Transcript: Dr. BAYO AKOMOLAFE on Slowing Down in Urgent Times/155
Ayana Young: Hey, For The Wild community, Ayana here. Before we begin this week's episode, I want to take a moment to thank the city of Bend, Oregon for their continued support. I'm still rejoicing the arrival of a new calendar year, and using this time to remind myself of what really matters, and what intentions I wish to set. If you're like me, you might find yourself craving to be immersed in wild places in order to do so. Bend, Oregon is certainly one place that comes to mind. Nestled between the peaks of the Cascade Mountains and the high desert plateaus of Central Oregon, Bend provides ample opportunity to reconnect amongst ancient juniper, or the snow-covered pine trees of the Deschutes National Forest. The time I have spent in Bend amongst volcanic vistas and snowy landscapes has always been regenerative. Of course, one of my favorite things about Bend, Oregon is their strong commitment to nursing wild places through their partnership with Pledge For The Wild: a group of mountain towns that support responsible tourism through the preservation of land. Not only does Pledge For The Wild give back to local community stewards, but they also encourage visitors who spend time outdoors to give back to the land. If you're in the area, consider supporting and visiting one of my favorite destinations, Bend, Oregon, and help protect the land by giving back at PledgeWildBend.com.
Welcome to For The Wild podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today, we are speaking with author, speaker, renegade academic, and proud father, Bayo Akomolafe.
Bayo Akomolafe: In trying to climb out of the pits that we've dug for ourselves, the pits become resilient. In trying to escape the prison, the prison gains its form. So in a very critical sense, we are in a crisis of form, and this form is the indeterminacy of things. The background has crashed into the figure, into the foreground, and so, sense-making is at a crisis point now. We need trickster approaches, we need ways of dancing away, or dancing to, fugitive spaces, dancing to sanctuaries where we can shape-shift, and I think grieving, mourning, even allowing ourselves to partake in pleasurable activities in the face of the storm, which may sound like a very very privileged thing to do, I know and yet, you know, doing that I think is—might be productive in ways that I do not even want to talk about.
Ayana Young: Bayo is globally recognized for his poetic, unconventional, and counterintuitive take on global crises, civic action, and social change. He is director and chief curator for the Emergence Network, and a visiting professor at Middlebury College. Bayo has also authored two books: We Will Tell Our Own Story and These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to my Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home, and his pen forwards for many others.
Welcome Bayo, it is such a delight to have you on the show, and I feel so grateful to have you in this space today with us to explore some of the deep philosophical threads of this time we're living into, particularly as we step across the threshold of the New Year.
Bayo Akomolafe: Thank you so much for having me here.
Ayana Young: Well, to begin, I'd like to offer you the opportunity to share a bit more about your background, and honor the people, or places that you wish to carry into this conversation, and I wonder how the religious lineages of your childhood, or cultural traditions of your family, have served as important touchstones, or change agents along the path that has brought you here today.
Bayo Akomolafe: Well, first and foremost, I’m sitting here in Chennai, just to acknowledge my presence, and my grounds, I'm sitting here in Chennai, India, where we spend perhaps half of our time in a year, six months in a year, and the other part in the United States, and…I'm here because my children made it possible, my wife Ijeoma, our kids Alethea and Kyah made it possible—they make everything I do possible, and their yes is my liberation, if you will, is my emancipation.
To go back further,I come from Nigeria, I was born in Nigeria, and in Nigeria, in Lagos, probably the most populous city in Nigeria, in Africa, I reckon, and I grew up in a very highly Christianized world, a world of binaries, a world of not many gray areas, the world was split schizophrenia-clean to Black territories and white territories. Almost geopolitically as well. And in that world I learned to see the universe as this contract between good and evil, and grew up a Christian, this is gonna take a long while to get through, so I’m just going to say that, in growing up a Christian, I met many, many crossroads, many places where I was challenged to rethink my faith, and many places where I fell, but worked hard to get up again. But, one solemn day, I fell and I couldn't get up again, [Laughs], I couldn't recover from the fall which I now think of as the gift of the planet, it’s the gift of my ancestors, and I started to see through the colonial imperial interruptions of my received faith. And today, I am on a decolonial journey, a decolonial path that is bringing me to deeper crossroads, bringing me to deeper new materialist, feminist, Yoruba mythologies about the planet, and about the times we’re in.
Ironically, these spaces that are opening up in my journey are not a dismissal of the places that I have been, where I'm coming from, the past is not yet done. So even though I say that I fell away from my faith, I can never say that I have abandoned it. I mean, not practice Christianity, but in a sense, we never abandon anything in the relational Universe, so I’m still entangled in the past that I think I’m done with. There is no walking away from stuff like that, so I'm here because of this entangling chiasmus of mother, and father, and three sisters, and beautiful Christianized setting with your shadows, and troubles, and meeting this beautiful—ravishingly beautiful Indian-African-Iranian woman, falling in love with her, and becoming a father, and becoming myself in small things, it’s everything.
Ayana Young: Oh my goodness, just the way you speak, your depth of love, and your connection to your family is so, it’s so beautiful, and it's, I think it speaks to a buried part in myself, and so when you speak this unburiedness begins in me, and I just want to really thank you for that.
Now I know much of your writing circles around the many existential urgencies and processes of change that are rising up in this moment of planetary transformation, and in your essay, What Climate Collapse Asks of Us, you speak of a number of historical and contemporary articulations of climate change—from the early terminology of global warming, to the tragedy of the commons, to the green New Deal. And despite the abundance of new models and vocabularies to deal with the climate collapse, however, you note that, “The current frameworks stretch and yawn, gasp, pant, choke and ache to name and localize phenomena that resist our taming,.” So, I wonder if you could help orient us within this too small container we've imagined to hold the overflowing complexity of this time, and lead us into some of the philosophical inquiries that you're exploring at the heart of our unwieldy ecological crisis.
What does it mean for climate change to be unthinkable or incalculable?
