Transcript: The Edges in the Middle, VI: Báyò Akómoláfé, Madhulika Banerjee, and Minna Salami
Ayana Young Hello For The Wild community. I am sitting here watching the seasons change before my very eyes and I am really looking forward to a slower, cooler and more cuddly season ahead. So I hope wherever you are in the world, you are feeling relief as the transitions of seasons are upon us.
But before we start this episode, I wanted to quickly send a huge thank you to all of our listeners who support us on Patreon. Your support means the world to us and truly allows us to keep making free, well-researched and intentional content at a sustainable pace. This month, we are launching a new set of tiers on Patreon aimed at creating a library of deeply rooted resources for those who sign up.
At $2 a month. The Stacks Tier offers supporters transcripts, music playlists, access to gift guides with product discounts and extended episodes. At $5 a month. The Study Tier offers everything from The Stacks Tier plus giveaways, a monthly Field Guide zine and access to seasonal online gatherings. At $25 a month, the Archive Tier offers everything from the previous tiers plus priority for q&a. In gatherings and producer credits in the field guide seen at $100 a month. The Living Library tier offers everything from previous tiers plus a contribution on your behalf of $25 a month to our current land protection project and seasonal letters from the land.
Listener support is one of our main funding sources. So if you enjoy the podcast and want to see it keep running, please consider signing up for monthly support. With this, I'd love to give a huge thank you to our team, Erica, Julia, Evan, Jackson, and Jose, whose dedicated work across audio editing, design, research and writing makes For The Wild possible. Your donation supports our small but mighty team of creatives who are deeply dedicated to this project and all of the work that goes on behind the scenes to bring you podcast episodes, zines, slow studies, and more.
If you feel called to support us or deepen your current donation, please visit patreon.com/forthewild to sign up. If you'd rather make a one time donation or a recurring donation outside of Patreon, please visit forthewild.world/donate. If you can't support monetarily, please consider leaving us a review wherever you listen to your podcast. And the support means so much to us. With that, let's get on with the show. Thank you from the whole For The Wild team.
Bayo Akomolafe So it seems to me that belonging needs to be stretched out to take in alien others that we would never have admitted if we had our head set on straight. Belonging has to be blasted open to accommodate others, exquisite others.
Minna Salami I'm wondering if we want to describe democracy without words, it's something...if I were to try and dance democracy or draw democracy or eat democracy, it's moving into that kind of domain for me if we extract bureaucracy from democracy.
Madhulika Banerjee Certainly the most important lesson from our impermanence that we can derive is our acceptance of fluidity. Things will change, they will flow, they will go from one to the next, and it's when you're in flow that you can actually accommodate others.
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 Bayos work as the Global Senior Fellow at UC Berkeley's Othering and Belonging Institute. In this role Bayo has been holding a series of public conversations on issues of justice and belonging for the Institute's Democracy and Belonging Forum, which connects and resources civic leaders in Europe and the US who are committed to bridging across differences to strengthen democracy and advanced belonging in both regions and around the world. Bayo's conversations encourage us to rethink justice, hope and belonging by sitting amidst the noise not trying to cover it up with pleasant rhythms. To learn more about the Democracy and Belonging Forum, visit democracyandbelongingforum.org.
This recording features Bayo's conversations with Minna Salami and Professor Madhulika Banerjee. Minna is a Nigerian, Finnish, and Swedish feminist author and social critic. Her research focuses on Black feminist theory, contemporary African thought and the politics of knowledge production. Madhulika is a professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of Delhi. Her research interests center on the politics of knowledge, and its roles in shaping the discourse and practice of development with a particular focus on the Global South.
Bayo Akomolafe Good evening, hello. [laughter] Hi, good evening to everyone on this fugitives channel. We're beaming from the underground and through the cracks, and inviting conversation, difficult conversations, the edges in the middle. My name remains Bayo Akomolafe and I'm here with two very, very dear sisters of mine, and their preciousness to me and their work is of these times. Their thought and their explorations and their inquiry, there was no way they were not going to be guests, and co-participants in this co-creation of possibility. And so I'm really excited and touched that they said 'yes' to being part of this. And I will introduce you to them, and bring them up shortly, but just before we do that, as is traditional, I want to say that this conversation is the last in a series of conversations we've been having for some time now since last year. And if there's time, I might say a bit about how we are relaunching this and it might take some new form.
