john a. powell And yet, we have no choice except learn how to, as you say, get along or belong to each other.

Ayana Young For The Wild is honored to present “the edges in the middle”, a series of conversations between Báyò Akómoláfé  and thought companions like john a. powell, V, Naomi Klein, and more. These limited episodes have been adapted from Báyò’s work as the Global Senior Fellow at UC Berkeley's Othering & Belonging Institute. In this role, Báyò has been holding a series of public conversations on issues of justice and belonging for the Institute's Democracy & Belonging Forum, which connects and resources civic leaders in Europe and the US who are committed to bridging across difference to strengthen democracy and advance belonging in both regions and around the world. Báyò's conversations encourage us to rethink justice, hope, and belonging by sitting amidst the noise, not trying to cover it up with pleasant rhythms. To learn more about the Democracy & Belonging Forum, visit democracyandbelongingforum.org.  

This recording features Báyò’s conversation with john a. powell, Director of the Othering & Belonging Institute. Báyò and john play with trouble, belonging, and breaks of transmission. 

Báyò Akómoláfé I think it is a beautiful thing to begin with gratitude. Gratitude seems ironic, maybe a contradictory thing, a paradoxical thing, especially in times, such as we're in, but it's a good place to begin. So I want to give thanks to the Other & Belonging Institute and the Democracy & Belonging Forum for inviting this queer aesthetic of inquiry to take root, which we call the Mbari. I'll just share a bit about that, but not before acknowledging an elder and someone I deeply respect, who is joining me in conversation, this being the first of this adventure, into depths, and I just want to also welcome elder john powell. Thank you very much, sir, for this conversation. I have to say that the reason I call him elder is, among many other things, Yoruba people, especially, you know, within the context - away from the cities do not know how to call people that they respect by their names. So I respect him and his work and I'm going to be calling him elder john, just so we position ourselves within that reality.  But I want to begin with this short introduction to mbari. Just to set the stage, to offer a libation, into what this is about. The ancient traditions of Igbo people, the Igbo people are from Eastern Nigeria, is to create a building and dedicate this building to a goddess, Ala, this building is not designed to last. This building is designed to be eaten up by the Goddess, the Goddess of the Earth. So it's an art form that is dedicated to decay, that is dedicated to rupture, that is dedicated to vanishing. It's not built to last, it's built to be given away so to speak. I'm inspired by the work of writers like Chinua Achebe, one of the quotes of Chinua Achebe is that the impatient idealist says, give me a place to stand and I shall move the Earth. But there is no place to stand. Such a place doesn't exist, we move at the world's pace. Mbari is a desire to move conversation at the world's pace. It's not a quest for truth, at least not truth in the final analysis, in that Western notion of arrival. But it's not a quest for final arrangements, it's not a quest for critique. It's not a desire for agreement or consensus. And Mbari is a desire to have a conversation in such a way that it falls to the more than human that might be best expressed by a proverb, and Igbo proverb that says if a meal is properly cooked, it will reach the ants. So maybe we're having a conversation in such a way that it might reach ants. How might it feel to have a conversation to talk in ways that are not about finding some universal notion, but about allowing it to decay, allowing it to wash away to disappear. 

The things that will be said between elder john and myself are diffractive composed, I don't think we're searching for consensus, or a manifesto, we're looking for a meal that might serve goddesses that might feed ants. So we invite you to take whatever, whatever is resonant. And if there are questions that emerge from this diffractive experiment, then all the better.  And with that I again, elder john, thank you so much for being in conversation with me. I was struggling with how to start, the best place to start, how do I start such a conversation? Well, the first question that I feel might be a beautiful rabbit hole to get into is the one that is already in the title. Why don't we get along? Why don't we just have peace on Earth? It's a lowball. It's a softball. I think that's the expression. But I think we can swing, we can swing away from there, see what happens. So elder.