Bayo Akomolafe: Mm. Beautiful. So one of the most persistent and sticky habits of perception that has possessed those of us gestated in modern civilizations is: we tend to see things as separate from each other… the mic is separate from the one who speaks into the mic; the podcast is separate from the computer that broadcasts the podcast; cars are separate from their drivers; we are separate from our technologies; we see things as bounded and as atomized in some Newtonian, Cartesian sort of way. And it’s a good strategy. It is a strategy that has produced a kind of world, and I’m not in the habit of naming it as evil, or bad, even though that’s a strategy in itself too. I see the strategy of separation, is to create safety, permanence, fixity, for once and for all, to name things in a final way. That’s the modern impulse, I would say. Now, you run into trouble when things like what's happening today start to crop up. First thing I'll say is that we are slowly coming to terms in a world that is more entangling, and more relational, and more processual than our modern habits of seeing can allow us to notice or appreciate. So it’s that we are not so much as distanced from our technologies as modernity would have us believe we are. In shaping computers, we are shaped by computers. In participating in networks, we are conducting and performing emotional labor of some form, and should be shaping ourselves in that way. In very practical terms, we are now consuming more dairy products than human beings thousands of years ago. Our bodies are not used to it and they're artistic impressions and experiments decipher how we would look like if we continue to drive cars, for instance, and if we continue to sit in cubicles, how we would look like in the next hundred years. I don’t want to conjure macro-evolution here, except as if we’re headed for predestinated space, or to say that we are changing, and we are not as human as we think we are. What does this mean for this rude thing called climate change? It means that we think, act, behave, see, want, yearn, practice, perform, do things, only with the world or only with others, basically, that is, the perceptual stickiness, or the presumption that we act as individuals, is already being haunted by the idea of an entangled world. That when Ayana thinks about building a house that is something ancestral as well, that is something ecological as well, that is the lives, and breaths, and size, and hopes of multitudes and the manifold that are mostly invisible seeping through and being performed, so that we are always intergenerational, so that our failures are shared by community that are not always noticeable or perceptible.
So this idea that we are in community also has its risks, because it means that there are ways behaving that are becoming resilient, and that is very difficult to shake off, and basically, my work in thinking about climate change through the prisons of Indigenous realities, and poetry, and entanglement, it's basically to notice that, yeah, there—there is a…those ways have become very sticky and become troublesome, and so we need to find all the places of power with which we might respond to something that is beyond us. We are responding in the machine, and the machine is tired and exhausted.
Ayana Young: Yes, this machine is tired and exhausted, and I cannot wait to hospice this machine to—
Bayo Akomolafe: Right.
Ayana Young: —its next sleeping area. [Laughs] As you've named, we're spurred to action by catastrophe and crisis, and it's this desire to fix, to solve, to post on social media, to quantify and measure. Now in contrast to this cultural twitch of a frenetic production, you've invited us to consider a kind of slowness and deep listening that I think many are calling into this movement. This idea of, “Coming to a place of an elderly silence so compelling that one yields old oneself to its operations longing to be defeated. A place of creative surrender—the end of thought.” So I'd love it if you could share a little bit more on the teachings of slowness, defeat, and surrender, and what is activated when we are finally still?
Bayo Akomolafe: You know, I was really grateful that you started a conversation with, um, inviting me to notice where I come from, because I have been very fascinated with the wealth, and abundance, and the beautiful gifts of thought and conceptualization that were always around me but I couldn’t notice, it was hard to notice that then. The Yoruba people, mainly in West Africa, but also in Brazil as well, the so-called “New World”, prostrate before their Elders when they see them, it’s a deeper form of genuflection, and, uh, the Yoruba people call it the ìdọ̀bálẹ̀, a man literally falls flat on the ground and is still until the Elder says, “Rise.” For the ladies it’s called ìkúnlẹ̀, and the lady just bends her knees a bit, and—and rises, just briefly. I was shocked to learn there’s deep mythological significance to prostration. It’s not just a gesture, you—you know, it—it goes deeper than that. To literally prostrate is be still in the face of the storm, that is how Yoruba people see it mythologically. That there is a great God Shango who is the God of thunder, and seismic shifts, and upheavals. And when he shows up, you don’t run, you don’t run away, you don’t fight it too, um, you know, the habits of war have already been heard when we say things like “We’re gonna fight climate change,” “We’re gonna defeat climate change,” and stuff like that, that’s war lending itself again to how we’re framing it. But these are the teachers that tell us to stay still, you know, to lay perfectly still in the face of the storm, and it’s from these that I was able to tease out this beautiful idea that times are urgent, let us slow down.
Slowing down has been interpreted by many communities as, basically, doing what we’re doing but at slower speed, that is, literally slowing down the pace of things, who we are, not typing our memos as fast as we once were. I literally had a German brother write to me and say that “Your slowing down invocation isn't working because my bosses are still on my neck. Slowing down to type a memo isn't really working,” and I responded by saying, “Slowing down is not a function of speed, is a function of awareness, and I don’t want to make awareness a mental construct. It’s a function of presence. So, when I invite slowing down, I invite us to research, to perform research into the ancestral tentacularities that proceed from us. I’m asking us to touch our bodies, and touch our colonial bubbles. I'm asking us to listen, as you say, to witness, no not just to witness, to ‘with-ness’; to be with land, and community, and ancestor, and progeny, and children in a way that isn’t instrumental. Activism is increasingly instrumental, so it’s forming a form of power that is tied to the logic and algorithm of the status quo, which makes activism, even in the search for justice, a creature of the status quo, which makes hope and justice, as ironic as that sounds, a creature of the things we're trying to leave behind. So, slowing down seems to be a hacking of the machine, is like we're taking on other forms of body, of embodiment, that allows us to penetrate into different kinds of realities, other worlds, if you will. Um, let me stop there [Laughs] for now…I could go on and on…
Ayana Young: [Laughing] Well I do want to go on, and I really do want to learn further into this topic, and I've been meditating on the real challenge and friction of slowing down. Now Trisha Hersey of the Nap Ministry describes rest as a radical threat to the system that feeds on the grind of urgency writing, “We are living and participating in violence via a machine level pace of functioning. Anyone who goes against this pace is living as an outlier and a risk-taker. It is warrior-style resistance to push back and disrupt this reality.” In context of the so-called modern capitalist life, I find that rest can only be non-threatening insofar as it's carved out of the shadow of work. As say, consuming or vacationing, rather than a generative expression and worthy endeavor in its own right. So, how can we reorder this kind of dualistic thinking around work versus rest, or progress versus stagnation, and embody the power of a slow, humble pace?
Bayo Akomolafe: Hmm. I would think of rest, let me apply Fred Moten’s, let me do some rapping here even though I don't rap at all, and stretch… and, you know, I think the beautiful gift of rapping is to disrupt linearity and binaries, is to tease out branches, what the French philosopher Deleuze would call “deterritorialization”, it’s to tease out branches from the singular, to tease out the many streams from the mainstream. I will take that word rest, and stretch it further. How about we take that word rest and think of marronage? Marronage being the process of extricating oneself from slavery, and rest as fugitivity, that is, moving away from sites of productivity, that is, are there other ways we can be generative and productive without taking on the singular definitions of a capitalist neoliberal structure? Are there other ways that we can define the stentorian voice of progress? If we're not progressing, then there's something wrong with us as a community, as individuals, if we’re not producing. What if rest is, as I’ve said before, listening to one’s Elders, dreaming, what if that’s a form of rest? What if working is playing, or what children do, you know, the university structure is one example of a colonial imposition that sees study and learning as only one thing, if you’re not studying in some disciplinary manner, then you’re not studying, that’s what the meaning of learning, that’s what the university’ll tell ya, but what if having a conversation with a friend is a form of study? So, yes, I agree that rest is decolonial in its relational entanglements with a capitalist structure. Like you said, I don't want to see it as a binary thing: rest versus non-rest. I want to move outside that binary altogether, and create fugitive communities where rest takes on new meaning altogether, and I don't know what that is. Only in the performing of it can we speak about it, and that’s just fine.
