebrate that. I think of these insights, these concepts as world-making in their consequences, and we do need that. We can say that it's potentially problematically essentialist. Right? To think about truth in ways that are familiar to the modern, or even to many Indigenous groups around the world, even mine, right? Because… maybe I should put it this way, with a story. Stories are always a good way to enter, but this will be briefer. 

This brother of mine tells me a story about a group that traveled, I think it's from the First Nation group that travels to China for a gathering that involves Indigenous groups around the world. And I think they've been trying to revive a project that is about images and connecting to the dream world, and connecting to their Tricksters and things like that for a long time. They’re artists, but they've not found their mojo, they've not found the flow, they have not connected to ancestry, something is missing. Well, the story goes that they are in this festival in China, I think it’s China. And they are dancing on the streets. And they fall into conversation with another Indigenous group, from a different part of the world, and they're just mixing and sharing experiences. When it seems all of a sudden, I think this is how the story goes, one member of the former Indigenous group from the Americas that I've been speaking about, becomes possessed, so to speak, and starts flailing his arms wildly on the streets. And does it so hard and so prominently that a police officer has to be brought in to try to contain the situation, right, but some event happens. 

And this signals the return of a Trickster that they have been waiting for on in their own lands for a long time, but did not meet them in their own place, met them in the diaspora, met them in a foreign strange place. And that night, as I've been told, all of them have dreams of images that come to them. And these images of what to do with their art is nothing like what they would have expected. They would have expected to maybe create masks out of the original fabrics that their ancestors used. But instead, they create selfies, like this Trickster figure that alights upon them, inspiring them to use modern images, to use modern tools, and modern objects to create the sacred. Now I just want that to sink in for a while. And my sense here, and that's the end of the story anyway, my sense here is to notice how the sacred travels. 

There's sometimes this Reconstructionist way that comes to mind, how we speak about the past, you know, I'm always wary about the story, this narrative, that there was once a time where everything was harmonious, where we had this Indigenous alignment with truth and the right relationship. And then something happened, and everything went wrong. And now we're trying to restore that relationship. First of all, it doesn't do justice to the complexity of the lives of our ancestors. Summarily, it also contains them in static temporality as if the past is done with, as if those lives are not still consequential, and material, and political, hidden constituents of our social material realms, even right now. 

It kind of romanticizes the Indigenous, and this is why, you know, sometimes I find that in the recent upheavals and desire to center Indigenous realities, there is a romanticization of those Indigenous technologies that kind of instrumentalized them for modern anxieties, like, grabs them by the scruff of their necks and says, “here's climate change, what do we do about it? Do we take Ayahuasca? We'll do it. Do we sit in the desert for seven days? We'll do that as well.” But it's like a museum. It's like a museum-ing, like a corralling or coddling of the Indigenous. Even in naming the Indigenous - I know it's useful for political reasons, and divorcing it entirely from the modern does not allow for the complexity of movements and shifts that are still happening. That the sacred travels. It's not that still. 

So to the question of right relationship, I think my heart's yearning is to bless that is to acknowledge that yearning, that desire for a different relationship that is not supported by our modern suburban arrangements but also to caution that sometimes in our quest to go back, we actually re-entrench, or reinforce and reinscribe the modern. It’s the deeply modern way of thinking to situate time on a simple linearity and to conveniently locate the Indigenous in an originary Puritan past that can be resuscitated by some kind of advocacy, conservationism, preservationism, or reconstructionism. I feel that the Indigenous is melting and moving and traveling and migrating; that the modern, too, is a form of Indigeneity, and it too is traveling. And that we cannot easily parse or divide the world between “we're in an evil world right now and once it was good and fine and dandy,” so that our work is much more complex. It's about listening, more than just restoring an image. So ‘right relationship’ is as useful a concept as it can be. There's danger there too. There's something, not even remotely, but presently and urgently essentialist about it. But that still might do some good work in turning out our heads, our attention, our hearts, and our bodies to a different cultural formulation. But nothing appears in the world that does not appear without risk and retention.

 

Ayana Young Wow, thank you for bringing us there. I really resonate with the problematic nature of romanticizing Indigeneity. And I want to dive a little bit into this idea of post-activism and where you see us tripping. And I also want to read this quote that I think ties in with this and it's from “Let's Meet at the Crossroads” from your Pacific graduate commencement speech and it goes, “The world has ended many times. I am not speaking about extinction-level events and spectacular arrivals from the skies. I am speaking about all the ways something unexpected slips through and breaks the familiar so thoroughly, like an accusation in Salem, that forward movement becomes impossible. Critically the world has ended many times to make room for whiteness – the world-performing imperative that enlists bodies of all kinds to perpetuate secure arrivals and safety. Even more critically, there isn’t one world – one dominant already-made world. The world has never been coherent or okay for many of us. And endings are plentiful – often happening at the edges of our tongue.”