john a. powell It's great to be in conversation with you. I'm looking forward to it, both today and in the future in your role with the Institute, you know that question reminds me of Rodney King, and I know some of the listeners are from the United States, some are from other parts of the world, but Rodney King, was beat on film by the LA police. He was down on all fours. It went to trial, the police went to trial, and they were acquitted. There was a second trial, and they were convicted, and then he became somewhat famous. And one of the comments was, why can we just get along? So in some sense, he posed that question, there is a lot in that question. Like, there are many questions. It's not clear that we want to get along. Who are we that want to get along? In Rodney King's case, an African American man, the police talked about him being big and scary. They were not trying to get along with them. They're trying to make him submit. They were trying to dominate. And so I think people, we and people on Earth, and in our communities, in our home, part of the thing is what is our intention? What are we showing up? There's also a question of what supports us? How our physical space, our psychological space, our moral space is organized. Because we navigate these spaces and they activate different things. And so I think it's not inevitable that we don't get along, but it's certainly not inevitable that we do. I think we have agency in this, and the agency is not just personal, agency is also how we interact with our environment? So one way of reframing the question would be, what do we need to do if we want to get along?

Báyò Akómoláfé Right, I know the Rodney King story and, in fact, I believe it was part of the storying of this conversation, and that question is, yes, it is, I feel it's theoretically dense, and inviting. It's juicy. There's something that wants to be said there. And thank you for sharing that. I want to go deeper into how we frame belonging, and how we think about belonging, especially in these times when it seems while we're in a time of war, and strife, not just on the African continent, and Kenya just went through a largely peaceful election process, not the same in Nigeria, where I come from, where there are warring tribes and parties that no longer represent the people. America, the United States of America, seems to be an exemplar for weaponized divisions today. And those of us in the so-called Global South observing, are asking these same questions. How come there are these strange and rabid divisions where the left is unable to speak with the right or the right with the left? And what does it invite us to do with our aesthetics and politics, especially the ones that seek belonging, that seeks to build home for the many instead of the few.

john a. powell I think a very important question, when looking at the world, whether it's the United States or Kenya, or Nigeria, or India, Argentina, there's a strife everywhere. In some ways we're, you know, it's almost like in the biblical discussion of the tower of Babylon, where people came together and were building this heaven, and then they were cursed by having different languages and division, and they start fighting each other. In some way we're being pushed together in the world. It used to be that Nigeria was a long ways away, it's not anymore. It used to be that India was, from the United States perspective, some strange, exotic place. It's not anymore, it's next door, it's on your smartphone, in a sense, we're bumping up against each other and we haven't really gone through the process of actually living a world where we all belong. 

From my perspective, our connection to each other is real. It's not just an aspiration, it's not just academic, but we don't live that way. Our connection to the Earth, our connection to the ants, it's already there, but we're objecting we're saying "No, not them, not them." And yet, we have no choice except to learn how to, as you say, get along or belong to each other. And we see each other as a threat. And we don't come to that by ourselves, we're helped. the stories that we inhabit the movies that we watch, the fear that animates much of our lives. You know, we have, I think, a tremendous capacity, as we've talked about the beginning, to create, to tell stories, to fix meals, we also have deep anxiety, deep fear. And so both of those things are there. And unfortunately, we spend way too much time feeding one and not the other, feeding our fear, feeding our anxiety, feeding our threat, and so we act that way. Everyone seems like a potential threat. Every group seems like a potential threat. And part of that, I think, is also possessiveness, right? It's like, "It's not our Earth, it is my Earth. It's not our country's country, our water, it's my water," you know, where we have that "my" in opposition to everybody else, we're going to have conflict.  I think that's the challenge, can we recognize that not only is it our Earth, our water, our food, that the only way we really thrive is when we hold each other, when we see each other, when we recognize each other. But that's not the way we've grown up. In many cases. It's not the way political systems are organized. I think when you dig deep into belonging, the idea of left and right starts to melt away. We're talking about life. We're talking about, you know, when you look at a baby, is a baby left or right? You know, most of us when we see a baby will sort of move with love and deep connection. What's that baby's politics?