Ayana Young: It makes me think of an interview I did with a dear friend brontë velez where she speaks of Fred Moten—
Bayo Akomolafe: I know brontë.
Ayana Young: Ooooh, amazing.
Bayo Akomolafe: Right.
Ayana Young: Great. Yeah.
Bayo Akomolafe: Yes. [Laughs]
Ayana Young: Yeah, I definitely... going fugitive, and you bringing those things up, I'm thinking of them…so clearly at this moment, so I'm happy we're bringing brontë into this.
Bayo Akomolafe: Yes. Right.
Ayana Young: So within her connection to this dynamic, fluid universe, I'm also thinking about quietness as an elemental ingredient of relationships, and enactment of reciprocity. How is cultivating a humble quietness imperative to creating alliances and collaborations with our beyond human relatives, for our collective earthly survival?
And, I want to just make a personal note on this, since I've been living out in the forest. I do realize that it isn't until I get quiet, and I get humble, that I'm able to listen and connect with the more than human world. I realize that if I'm too busy, or I'm too crowded with the distractions of modernity, the voices from the more than human world won't enter me. They—I can't hear them, and so I really feel that my relationship with the forest, and with the more than human world has come from me quieting down, and really offering a lot of myself, patience, and trusting in this connection that will come if I'm just able to, like I said, kind of leave modernity at the door, and walk away from it for a while.
Bayo Akomolafe: Mmm. Yeah, um. I'm happy for you, sister, not–not many people have the privilege, the space, the opportunity to be in the space that you are in. You know, to go to the forest to build a cabin and to live, it's entirely unimaginable to do that in a place like Chennai, for instance, where there’s hardly any green life here, it’s almost entirely structures and asphalt, and steel, and buildings, and parking lots, so it’s almost unfortunate, but I envy you, and at the same time, your question inspires me to think about quietude, as not an event, or, not a space or a moment that is internal, like, in one subjectivity, in one's mind, but quietude as an enlistment of bodies. Just like a wind rushing into a space and making everything shiver, my God, making the leaves rustle and shudder, and making the hollow spaces in the branches sing! Just enlisting all these bodies to perform the world in a particular way.
I want to think of quietude as an assemblage of bodies and, if I were to do that, I'll be very much invited to notice that it can happen here. This space of slowing down, this place of achieving rest, this place of critiquing or diffracting modernity, right in the belly of modernity, right in the city, and I say this this way most of the time that enchantment is never in short supply. Most of us, and it's beautiful again, what you’re doing, sister, but I want to stress that most of us are caught in the habit of thinking of escape as a way towards the sacred, that is, the sacred lies in the distance, if we can leave the mundane in the battle behind, then we will find the sacred, but I think the sacred is more pervasive, more fugitive, than just something that is exterior to the conditions we want to leave behind. I think fugitive spaces, and I think they're very beautiful examples of a fugitive space, the Great Dismal Swamp is one example, that is it's a swampy place, it's smaller now, but in the 17th century when slavery was really beginning, it was this fugitive space between Virginia and North Carolina, where African-Americans, uh, Maroons, they called them, built new communities in the swamp, basically, and it was in the heart of Empire they did this. It was right there in the heart of the slavery enterprise that they built their fugitive communities, so I feel invited, I feel lead and inspired to ask if quietude, if rest, if fugitivity isn't a space of reckoning with the banal, isn’t a space of teasing out the sacred from the mundane, isn’t a space of actually noticing that being at one’s computer can be a time of quietude, a time of ancestral connections that our imagination of what the sacred looks like often gets in the way of our transformation, and that we can be enlisted in ways that are surprising and unexpected to slow down, and it’s not our work to do that, it’s not our work to come up with a final answer to do that. It’s our work to know how to be ready when it calls us.
Ayana Young: Wow Bayo. [Sighs] That was really profound and I'm really glad that you spoke to how to find this quietness and rest beyond what many of us think we need in order to gain those perspectives, and—
Bayo Akomolafe: Right.
Ayana Young: —I do feel the privilege of living in the forest, and with that privilege, for me, has come this feeling of immense responsibility of: how do I take this honoring of being in relationship with the land like this and support communities, and support the land, and their own survival, and so I think it's such a complex time to be alive and there is no one-size-fits-all or blanket solution that everyone can achieve—
Bayo Akomolafe: Hmm.
Ayana Young: —in the same way so how do we challenge our assumptions of how to find self-care and find what we need in our particular circumstances. And now, I'd really like to call the words of two thinkers that have helped me navigate the dark waters of extinction
Bayo Akomolafe: Hmm.
Ayana Young: —and the existential immensity of climate change, Deborah Bird Rose and Tom Bandurin. In keeping faith with the dead, mourning, and the extinction, they write, “Mourning is a process of learning and transformation to accommodate a changed reality. Mourning is about dwelling with the loss and so coming to appreciate what it means how the world has changed, and how we must ourselves change and renew our relationships.” Could you take us deeper into this notion of tending grief as an opportunity for transformation or rebirth, and within your answer, perhaps you could speak to your project Vulture: Courting the Other/wise in a time of Break Down with the Emergence Network.
Bayo Akomolafe: Oh, thank you, sister. Those are powerful words, on mourning. I know it in my bones, not just in a poetic sense. When my father died in Nigeria, we traveled to the village to bury him, he was an important figure in the country's politics and governance—we’re approaching the village in a convoy, and I remember the market women—women I never seen before, women I never heard of, literally tearing their clothes, you know, as the cars approached and as his coffin was seen, wailing by the side of the street, crying, shedding tears. And I felt in a moment annoyed, ‘cos I felt they were taking my moment to to cry like, “Who are these guys? Who are these people crying for Daddy? They didn't know Daddy. Daddy didn't know them. So who are these ones to be crying?” I felt it was the politics of scarcity, like, if I cried then you shouldn't, or we cried, at least acknowledge a hierarchy of grief here. I should be the one noticed here, the son, the only son of my father. And then I learned again, as part of my decolonial journey, about grief as ceremony, grieving as ceremony, that is when we grieve, it’s not instrumental to anything but, it’s an opening, it's a performance of indeterminacy that is somewhat stifled by the psychological, I should say the psychological military industrial complex, [Laughs] an ironical portmanteau of words, yes, but as a practicing, or as a recovering psychologist, I was taught to, help the grieving subject to recover, to, probably offer pills, or something, to help you get back in the game, to get back into the cycle of productivity, you know to “pull yourself together,” if you will, and this noticing is what has manifested in my writing as a need for us to find spaces where we can fall apart, which is what I call grieving.
