Transcript: The Edges in the Middle, III: Báyò Akómoláfé and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor I don't believe that we can achieve anything resembling human fulfillment within the structures of capitalism.
Ayana Young For The Wild is honored to present the Edges in the Middle, a series of conversations between Bayo Akomolafe and thought companions like john a. powell, V, Naomi Klein, and more. These limited episodes have been adapted from Bayo's work as the Global Senior Fellow at UC Berkeley's Othering and Belonging Institute. In this role, Bayo has been holding a series of public conversations on issues of justice and belonging for the institute's Democracy and Belonging Forum, which connects and resources civic leaders in Europe and the US who are committed to bridging across differences to strengthen democracy and advance belonging in both regions and around the world. Bayo's conversations encourage us to rethink justice, hope and belonging by sitting amidst the noise, not trying to cover it up with pleasant rhythms. To learn more about the Democracy and Belonging Forum, visit democracyandbelongingforum.org.
Bayo Akomolafe I want to say a few things again, as I'm now traditionally known to, about what this is. This is an experiment in conversation. This is an experiment in the Mbari, which is the Ibo. The Ibo people are from Eastern Nigeria. They are a noble people, powerful people, beautiful stories, and wonderful cosmologies. Part of that cosmology is this art form, which we have tried to articulate these conversations around. The idea of the Mbari isn't to arrive summarily to a notion of truth. We're not looking for truth here. As important as that designation is, we're not looking for a way to arrive at consensus or agreement, as useful as those are strategically as well. The idea here is to listen with each other, to listen defractively, to create art, with words and textures and memory and feeling that allows us to see each other, including you, listening, as gestures, minor gestures, instead of stabilized points in space-time. So we are not atomic entities trying to finalize our positions. We are touching each other, so to speak, and creating art with our conversation that we allow to be composted by the Earth. Nothing that is said here needs to be grasped, as some final principle of fundamental reality. We give it back to the earth, just as the Ibos with the Mbari process will give their art forms back to the earth to be eaten by the Goddess Ala. So it's with that that I welcome you to this conversation that is premised and derives from an essay that I wrote a couple of months ago, not too long ago, January, I think it was published in February by my people here at the Institute.
And the premise of this conversation is what if justice gets in the way, now that doesn't sound right. Justice feels like the thing to arrive at. It's where it's what we all want. To say justice gets in the way or to suggest that it might get in the way is to trouble the relationalities, the way we relate with the public, especially how black bodies are situated within modern civilization. It is to cast our gaze beyond our fight for inclusion and to kind of bring in a historicity–a history, a narrative, a storytelling tradition that stretches beyond the moments of capture and captivity. And beyond that, not just into the past, but into the future, into a speculative future, to ask questions about what we are doing, and what is being done to us in our quest for justice, right? So I don't know that there is any other person that I would like to have this conversation with this [inaudible], except Keeanga, Professor Keeanga Taylor, I have followed and admired her voice in the United States for some time. And when the prospects of this came up, I jumped at it, not only because of the soul, and the rigor with which she speaks to these matters, matters of justice. But because of... let me call it a weather of wisdom that surrounds her. So it is my great pleasure to bring Keeanga into the virtual space. Welcome, sister.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor Thank you. Thank you very much. Looking forward to the conversation.
Bayo Akomolafe And you're joining us from Philadelphia.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor Yeah.
Bayo Akomolafe The seat of democracy,
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor The birthplace of American democracy, whatever on earth that is worth.
Bayo Akomolafe And what feels what feels very, very urgent, and very, very potent right now? To say, as we dive into this is, how do you feel about that question? How did it land with you? The problematic, troubling idea that justice by getting away, and then we move wherever we want to go? This is emergent.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor Sure. Well, thank you again, for the invitation. And, you know, thank you for the provocation that is your essay. Um, I think I mean, there are a few immediate things that come to mind. For me, one of which is the question of I mean, some of this is specific to the essay, which is the audience, in terms of who it is that you're writing to, because in some ways, you know, I think that the participation in Black Lives Matter, and it's many different iterations is quite varied. And, you know, people come to this desire for movement, from different positions from, with different thoughts, with different politics. So that's one thing. I think when you know about the question of justice, does justice get in the way? Is justice limiting? You know, I think, yes, and no. Yes, in the sense that, you know, if we only conceive of justice, in the existing political paradigm, if we only conceive of it, in the ways, the narrow and confined ways that an American context and American ruling class conceives of that, then, of course, justice is incredibly limited. And we saw that throughout the different kinds of responses of Black Lives Matter. So we could talk about the first wave of protest with Black Lives Matter in 2014 and 2015, where, you know, the main kind of sense of reform in forms of justice had to do with police commissions and, you know, making sure that the police had body cameras. You know, the second wave of protests, you know, produced this George Floyd Policing Act, which was, you know, kind of toothless, and, you know, different things that basically keep the system of policing intact. So there's a kind of normative sense of justice and reform that, you know, is attractive to some people.