Báyò Akómoláfé Maybe one more before, I realize I'm asking more questions, but if that's all I have to do here, it's fine.

john a. powell I have a few questions for you as well. 

Báyò Akómoláfé Okay. Just one more, just one more. It's really about the political imaginaries that are the contemporary political projects of today. And whether they're able to hold the weight, the ontological weight of this desire for belonging. I mean, you spoke about Gods and towers of Babylon. One unnamed God, in the pantheon of gods in Yoruba land, was a musician who's widely considered the father of afrobeat Fela Anikulapo Kuti, whose music ushered us into this session, and he would, he would rail against democracy, and call it crazy demonstration, beautiful music, hip, jiving music. But his point was, this political imaginary seems to have been imposed upon us as a people, and it's actually carving us apart, cleaving us apart. So that inspires me to ask about the dynamics of the politics afoot today, which some might name, you know, in the cadence of inclusivity or justice. What is it about these approaches, these modes of encounter that might actually get in the way of our desire to belong, to build home projects for each other?

john a. powell Well, there's a lot in that question and the Othering & Belonging Institute, I'm the founding Director, but the issue of belonging, you know, we draw inspiration from all over the world. As you know, my daughter was born in Tanzania and I worked in South Africa and these concepts of belonging, you know, it's in reality, belonging, we literally are born, as humans are connected to another being. And how we express that belonging, may vary from band to band, from nation to nation, but all of us need to belong, we need to belong to the Earth, we need to belong to each other, then we may have our particular ways of expressing it. Just like we may have our particular ways of recognizing the divine. And sometimes that particularity becomes us-ified you know, it's like, the way you eat, we all need to eat, but doesn't mean eat the same food. Doesn't eat the same way. Do we eat with a hand? Do we eat with a chopstick or do we eat with a spoon? And there's a concept called schizogenesis. I'm reading a book now called The Dawn of Everything, and the idea of schizogenesis is that sometimes we define ourselves against something else. If you do something, you like jazz, okay, I like rock, you know, you like hot, I like cold. And it's not just that I like cold, it's that I'm trying to distinguish myself from Báyò, so that whatever he likes, I like the opposite. I think even if that is a relationship, that's a relationship itself. And we have multiple expressions of ourselves, within ourselves, and collectively. But I think sometimes we celebrate differences that are not necessarily as important as we think they are. Right? And it gets organized politically. You know, when you look at strife and war and stuff, it's not just two people having a fight. It's someone, usually a leader, the elites are saying, you don't like those people. They're not like us. They don't eat like us. And usually we do a caricature, those people become flat, don't really know them. We only know them in our imagination. We don't know their aspiration, their pain, their suffering, their joys. 

So that's part of it. I mean, we do need to get to know each other, and we do need to co-create. The last thing I'll say is on the issue of democracy, we have people at the Institute who are from Africa, and they raised the question "Is democracy a western idea?" And you sort of indicated Báyò, you know, that book, Dawn of Everything, the author's make the point that many of these concepts that were associated with the West actually don't come from the West, they come from the Indigenous community. So we need to be careful not to just attack something and then throw it out because we assume this is Western. The roots of democracy, at least as I understand it, is that is co creation that people get to create the thing they belong to, if they want to create something different, call it something different, that's fine. As opposed to domination, as opposed to someone imposing something on them, many different expressions of democracy in the United States, which would be a democracy, it's never really been a democracy, it's what my friends Michael Omi and Howard Winant would call a racial dictatorship, where one group dominates another group and that's the antithesis, at least in my understanding, or what we mean when we say co-creation of democracy.

Báyò Akómoláfé I'm going to pause here and invite you to ask questions.

john a. powell You traveled many parts of the world, are living in Chennai right now, from Nigeria. Tell us a little bit about your journey, and about what keeps you grounded? What keeps you moving forward? What keeps you sort of, in this process of co-creating a future? Where do you draw inspiration from?