I think of grief as a falling apart, not as a falling apart in only human terms, but as a falling apart that is part of the motions, part of the processes, that is stitched into the fabric of matter itself. The materializing world is grieving. Wherever movement is there is always loss, and wherever loss is there is the desire for grief, there is grieving, there is need to fall down. Unfortunately, in modern settlements, we hardly have spaces for falling apart. We don't know how to stay in the indeterminacy and the slowness of the compost. We want to get back into the game quickly. Applied to the climate change discourse, you can sense the techno-materialist machine doing its work all over again, producing bits, binaries, ones and zeros—it’s either climate justice or climate chaos. That's it. That’s all this machine produces, and I wonder if there aren’t worlds in between that we—we're not able to notice. I wonder if the trickster isn't beckoning at the wilds beyond our fences, wanting us to dance between the binary, between the ones and the zeros, to notice a place for climate grief. What if that was actually an objective of UNESCO? [Laughs] You know? To gather people together and to just grieve. That doesn't seem instrumental to salvation or redemption, but it's a place of noticing that the world is shrewder, wiser, and more trickstery than our systems know how to appreciate, there are some other sites of power, the otherwise is shining if you will, it's—it's being illuminated by poetry today, and I'm so given to it.
My work with The Emergence Network is, and some of our projects like Vulture, even Vunja which is the festival we’re holding in Brazil next year, is to notice these other many streams in between, these other multiple worlds between, that lie between justice and failure, the worlds between victory and defeat, the worlds between the ones and the zeros, the space between the stories we tell. What if there were climate “Soudajet”, you know, what if there were climate “Ambito”. [Laughs] I’m using “queer” words, you know, a place of nostalgia.
What if there's a place of just sitting with the trouble of noticing that the things we've lost may never come back to us? What if there's a place of just doing that? That can be founded I guess. Most people who are hearing this right now would say, “What good does that do? You know? We need to save the word for our children! We need to, uh, we need to get into shape as quickly as possible! We need to call out the capitalist structures, the people—the enemies that knew about this, uh, shit-storm before it happened, before it began to spill through our doors. Yes, I think there's a space for that, but I think, most of the time, in doing that, in pursuing justice, we're reinforcing the system we're trying to escape. In trying to climb out of the pits that we've dug for ourselves, the pit becomes resilient. In trying to escape the prison, the prison gains its form. So in a very critical sense, we are in a crisis of form, and this form is the indeterminacy of things. The background has crashed into the figure, into the foreground, and so, sense-making is at a crisis point now. We need trickster approaches, we need ways of dancing away, or dancing to fugitive spaces, dancing to sanctuaries where we can shape-shift, and I think grieving, mourning, even being, even allowing ourselves to partake in pleasurable activities in the face of the storm, which might sound like a very, very privileged thing to do, I know and yet, you know, doing that I think might be productive in ways that I do not even want to talk about.
Ayana Young: I resonate really deeply with that Bayo, and I—[Sighs deeply] I've been sitting with this thought the last year, year-and-a-half or so, with one of my mentors, and I don't know if I'll say it's super clearly at the moment, but this question I'm asking myself of: “What would I do if I accepted that the Anthropocene will not be stopped? What would I do with my life, who would I be, how would I live?” And I don't mean that necessarily in, where would I move to, or what—what would I do with my job so much, it's more an internal questioning of: “How will I live in my—in my body and my spirit if I'm not clinging on to the hope of solutions as a way to fix everything that's gone wrong. What if things can't be fixed in the way that I hope they could be?” And I think this speaks to what you're saying—what would happen if we sit in the grief of this and not [Sighs] grasp for a way out, but rather just realize what's happening, and I do struggle with feeling that there could be a type of deep connection on the other side of sitting in that, I struggle between that, and then this feeling of duty, this feeling of responsibility, that I have to “fight” or I have to “figure things out,” and I don't even like those words because I think that it's the terminology that has been used in the environmental movement, climate change, justice movements, this power behind this urgency which in it—and of course it also makes sense. People are suffering, we're all suffering in our own ways, the planet is suffering, I'm thinking about Australia and all of the humans and more than humans that are [Sighs] burning right now, and what do we do in the face of what feels like an apocalypse? And I really appreciate it, what you're saying, and thinking about what you won’t talk about in terms of what could be on the other side of this sitting with the grief, sitting with the trouble, reminds me of Donna Haraway in that interview we did with her so, yeah I'm really with you, and I wonder how we can [Sighs] not stop our work to—to, uh, serve justice, ‘cos I think serving justice is—is an ethical way to live, I think it's a moral way to connect with being alive, is to see injustices of our world, and try to be strong figures or at least figures that are standing, and saying no, but the same time realizing that it is so complex, the trouble that we’re in, and urgency, and that type of mentality of—of the fight, may not be what “saves us” or “saves the world”—whatever that means. I really resonate with you, so thank you Bayo.
I want to talk about one of your lectures, and you share that the etymology of the word demise traces back to the transference of property, and if we hold this time as an expression of a greater collective demise, a system malfunction, and, you know, the categorical collapse of the “human”, then I wonder how this could give away to a radical recomposition of power, you know, how are the dominant logics of mastery and white supremacy swallowed up inside the compost pile of the Anthropocene, and how can our movements of justice actively tend decomposition?
Bayo Akomolafe: So many things swirling and let me see if I can pick one strand. I got a question from a magazine recently, a German magazine, asked me to answer a question like, uh: “What are the skills and capacities you think we need to develop in order to meet the Anthropocene?” I wrote back and I said, “I'm quite reluctant to name a skill.” [Laughs] You know? To say: “This is a skill.” Without disparaging your question, or throwing it away, I want to hold it in deep tension with what I'm feeling, but here’s what I'm feeling, that, I think instead of capacity development, which seems to privilege the same old human development paradigm of us developing new skills in response to an environment in disrepair—adapting, becoming more sophisticated, that same narrative tends to, you know, sneak back in. So I wonder if it's not a question of capacity development, I wonder if it's a question of incapacitation, that is, I wonder if this isn't a call to die, to die well, and here’s where demise plays a role, right? What if this is a time to fall down, to know how to die, to notice the myth of permanence, and to trace out how bodies tend to congeal, take on resilience, take on weight, take on structure, and also lose structure. What if we're in cycles of creation and—and destruction, and modernity has shaped us in such a way that we believe in this idea of stability. What if this is nature, what I really would call nature—nature is a destabilization of self, but what if what we conveniently call nature is calling us to a composting?