But this is a threshold, we've come to a threshold in this experiment with conversation and exploration that we call the Mbari series. And it has never been a conversation or an exploration that is around reaching consensus or arriving at a stabilized notion of truth. It has always been a dance with possibility of gesturing towards the possible, of noticing that our bodies are yearning beyond language, beyond text, beyond theory, beyond concept, to do things with the world that our academic work and our activisms may not have language, um, space for. So this is a space for radical and exquisite becomings. And speaking of radical and exquisite becomings, this conversation in particular, around democracy and its exquisite other wants to do something and hold space for questions that I think are increasingly vital, now, and urgent.
Something happened a couple of days ago in France as most of us or everyone here knows. There is fire on the mountain. Right. And this is not limited to France, this is spreading. But that has to be held in context with larger trends and observations about democracy. Democracy as a system of governance, democracy as a power sharing format, democracy as the presupposition of the primacy of the citizen. There is a sense in which one might say that democracy is shrinking, if you will, and studies showing the diminishing trust in democratic institutions. Those studies are just symptomatic of what is happening at large and so what we're here to do together is to probe is to co-examine this thing that is happening, and to see what might want to emerge then. Not to displace or to replace or to, to go beyond democracy. I'm not ready to do that, yet. I don't even know what a beyond democracy looks like, at the moment. But at least, to touch the demise, as it seems, the demise of this paradigm, and to have questions about how people in the Global South have experienced democracy, especially to wonder if there aren't other ways of being in power together with each other, and together with the world, that is creeping up through the cracks of these times.
So with that, I would like to bring Professor Madhulika Banerjee and my dear sister, Minna Salami to the table, we promised we would eat chicken together, digitally. But in the absence of that, please unmute yourself, my sisters. How are you? It's a very banal question. But how are you doing?
Madhulika Banerjee Minna?
Minna Salami I'm doing—however I'm doing, all the better for being here with you both. It's really wonderful to be joining this mbari and as you say, by all the questions that we're going to be exploring, are really emergent, really important, really symptomatic, I think of so many of the questions that people are harboring in their minds and their bodies and their spirits at the moment. And so I'm very much looking forward to just unpacking and exploring this idea of democracy together with you both, very dear minds, and dear spirits to me. Thank you.
Bayo Akomolafe Thank you, Minna.
Madhulika Banerjee Well, very happy to be here, Bayo and Minna—kindred spirits I have just discovered in the past few months, and what a pleasure. And I really welcome this forum, this opportunity for us to talk and share our ideas with others who are listening and watching because I think we represent very self consciously voices that are not often heard.
Bayo Akomolafe Yeah.
Madhulika Banerjee And need to be heard. Because they have wisdom, experience, forbearance, and a lot to offer to the world as it is now. The two ideas like democracy and freedom, and you know, progress. There's a lot that these voices can contribute to, so yes, I thank you for creating this opportunity where we can chat together, what you call mbari chat. My own grammar of Bangla, in which we call it an [another language] where friends sit together, and yeah, it could be chicken, it could be tea. And we talk about things that you share, in the hope for doing things better, and together.
Bayo Akomolafe Yes, yes. Yes. Thank you, my dear sisters, and this is the first time we are on this platform having a three way conversation. So this would of course, this has informed the time. So we usually have this within an hour, we're stretching to 90 minutes to hold the juiciness and robustness of what we want to explore today. And I'm really glad we're doing this together. Let me start things out by situating with a proposition. I was just on a call just prior to this, and I shared with them that I woke up yesterday and was alerted to a paper...this scientific report by Jeff Morgan from the National Museum in California with an intriguing premise. And so this dude has studied over 50,000 years, the correlation between the rise and fall of temperature and the shrinkage of brains. Right. So, what he is finding, what this research team is finding is that in warmer temperatures, when the earth gets warmer our brains shrink. Right?
And I just want to leave that there for a moment. When climate warming and global warming happens, the brain capacity reduces, if you will. There's so much there. That's so layered on many levels. There's so much we can do with that. But it ignited a different question for me. Right? And we'll enter into the definitional aspects of democracy, but let's get into a conversation and see what ignites from here. And maybe I'll start with you Madhulika.
Could it be that we are, that our practices of democracy? How we see democracy, how we think about democracy? Could it be that democracy is just as much an organic responsivity to these times? And it's shriveling up, as the Earth gets hotter, so to speak? Could it be that in some instances, this decline in trust in democratic institutions, this rise in the 'big man' in the populist movements, fascist undertakings... Could it be that we're seeing these events? And it's correlated with rising global temperatures? Could it be that democracy is at risk? And it's facing extinction? What does that ignite for you listening to that?
Madhulika Banerjee I think that, for so long, we've been talking about democracy. And if we even go back to the most banal, but very significant definition of the people, for the people, by the people kind-of-thing. I think we need to understand that we have forgotten the parts of ‘by the people and of the people’. We have focused on democracy for the people, which is okay, which is good, because all people need democracy. And all democratic institutions should try to provide it and protect it as much as possible for the people. But I think that democracy is something that people can construct for themselves. And that they can continue to construct and continue to contribute towards a democratic undertaking is underestimated.