I think that there's also when I say no, there's also I think, a more capacious sense of justice that comes from people engaged in the movement itself, and it comes from people who are oppressed. And so I think that in that sense, justice is not just about tools meant to restrain the police or restrain the violent impulses of the state. Justice is about what do we have to do to live more meaningful lives. And so that I think is is important, which is to say that these concepts are not stable, and deliver to us from on high or deliver to us in the forms that, you know, that they emerge from, through the enlightenment, you know, that the struggles of oppressed people have also changed their meaning, or at least put the meaning of seemingly stable categories into conflict and contestation. And so the one thing that I had questions about in the essay is, are you holding these concepts to be too stable, to see only as a manifestation of the desires of the West only as a manifestation. So we think about justice or freedom, only, as they are conceived of by those who put them into the universe at a particular point in time, and had a very specific meaning of them. In the United States, the colonial leaders understood freedom in a particular way, because they all held slaves, they knew what the absence of freedom look like. And so their conception of freedom was organized in response to slavery. But of course, enslaved people had a very different sense of what freedom was. And so that is just to say that, I think that these concepts which on the surface seem to be reflections of the dominant class and what it is that they desire are contested and fought over, and have come to assume different meaning from the oppressed themselves. I think that we have to integrate that complexity into the discussion about what seems like stable categories to begin with.
Bayo Akomolafe Yeah, I totally resonate with that there is a move that is threaded through the essay. And for those who are listening, as my brother a while ago said, this essay is called Black Lives Matter, But To Whom and it was published in February, and it's available on the internet, if you take a look at it. It's not. It's a long read. And I'm grateful that he went through it, but there's a move that is privileged in that essay, and that is to stabilize strategically if only for a moment accepting that justice and these concepts are contested and contestable. Right, but to stabilize it just for a moment of thought, to see what other moves are mobilized. And why that is, you know, you asked me just before we came on what precipitated, what led to this, what gave birth to this. Following George Floyd, event of George Floyd, we had a moment of our own. By we I mean, the biggest country in Africa because black nation on earth, right.
We had End SARS, that is end police brutality. SARS representing this violent force that calls into question our wanting to see more brothers and sisters [inaudible] power right it clears that a little. And in the struggle to end police brutality, many questions were formulated many ideas that have been gestating for a while found expression, just like the pandemic gave birth to new ideas about schooling and the workplace and organizational arrangements. This gave birth to questions around justice and what justice is doing. We started to have questions or have conversations about how justice is kneeling on our necks. Literally, you know, taking the figure of that police officer kneeling George Floyd's neck, and this has, you know, of course, what I tried to do is to trace those beautiful connections that have always existed between diasporic African communities and members of the African continent, right?
Blackness is meeting, Kwame, Uma, Martin Luther King, beautiful convergences. I feel there's a new conversation that is troubled or invited in. And I think these conversations are especially needed now, in a time when it seems at least from one perspective, that justice is imbricated with the continuity of modernity. So there is a sense, of course, like you, like beautifully notice that we can see justice as this enlightenment thing, right? It's never some transcendent notion. It is emergent from relationship, right? It's how we relate is negotiated. But there's also a sense in which it transcends or exceeds those troubling containments.
And we can start to see justice. We can even practice seeing justice as something to reach out for. But for now, through the agency of this essay, I wanted to ask questions about how bodies were imported into the human, into the Anthropos. Right. How Sylvia Wynter speaks about the man and what the man is doing, and what we're missing if we negotiate the public order, in a particular way. So the question for me, what are we missing? That is a hidden codicil of asking those questions about justice. What are we missing when we, you know, to use Fred Moten's voice, speak truth to power? What is left out when we do that? And where does fugitive city come in? How do we think about the figure of the fugitive through this conversation about what justice occludes? Right?
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor I mean, I guess, for me the problem that I have, because I think that those are, are legitimate questions to raise. I think they get raised in a different kind of context, here. And so this is what I brought up initially, about the audience. When I'm speaking to there, and you hinted at some of this, I think, well, for certain in the essay, particularly actually, when you're talking about the African context, and not so much in the US, but certainly in the African context, which is a question of class, the question of different interest. And so, part of the difficulty I have with the essay, and just in terms of understanding the nature of the debate and who is being argued with.
