For The Wild - Dr. BAYO AKOMOLAFE on Coming Alive to Other Senses ⧸300

00:00:00.000 Hello, and welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayanna Young. Today, we are speaking with Dr.

00:00:10.080 Bayo Okomalafe. In a sense, the fugitive answers the question that is hidden within the words of

00:00:21.300 my elders when they say, in order to find your way, you must become lost.

00:00:28.260 Bayo Komalafe, PhD, rooted with the Yoruba people in a more than human world, is the father to

00:00:35.620 Alethea and Kaya, the grateful life partner to EJ, son and brother. A widely celebrated

00:00:42.480 international speaker, post-humanist thinker, poet, teacher, public intellectual, essayist,

00:00:49.100 and author of two books, These Wilds Beyond Our Fences, Letters to My Daughter on Humanity's

00:00:55.540 Search for Home, and We Will Tell Our Own Story, The Lions of Africa Speak. Bayo Komalafe is the

00:01:03.060 visionary founder of the Emergence Network and host of the online post-activist course,

00:01:08.040 we will dance with mountains oh bio i am just so darn excited to be with you again exploring the

00:01:21.720 edges and connecting i just appreciate you and our last conversation on the podcast was so

00:01:29.740 so moving it definitely left me shook and I know so many of our listeners were too so I'm really

00:01:39.940 looking forward to this it's uh wonderful to be with you again Ayanna looking forward to this

00:01:47.460 this time the second time is a charm so I've heard me too so I want to start off by reading

00:01:56.960 a quote from your multi-form essay coming down to earth and it goes like this quote

00:02:05.860 we now live in fugitive times and fugitive times require fugitive epistemologies or ways of knowing

00:02:13.760 deploying the settler epistemologies that contributed to the geo-ecological hostilities

00:02:19.440 of the present risks reinforces the dynamics we want to address the promise of fugitivity as we

00:02:25.900 shall see is that in a sense it helps re-sacralize the world, ministering to our weary bones by

00:02:32.800 drawing God closer. So intimately close, in fact, that we lose some of the categorical independence

00:02:39.980 modernity burdened us with. I know I'm starting off with a deep one, but there is so much in that

00:02:49.060 quote that i want to explore more one being what is it to live in fugitive times that require

00:02:57.000 fugitive epistemologies you know i've heard you speak the word fugitive many times and i feel so

00:03:04.940 drawn to it but i'm not really sure that i understand it more than

00:03:11.380 like body understanding like an intuitive maybe understanding but i'd love to hear you

00:03:18.280 speak to that right well you could think about the fugitive as a mode of navigating the world

00:03:29.820 a way of knowing right modern epistemologies are forward-facing

00:03:37.260 um they centralize the knower right and they often thrive on what some philosophers would

00:03:49.760 call representationalism that is the presumption that the world is outside external and our work

00:04:00.160 is to adequately represent it, right, in our ideas, in our language, in our concepts,

00:04:07.700 to bring it in, so to speak, to traverse the ontological gap between our skins and the

00:04:16.400 environment, right? And that's the task of modernity. That way of knowing is costly,

00:04:25.460 right and this is the idea then that if you if you perform knowing and notice i said

00:04:33.340 perform right that that knowing is always a corporeal embodied tactile relating with the

00:04:41.680 world that is always risky that is always speculative that is always experimental

00:04:47.960 and it's always political right when we know the world in ways that

00:04:55.460 um centralize us as prime knowers um one of the speculative costs of that is that we tend to see

00:05:06.680 the environment as instrumental as dumb and mute and only there for our use right and that is why

00:05:17.120 some writers and authors and speakers uh you know bring that kind of thinking in as complicit

00:05:26.460 in the production of the troubles we're experiencing as a civilization today the

00:05:32.600 anthropocene so to to know um you know fugitively if you will is to come alive to other senses

00:05:44.860 it's to i i hesitate to use the word awaking um because it also presumes a binary

00:05:55.100 between wakefulness and sleepfulness if you will um but it is to it is to navigate the world

00:06:05.620 differently. There's a sense called proprioception, right, in which we kind of,

00:06:14.400 our muscles, the way we move in the world, and the way we situate ourselves in space-time

00:06:20.560 is what's at stake, right? That sense of proprioception, I like to think of

00:06:29.500 knowing as proprioceptive, that how you move through the world makes the world and makes

00:06:36.620 knowledge. Knowledge is not just a stable, objective thing out there, you know, at the end

00:06:43.560 of a scientifically rigorous exercise. Knowledge is how we meet the world and how the world meets

00:06:49.780 us in return. So fugitivity is really this political project, or maybe political on-project,

00:06:58.460 that is about a call, a conjuring, an invitation to lose our way from the human, Ayana, the human.