 

Dr. Bayo Akomolafe Yes, it was good to listen to that. And to be reminded of what I often call the Afrocene. Not so much the African Anthropocene and definitely not singularly the Anthropocene, but the Afrocene, I'll make some distinctions here. The Anthropocene is the proposed geological epoch that is defined by heightened industrialization, and the rise of the human as an organism superior to all others. It is the terraforming project of the Man and the geological effects of that constitutional approach to homemaking, placemaking. But what that concept doesn't do well is acknowledged the legacies of slavery, of extractive capitalism, of pathologizing the desire to escape the cotton plantation, of the scientific method, right? The idea that the world is geometrically stable, Euclidean, probably, and can be known, in any final way: this liberal, traditional, humanist sense of things. 

What the Anthropocene does not do well is bring that in and fall to the ground to acknowledge the legacies of the slave ship. And so in its clarion call to do something about climate change, which is just one aspect of the Anthropocene, it makes this brazen attempt to wrap us all into its royal “we” as some authors call it. So “we” need to do something about this, “we” are all in this struggle together, and “we” need to get our act together. That “we,” it's a mess, right? It's a monolithic heap of a “we,” because it kind of lumps the United States, for instance, together in the same boat with Zambia, as if they were equally complicit. That's one way of looking about it or looking at it. 

And so authors distinguish the African Anthropocene to talk about the other effects, you know, the racializing effects of the Anthropocene in world politics today, in how the history is considered, and how knowledge is considered, in how our playgrounds and landscapes are still being terrorformed by biochemical, industrial, economical projects of the West, right? And how, for instance, wind or rather, air quality in Lagos will never be a project, will hardly be a project of the UN or World Health Organization. That data will probably not be found as easily as data about air quality will be found on the internet about New York. So that's the African Anthropocene. 

But I coined the term Afrocene to do some other kinds of work: to invite a noticing of the more-than-human constituents of our politics today to say that the world has ended many times, as I said, in that speech. And with the world ending, and with these cracks emerging, we are suddenly exposed to the diasporic quality of our bodies. So that, in a sense, we are no longer as composed as we were. And the idea here is that the human or whatever colonial project that can come to mind is not as resolutely stable for all time as we think it is. That when the world ends, when Hiroshima is exploded, when time stops, something happens to our bodies.

With Hiroshima for instance, CO2 and radiation just blasted into the environment, settling into our skins into the ocean, so that every one of us born after that time, I think up till now, has a little bit of that radiation from Hiroshima still exploding in our cells. So we are changed by cracks, by events. The idea of ‘post-activism’ is not a way of dismissing activism, not a way of saying “after activism,” it’s not another post-project. It's a way of saying that we cannot continue forward because the road is exploded, the road is gone. And now we're in very awkward circumstances because the map, the terrain is no longer familiar. Vision is gone, plumes of smoke everywhere. There's a pandemic, with the marked space in our bodies, everywhere right now the public is haunted. That's the idea. 

And now we must meet these monsters, we must meet these alien bodies at the crossroads. Post-activism is always a matter of disability. Not so much spanking new capacities but disability: where something breaks, that agency becomes distributed. That's why in a sense, post-activism means or suggests that the territorial, agential, humanist, dissociated self - the citizen is dead. And suddenly, we are all exposed to these immersive waters. And we now have to take into consideration what these others, these strange others are doing. Doing is no longer our thing: doing is now a shared co-production of the next. So post-activism asks questions, like: “So who do we meet? Who becomes our new ally? How do we even ask that question given that the future is broken? What does time mean right now? How do we live in a world that is uncertain?” 

So post-activism, I like to say, is the creolization of agency: from ‘creole,’ a mixing, an estrangement, is that forward movement is no longer possible, we now must dance awkwardly, it’s the proliferation of monstrous tentacles, Ayana. It's like suddenly, we're no longer human, we're monsters. And we're now living in a time of failure. And the promise of post-activism is the political project of making sanctuary, where we're making sanctuary is not about keeping people safe. It's not a politics that can be reduced to safety. And sanctuary is not safety here. Sanctuary is, from our point of view, how do we take care of the fugitive, right? We become the temples offering sanctuary to the criminal. So how do we gather around the criminal? How do we nurture this panting? Fugitive? Possibly a murderer? How do we make room for this? You know, disability? And what do we do with this place of fugitive power? And in my estimation, that is one way the new can be sustained, or can be supported. The danger is always that we relapse into the familiar, and we get back to normal.