And so I was asked a question of myself, you know, I am on the decolonial journey, and this is not my journey, there isn’t a sense of arrival, there isn't a sense of victory, it's a journey that my children might complete for me, and it's a journey that my grandchildren may start for them, their own parents, so that it’s really an intergenerational fabric we’re weaving, of endings and beginnings, no totalitarian thing here, but I asked myself a question: “If our Gods are really all powerful in Yorubaland how come they didn’t rise up to stop the Europeans from taking away those African bodies to the New World, you know, what if I'm wrong that they’re…? Why should I just give in to this colonial idea that white always means right, or white always equals might?” Because really, think about, they were more powerful, they came with guns, they came with gunpowder, they came with the Bible, they defeated us. So, where is our power? What does it mean to have other places of power if our own Indigenous realities were unable to meet or rise to the occasion of colonial interruptions? But, you see, I was working with a very conventional notion of power. Power as dominion over another. Power as control, power as supremacy. There is a different view of power that is possible, that is faintly discerned in a relational universe, and that is, power as how bodies gain difference, and power as how bodies become similar. Let me explain: in some Maroon conceptual islands of Yoruba cosmology, there is an understanding that Eshu, who is the trickster archetype in the pantheon of Yoruba gods. He is quite popular in…I should say she/he, since he defies gender, but I—that’s too complicated, he’s in Brazil, he’s in many spaces in South America, Eshu is worshipped across the world, is what I want to say.
Now Eshu is said to have been the one that brought the ships to our shores in the first place. Think about that for a second. Our own Gods permitted the slavery to happen. It’s said that the God of War, Ogun, rose up, and was in the furious haste to the shipping from happening, to stop the chattel slavery from happening. But Eshu approached him, and gave him alcohol, and made him drunk, and Ogun slept on the road and forgot what he supposed to do. And Ishu traveled with the slaves, and became the Creolized bodies, and universes, and economies, that are now present to the New World. Without Eshu doing that, there wouldn't have been rap, there wouldn't have been Rastafari, there wouldn’t have been the marvelous people, and communities, and social technologies, and realities that we now experience in the so-called New World. Now this is not a justification of slavery, it’s a noticing that the world is, and exceeds, our notions of power and justice. What if in opening my back with your whip, you are also undoing yourself? What if in unzipping my shorelines and ravaging our villages, you are also undoing your worlds, and introducing new worlds in the process? What if in rendering me useless, you are also participating and waltzing with me, in creating new realities? What if in burying me as a seed, you are allowing me to grow into something different? That is a different notion of power altogether.
What I would tend to notice about activism and movements around justice today, and I've been speaking, and I teach at Pacifica Graduate Institute, and my recent letter there I pointed out that intersectional theories of Black feminism are unfortunately still tethered to modern power, still tethered to a modern notion of power, and the highest you can reach in this assemblage of bodies is representation, that is, more people represented, and we can speak about identity politics, which is a beautiful strategy, but has deep limitations and shadows of its own…So it's, again, a noticing that most modern movements today, contemporary movements are tied—they’re anchored to this island of power. They know no other way of being in the world except for claiming inclusivity, or seeking inclusivity. I am itching to move away from the inclusivity-exclusivity paradigm, that is, I tend to notice due to the demands placed on me by my own body, that, even getting included is a form of violence. Even becoming a citizen, if I were a refugee like many of my sisters and brothers are, knocking on the doors of America, or knocking on the doors of Europe, even with all of this, even to get accepted is a form of violence, there is a Procrustean bed dynamic that is at work, that cuts away the flesh of the refugees and immigrants, and makes them adapt to a way of being that is not theirs. So, I wonder if there aren't fugitive justices, fugitive hoax, fugitive spaces, unspeakable apophatic realities that are outside of this performance of power that we can notice. It might be scandalous to the modern ear! Like saying, for instance, that Eshu traveled with the slaves, condoned all that suffering, and yet was using that as a way of ritualizing other bodies into being. And so this is my question, this is the question that animates my work with the Emergence Network, to hold the gift of this inclination, I call it post-activism, these thoughts. Not to signal a move away from contemporary activism, not to say we’re the new guys on the block, not to say there's a sacred kind of activism that is materialized by tethering contemporary activism to Eastern spiritualties. No, it’s none of that, it's basically a way of asking: “What if the way to respond to crisis is part of the crisis? What if there are other spaces of power? And, what if we could touch these spaces of power and be touched in return, what happens?”
Ayana Young: I would love to know what happens. [Laughs] Yeah, I think what may happen is something that I certainly can't begin to comprehend, and that [Sigh] feeds me, that nourishes me in a way to think about the things that I cannot even begin to metabolize in my mind, and, I think when human supremacy, white supremacy, tell us that we can understand everything, it's really detrimental to our own connection with ourselves, and with the world
Bayo Akomolafe: Well said, sister, well said.
Ayana Young: In preparation for this interview, I was listening to a lecture you gave last year in Victoria, B.C., and I was really profoundly affected by the response you shared with an audience member on their question about allyship. And you said “Even our failure matters. A failed star shines brighter than a coherent one, because a failed star has burst its guts into the universe, and becomes stardust, and come into our skin, and made us human. It doesn't end with you, it doesn't end with me.” And I'm [Sighs] just interested to hear what are we hospicing out of our movement cultures when we hold space for failure beyond the paradigm of good allyship? How does accountability and agency take shape differently in the shared process you call “making sanctuary”?
Bayo Akomolafe: It’s always a good moment to be thankful to our white brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers… if I could prostrate to them, even though it embarrasses some of them, people that I deeply respect, Karen Barad being of them, Helena Norburg is one of them, the people who have touched my life, and whose milk I suck, and it nourishes my bones, in my mind, in my spirit, I would do that every day. So it is—it's always a good moment to offer gratitude to allyship. It's from reading and struggling and wrestling with these revered ones that it is possible to notice that everything in the world, and it’s not just white allyship, is as it is dimensional, and as it is three-dimensional, it is also fraught with tensions, and there isn't some kind of self-sufficient progress narrative that we can latch onto, like holding a basket to a—a butterfly catcher to a comet, and zooming into another universe. There isn’t a place of those that would ease away or release us from the trouble of just being alive. But I will say this, that, and, again, it's in response to what you notice about white allyship, that it’s a beautiful thing, it's a struggling and a yearning to be present for suffering, just to stay with suffering, to notice the ways that some bodies are privileged in a power structure to the detriment of other bodies, and I've been so grateful, I’ve been so blessed in my own work, everywhere I travel, uh, the people that come out to hear me speak, the people that put me in the homes, you know, that's a form of allyship, that we rarely talk about, but it’s—I’m grateful for that.