Bayo Akomolafe Who?
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor In the, in the US, the movement itself is deeply fractured, around questions of class, right, and class influences, then questions of strategy and tactics. And so what you are speaking to, absolutely applies to, and is the concern of a section of this thing that we call a Black Lives Matter movement. And there's also abolitionists within the movement. There are socialists in the movement, and people who reject the kind of normative parameters based on what is pragmatic and what is politically possible, in our current context. You know, those people populate the movement as well. And so part of the problem has been a kind of lack of engagement, a lack of debate and tension really, around these sorts of questions within the movement itself. They have been muted and papered over. And so that the kind of liberal voices, those who are most concerned with a kind of what I'm going to describe as a normative sense of justice, normative reforms, those voices have been allowed to dominate, and really capture and overwhelm the discussion about what for others is a question of Black liberation, and in questions that involved, you know, quote-unquote, how we might get free. And freedom based on the lack of coercion in making decisions about one's life. Like, what does it mean to achieve actual self determination. And so, you know, these questions of class and class-conflict among Black people in the United States, in particular, are quite profound, and may have resulted in a very bifurcated notion of what it is that we are fighting for, because there are people who are totally fine with leaving the hall of the slave ship, and just being on deck, you know, and letting the wind blow through their hair, and they're okay with that. And then there are other people who want to not just leave the slave ship, but set it on fire. So the problem is, is this is all still happening within these, this concept of community, this concept of a kind of shared Blackness, you know, shared experience. And so that, that's this part of what complicates my kind of thinking about the essay in answering some of the questions that you posed, because, to me, those are questions that really engulf a kind of liberal mindset that exists, absolutely, but are not shared throughout. You know, some of the folks, you know, what I might describe as the left of what we are calling the Black Lives Matter movement.
Bayo Akomolafe Right.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor You know, I don't think, you know, people who see themselves as abolitionists, these are, these are the kinds of ideas and debates that animate those politics is really about how do we look beyond the existing paradigms?
Bayo Akomolafe Yes.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor How do we imagine different ways of being, different ways of living? And these come into extreme conflict with other Black people, you know, who are who see problems with the status quo, but really, problems are about how they fit into it, not the status quo itself.
Bayo Akomolafe Inclusion.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor That is what you're addressing about the limits of inclusion? Yeah, of course, I Yeah. I wrote a book about this question as a kind of critique of postwar racial liberalism. And the idea that our sole objective in life is to reject exclusion and simply be included, without ever taking stock fully, of what it is that we are being asked to be included into.
Bayo Akomolafe You said something about coercion and articulated that with regards to freedom. Right? How would you, I'm going to use a word that I'm guessing I'm hoping that everyone might be familiar with – ontologies – the nature of the reality of. How would you think of freedom then? Freedom being this very... it's a gleaming data point in the intergenerational, trans-continental conversation about Blackness, right? We talk about freedom all the time, when Martin Luther King talked about freedom. Activism is about freedom. But a thread, if you think about it as a biological, or symbiotic thread that runs through some of my engagements, through the essay and beyond the essay, is the nature of freedom. Do you want to struggle with that? Let's struggle with that a little, sister?
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor Yeah, I mean, for one, freedom is deeply contested. What do we mean by freedom? So, you know, none of these are, as we said earlier, stable situated categories. And their meaning and inference and importance, frankly, change over time. Right.
Bayo Akomolafe [Inaudible) this sister, how do you think we are enacting freedom and performing it? And how do you think it's performing us within an architecture of socio-materiality and relationships? How are we enacting it even in demanding certain things of the system that externalizes and oppresses us?
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor Well, let me just say, what I, when I think of the, the idea of freedom, because I get asked this a lot like, what does freedom mean to you? What would liberation look like? And so I mentioned earlier, this idea of self determination, and what does it mean to make choices and decisions in one's life that are without coercion, and that you are thinking or motivated simply by one's desire to move from one place to another, from one thing to another, from one thought to another? And so for me, that gets somewhere in the realm of what freedom is, you know, I think that it's not, it's not wholly clear to me what it means or how it is ingested in our contemporary society. Is it the ability to vote? Is it to be free, it's often negative, right? It's like to be free from harassment, discrimination, these sorts of things, which to me, doesn't sound very free at all. And so, you know, I think that, of course, we have a political agenda that is limited by what people think, is possible by what people's expectations out of life have been ground down to. I think that it has been reduced to its most basic negative form, which is to kind of be left alone, which again, is not very free. And so the question I have for you, was really, what are you thinking about? Freedom as something that we should not strive for? Right. So what to you? What does it mean to be free? And what would it mean, to not have that as an objective as the center of a political struggle?