Let me explain and let me see how that links to the issue of warming. I think that while many new concepts of democracy have no doubt come in the last 300 years or so, and actively in the last 150-100 years or so, one of the most deeply democratic things we had built across culture is a democratic relationship with nature. We always felt that we were part of nature, nature was a part of us. There is a way in which the human being is at-even fee with nature. And so, even though human beings have utilized nature, have been dependent on nature, have worshiped nature for that reason, but have always known that they have power over nature. But because human cultures, in so many parts of the globe, were extremely respectful of the same nature which they could have power of, that respect meant that they kept themselves at least that even key with nature, never trying to plunder us, but not abuse.
So this, of course, enabled them to produce so much, to create such beauty, to create so much abundance, to create wealth, but nature was never destroyed in that process. I think that in building all the other dimensions of modernity, of development and so on, we have somewhere lost this particular aspect of a democratic relationship. ... Reams and reams have been written on the soul, but to link with your question about what is happening today about democracy being in danger and how that links with what I'm saying is that the kind of democracy that we think ought to be built today always rides on the back of modernist notion of prosperity.
Bayo Akomolafe Okay, there you go.
Madhulika Banerjee So the big man becomes big because he promised that prosperity on the basis of which you can anticipate a democracy. Whereas, and that is accompanied by the claim that "Nobody could do this for you, I'm going to do this for you and we are going to discover a greatness." You know, I and whenever somebody is trying to deliver democracy to you, for the people. Now, today takes the form of populism and the big man. It's a problem.
But look at the history of democracy especially in the Global South, all the people who have tried to deliver it to us, for us. There is somewhere in assumption that the people are not clever enough or smart enough to be participants. We talk about participatory democracy, but the way in which we have thought of prosperity in the modern time, we don't think that what people know, how they have cultivated crops, how they have woven cloth, how they produce beautiful materials, how they built beautiful buildings, how they had trade and commerce, they built big ships, they've crossed the ocean, they know the stars, they know the currents, these knowledges are not seen as germane to the project of prosperity in modernity.
Bayo Akomolafe Right.
Madhulika Banerjee So if people, those very people who are supposed to be constituent of the democracy, are not respected as human beings with a mind, you have been shrinking their minds for a long time and the entire process of prosperity building has been contributing to global warming that we know independently anyway.
So global warming is happening on the one end, why actually, you have been shrinking the worth, the self worth of people who you expect to be participants in a democracy?
[Musical break]
Bayo Akomolafe I want to take this idea of contortion there, because how you describe it, it's that the way democracy has unfolded and there isn't a monolithic perception or practice of democracy, right. But the way it seems to have unfolded, especially received by the Global South, is that it's front loaded with ways of knowing that are decidedly European, that are decidedly industrial.
Minna, I wonder if you could just jump in on this and what you feel about that because there is a prevailing presumption that democracy is contentless. That it's neutral and it's universal. So it basically applies everywhere and anywhere. But is that how you understand it? Is that how you understand this political arrangement? Its notion of power, its understanding of the citizen, as the unit of analysis. Is this what is at stake when you think about democracy?
Minna Salami Thank you, Bayo. And thank you for kicking us off with the image and Jeff Morgan, and want to just turn to that briefly in, you know, in order to respond to the question that you're asking now, because what came up for me similarly to Madhulika, as you share that. And I know it was metaphorical so let me also stick with image and metaphor, because what came up for me is house and an image of, let's say, all of us, all of humanity, all of living species, if we were one organism, and we're in this house, and it's a rectangular-shaped house with a window on both ends, so two windows. And if you look at the window on the right, let's say, you would see a raging fire, you know, war, destruction, the erosion of our forests, our rivers, our mountains, and so on. So everything catastrophic, all the poly crisis, all of that--one window. And we also visit the other end of this collective organism, and looked out of that window, there would be... imagine you see this immense beauty, you know, our planet thriving, humanity elevated and elated, knowledge of the mind, body, and the soul being championed, democracy in its best form being practiced.
And as Madhulika was speaking, the image started to shape shift for me, following from what you had said Bayo. And I thought about how, you know, at the moment we have, I believe it is about 30% of the world is under authoritarian rule. Which is a massive increase if you compare it to a decade ago. And it seems as though you could sort of say that we are shifting, this organism is shifting towards the window that faces the fire, that faces destruction, that faces the declining of democracy. But a huge part of that and this is in response to your question to me, because there are various reasons, yes, climate change, and it's a sort of shrinking of the organism, shrinking of the brain, shrinking of the world, shrinking of the house that we're all in.