At the same time, sister, it’s—I tend to think of white allyship in the same vein as the intersection of politics that I’ve just referenced, cos’ it’s—it still, in centralizing the—the body and the experiences of Black women, for instance, it ironically creates a savior narrative for white people, or for whiteness. As a Yoruba person, and dwelling without cosmologies, identity is not a stable thing for me, so I even hesitate to label people white or Black, and I'm not colorblind, either, there’s tension here, but yes white allyship seems to be a creature of intersectional politics, it’s still tethered to that same place of power, kind of centered paradoxically recenters, it makes possible to the savior narrative that is problematic, and it incarcerates Black bodies into positions of eternal victimhood, so that, because this is your identity, we're going to predispose you to behaving in this way, you're going to antagonize, you're going to be angry all the time, you’re going to demand your own say, you're going to seek a seat at the table, and this is how you should be as a Black body.
And, leftist politics has kind of embraced this stratagem, this way of seeking and asking for space, but a space in—a space in the pyramid, or on a pyramid, or space in a prison cell isn't exactly an abundant space. It's still incarceration, it’s still a loveless economy of bodies, it’s still a loveless structure that we don't—we don't know what a wiser economy or wiser politics might look like, maybe we can gesture towards it, and this is why I speak about failure, because white allyship comes with a righteousness model on morality, or ethical code, that is just as binding and incarcerating as the politics it wants to liberate Black bodies from, ‘cos it says if you're not a good white ally, then there's something wrong with you. You know if—if, you—you need to be a good white ally, you need to do your work, and all of that is important, very important, but yet, at the same time, I have to speak in—in a double sense here, and say that I also noticed it is deeply flawed and problematic, because you're trapped in an ethical code that doesn't allow you to spill, doesn't allow your body to move, doesn't allow us to notice the intergenerational dance of bodies that we sometimes glibly call failure or success. So, I wonder if there aren't all other ethical spaces where we can spill into each other, that doesn't constitute a spiritual bypass, that doesn't dismiss identity politics as the rantings of the left, and also doesn't dismiss the conservativism, those MAGA hat-wearing Trumptards as the the Twitterati would call them, it doesn't dismiss their—their concerns about identity politics and also doesn’t perform some kind of milquetoast, um, reconciliation, but holds the—the tension of these many worlds, the universe that exceeds, all of them. So yes, my sister, failure I've been learning about failure from the likes of Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, a book shook me, an exploded my world, and I learned, you know, how even a failed on star shines brighter than, a coherent one, an integral one, that is, a world beyond wholeness, and I learned, when I listen to Indian mythology, and I learn about Akhilandeshvari, the Goddess who is never not broken. This idea of brokenness is missing in our conversations, ‘cos we're looking for wholeness, righteousness, we want to get it right, we want to stick by the script, and in doing so we’re becoming, ironically, brittle bodies, now, breakable, you can’t even have a conversation about mistakes anymore. As a result of the operations performed on us by social networks, so I'm leaning into failure, I’m wondering about the promises of monsters, I'm wondering about how brokenness can redeem us from the incarceration of wholeness, I’m wondering about other spaces of power that can help us perform spillages, a maroonish, a marooning body, a runaway of fugitives from ethical codes of righteousness.
Ayana Young: Um, I'm feeling inarticulate and speechless after what you just said, because there's no way for us not to make mistakes, there's no way for us to not fail, the pressure of being a “perfect human” it feels fake, it doesn't even—it doesn't feel authentic, and I think you had completely severs our ability to connect with each other when, one, we put each other on these pedestals of perfection, moral perfection—activist ally perfect, whatever—we whatever tag we want to put on that, or category and then I think it also makes us feel separate because, I—yeah the pressure that we put on ourselves to not fail, and the pressure we put on others to not fail, and it's not even possible, and so it is a type of prison, and it doesn't allow for growth, and it really, it severs the future of what a deep relationship can be, and I am thinking even about one of my dear friends, [Sighs] who, we got in a—an argument, or not an argument, it was—it was just a point of disconnection, and it wasn't until we actually were able to come together, and feel embarrassed, or feel a little ashamed, or guilty, whatever it was, that we actually were able to grow closer together, we were able to go closer through our imperfections, through our mistakes, and there's a world, a whole world of connection when we make a wrong step, and then are able to sit with one another, and learn from that, so I mean that's just one, almost, surface-level example.
But what social media has done to us, especially with call-out culture is insanity. It's insanity—and it's—and the people are so afraid, I have so many people coming to me, being afraid of being involved, because they're afraid they're going to do something wrong or make a mistake, and then be ousted from the community forever, and I think to myself, my goodness, our movement is already so small, we can't afford to lose people who are willing to give their heart, souls, bodies, resources—whatever it is that they're offering… We don't have the luxury of just sending people away, and so gosh, anyway so many levels, so many rabbit holes there but I do want to ask this next question, because it's something that I feel, you are so unique, such a unique human with your intimate lens of fatherhood, and—and it's this, this theme that comes up again and again and your work, and I've been so touched by your invitation to “Treat our children as Elders,” and you've also say, “Children now come out of the earth, dragging the textures of wisdoms gone before, and bringing it up with them. They're not tabula rasa, they're not empty slates, they're alive in the wisdom of ancestors that are still folded in the thick present. Pay homage to the multiple that is lingering within them.”
Speaking from your experience as a father and a teacher, how can we follow young people as ethnographic guides into the divine realm of imagination? And what is important about this space of wonder, bewilderment, and vital curiosity?
Bayo Akomolafe: Yeah, that's such a beautiful question, I just wish I could just say, “good night,” and just go dream and sit with that question. Yeah, I think good questions transcend the answers we give them. They should be taken in their own right, and just received and embraced, so thank you for that question, um, ethnographic, um, surveys into the worlds of…Well—well, one very impoverished way I would respond to that beautiful invocation, sister, is I don't know that our present educational systems, at large, are able to hold, or appreciate children. Children are resources to be, generically speaking, resources to be fashioned into proper citizenry, good citizens, and that is deeply problematic, ‘cos we’re creating the spares for the system, we’re creating the spares for the machine. A spare boat, a spare knot, a spare nail here and there… And teaching in university, my wife and I, before we got married, we just decided that we're going to experiment with this. I have to admit that we had romantic notions of what unschooling, which is what we called it, which is what we still sometimes call what we’re doing in our best moments, but there was a time that we have very romantic notions about, it didn't quite pan out that way… Yes, our kids don't go to school, our kids are six and two. Alethea has never been to school, she's heard about school, she has ideas about school, some of them imprinted by our own conversations, but, by-and-large, she's a being in her own self. And the things she can do, and the things she can say, and the things she's permitted to say, the places she’s already probing, shocks even us, her parents. We’re like, we never did that, as children, and yes, maybe a gen—a general argument could be made that even schooled kids, uh, do that, but there’s a sense in which we notice there’s a difference here with what's happening with Alethea, and I wonder if that isn't a sacred dance with wonder.
