We Will Dance With Mountains:
Into the Cracks!

It seems to me that in this time of catastrophes followed by catastrophes, as novel viruses prowl the streets, as heat domes and heat waves short circuit air conditioning units, as nation-states struggle to remain relevant political units in the face of geological and technological shifts, and as old rituals no longer ignite the warming fires by which our modern experiments have kept the cold at bay, an unearthly tune might be heard – wafting through the ruins of proud but anxious civilization, unsettling the browning leaves of disillusionment, whispering through traumascapes of exhausted activisms, braiding itself with the sinews of the migrant winds that once powered the sails of humanist progress and confidence.

This arhythmic howl is by turns soft and bodacious, barely perceptible at times and then impossible to ignore. This ‘tune’ is not music, and yet it is the irresistible stuff music is made of. If we listened, we might hear no discernible lyrics, no convenient message – and yet that is the point: this tune is our permission to fail, an invitation to new reformulations of citizenry. The undoing of an acoustic order. A call to delirious depths. What might failure look like? Where might this generative incapacitation lead us? Who are we and who is here with us? I do not know yet. But I suspect that as I try my feet and hips to these seditious sounds and throw my limbs in trust of the abundance of this place, I will be caught by the surprise of the many already dancing with me – for failure is rich, and where there is ‘nothing’ there is much to go around.

In the time since the first coronavirus vaccines were announced to an exhausted global order, a slightly inflected normal has returned against the soundtrack of a persistent viral irruption. The engines are humming; the administrators have rushed to unbox the old tools, to polish the flagpoles, to tighten the old bolts, and reassure every citizen of the viability of the previous. But there’s something different: something molecularly off-track. Not everything has returned the way we once recognized them – not even ourselves. There is a jarring chord of failure – perhaps now amplified – that innervates our once cheery song of things. Perhaps now more than before, our optimisms seem cruel, our postcolonial hopes dashed, our efforts for justice tinged with cynicism. It seems like things want to fall apart. It seems like we’ve been stolen from home. Where do you go when things fall apart, when home has been taken away from you, when the cracks appear?

There are rumours that the cracks are not so foreboding. And that there might yet be a strange abundance in those ruptured places. Legend has it that a stolen people arriving on Brazilian shores centuries ago found a way to weave a posthumanist politics of care, a new theology of smelling and eating and tasting and sensing, a treasonable altar of gods and goddesses in their fugitive terreiros. They shut their eyes and danced with hyphenated deities; they choreographed strange sanctuaries. They stayed with new sites of power.

Perhaps that unsettling counter-imperial strain of failure that reframes the normal, calling for new response-abilities, new dis-abilities, and the making of sanctuaries, stirs in our epidemiologically inflected landscapes, in this age of the “hyposubject”* and the fugitive. Perhaps there is nowhere else to go but into the cracks. Perhaps our deepest activism is this dancing that might yet be.

– Bayo Akomolafe, Ph.D

*hyposubject: A term by Timothy Morton. “Hyposubjects are squatters and bricoleuses. They inhabit the cracks and hollows. They turn things inside out and work miracles with scraps and remains.”