Bayo Akomolafe Right. Even agency, shrinking of agency.
Minna Salami Yes, precisely. But one very massive part of this shrinking is Eurocentrism. and the way that, you know, it has been decades, centuries, soon probably millennia of our trying to end the imperialist forces of Eurocentrism and the way that your centrism, shapeshifts and convoluted and consorts and distorts notions such as democracy. Because I do very much think that with democracy, the Eurocentric impulse is very easily transmitted into this form of governance, you know, with its impulse to sort of assert itself as an empire. And so the way that we could associate democracy today is we can associate with neoliberal capitalism, for example, that, of course, is connected to and stems from the enlightenment and a lot of the thinking of the Enlightenment that conceived of the human in a particular way, and freedom of speech in a particular way, and knowledge in a particular way, and all of these things that have been immensely problematic and destructive for the collective organism.
That said, I find that it is important for me anyway, as I think about democracy to make the distinction between let's call it Eurocracy, maybe we can call it?
Bayo Akomolafe Let's go with that.
Minna Salami Let's go with that, right? So there's Eurocracy and then there's the democracy for the people of the people, which as an African, as a Nigerian, specifically, when I've gone to vote in Nigeria, for instance. And it's almost as though people vote with their entire bodies. You know, there's this exuberance, about being able to participate in shaping the politics of your society. And that for me says that there's something almost instinctive about democracy, to the pursuit of... I mean, freedom is not because again, then with going back to the Enlightenment and all of that, but yeah, there's something very embodied, joyous, and of course, it is then often completely met with corruption, with violence and so on. But just that impulse towards democracy that I've witnessed in Nigeria, and that I seem to see in all of the so-called Global South when the opportunity arises, is something that I find juxtaposes bureaucracy so massively, and it really troubles me that... I guess it also corresponds well with this house of very different worlds that we're faced with.
Bayo Akomolafe Mm hmm. I like that helpful distinction between bureaucracy, which you should obviously write a book about now...
Minna Salami I'm gonna just quickly say, because I've always struggled with the term Global South as Madhulika knows, I spoke about. I'm trying to find a better way and so maybe thanks to you, and this conversation, maybe Eurocracy is the––
Bayo Akomolafe Maybe Eurocracy, but it's increasingly problematic, but it's a galvanizing point for the moment to plant a flag and see what we do with space there, and how we move there. But there's something you say, in distinguishing between Eurocracy and democracy, Eurocracy as an enlightenment product, and then something that feels more instinctual, something that feels animated.
Though one has to also contrast this and hold this in light of the diminishing returns of democracy in Nigeria. Going by our recent elections, less and less people are dancing to the polls, right? It seems there is even a fear to participate. And the very notion of the citizen is called into question in our political arrangement. In fact, I might just venture to say that we don't have a government per se, we have a bully system that runs parallel to citizen aspirations. Right? Every time something wants to reach out for something new, this bully system reinforces the parallelism and says, "Stay in your track. We will drive the best cars, will fly private jets, and you will stay in this space of servitude and exclusion and oppression." So there is a sense in which I might hold this space of tension and notice that along with Fela Aníkúlápó Kuti, that democracy hasn't worked for us. And I wonder how that sits in your body, Madhulika, with regards to India as well?
Madhulika Banerjee You know, in India, an anthropologist who also happens to be my sister, who studies elections in India and democracy, and she has a book called Cultivating Democracy. She has been studying rural India, and its involvement in the democratic process for 20 years.
Bayo Akomolafe Let's go there.
Madhulika Banerjee You know, one of the things that she argues is that, like Minna said, in India, election time is like a festival. Anyway, in our cultures, every festival is very, you know, very joyous, very colorful, noisy, and participation. We've turned elections into one of our many festivals. So when people come to vote, there is that joy of participation. I think it cuts both ways in India. You know, the national election survey that has been doing extensive surveys in India since 1995, has shown a very high rate of participation in the elections. So, in simply procedural terms of democracy, where elections are one of the important institutions and procedures, that is about suppression, and the highest participation comes from so-called illiterate people, the lowest of the society. They are the ones who vote the most. And to link with what I was saying earlier, these are the people who have been enfranchised by their ability to participate in the elections. You see them as human beings who are, for me, carriers of very deep knowledge. They have been disenfranchised by the process of development. And the entire history of 75 years of post colonial India has been this struggle between one kind of enfranchisement on one hand, and another kind of disenfranchisement on the other.