Ayana Young Bayo, I don't have words right now. At the beginning of this conversation, I was mentioning that after so many amazing conversations and so much research, I feel like I am more confused than ever. And really, in so many ways that a loss of how to understand this time, and how you just navigated this really bumpy trail that I think so many of us are conscious of being on was really comforting in a strange way. It's like, I don't know I'm trying to understand where the comfort lies for me in that. But maybe it feels comforting because it's almost like the most authentic understanding of what it is to be alive right now is this way of not understanding. And I think maybe also when you're speaking of the murderer or that the one that we're taking in, it's almost like we're taking in that side of ourselves as well.

Dr. Bayo Akomolafe Oh, yes. Yes, yes. It's like we're imbricated with the things we're trying to escape from. That's the trouble right there. It's the story of - you might get some chuckle and laugh out of this - is this story of the atmospheric chemist, Jonathan Williams, I think works at the Max Planck Institute. I've spoken about him and his work for some time. He won the Ig Nobel prize. I said Ig Nobel, not a Nobel Prize, but the Ig Nobel prize, which is about scientific work that is more likely to make people laugh, and then think. So that's the Ig Nobel prize. Which is shocking, because his work, even though speculative, is theoretically abundant. And I’ll cut the long story short, it's about this guy who is trying to answer the question, “Do humans contribute to climate change? Do we actually emit those gasses, those greenhouse gasses, carbon dioxide, to significant levels to actually alter the environment? And his data says no, not to that significant level. 

But a new question emerges in the meantime as he's exploring that question, and it is about this gaseous entity that is the human because we're bags of gas, right? And he's asking a question about is it possible to decipher human emotions through atmospheric gasses. So he gets this cinema theater contained, and runs 106 sessions, 9500 people, 16 genres of film, Romance, adventure, blah, blah, blah, The Hunger Games, and basically spools air through the theater on one end, and measures the outcome on the other. His idea is to try to detect the chemicals associated, that are emitted from the theater goers, and are associated with certain scenes. 

And they do this and are able to come to some sort of exactitude, some court sort of certainty, that tells them almost to a tee based on the composition of VOCs, they’re called volatile organic compounds, they're able to tell what scene is at play within the theater. Right? So it's carbon dioxide that is mostly emitted, and isoprene, another hydrocarbon entity. And it literally suggests that suspense is in the air. One article I read, you know, put it that way: suspense is literally in the air. And I think this is just shocking. stuff. This is beautiful, rich, theory-making work. Because what it does is it suggests, like theorist Terese Brennan would do with the Transmission of Affect, her book of late memory right now, that we are atmospheric beings, Ayana, we are not just contained flesh, we are spread out, quite literally. 

And that in a sense, we are participants in an ecosystem of feeling. That shock, and laughter, and despair, they were able to notice the parts where people were actually anxious for the life of the protagonist of some given film they were watching. That, in a sense, is not just greenhouse gases that are floating up into the atmosphere - is that despair, and sadness, and laughter, and joy could actually become territorial entities. So feelings are more than just human products. They're atmospheric, geologic, doing other things other than being felt. And so they enlist bodies in their territoriality. So joy could become a principality and a power; despair and depression could become a principality and power, speculatively.

We're only beginning to understand the sense in which we are more than our bodies, we exceed ourselves. If we're swimming in those waters, if we're swimming in Afrocenic waters, if we are participating in ghostly becomings, gassly becomings, chemical becomings, microbial becomings, neuropathological becomings, physiological becomings, then it's not really easy to collapse the world to safety, to collapse the world to a sense of isolated cells, to collapse the world to pristine identities, then the world is undone, you know, not in a permanent way, but in a way that suggests that categoricity is also a becoming, also migrant, also nomadic. This is where post-activism does its terrible work. Because it's now about “how do we travel? What new questions are powerful? What should we listen to right now?” It’s not easily collapsible to compassion, or let's just all love each other. Love is all we need. No, the universe loses that kind of moral coherence, and suddenly, even its physical laws shapeshift, and we're being invited to thrive, to die, to travel along with it. But I've gotten too far ahead of myself.

Ayana Young No. I am just so grateful for this time with you and it was truly medicine for me on a personal note, and I can only imagine what all those ears out there will be soaking in from this exploration with you, and I really appreciate you. Thank you so much for this time and this winding trail that we've navigated through together.

Dr. Bayo Akomolafe My pleasure, my sister, so grateful.

Emily Guerra Thank you for listening to this episode of For the Wild Podcast. The music you heard today is by Curran Runz, Dzidzor, and Lady Moon and the Eclipse. For the Wild is created by Ayana Young, Allie Constantine, Erica Ekrem, Emily Guerra, Francesca Glaspell, and Julia Jackson.