Báyò Akómoláfé This might sound trite and ordinary, but yeah, it's ordinary, and it's beautiful. I draw inspiration from my family, from my children, from my life partner, my wife. My story of migration is, and just in the backroom, we're speaking about the migration of God, the Yoruba God, a trickster, who left the shores of Africa and traveled with, this isn't a apocryphal account for those who are just hearing the story for the first time, who traveled with the slaves, as the elders in my part of the world tell the story, aboard those ships. And the question is always why? Why did he do that? Why didn't he just save them? Why did he not just intercept his brother, the God of Iron and Victory, Ogun, from saving the situation, from mounting successfully, mounting an insurgency, and some of the tentative answers, responses given to that are, without these departures, belonging is impossible. Without the going away, we may not be able to meet ourselves as if for the first time. 

I don't want to sound essentialist, but in many senses, I feel I was conditioned, my philosophies, my politics, my upbringing, I grew up in a very traveling family, my father was a diplomat. So I grew up wanting always to travel like that God Èṣù, whose one desire when when asked by the chief god, Olódùmarè, all the others said, we want the power of lightning, I want the power of the ocean, and he said, I just want to see the world, I want to travel. I feel that desire to travel, kind of innovates me and activates my politics. It brought me from Nigeria to India. I dwell well within the foreign and the strange, maybe that's part of my psychological resistance, subconsciously, of learning the Tamil language, but that's a different story. Because I don't want it to be familiar. At least this is what I tell myself, for my failures, my repeated failures to learn the language. But this inspires me, stories of adventure, not adventure in the medieval sense, but adventure in the sense of novelty is just at the edge of the horizon, that there is something else, something we're not able to think within our political imaginaries. Something we're not able to calculate or anticipate or articulate within the lexicon available. So we need to be a trickster. We need a trickster to burst open new pathways for us, if you will. 

john a. powell Thank you, I have one more question. Having some attraction to the foreign and liking to travel, maybe even more than liking to travel, needing to travel. One of the things as I look at the world, I think of the word alien, and the word foreign, are very close and people are being animated by fear. Fear is a very old emotion, you know, even animals have fear, this is part of the oldest part of the brain. So if you're acting out of fear, you have a big playground to play in. And apparently, one of the things that can be animated in our world today is the fear of the other, the fear of the foreign, the fear of the unknown. And yet, we're being asked to actually engage with people who are in some ways different, but in many ways, like us. And so I wonder in your travels, if you're seeing that and how you know, virtually every society that's roiling, has a story about the other. They substitute different people in the story. So the United States is Blacks and immigrants, in India it may Muslims, in Europe it may be Turks or Syrians, and it's always foreigners, those foreigners, those other people who are not part of the "we." And in your travels, and this is a footnote, my daughter's first language was Tamil. We were living in India, my daughter was muttering and a woman said, "Why don't you respond to her?" And I said "no she's just babbling." And she said, "no she's not babbling, she's asking for milk." How have you sort of processed that? You have a curiosity, I can tell you have deep curiosity. So what's foreign to you is inviting. It's part of knowledge, but to a lot of people it's the edge of fear. How do you move from the foreign being a threat to the foreign being knowledge?

Báyò Akómoláfé I mean, when I first came to India, I felt a cultural shock, it was the shock of being in a place where I wasn't part of the crowd, like Nigeria is the largest Black nation on Earth. I would disappear in an instant. But I suddenly stood out. And not just that I stood out, but I was, it felt like I was called out because the billboards around our home, were plastered with advertisements around Fair and Lovely cream, I remember when I walked down the street to the grocery store, people would gather to look at me, you know, like, if I was this strange being, it was very uncomfortable at first. And it tested me for a bit. I won't go down that rabbit hole except to say that I started to open up myself to the experience of even being objectified by the touch, what it meant to be stabilized by a different gaze, the gaze of another, right? What would it mean to stay here and to inhabit this place and to touch it, and to see what happens? So instead of enacting an approach of reactivity of just lashing back, I embraced conversation. I embraced hospitality as a way of breaking the spill of the image, like Èṣù slipping away with the slave ships, I also slipped away from the image that I had been assigned to, the pre-designated boxes that had my name on it. And with that, I met new people, new friends, new community, new ideas. Maybe the point here for me is society's co-create their monsters, and they need monsters sometimes. Right? In order to say this is where you dwell. This is the boundary of sanity. This is the boundary of morality. Don't go to the places where dragons are. Dragons are yonder, we create monsters and monsters have been cultural tools for us to create settlement, but over time, settlement starts to get carceral. It begins to get incarcerating. So we develop something that I call settlement cognition, in our ways of thinking, and organizing and marking the world. 