There's something deeply political about what we doing this well, it's not divorced from climate change, or Trump, or Bolsonaro, or even Modi here in India, or the rise of ethno-nationalist fascism, what we’re trying to do, in some—and I think we things we tell ourselves these—this in many articulate moments—what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to thwart the productivity of the status quo. We’re trying to learn again how to play. Not that we believe that this is a fix-all, that homeschooling is some kind of self-sufficient paradigm, and if you keep your child away from school, that is tantamount, or equal, to some kind of sacred activism. There is no broad—there is no single brushstroke here, but at the same time, there—there’s something really powerful about noticing children as beyond good citizens in the making. And that twist of perception, that plot twist allows us to say, for instance, to our children, that, “You don't have to grow up to be an artist, you can do right now, right here.” And it allows, ah, my daughter to say, “What if 2 + 2 isn’t 4?” That kind of emancipatory, [chuckles] that kind of poetic liberty seems like what will happen in fugitive spaces, in many senses, we are fugitives, what my wife and I are doing, and in many other senses, all of us are fugitives, because the Anthropocene is rendering us homeless. It’s removing the hieroglyphics on the wall that made home and stability possible. It’s wiping it away in the insurgency of the Pagan, and as it does that, I think we need, in response to it, to listen to our children, to bring all the data in, and part of doing that is to listen—to perform research with our children as if they were philosophers of the wise already, not in the making, but as if they are already wise, as if they are entangled with the world, as if they can teach us something, because I’ve found in my own experience that they very well can, and I think that's what the Anthropocene makes space for, makes space for our children to be powerful.
Ayana Young: What an inspiration to [Sighs] realize that there's other ways—there's other ways of being, and growing, and learning, and I think that part of the [Sighs] the prison of the dominant culture of capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and so on and so forth, is having us believe that there isn't another way. That there is this one way, and that is the way, it's the way of raising citizens, that's the way of school, it's the way of [Sighs] urgency, it's the way of instant gratification, so on and so forth, and, I think this dominant culture has come in, and infiltrated our minds to have us believe that there aren't other options or, not only either—even tangible options, but even options in our own imaginations, and so when I imagine your daughter, and the space you give her and her imagination, to go beyond 2 + 2 = 4, I mean just that is of itself is revolutionary, that you are allowing her and, in this timeframe, especially, to question everything, and not just feel like she has to believe what she's being given. And I think so many of us just don't even know that we can question what we are being—really, like, forced down our throats, so now I'd really love to think more about the resilience held within the bonds of intergenerational lineages of struggle, and resistance, and a few months ago I came across the word atavia, meaning great-great-great-grandmother in Latin, and related to the word atavism, which in biology, refers to an ancestral trait that reappears in an individual, after having been lost in previous generations through evolutionary change. So as I meditate on this word, my mind wanders to the hopeful re-emergence and turning of worlds that we can't always see. Worlds that camouflage in our DNA, or hide in our bones, flow through our blood memory, or unfurl as seeds, and I just think there is an immense resource of wisdom in life's ongoingness and thorny will to survive that is far beyond our capacity to understand or quantify. And so I’m wondering: how can we learn to place trust in these temporalities, and how could we be partners to the mysterious and the unseen, to healing a vibrant mythic cosmos that perhaps lives beyond our human perception? And I know we've been touching on this thread a little bit as we've been speaking but I would really like to focus on this for a moment with you.
Bayo Akomolafe: My—my… Well I would say it’s already happening, sister, it’s for many reasons it’s not something that we now have to do. Like, let’s put this in the plan, now we know how to do it. Again, agency is not a human property, agency is the movement of—is the movement of material, is mater0ing, is the becomingness of things, so there—there isn’t, um, the efforts, you know, we tend to speak about decoloniality as a human project. When it’s so anchored to humanism it—it tends to, it tends to occlude the work of the posthuman, it tends to occlude the, as you beautifully say, the turning of other worlds. The ways that technology, the inhuman, the nonhuman, the more than human is also at work asking these questions, experimenting with concepts, and breaking through, and writing into being. As an example of some of the ways that we are beginning to notice the invisible, if you will, and this is another instance of irony, is the development of the ancestry testing—DNA testing technology. If I were to ask you, “What is ancestry testing made of?” “Oh It's made of, uh, those biological instruments, it’s made of capitalist systems of profit and profit making, it’s made of endless hours of servitude, it’s made of very problematic things,” and yet! This very problematic thing we call ancestry testing is allowing us to, you know, is territorializing modernity. That is, it is hacking, at the heart of modernity, is the hacking of modernity. Just like quantum physics becomes this, which is produced in modernity, becomes this tool that disturbs and unfounds modernity, unfurls modernity. Ancestry testing is allowing us to notice keener worlds that, you know, disturbs the story, the dominant story of identity. Dominant story of identity is that we—our identities are more or less fixed. Tick one box, you’re either white, or Black, or you’re Brown, or you’re something else—you’re always found within a box. The very conditions that make those boxes possible, those categories possible, are the same conditions that are producing… that these technologies…that is allowing us to say, for instance, that I am not just white, I am brown, and green, and yellow, and the enemy of my ancestors is also my ancestor, as Stephen Jenkinson would say, so that I am wide, I am a multitude, and I meet you apologies for it, I am so incoherent, so chaotic, that the product of identity making—the identitarian dynamics of modern settlements and modern epistemologies breakdown in the face of what I am, in fact, I am is a rude remark to make in the face of what I am becoming, and language cannot bear hold the thing that is me, and so that is a noticing of worlds that—that is made possible by the conditions around us, so it’s not just something we must do to create space for, it is something that is happening around us, it’s in art, it’s in technology it's in spiritual sensitivities, and new movements in contemplation, and movements between contemplation and activism, it's a place of shape-shifting, which brings me to the concept of sanctuary. I think and talk about sanctuary—reclaiming this medieval practice of allowing the fugitive a place of rest to escape the fugitives’ accusers, um, which is practiced in England but became wiped out when our juridical systems started to emerge. Systems of laws, and legislation and judges, and courts of law. Prior to all that, we had sanctuary and—and sanctuary also being this Pagan— [Chuckles] I love the word Pagan—Pagan technology that the Christian establishment pilfered, you know, stole for themselves, because it was such a powerful thing. I ask myself, “Where are the places of sanctuary today? Where do we run to within the Anthropocene, you know, breathing down on us?”