Bayo Akomolafe I think that and I'm deriving, or I'm sitting with a response that is grounded in these African stories and the ways that elders in my lands have, you know, alkalized the stories of capture and captivity and stayed with the trouble, you know of this, of freedom. Right? So running through what I'm sure you recognize as a Yoruba cosmology that it's talked about orishas is the is the idea of the pre-individual, which is, if you're listening, you might, you might recognize this as resonating with what a philosopher called Gilbert Simondon articulated. That is, we are not individuals as such that have the property of freedom, we are indebted to ecologies, right? We are not isolated. Modernity would have us see ourselves as separate beings like to have designation of free or not free, but there is a sense in which even the lack of coercion could be a bind. Right? That without the outward signs of being shackled, we are still tethered to systems and ways of being and ways of seeing. I just had a dear sister, Dr. Erin Manning say to me, or speak to me about the violence of sight, right.
That even neurotypicality is normal pathic and could execute some kind of capture. So holding these ideas of the notion of flow, that breaks down to distinctions between me and my environment. It calls the whole project of freedom into question. It troubles it. Freedom from what is not as powerful any longer as what is using us, what is instrumentalizing us, even without the outward signs of being coerced. How are we part and parcel of algorithms, systems, and ways of thinking that are sticky to get out of? How are we caught up in a death spiral? Right? So I don't know what lies beyond freedom.
I'm thinking right now of the way that I started out the essay, the crafts, running away from the plantation. What I should have added, or what I now think I want to add, if I get to modify the essay, is how, you know, historically, they still have trouble when they escaped. The question is escaping from what? Right? It's always the question of fugitivity. What are we escaping into? Because white modernity... the plantation wasn't as big asm what the plantation was serving, the real estate of white modernity was beyond the plantation. So my question is still what are we running into? How are we co-creating and co-performing freedom? If freedom is to imbricated within specific ways of being that are increasingly problematic, especially now that we know how to name the Anthropocene. I don't know what freedom leads to. All I know how to do is gesture towards something else explicit beyond my language and capacity. I would signal with the idea of shape shifting the crafts turning into birds. Octavia Butler speaking about bodies melting into other bodies. I'm not exactly sure how to think beyond freedom, because I'm part of this project as well. But I'm feel that we're at a turn, sister, we're at a point in our shared history is colonized and colonizing right, where the ship is in trouble. And now we have to ask new questions.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor I think, yes. I think that we do have to ask new questions. I also think that you know, I don't believe that we can create or conceive of a different kind of world from the one that we are currently situated in.
Bayo Akomolafe I agree. Yes.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor But I do believe that through the struggles of regular people, ordinary people, that those people have the capacity to create a different context and a different kind of social relation. I'm an anti-capitalist, I'm a socialist, and I believe that capitalism imposes certain material, social, political, spiritual constraints on individuals, socially, society, the whole thing. And I believe that it's also as a system that promotes this kind of self interest in itself, individualism. And so someone is asked about self determination. Is that in conflict with collectivity? I don't I don't think so. I'm not talking about self determination as individualism. I'm talking about the self as a collective body, like what is in the interests of the collective and is the collective that determines what is in its interests. And those interests are constantly in flux and changing. But I believe this is where maybe they're, you know, I'm a materialist.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor Me too. There's tension in like, even how to talk about some of these things. But I believe that people have the capacity to collectively determine in a given moment and circumstance, what it is that they need. And I believe that without the particular constraints and obstacles created by capitalism, or by systems that.. there's the kind of bureaucratic collectivist states that call themselves socialists.
Bayo Akomolafe Mmm, hmm.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor If we think of socialism as sharing an abundance, these are states that still have the kind of dynamic towards extraction, where the state was in control and ownership. But who owns the state? There was not democratic control of the means by which people govern themselves. They're not democratic control of the state itself. And so, I think that it's through that process of collective struggle, that people's ideas about what freedom is, what it means to them, in their particular context, changes. I don't know, I think this is kind of where I'm at with this question, because one of the things that occurred to me in the essay was, what is the mechanism? And so for me, the mechanism for the kind of social transformation that I'm talking about, is mass struggle.