00:07:09.560 And I'm capitalizing the human here, the way Hortense Spillers might do it,

00:07:15.960 the way Sylvia Winters might do it, the way C.L.R. James might do it, 0.60

00:07:22.980 those Caribbean philosophers, the way Wale Shoenka might do it. It's the idea that the human

00:07:32.960 itself is not the anthropomorphic figures we're used to, you know, the figures and shapes we're

00:07:40.220 used to. The human is a territory. It's a way of acting and thinking and believing. It's a mode of

00:07:49.120 individuation. It's a way of desiring. It's an imaginative economy. It's a political imaginary,

00:07:57.600 right? And this political imaginary is becoming toxic, right? It's a way of knowing. It's a

00:08:04.680 colonial imperial order. It has its legacies in the Atlantic middle, in the slave ship. 0.89

00:08:10.920 What fugitivity is inviting is projects of exile, right, that move us away from the dissociative escape or transcendence of the modern and closer, as I write in that passage, to God, where God is not Gandalf or some bearded white dude on a throne in some distant fairyland.

00:08:38.500 but God speculatively becomes the unbecoming, the becomingness of things, the unraveling,

00:08:48.780 the teenage promiscuity of things, that this promiscuity is so severe and powerful and potent

00:08:58.140 and vibrant that we can no longer even speak about a universe. That presupposes one thing.

00:09:05.180 We can't even speak about a multiverse because that presupposes that numbers are stable categories.

00:09:11.780 So I like to think of it as an indeterminiverse, that the world or the universe or something, words fail at this point, crumble entirely, that the world or the universe is still figuring itself out, right?

00:09:26.880 And so the fugitive is the figure of the Anthropocene, a political invitation to unlearn mastery, to fall to the earth, to learn how to commune with soil,

00:09:44.240 to disturb our social analytics that tends to centralize justice to move beyond critique 0.65

00:09:53.940 right to notice how even protest could be a department in the slave plantation

00:09:59.800 and to travel to get lost in a sense the fugitive answers the question that is hidden within the

00:10:11.140 words of my elders when they say in order to find your way you must become lost thank you for

00:10:19.000 taking us there from the very beginning I was definitely getting lost in your words and

00:10:26.600 I imagined myself falling to earth and feeling so held by the ground in this this longing this

00:10:37.940 yearning like crying out to be held in a fugitive way and I'm thinking about

00:10:44.660 you speaking about God and what it is to draw God closer and I think this is an interesting topic

00:10:55.740 for me right now especially because I think about God and spirituality and of course

00:11:01.340 in different times in human history God was a lot more important seemingly than they are now

00:11:08.380 and I think that this type of post-modernity post-spirituality post-God

00:11:16.180 world is not good for us in a lot of ways like without God what holds us accountable

00:11:25.020 without God how do we live in right relationship when I say God it can mean so many things but I

00:11:32.100 want to pause there and just ask for you to speak about God more and maybe reflect on

00:11:42.120 what it has been for us humans to lose that intimate connection with God and how do we come

00:11:50.900 back or find new ways of relating to that type of life force or source to belonging

00:12:03.560 i think i would source my response from katherine keller

00:12:10.220 um and who's a theologian um and a brilliant thinker uh that i really deeply respect and

00:12:21.980 she speaks about the the traditions um i could probably i could never speak about these matters

00:12:30.300 in in the same um vein as she does but she speaks about the the apophatic and the cataphatic

00:12:39.140 these were and are traditions of coming to understand the notion of god where the cataphatic

00:12:50.840 is the is the you might call it the ancient acknowledgement of god that is populated by

00:13:00.660 statements um that you know are about what god is right so you can say god is good god is great

00:13:14.560 god is huge god is kind god is wonderful god is infinite and all these are positive statements

00:13:22.680 right um they are even to say god is evil in this sense of positive statement you have

00:13:28.540 something to say about God, something definite that is about, uh, God's attributes. And I use