And I think that the fact that people continue to participate in what makes them enfranchised even as they are continually marginalized, invisibilized by the system is a remarkable testament to their spirit, and to their desire to be part of a modern democratic process.
And I think that there's so much else in the democratic process that they have participated in. So they're invisibilization in terms of technologies and that kind of persona, economic persona, what are they going to do? How are they going to contribute to the economy and to the society? There's been so much mobilization against injustice of all kinds: injustice against caste divisions, injustice against gender inequality, injustice against regional imbalances. And people have mobilized, fought, petitioned—every single kind of political mobilization that is possible, people have done. And there's never a dull moment, in terms of political life in India, and there's a continuous desire to grasp with both hands every single possibility that the Democratic sphere holds out. And I think that that's possibly why democracy in India continues to be by the people of the people.
And this is irrespective of whichever regime may think that they are the ones who are going to provide for the people. You know, there will be more malevolent or benevolent regimes, but regimes always think they have to provide for we haven't yet reached that point in democracy where the regime says "yes." The people will constitute, "I will just be a handmaiden." The institutions will just be a process by which the contributions of ordinary people will be consolidated into the democratic process. That's yet to come. But pressure from below, pressure from different kinds of people, different kinds of movements, that has been continuous. And that has been, you know, energetic. And it has been one with great belief carried with great dignity. I think that's the real destiny, the real... and you know, no surveys or parameters of democracy across the world have yet been able to really identify this aspect of how to address the Global South. People retain their belief in this process. Right, everything contrary, everything, and the wrong end of the stick of different kinds of sticks that they have to deal with over the last century. They continue, they rise. Still I rise. Yeah.
Bayo Akomolafe Still I rise. But Didi and Minna, maybe a lingering haunting question here is, is civic participation commensurate to the materiality of democracy? Right. I think it's quite evident in the regions, the worlds that we come from, that there is a resilience. There's a story of this Nigerian woman who came out to vote. I mean, I don't know if you saw the recent, the February elections in Nigeria, February 25? And she came out to vote, and she was beaten by people who work for the ruling party and almost lost her eye. She went home, dressed herself up and came out again to vote. You know, she insisted, and she was carried on, became a media project, and almost a meme without bandage on her eye, saying "I will vote." And this happens again and again. This resilience is exploited and almost used as a resource base to fund, can nurture bully systems, again, regimes that do not care for people.
And I'm wondering about this one-sided notion of democracy that celebrates resilience, but doesn't actually translate into, I dare use the word power or the term or the phrase power equity, that doesn't translate to agency, the spaciousness and the wonder. So I'm critical. I'm wondering about this materiality of democracy, like as a spatial temporal arrangement, it cannot simply be civic participation can it? We have to take into consideration democratic institutions. We have to take into consideration post-humanist, you know, infiltrations around us and wondering, “Where does democracy lie?” If we noticed that it cannot simply be one aspect of a spectrum of things?
Minna Salami Yeah, I think that's why what really came to me was this image of people as Madhulika also so beautifully explored, like the image of people in our parts of the world and in movement in festival in and festival, you know, traditional festival and masquerades and ritual is not always one that is peaceful or joyous. It can also really be eruptive, and bring out all of the shadow sides of society that we're trying to hide, and that are indeed very oppressive and violent. And it sort of all really comes to the fore.
And I guess you said, Bayo, that, you know, maybe democracy isn't for us. And, and I think that that's a statement that we really need to take seriously, you know, in our societies, in our social criticisms, in our dialogues, in our embodied explorations, because there is something to that that is true. But then on the other hand, I still want to go back in thinking about the materiality of democracy and expanding not beyond democracy, but beyond the materiality of it, because maybe there is where we can find a way to not get stuck in the idea that democracy is not for us.
Bayo Akomolafe Okay. Thank you. Let's do this. In this way, I would like each of us to pose a question to another, right? So we'll, I don't know, when in Nigeria did you play, was it called [name of Nigerian game] or something? Did you know [name of Nigerian game]?
Minna Salami No, I don't know [name of Nigerian game].
Bayo Akomolafe That horrible playground thing where you sat, there was a slide, which always burned your behind because it was rusted in the sun. Then there was the other one that you sat in a chair and then you have to pull a wheel and then everyone, but they're always rusty, and so they have this nickname for it. We're going to do something of that kind here...
I like each of us. I know your questions. I know your works. I know each of your works. I know Madhulika's work. I know Minna's work. And I would like you to articulate from the heart of your project, the things that keep you up at night, defractively with this theme of democracy and its exquisite others. Pose a question for someone else here. And let's see if we can rotate our questions in this way. And then we'll come back and see what happens. I've asked questions so far, who would like to go?