Bayo Akomolafe Yes.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor And that mass struggle can't be in and of itself. It can't be struggle for just the sake of struggle. I believe that we have to change the ways the relations between each other. Change the relations between people, and how things are produced. I don't believe that we can achieve anything resembling human fulfillment within the structures of capitalism. And so, what is the mechanism for this kind of social transformation? It is the self activity of collective human beings through collective struggle. And so, one of the questions that I have for you was this question of mechanism.
Bayo Akomolafe Okay.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor How do we go from what we are in today to, as you say, walking away from the constraints of these objectives and concepts into something else that is not bound by these old ideas.
Bayo Akomolafe Yeah.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor What is the mechanism that propels that process?
Bayo Akomolafe Right. It's how people are peopled. That is, that is really, really energetically powerful for me right now. So let's read insights into each other, sister.
Bayo Akomolafe When you said I'm a materialist, I know that.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor Yeah.
Bayo Akomolafe I'm a materialist too. Of course I would often describe myself as a neo-materialist, along the lines of a posthumanism, of an animism that refuses to center human beings as independent actors, so that when we speak about people, I hear processes and I hear fungi,and I hear architecture and I hear texture and I hear algorithms that are streaming through the air so that there's a lot of porosity between the environment and people. So the question is, when you say, for instance, that it's people struggling, collective struggle, that is the mechanism for breakthroughs. I can sit with that. And I know that this is true at multiple levels in our history and our collective histories. We wouldn't have achieved what we achieve in terms of even living to have electricity in Nigeria, for instance, without people hitting the streets. People on the streets, you right now struggling against the tide of don't even need to mention it. You know, what's happening probably, a horrible electoral process. But the question for me still remains, how people are peopled? It's not simply about people struggling, it has never been about people struggling, because environments, create people, and not in a deterministic, final way. But even the ways that we come to struggle, even the ways we ask questions, the imaginations we have about what it means to be free, and all of that, is already a mark of a crossroads. There's multiple effects right there, so that it's never about just this monolithic entity struggling for a new dimension. It's how bodies interact with other bodies. And I wish I could, I could put my finger on beautiful and resonant examples that suggest that even with struggle, even as important as struggle is one wants to hold the tension of where struggle has only been equated us with the inheritance of repetition. That our struggle has, has sometimes led to the proliferation of the familiar. I will never forget, you know, listening to Bernie Sanders, saying that since the 70s, we've been struggling for a response to climate, climate chaos. And he would say, we have to respond to this yesterday, you know, the way that he speaks, we'll have to respond to this yesterday.
Bayo Akomolafe He would ask the question, why do we keep doing the same things over and over? Again, I think it's a question that haunts the idea that struggle is the soul or exclusive. Which I don't think is what you're saying, but hold that thread of thought, that struggle as the soul or exclusive mechanism for breakthroughs doesn't feel adequate in a posthumanist world, where people are peopled in different ways by their environments. I think about the mechanism of shifts as lingering in the breaks. And by the break, I mean to speak about places of deep errancy. I can situate errancy in terms of autism. I do this all the time. Having been a father of an autistic child, I feel that we have learned to pathologize spaces where novelty thrives.
And you could see this pathologization in terms of how we treat disabled people, how we treat minorities, and all of that, and autistic children. I think that they kind of embody and I don't want to binarize the neurotypicals and the autistics, but there is a dense sight of monstrosity. The monster to me is the cultural symbol of straying from the normal path. There is the monster. And I feel inquiry of politics that sits with tracing and understanding how we are imbricated with specific social analytics might allow us to do something different or see something different. Let me put it this way, sister. Now, the one problem for me is that we're part of a sensorial monoculture, that even protest and struggle could coexist side by side within a sensory monoculture that engulfs even those that we think are against us. We could be part imbricated with the very same systems.
I remember seeing a brother telling me that he wanted to get people away from Facebook. So his method of choice was to use Facebook to get people away from Facebook. It was entirely lost to him. The irony of getting people to do permaculture and away from Facebook by starting Facebook groups, right. It's just a comical example of the ways where imbricated within systems. Even our struggles are articulated within them. So speculatively, I think of the site of the zombie, zombie being this monster, but which is a decolonial entity, of course, with history in Haiti and Black culture.