00:13:36.100 his most of the time, because I grew up in a tradition that was more comfortable, um, thinking

00:13:41.440 about God as a, as a male, right? Um, even though I had my seditious moments, um, and it's not even

00:13:50.420 sedition right because there are many places in the christian text um where god speaks about

00:13:58.760 um feeding you know breasts to his children or to her children like a mother and i really loved

00:14:07.960 that anyway i digress um so those are cataphatic statements and then there there's a different

00:14:14.960 tradition, ancient tradition that is apophatic, that is situated in this idea that the more we

00:14:23.440 say things about God, the more we lose the sense of Godness, right? Because God is infinite and God

00:14:32.420 is beyond saying, right? The moment you try to say God is something or God isn't something, you

00:14:44.960 or rather God is something not isn't in this in this sense you lose you postpone God you kind of

00:14:52.860 lose the the sense of potency that comes with the negative theologies so apophatic theologies

00:15:01.760 are negative theologies they're more like God isn't right and the idea is to we draw more and

00:15:08.920 more and more away from any positive statement that can be made about God in the hope that

00:15:15.320 by and by, we might be engulfed by this Godhood, right? We might be taken back by this infinite

00:15:23.880 nothingness that is also infinite somethingness, right? But that escapes language so thoroughly

00:15:31.260 as to discipline our attempts to name God.

00:15:37.520 And what Catherine Keller does with this concept

00:15:40.020 is to rework it, right? 0.99

00:15:43.640 So she calls it apophatic entanglement.

00:15:46.720 And what she wants to do is to put God to work

00:15:50.200 in a different way so that it's not just a sailing

00:15:54.080 into a Socratic or Platonic nothingness.

00:15:58.340 Instead, what she wants to do is to bring God down to earth, to make God, in some sense, synonymous with the loss of image, the loss of the familiar, the fugitive breakthroughs, you know, that tantalizes from the wild edges.

00:16:21.180 that God is not so much the temple as he is the mad man outside the temple, you know, conjuring

00:16:31.440 and babbling and inviting us to seditious playgrounds. God is the breakthrough. God is the

00:16:38.920 crack, right? So I often think about God together with Catherine Keller as a godding, right? I put

00:16:46.460 a gerund after God, that God is not just some stable figure that holds the objective moral

00:16:53.620 universe in place. You know, to think that way, to think about God in that way, is to risk

00:17:01.940 imperial narratives and imperial dynamics, to think that one needs to appease an external figure,

00:17:13.220 right that is outside of our bodily entanglements that it's outside of lichen and microbial and

00:17:22.500 mycorrhizal and rhizomatic becoming that is in a sense to um to capture god in a in a knowable way

00:17:32.800 So the Kalarian idea of an unknowable God really appeals to me. It's the idea that God is still figuring itself, herself, himself, themselves out. God is still being worked out. 0.96

00:17:52.640 God is not just an essence. God is a becoming. God is a dying. God is a living. God is the animacy

00:18:00.720 of a mushroom world. God is the weather. God is geology. And this is not just to say in a glid way

00:18:08.180 that God is everything, because there's no such thing as everything. That's just a convenience

00:18:13.360 of language. And there's no umbrella term to capture things that are happening in their

00:18:18.820 happenings, right? There is only this convenience of speaking and words. So I like to think about

00:18:30.380 God in this way, as fugitive, as the crack in things that disciplines our attempts to name

00:18:37.440 with any sense of finality yeah I appreciate the uncapturability or the like now you're spinning

00:18:52.900 words yeah just like we can't hold God it's um there's like I'm just seeing God fall through my

00:19:02.120 fingers as you're speaking and there's some relief in that and there's some nervousness

00:19:08.860 in that as well for me good but I guess there's this gnawing question that keeps coming to me

00:19:19.240 which is something around accountability or justice or right relationship or what holds us

00:19:27.780 humans what holds us what contains us how do we hold ourselves accountable who do we serve

00:19:37.800 um if not god and wanting to bring up that justice accountability being good at this point

00:19:47.520 in our post-modernity who holds us

00:19:52.260 let me tell you a story i think i'll answer it this way there's a story um and it's not entirely

00:20:02.420 apocryphal um and it's not entirely archetypal to there's something experimental about it and

00:20:10.880 i might have a little something to do with that but there's a story about um the arriving the

00:20:22.260 and the stealing of Africans, women, children, men,

00:20:29.420 to those ships, cargo ships.