Minna Salami I have a question for Madhulika. First, I have a comment to the prayer that you say you recite every day. I think you know, it's something that should be disseminated, you know, if we all could recall that we are these elements. And I love that in Hinduism that you have five and that space is also an element then I think we would just operate and relate to one another and to our planet in very different ways.
And yet, that said, and this is my question or my provocation to you maybe is that nature, I don't know that nature is democratic. You know, I think if you look at much of the animal world, and even the plant world and nature generally, you know, it can be very harsh as we know.
Earlier in Hamburg today, it was very windy, and I got hit by a huge branch that had somehow loosened from a tree and punched me straight in the eyes. You know, it made me reflect on how this very tiny mundane incident made me reflect on how harsh nature can be and how nature really doesn't give a shit about you know, the way we go about conducting our days, running our errands, or whatever the case might be. Let alone the ways in which animals fight wars in order to survive. So I guess, how do we call insight from these nonmodern knowledges that you're working on without glorifying or romanticizing the natural world? Because I think ultimately that if we do that, we will also won't arrive at a true display and dance of a democratic principle that is perhaps instinctual to humans and to living beings.
Madhulika Banerjee Mmmm. But thank you, Minna, that was the….yeah, we've talked about that prayer before too, haven't we, yeah. And I do think that it does ground one on an everyday basis. And that's why when we greet, we greet with folded hands, everyone in the same way as you greet the maker, the universe, because you recognize that the universe resides in everyone, that's why you greet everyone with folded hands.
I'm talking about the democracy with nature, and I should have clarified. What I was saying actually was about our relationship with nature, which was not extractive even while it was utilitarian. So, in that sense, I meant that we had a more democratic relationship with nature. Nature is, I certainly don't know enough to be able to claim that it is democratic, and I certainly know it in the way that you do actually. And I see that there are so many processes, which are very harsh within nature, which don't seem like democratic at all. But the one thing that I do know, I do understand I'm sure this is something you shared as well. Is that in nature, violence between species within species is recognized and allowed within the limits of basic need. In terms of, you know, when there is hunger, or when you need to protect your young, there are very clear rules for when any kind of violence is allowed. But from what little I have learned, you know, the animal world really fascinates me as the plant world, what little I have read and understood, simply to be able to dominate and create a sense of power that is autonomous of any kind of need, is not something that seems to be warranted, within the animal world.
Whether that qualifies to be understood as democratic in the way that we understand it, I don't know. But I do think that human beings who used resources from nature... Simple example: when you collect medicinal plants to make herbal medicine, after all, most communities still, today, use herbal medicines, right? There are very strict rules by how you can access otherwise, when you access a plant, if you were to just uproot it, who's going to be responsible for the regeneration of that plant so that others can use it for the, forget the future generations even your own contemporaries should be able to use it. So there are very strict rules. And when you know that a plant can, you know, there are leaves or their flowers, sometimes the roots of plants, have medicinal value, there are rules by which part of the route you use, which are to live in the earth. So I'm talking about that as principles of democracy, where you're using but you do not abuse. And I think that this is something that is systematically destroyed by industrial capitals, because industrial capitalism has its temporalities different, its outcomes are different, its spatial considerations are different. And therefore, that guides how you use.
And the sad part is because industrial capitalism is so hierarchical, the very people who collect are the people who are least rewarded. That of course is a different set of issues but deeply undemocratic practices come from our undemocratic practices, basically, nature as well, they're all completely intertwined. I mean, I believe that it's when we engage with the undemocratic nature of our lives at these fundamental levels, that is when we are beginning to ask the substantive questions of democracy.
[Musical break]
Madhulika Banerjee Bayo, I have my question to you, which is that, you know, why would you want to couple democracy with belonging?
Bayo Akomolafe Why would I want to do that? Do you know that I want to do that? [laughter]
Madhulika Banerjee Okay, tell me why you wouldn't.
Bayo Akomolafe Let me dance with that. Let me dance for that. Democracy and belonging. There's something deeply aspirational in the framework. The longing for a world where everyone has agency, right?
Everyone has a say, and everyone has a seat. I am exhausted with the idea of the seat at the table. And no, but there you go, I'll just use it. But the idea of belonging of course in the ways that Elder John Powell, and many of the scholars that have nourished this ground together, that idea of belonging just goes beyond 'Can we all get along?' No. It notices disparities on evenness, it notices how things move in and come out. It notices how paradigms die and paradigms swell in their place. But it still longs for a world that is free from the horrors of hierarchical arrangements, where bodies are racialized according to various attributes that they seemingly possess, according to one sense, surreal affinity to that aspect, right? Whether it's pigmentation or something else. So belonging wants to do that.