I think of those sites as places of deep interest to me, that it's not enough for us to struggle, because struggle can codify or reinforce the very conditions under certain conditions that we're fighting against, but that we need a way of decentering the struggler. The question for me again, is who is struggling? What is struggling? Is there a stable identity behind the struggle? And if there isn't, if even the struggler is contested, and the struggle is contested, then what kinds of spaces can we co-enact that allows us to see differently, this is what I theorize as the monster. Stop here, for now.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor I agree that this is not a struggle for struggle sake, or that the quote-unquote, or hashtag-struggle, in and of itself, changes everything. For me, the possibility of a certain kind of struggle is a mechanism. And the reason why I see it as mechanism is because struggle from below is disruptive. It breaks the status quo. And it's within those moments of disruption and breaks within the status quo, that the other part of this becomes viable. And so the other part of this for me, is then politics. So there's the symbiosis with objective and subjective factors that create the space for different ways of thinking. And I have a million different examples of that. So it's not just that you struggle, it's also the ideas that imbue those struggles and those those Ideas are constantly being fought over. This is the history of the black struggle in the in the 1960s. But it was the movement itself, that opened up the possibility of thinking differently about the position of black people in the United States without any kinds of social disruption, which is represented. It is very difficult on a mass level, to bring in these ideas about black freedom, about liberation, about how black people could live differently. Not to an external audience, but to black people themselves. And so for me, without the disruption of struggle, because it's true fascist have mass marches. January 6, in the United States, was a protest, was a demonstration. So it's not just the ability to demonstrate. It's not just the ability to amass people in a certain location. I distinguish that struggles in the service of maintaining the status quo, struggles that are disruptive to it.
Those who are stewards of the status quo, may think that a particular movement can help it, is in service to it. But I believe that the longer that struggle, protests, demonstration, movement of some sort exists, that it raises questions about the stability of that society. Whether or not there is a particular kind of politics, that enter into those gaps, that enter into those fissures that raise new ideas and different ideas about what society is, what it could be, what its problems are, how to deal with those problems, how to respond to those problems? That's a political question. And that is a question that has to be debated and argued over. And, and that is not in and of itself a product of street demonstrations, but is a product of political struggle between individuals, between people who are in some kind of dialogue about how do we change things? I see those two things working in tandem with each other.
Bayo Akomolafe Oh beautiful. There is a sense, sister, here that I'm in touch with the violence of clock time. I really wish we had two hours to do this. I do have something to say… Iit really needs to be said that. At least, I want to say that I agree with the need for struggle. There is no dismissing that. There's no side-stepping. Like, oh, there's a new political movement afoot, let's get rid of it. No, there isn't any of that. But reality is never pure or categorical. It's promiscuous and unwieldy. There is also dot dot dot, the sense in which the ground beneath our feet, especially in Africa, is widening. You're relatively embodied by the crack that is literally dividing Africa into two running through Kenya at this moment, right? The ground beneath our feet is going and that we're finding more and more this to be the case that our struggle is eaten up. Right, there is some kind of a presumption of able-bodiedness, even in the call the clarion call to struggle, the fight to the power. Right.
So I'm asking, what do we say to my son, who will not look you straight in the eye because visuality is not the premise of his experience. Right? He looks to the side, right? He does not gentrify bodies visually. He looks to the side. What do we say to my son? What do we say to those people in Africa? Are we gonna say the same thing like, just keep struggling? Or is there something else that is possible? And this is not just a question for you, it's rhetorical. Is there something else that can be done within those cracks? Are those cracks, now, political agents in their own rights, inviting new cartographical projects, inviting new directions, without dismissing the need to engage the familiar?
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor And I would say that we shouldn't reify struggle as a single thing.
Bayo Akomolafe Right, absolutely.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor 20 year olds on the street, shaking their fist and running at cops. It is the ability to say no, either verbally, through what we do with our bodies, a refusal to participate.
Bayo Akomolafe Refusal.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor In one way or another. And so, the last thing I will say is that I agree that we absolutely run the risk of reflecting the forces that we are fighting against, I think that we see that profoundly in the US where the right wing is canceling books and banning books. And there is an impulse from parts of the left, when you step out of line, when you have a political thought, or say something that people disagree with, that there is a very intense reaction aimed at disciplining you into not saying it. And so these are mirrored patterns of each other. And I don't believe there's any way out of that, without political struggle, which is not about the street. It's about how we engage with each other, and what Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò talks about in the room in the space. And that is a problem that that we have in the in the United States left, an ability to engage one another, in the space, on the plane of ideas, to think differently, come together, to understand, to create a politics with those outside of the room that can really focus on what it means to be free.
Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to this special episode of the edges in the middle. The music you heard today was by Sitka Sun, graciously provided by the Long Road Society record label. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Francesca Glaspell, and Julia Jackson.