00:20:35.000 One story is in response to the question,

00:20:38.560 well, where are our gods?

00:20:42.240 Why didn't they do something about this?

00:20:44.820 One response is that, well, one god tried to do something.

00:20:47.860 His name, Ogun, and Ogun is the god of metal, iron.

00:20:53.920 You know, he's the god of victory.

00:20:56.480 And it is said that Ogun marshaled and galvanized and brought together an army to chase down these slavers, to chase them away.

00:21:14.840 um but as he headed to the beach he was met by his brother issue and issue is a trickster issue is

00:21:28.600 mischievous it when one prays you pray issue come close but not too close so that sense of

00:21:36.200 That sense of intimacy and distance and irony and paradox and complexity is sensed in this engagement with archetypal flows and what the Yoruba people figure as Eshu.

00:21:54.640 It is said that Ogun met Eshu, and Eshu regaled him with stories and stuff, and served him palm wine, and eventually succeeded at putting him to sleep, his brother putting Ogun to sleep.

00:22:11.800 And then brought in the ships even closer, stole into those ships and traveled across the Atlantic with the slaves, which doesn't make for a happy ending.

00:22:35.820 right if you're to say that within a traditional social justice forum because it's a story of

00:22:44.780 complicity it's a troubling account of our own gods doing us in but there's there's a thing about

00:22:53.420 tricksters and how they defy moral stabilities. In some sense, moral stability emerges in the

00:23:07.900 wake of the tricksters' adventures. And that's one way of seeing the world as open and experimental,

00:23:17.520 but not so open that anything goes right that in moving and navigating through the world

00:23:25.740 and not just humans other things as well the more than human we co-produce moral architecture

00:23:34.560 moral stabilities some of them we have names for you just named a few good accountable evil

00:23:43.680 you know turning away a bypass you know um and and in naming and in inhabiting and in performing

00:23:54.440 those moral architectures we place make the world we terraform the world as we are terraformed

00:24:01.700 ourselves as we learn to acculturate ourselves to the psychic demands of these moral stabilities

00:24:09.060 But moral stabilities are also indebted to larger territorial flows. So even the concept of good and accountability and evil is also indebted to other things. The river, the libidinal flows, and the archetypal algorithms that make us us are constantly migrating.

00:24:32.020 And in those moments, good could become incarcerating.

00:24:36.860 The very idea of good could become troubling, right?

00:24:42.280 And there are many stories I can tell you, but the most famous, familiar one is the story in Things Fall Apart,

00:24:50.820 And how this culturally stable setting with your coherence and just the attempt of the protagonist trying to live true to those moral demands on this person creates trouble.

00:25:07.800 which tells me and I think to any other reader that the world is imbued with irony and paradox

00:25:16.920 and complexity that are not reducible to the ways we speak about things in terms of good versus evil

00:25:23.560 in terms of accountability so this is not to dismiss any of that it is to notice that

00:25:30.720 those moralities are indebted to ethical flows so this is differentiating between ethics and

00:25:39.400 morality morality might might pose the question of what should we do but ethics is about what

00:25:46.200 comes to matter and what comes to be excluded in the mattering of what comes to matter

00:25:51.300 I hope I'm still making some sense. So, so the question about, you know, who do we answer to?

00:26:05.320 What, who do we, who are we accountable to? Must be framed within the Cosmo vision that gave it

00:26:15.040 life. If you're asking within postmodernism or modernism, which must postpone God indefinitely

00:26:22.240 in order for the human to thrive, then that question becomes urgent. But if you're dealing

00:26:32.400 with a different cosmovision, where good is just one of a number of moral archetypes that are

00:26:40.420 available, and is not always promising for the project of thriving on the planet, then

00:26:48.300 other questions come into being, then we have to situate the trickster and ask, what is the

00:26:54.980 trickster doing? How are we shifting today? What are the demands that are being placed upon us,

00:27:01.540 you know, in order to be alive to the sensuous flows of the world? What could, in what way,

00:27:07.780 let me put it this way, in what way, and I ask this question all the time, in what way does

00:27:11.600 justice stand in the way of transformation, right? In what way does being good actually come,

00:27:18.700 become an obstacle to being sensuous, right? In what way does it become an exoskeleton

00:27:24.540 that chains us to the ground, you know, with a presumption that the universe is coherent,