At those times, I think the work to do is to embrace the monster. Such as I've been embraced here, to the community that I call family is to embrace the monsters, to take monsters for picnics. The monster is the edge of settlement, is the edge of novelty, until we come to a place where there is shadow, where there is depth, where there's uncertainty, Until we learn to live with the noise, you know what scholars like Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman  call Black Geographies, Black Noise, until we learn to live with that noise we will continue to live with within this toxic cyclicity of repeating the same old images were used to and continue to otherize even the angels that have been sent to us. So I was a monster, in many senses still a monster, but I'm learning to live within that paradigm and to embrace it, and to also see that as an invitation for me to cast my eyes on the horizon and see the masks dancing beyond my own fences. Maybe then new political imaginaries might be possible, gifted to me by the monster.

john a. powell So I want to make space for other questions and for questions from the audience, but I have one more. What you just said was so beautiful and powerful. I just want to excavate it a little bit. And excuse me, in the translation, but one of the things we talk a lot about is bridging. How do you connect with people who are supposedly others? How do you connect with people who are supposedly the monster? What you described in part was your being cast as the monster, but you did the opening up, you did that. And a lot of people say, "Why should we have to be the ones doing the bridging?" Why do we have to actually extend ourselves? Which sounds like what you've done. People say, you know, "We're experiencing trauma, we're experiencing pain. No, I'm not going to extend myself." In fact, some people even go so far as to say, "I'm gonna be that monster. And I'm gonna breathe fire and not love." So, how do you respond to that? And, and you talked about the trickster, one of the things to think about is play, you know, turn things on their head, you don't quite see it coming. And it takes an openness to really play. It takes a curiosity to really play. And I don't know that we know how to play anymore. Most of us have forgotten how to play. That's one of the sad things, children know how to play. Adults have, by and large, forgotten that. So yeah, what do you say to people who say, you know, I'm being other, and I'm pissed and angry and slapping back, I'm not going to extend myself in conversation to the other.

Báyò Akómoláfé I think, with great compassion to those responses, I think most of the time when we respond in that way, we fail to see, or we obscure, the gift that is refusal, that is the invitation to play. As you eloquently said, elder, the trickster is the invitation to move from side to side, to break the posture that we're used to, to play like children. That's a gift, that's the decolonial. Decoloniality for me is playful cosmology, is the call to create a new, is the call to leave the familiar behind and dwell within the Black Noise of the uncertain. And then to see what happens there. Just like the people, the Inuit people that have this beautiful ritual called qarrtsiluni, I think I'm pronouncing that right, which is sitting in the dark waiting for something to happen. And it's part of this whaling tradition, of co-creating a song, but the lyrics are not clear to you at the point of creating a song. So they go into this room, and they sit, and they're still and somehow through the ordinary. And I started our conversation by speaking about the ordinary, being more extraordinary than the extraordinary. But somehow the ordinary gifts, the moment, the darkness, the lyrics of the song that wants to be born. So I in that way, I feel that when we say for instance, that I don't want to extend myself, I deeply understand that in my bones, because I was there as well. But the invitation to extend oneself exceeds conversations about entitlement and rights and privileges. It's the trickster, is a trickster giving us an advantage to break outside of the settlement cognitions and colonial bubbles of identity with which we framed our worlds and our homes. So it's actually a gift. It's an advantage is a plus, to exceed those boxes to move outside of the way. And this is what I think of as refusal, or what I often write of as ontofugitivity. It's about us escaping the plantation that belaborers or uses our labor to create worlds. And one of the ways that I think that is done is through very colonial stabilizing static notions of identity that we're here and there's nothing else to be known about us. This is who you are, is very platonic. Where you sit, that is all there is to you. This is not my cosmology, the world that I come from means that I always travel, that the local and the diasporic are entangled with each other. My response to that is, is duplicitous. I understand, on the one hand, why people would respond that way. And I understand the politics that make that possible. But I also long for something more than critique, I also long for something more than just the politics we're used to. I long for flight. I long to move away from the shores that I'm used to, because it doesn't seem to be working for even those that are privileged anymore.