And coupling with democracy is, of course, noticing that there is a sense in which democracy is... brings together our best political skills, and brings together the best of us. If we can furnish the world with a system that allows belonging to thrive that would be democracy, that would be the definition of democracy to aspire to.
My questions here, the work that I'm trying to articulate here or what I'm trying to notice and observe and put to writing and text and questions and conversation is noticing that the vote is dying. And by the vote, I mean, the materiality that made democracy as a people project possible, as an anthropocentric project,. That materiality is fading away, if you will, democracy has always been tied to the citizen, right, to the citizen to the sovereignty of the citizen. And the way that the citizen practices the sovereignty is by voting. So there's something about the electoral process that seems to be interwoven with the heart of democracy, right. One man, one vote, as is often said.
But I think that every monolith, every political arrangement is indebted to on equal circumstances, is indebted to flows, is indebted to riverine phenomena, is indebted to the world in its posthumanism. And in some sense, what I started out with by noticing the shrinking of brains, and how the Anthropocene is not just a geological epoch, not just a climatic condition, it is thought the Anthropocene is thought. In some sense, the space of the citizen is shrinking rapidly and the unevenness ...
The tree branch that sucker punched my sister, sorry about that. I apologize on behalf of all nature. But the tree branch is part of this arrangement, is part of democracy, is part of how we have made a clearing in the wild and tried to forge a political project in that clearing. But the wilds are now encroaching on that clearing and the space of the citizen—which has always been a humanist project—is giving away to something else and we're not exactly sure what is being born here. We no longer have a confident response to the question, what is power? And who has power any longer? Because power doesn't seem to be even in the colonizer’s hand, right? They seem to be in IMF hand, or the World Bank hand. We now have to bring it into the demos of democracy, microbes, and bacteria, and fungi, and the Coronavirus.
So it seems for me belonging needs to be stretched out to take in alien others that we would never have admitted if we had our head set on straight. But belonging has to be blasted open to accommodate others, exquisite others. So freedom will look radically different from how we perceive it right now. Perhaps freedom might actually be the postponement of the exquisite. Democracy seems to be doing that right at this moment. We are yearning for some kind of fellowship or a yearning for different kinds of embodiment. That is not available in our political practices. The left and the right are doing the same thing. We're stuck right And now in the spaces of democratic impasses, we're seeing the rise of fascist regimes. So I think right now in those liminal spaces, something else wants to be born. I can only think of it as kolam. Madhulika, you know what I'm talking about? You would best describe it, what is kolam?
Madhulika Banerjee A kolam is a beautiful set of designs that actually bring the geometry precision of the universe align with the beauty of undefined lines—
Bayo Akomolafe Yeah—
Madhulika Banerjee —to the doorstep of every house, in Tamil Nadu, but in other parts of South India as well. And the beauty is that the way it is drawn, it begins with dots. And then the dots are connected in different designs. And this is done with rice flour. And it's done every day for the beauty, that it has its place. That beautiful creation, if you and I made it Minna, we would want it preserved forever.. framed, put up, you know. [laughter] Every day, it has a life of one day.
Bayo Akomolafe Yeah.
Madhulika Banerjee Every day you begin afresh. Every day you reiterate, you know the precision and the beauty of the universe.
Minna Salami K-O-L-A-M?—
Madhulika Banerjee —L-A-M and it is drawn by hand, usually by the woman of the house. And it's drawn and every morning it is wiped and you begin afresh. Yes. And those that do because they do it from childhood onwards, and people grew up watching them, the older women in the family do it. So it's done, definitely. And it's done in a few minutes. And it's that, you know, homage to the universe that is placed outside your home so that you remember it as you go out and see it as you go in. And everyday it is done anew. That's the kolam.
Bayo Akomolafe That's the kolam. That's the kolam. You know what's so fascinating about this art, which is a multispecies art arrangement, is I learned that the rice flour feeds the ants as well. It's ant agency. It's a feminist arrangement. It's a multispecies arrangement. And it seems to me to be this collective yearning for an arrangement that is yet to come. It is temporal and fleeting. It is not stable or permanent, like some monoliths that insist that this is the political arrangement for all time, right? It flows, the wind participates in this art project.