Running away is not a function of escape for me, you know, I think of sanctuary as a place of the monster, sanctuary as a place of shape-shifting, because I noticed that in the architecture of those old sanctuaries, the monster was always on the front door. It always had this inside this hagoday, or a door knocker, that was shaped in the ferocious figure of a gargoyle, or some other monster—lion or something, and I always ask myself, “Was this just a trend, or…why was the monster on the face of the door, the very first thing that welcomes you into sanctuary?” And I think to myself that sanctuary is the place where we gained different shapes, because monster is the dismissal, or the diffraction of shape, and I feel that what we rudely called climate change, and the Anthropocene, is the deterritorialization of man, the figure of man. It's the dismissal of man, it’s the problematization of man, the figure of man, and the stability of man. So, sanctuary, in the way I think and talk about, it—it's this place where we gain different shapes, where we lose shape, where we compost, and how do we do that? We do it by listening, we do it by working together in ways that are probably fugitive and outside of the normative ways of producing food, or money, or stories. We do it by listening to our wounds, by sharing wounds, by sharing painful feelings, by sharing our jealousy, and our grief. We do it sitting with the trouble of being alive, we do it in so many different ways, the idea is emergent, and I’m leaning into it—it’s a deep invitation to me and to those around me at this point in time to think about sanctuary as pedagogy of kinship in urgent times.
So, shapeshifting, for me is—is this invitation to take on different dimensions, to let identity spill, and to practice that, so that it gains body, to practice that in communities so that it gains shape and resilience. This is not an effort to centralize carbon reductionism, not an effort to solve climate change, but it's a different way of responding to the Anthropocene, not the correct way, I think the Anthropocene resists questions like: “What's the correct way to respond the Anthropocene?” I think we’re in a different world altogether, so sister, and to cap this all, it’s, the invitation sanctuary is an invitation to incapacitation, is an invitation to shapeshift, is an invitation to descend, is an invitation to fall, and descent and demise are shockingly generative spaces, spaces where art, and the aesthetics of the new can thrive. I'm really looking forward to this year, when this gains a greater intelligence, uh, through the practices of people that I'm speaking with, and, um, traveling with, and doing work with. I’m really looking forward to knowing what this could be.
Ayana Young: [Sighs] What you’re offering us isn't a linear type of outlined understanding of the world, it's really inviting me to…[Sighs. Chuckles] I kind of imagined, like a little me, inside of my head, pushing against the boundaries of my skull. It's like pushing the walls of my skull going “No no! There's much more than what you can even grasp,” and it's really interesting to be in this place where I'm trying to expand my capacity to understand things that I will never understand, and so it is really stretching me to sit in this place that is about taking it in, but not trying to categorize what you're saying, but just letting it sink, and letting your words move me in this [Sighs] place that needs to stay in the unknown, and it's so hard for the Western mind, I know for my Western mind, to be comfortable with that, but I think that's also part of it, it’s not about being comfortable with these types of questions or responses, and so I—you mentioned Stephen Jenkinson, and I am reminded of the interviews I've done with Stephen, because I felt similarly, where he would say things that were so profound that didn't have… it—there was no end goal to them, it wasn't about, it wasn't about figuring it out at the end of it, and I think that, in and of itself, that [Sighs] acceptance of not trying to figure it out is actually very healing from this Western prison of reductionist thinking that many of us have been imprisoned by. So, gosh, I feel so moved and I thought that I could finish by reading a short poem that kind of, again, will let our minds just swish in this water that we’re yeah, I guess that's kind of what it feels like, this like the ocean, this kind of endlessness, and it's a problem by Ursula Le Guin called The Marrow—
“There was a word inside a stone.
I tried to pry it clear,
mallet and chisel pick, and gad,
until the stone was dropping blood,
but I still could not hear
the word of the stone had said.
I threw it down beside the road
among a thousand stones,
and as I turned away it cried
the word aloud within my ear
and the marrow of my bones
heard, and replied.”
So, that’s a little something to leave us with but—
Bayo Akomolafe: Ahh…can I just say something quickly?
Ayana Young: Oh—please finish up in whatever way that you feel called.
Bayo Akomolafe: There is a biblical passage, you know, that I've been returning to in these returnings, the old is never not new, it—it keeps coming back, and, this story in the Christian text speaks about a figure called Job, who is a good man, who has suffered, and gained wealth, and one day he—his wealth is taken away from him by the devil, I think and he loses his capital, he loses his gold, he loses his children, all of them in one day. And all his friends just basically, it’s this deep philosophical conversation that happens on the nature of suffering and pain, and Job is a very very central character in many theological conversations about the nature of pain and suffering, and all his friends just basically say, “Curse God! Curse God and die!” and Job is, you know, he’s angry, he's like, “I'm not going to do that, and yet I need answers to my question: Why would a good person suffer like this? Why would I keep all the commandments, and—and do all the good stuff, be a good white ally if you will, and still experience the world this way?” And shortly, in the book, God appears to Job, and Job poses those questions to the divine, basically saying, “Answer me, you know, I’ve—I lived by the book, I lived—I did everything you told me to do, and yet here I am with sores on my body, no food in my—in my barn, my children are no longer sleeping in their beds, my cattle no longer roaming in the fields, why would you do this? Why would you allow this to happen to a good person?” And the way that God responds to Job is very fascinating. The answer to all suffering, and God answers, “Have you noticed, have you seen a deer? Do you know the strengths and the glory of Leviathan? Have you witnessed this, or that, or the DNA structure? Do you know the beauty of a volcano eruption?” In a sense, basically, God doesn't answer the question, it seems like a politician's move, basically dances away from the question, and I've always wondered about this passage, why would you belittle the suffering of a person in deep pain?
But I noticed a wisdom now, my head is in a different place, my heart is in a different place, and I like to say that, sometimes the best answer to a pressing question is bewilderment. It’s not the answer itself, it’s not the correct answer, it’s the gift of bewilderment, it's a gift of straying away from the algorithms of easy arrival. And my Elders always taught me that in some form, whether through television, or through their greetings or through their ancestral wisdoms defracting through Christian ethics and morality, kind of taught me that the answers are not always going to be available, and I know that you notice that, sister, and I just wanted to say that thank you for holding the space for queer questions, and uneasy arrivals for tending to the tense fields where new kinds of beings and becomings can thrive and grow… this work is really, really important, and I use my presence here to bless it, and bless you. Thank you.
Ayana Young: Thank you for listening to another episode of For The Wild Podcast, I'm Ayana Young. The music you heard today was from Daniel Higgs. I'd like to thank our podcast production team Aiden McRae, Andrew Storrs, Carter Lou McElroy, Erica Ekrem, Eryn Wise, Francesca Glaspell, Hannah Wilton, and Melanie Younger. A few things before we go: one, if you haven't rated us on iTunes, please do so, as it really helps expand our community of listeners, and sign up for our newsletter at ForTheWild.World to stay connected and to stay in touch. All right, until next week.