john a. powell Thank you. I see questions are coming in. So I'll turn it back to you. And I'm reminded, I know Toni Morrison basically said, paraphrasing, that if you want to destroy a people take away their dreams. That's partially what she's saying, dreaming is one of the places that we play, one of the places that we break out of the static so in terms of being colonized, it's not just our physical bodies, it's in our minds, our capacity to dream.

Báyò Akómoláfé Yes, yes, it's that even sometimes in our attempts to address the ills, the oppressive ills of colonial arrangements, we feed those arrangements, we reinforce them, we reinscribe the hurt and the pain. So the gift of refusal, the gift of play, is to dance away from those algorithms, so that we might find other ways to compose reality, to compose belonging. And this might be, I'm noticing the question "How do we play when we feel physically and emotionally unsafe with others?" For me, elder, belonging isn't something that comes from human longings. Belonging is a dense materiality, its animacy. It's multispecies solid, it's not just how we feel. It's not just the legal frameworks. It's not just the architecture, it's not just inclusivity. Of course, you've written extensively about that. It's also viruses and microbial activisms in our guts, it's also texture and color and a nonhuman world. So that belonging bodies, bodies do not precede belonging, belonging creates subjectivity, it creates our bodies. So there will be moments when we feel unsafe, physically and emotionally. And I don't think I can speak in some universal sense and say, stay there and see what happens. We have to deal with each specificity as it comes. But there is I think, even in the most oppressive circumstances, as African elders would attest to, even in the most oppressive, dark places, there is a glimmer of hope there is a glimmer of light, there is a trickster traveling with a fragile, precious treasure, to plant in the diasporic, to do strange things with it. So on safety, uncertainty might produce strange things. The work then is to create community for us to hold and cultivate the resilience to stay with that trouble together. I'm using Donna Haraway;s phrase "stay with the trouble."

john a. powell The questions are pouring in, and so we're taking another one. But, people have heard me talk about my family, you mentioned that's part of your inspiration. Both parents of mine have passed now, so I'm an orphan, in a way, but they left me so much, including my siblings, but if I were to chronicle all the difficulties of my parents life in terms of being sharecroppers in the South, in terms of watching and being aware of people being killed and literally lynched of when I was a young man and my dad's furnace blew up in his face and we're driving around Detroit, looking for a hospital that will accept a Black man into the hospital, there's a lot of what we might call trauma or pain, and yet, if you had met my mom and dad, some of you have, the story of that pain, and their story would seem to be incongruent. There was so much love. My mom was a trickster. My dad was a bodhisattva. And I feel some of that maybe has rubbed off on me. 

And I don't want to belittle people's pain and suffering through pain, at the same time, if we just stay there, then that starts to define us. Pain is like there's a second and third injury from the pain. It's not just that, it is the second and third injury. We can't see anything else. One last story, before we take another question, I had an uncle, he passed away. When we were young men, he was not much older than me, but still my uncle, a Yellow Jacket flew into his ear and his response was to cup his ear. And he's running down the street streaming. And we're saying, you know, remove your hand, and of course, the Yellowjacket, as you know, is a wasp and it kept stinging him over and over again. And his holding his ear, made it so the Yellowjacket couldn't get out, and he essentially lost his hearing. And his reaction was understandable, but in many ways, it made things worse as well.