I don't know, it may, I don't know what is to come. I do feel in a creaturely fragile way that settlement is heaving and breathing and burdened with migrancy... that settlement is becoming migrant, that we are becoming fugitive, that the city can no longer endorse our continuity. And so the space of the citizen; the project of the city is shrinking. And all I can put in the space of what is yet to come is a kolam, is this thing that we don't know the name of. Right? So that is belonging. Belonging looks like kolam to me, it looks like ants participating, and wind and tree branches, sucker punching my dear sister's face. [laughter]
Minna Salami I'm really struck by this practice it sounds incredible and I'm looking forward to learning more about it but it immediately makes me think of sort of dendritic fractal patterns that exist in so much of nature including human nature, right, in our our lungs and every part of our bodies really, our veins, everything . And how that too isn't anything static, right. In the way that bringing us back to democracy maybe that you know, Democracy also shouldn't be seen as something static and that's the terrible thing about Eurocracy because it tries to force its rigid box, right?—a rigid participatory function that excludes initially women and then people who are non european.
And yes, I concur completely with you, Bayo, that, you know, we are invited to bring in other species into our way of doing democracy. But you know, we haven't even yet invited children, for example, to participate in democracy as they should, let alone other animals.
And last week, Madhulika was also present when one of our co-fellows, Frederick, shared a project, whereby they were trying to understand the language of sperm whales through technology and eventually, you know, maybe getting them to be able to respond to questions about democracy. So it's definitely something that we should continue to keep as a feasible thought, but the question is how, and maybe you know, the kolam and the fractal patterns that exist can help us with that project?
Madhulika Banerjee I think the important thing you know, is to believe in fluidity, we are so afraid of impermanence. Yes. The reason that you Eurocracy tries to pin us down, as you were just saying, you know, and to box us into is because we believe and very foolishly, that structures bring certainty and certainty will lead to some kind of permanence. It doesn't work like that.
And every philosophy that we have inherited, asks us to begin with the assumption with the understanding that everything is impermanent. And we sort of dismissed that as “Oh, that's some kind of spiritual belief.” It's not. It's the biggest truth in the world that nothing is permanent. So if... we don't need to become fatalistic as a result of that, but certainly the most important lesson from our impermanence that we can derive is our acceptance of fluidity. Things will change, they will flow, they will go from one to the next. And it's when you flow that you can actually accommodate others. If you are very bound and restricted, then you will know who can be included and who cannot.
So when you say, Minna, and I completely agree, I cannot say that I have tried in any way to really practice. But yes, to think of spaces where we include different kinds of voices, inputs, children, others, and the fact that we think that when you see a child like curiosity, or behaving without guile, if somebody is guileless than that's childlike, which means that it's something that needs to be overcome. But that it can flow into, you know, an aspect of adulthood, which can be an asset, and therefore contribute to a different understanding of correlation between human beings. They are so afraid.
Minna Salami Like, what we're desperately missing is that, as Bayo pointed out earlier, like democracy is not just about the vote. It's not just about the civic participation. It's also about creating kolams and children playing and adults behaving in childlike ways, and meditation, and maybe even prayer, like all of these is human practices that are fluid, but that are also about some sense, deep in our historical nature. Our character is something about preservation as well, you know. We need and perhaps, we get it wrong in so far that we think that this need for preservation, this need to remember to have memory to have continuity, is something that we can actually institutionalize and turn into numbers when actually that is an ephemeral, beautiful part of being human. And, yeah, we really desperately need to make space for that in the Democratic project for the aesthetic, the mysterious and the mystical, and the metaphysical, all of these elements that are just as true of our lived realities as is the act of waking up one morning going into, you know, signing, putting your finger stamp or writing something on a card and putting it in a ballot box. You know, it's equally real that you relate with others, you relate with your environment, and we need that in the spaces where we're discussing democracy, and how to further democracy,
Bayo Akomolafe I think that's a beautiful sentiment, where we three come from time is also impermanent, and fluid. But, we also work with sisters where time is precise. And so that precision concepts now and it seems like a good place to punctuate our conversation around this, and I'm so grateful for this exploration that went in rhizomatic directions. It was never linear. It was never meant to arrive. It was meant to depart. And in departing it departs. I'm grateful. Madhulika, thank you so much.
Madhulika Banerjee Thank you.
Bayo Akomolafe Minna, Thank you so very much,
Minna Salami Thank you.
Bayo Akomolafe We will meet outside of this. And thank you everyone for listening and being part of this conspiracy, this breathing together. Yes, it continues in fugitive ways. So join us as we continue to unravel and stay with these cracks and depths and these troubling ideas. And hopefully, our lives will be met and we will be encountered and we will be supported to hold space for new worlds as they emerge. Thank you, everyone.
[Musical transition]
Jose Alejandro Rivera Thank you for listening to this episode of For The Wild. The music you heard today was by Sitka Sun and Karen Less, graciously provided by the Long Road Society, and Maree Siou. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Julia Jackson, Jackson Kroopf, Evan Tenenbaum, and Jose Alejandro Rivera.