Báyò Akómoláfé That feels like a trauma response. It's how we hold it in. The efforts to get rid of the pain become the efforts to contain it.

john a. powell So one question is, how can we teach one another to play the role of the trickster, identity smasher, new world creators? I'll start but then I will turn it over to Báyò. Báyò shared with us his tradition and family in Nigeria, many of us I would think are not Nigerian, maybe some of you are, many of us have had different traditions. So I don't know if we can completely, without more work, without more investigation, interrogate tricksters. I think it is something to sort of orient us in a certain way. And we may have our own way of playing, our own way of actually engaging, what I call my multiple identities. I think that if we, I think we are multiple identities. And the reason we don't experience that is there's something holding us back, the something we're taught not to actually investigate, experience, relax into, or multiple identities. And one of the things about playing we think about kids, when they play at the times they play, from a space of multiple identities. They take on different characters, they take on, they'll be a bird, there'll be a river. So they're doing that very early, and then we teach them to stop. You're not a bird, you're not a river, you stay. You're this, you're John. So I think part of it is going back to that. And then Báyò talked about different traditions, and even rituals that help us play, we may need that as well. And so for example, obviously, music, dance, that's about playing, that's about taking on something different. So I think that we may have to think about and invite playing back into our lives, both individually and collectively. Now you're back now so let me turn this over to you.

Báyò Akómoláfé I think we started to speak about tricksters too much and so the place got dense, the technology cannot hold the weight of our conversation. I apologize. Um, my first response to the question about identity, bursting work, smashes, and the trickster is that I do not think of humans as tricksters. I think of the trickster as this energetic flow, this liminal quality that shapes new possibilities, which enlists humans, as well as nonhumans, and it's always invitational. It's an invitation like the others. I heard you saying it's an invitation to play. Now, the trickster's deepest work is to break open binaries. Is to disturb binaries, whether it's between God and man, man and woman, or heaven and hell, or language and reality or reason and emotion is to burst. The idea that these are binaries and to find a way, one might call it a third way between the cracks of binaries. 

So I often think of politics or an aesthetic on art, that is in response to the trickster, as post activism, or as making sanctuary, that is an invitation to play, to compose from the fabric of our loss in our grieving, and our not knowing an art, a way of keeping track of our bodies, so to speak. So in the places where we don't know, in the places where we're not sure any longer, in the places where we feel defeated, where we feel like we're failed, and we're failures, and there are lots of stories to be told about the educational system in India, and how it co produces failure as a phenomenon. In those places. I think I think that the Trickster abides, the Trickster dwells in the cracks in modernity. So we think that things don't add up. You want to gravitate towards those things, and find a community to hold you and hold that precious thing that wants to emerge. Grieving together is trickster work, playing together is trickster work, sitting in the dark and waiting for something to happen is trickster work? So wherever you find openings in the explanation we give to things, that is the invitation to the trickster, I think.

john a. powell Thank you. And I'm going to read one more question. "I am Asian from an all white community in Ohio. I spent time in Kenya where I was [a monster], but it was easy to embrace being a monster there. I find it impossible to do it in this country, though. Why?" Let me just speculate, obviously, we don't know why. I've lived in Africa, I've lived what's now called Navajo or Hopi, and I remember people coming up to me and seeing me as the other. But there was no, it was almost like a just a fact, it wasn't like I'm going to beat you up. It didn't have the sight of the kind of toxicity that I find, sometimes being Black in America carries with it, and so I was the other, but there was a certain, I don't know what the right word is, but there's a certain openness, curiosity, just matter of fact, and so in a sense that was places to move. I remember one of the things I used to do, when I lived on the Navajo and Hopi reservation, I used to stand on my head a lot, doing yoga, and people sometimes when they would get a little frustrated with me would say "go stand on your head." But I've never heard someone who is being hostile to me because of their racism, say "go stand on your head", it's like they say cease to exist, they say "you're a threat, go away." So that was my experience. But I have had the experience of being the other in different cultures, where it wasn't a threat, where it wasn't quite as hard, or it wasn't crusted in some way, and there was the possibility of movement. In the United States, I feel like it's much harder in some way. There's a much larger narrative and their structure to support that narrative. And it's a collective narrative. So that's my idea. Do you want to respond to that as well?

Báyò Akómoláfé Yeah, I do. I think the United States has, this is where this speaker is from, is speaking from Ohio. Right? So I think the United States has a lot of practice of being empire, and empires eventually start to, after using up all the resources, natural resources, human resources, when you run out of resources, they might commodify monsters as well. Right? And take the other and contain it in an algorithm of indigestibility, put it in a family way so that it continues to reproduce for them, which is my highfalutin way of saying that some other cultures that I've also had the privilege of living with always have others. You know, it's almost inescapable that we co-produce the other in co-producing place, but they have healthy encounters with the other. Yoruba people have a sense of the crossroads, that is they say that the crossroads interpenetrates everything, that if you go to a marketplace and you bend down and you look at the world, between your legs, you know the world behind you, you will find monsters ,so that they're not far away. They're not in the wilds beyond fences. They are right here with us, and we're indebted to them. So Yoruba people pray to Èṣù, they say come close, but not too close. So there's this healthy fascination with the trickster, but also a deep respect for the tricksters to engage risk.  I feel this is entirely missing in empire, or at least so repressed or pushed down as to be of no consequence. It's that even monsters are now game for capitalist reproduction. And so it's almost impossible to have that conversation in that space. What needs to happen, maybe I would venture out to say, is a break, a break in transmission, or else empire will keep on reproducing itself. So something needs to interpenetrate that model, and invites falling apart. And I'm not speaking in terms of nation states falling apart, I'm speaking in terms of people meeting the trickster in local puddles of refusal, and finding a new world of play that could not have been possible if they stuck within those empiric assemblages.

john a. powell So we're almost out of time. I'm gonna throw out one more question and give a quick response. The question is, "Is emotional justice and belonging linked, is emotional justice and belonging linked?" And let me just add one thing to what Báyò just said. I'm here in the United States. I'm in Berkeley, California. So things may seem very solid, but they're not. I was in Africa, doing work on ending apartheid when Steve Biko was killed. I was actually doing postgraduate work. So I was studying what was happening in southern Africa. And when Steve Biko was killed, I felt like South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, they will never become post-colonial. In a few years later, apartheid era began to crumble. I miss the fragility of it, it looked like this huge empire, if you will. And so I think that even as we think about empire, there's a fragility to that, and part of the people themselves. And we're running out of time, so I'm not going to it, but I thought I wants to sort of distinguish between empire and the people that, for the most part, white, black, straight, gay, are trapped in this empire, sort of, and we're not all on the set position, but this empire is weighing upon all of us, and it's fragile. The fragility in part can be accelerated by belonging, by the trickster. But if we see it as this big thing that can't change, it actually freezes us as well. 

Báyò Akómoláfé And so in terms of your question, is emotional justice and belonging linked? I would say yes, but they're not the same. To me, belonging already exists. We don't live it. We don't celebrate it. We don't acknowledge it. But it's there. We're always connected, always belonging to each other. We already belong to the Earth, we may not recognize that. Justice is something is different. Justice is not something that's already there. I would say yes, but I struggle with the term emotional justice, the phrasing of that, maybe I would invite more conversation about emotional justice as a concept. But yes, justice and belonging play with each other, but there are also moments when it seems this trope of belonging that we're building concepts around where it pushes out, and it seeks new ways of traveling when home is no longer hospitable. What do we do? Maybe that's how I end that or respond to that question. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to this special episode of the edges in the middle with Báyò Akómoláfé and john a. powell. The music you heard today was Adonia's Lullaby, In Memory of Samir Awad, and The Long Night of Octavia E Butler by Sons of Kemet. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Francesca Glaspell, and Julia Jackson.