00:27:30.580 morally coherent, or to repeat the age-old phrase saying of Martin Luther King that the

00:27:38.660 world or the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice, right? In what sense is that

00:27:46.620 true? And in what sense does the universe exceed that sentiment? So I don't think that if we think

00:27:56.100 about God as an external being, we can escape the trap of good versus evil. And I call it a trap

00:28:04.600 within that setting, within the cosmovision I'm speaking from. But if we think about God as this

00:28:12.640 ecology of trickster, of archetype, of cybernetic flows, of technologies, of monsters, of ghosts and

00:28:22.200 becomeings, of scabbed over oceans, of moanings, of songs, of murmurations, of rhizomes that are

00:28:31.000 still figuring themselves out, then other questions become possible. Then we're no longer asking simply

00:28:36.620 who do we kowtow to or who do we bow to. We're asking how we are co-producing those realities,

00:28:44.940 those moral realities, right? And we're asking, you know, what other questions are

00:28:51.960 inviting us to pay attention at this point in time?

00:29:14.940 I've worked real hard for my body to be a place where I am able to worship in,

00:29:29.900 and I cannot allow you to mess that up.

00:29:34.200 My house did not become my home, my body did,

00:29:38.420 and I find it hard to deny rent to demons when they are willing to pay three months in advance.

00:29:44.420 Yet my home needs a renovation.

00:29:47.860 It has leaps the size of God's tears.

00:29:51.560 Until I evict my rentals, my home will always, always be for sale.

00:29:58.120 This body, this body, this body doesn't know death as its own.

00:30:03.540 It only operates as much as its souls requires.

00:30:06.980 You would think after becoming earth and transforming into trees that it would understand the beauty of letting go.

00:30:13.200 but it doesn't it doesn't it's fascinating to hear your just exploring the differences between

00:30:24.160 ethics and morality and as you were speaking i was trying to imagine examples of that and

00:30:32.580 gosh also just really considering not just god but truth and how capital t truth also

00:30:42.700 seems to have just flown out the window in post-modernity and in this time so I'm I'm really

00:30:50.640 holding God and truth side by side right now trying to understand what is their relationship

00:30:57.240 to each other at this point

00:30:59.440 well um when i was a nerd as an undergrad um i had this latin um phrase that i can't remember

00:31:18.320 i think it's uh veritas a something a prevalent it it it was it translates to truth is great

00:31:27.160 and shall prevail right and I had it inscribed on all my notes all my class notes all my journals

00:31:34.440 and yes you're hearing that right I did not have a social life I was about the library

00:31:40.760 kind of life and about the theology and psychology and Freud and reading all of them through each

00:31:48.560 other kind of life um and it was not at all difficult for me to notice that to speak truth

00:31:57.340 um or to think about truth this capital t truth and i give you that you know appellation as well

00:32:05.160 is to think with in very strong eschatological christian terms and i'm not saying this is the

00:32:14.100 only way to make this connection or to think about truth, right? But there's something deeply

00:32:20.860 platonic about thinking about the world this way. And speaking about platonic, right, this is what

00:32:28.320 the French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari refer to as arborescent thinking or arboreal

00:32:37.920 thinking. It's from the arboreal or borosan, it's to think like trees or a tree line that comes

00:32:47.600 from the roots and proceeds to the less important parts, which are the branches, so to speak.

00:32:53.460 And they hated thinking like trees because what that signifies basically is a borosan thinking

00:32:59.220 is representational thinking. It's this platonic idea that the world around us is just this roving

00:33:07.760 material mass of appearances. It's phenomenon, not noumenon, right? So this is just lesser

00:33:18.240 secondary stuff. There's a world, an ideal world of forms, right, behind the world we're used to.

00:33:28.780 And this is why we need philosopher kings in a platonic city, people who are trained and

00:33:36.440 disciplines to see the world as it is and not those ravenous masses that are animal

00:33:44.500 in their senses and do not have the fine tastes of discerning truth, right? So it's this binary 0.69

00:33:52.580 dualistic situation that sees a world of forms and a world of representations. This is

00:34:00.820 abortion thinking. So you look at a cartoon, and a cartoon is a representation of a human being, 0.92

00:34:10.640 right? It's just an appearance, you know, a shadow is a representation of a human being.

00:34:17.440 And those French philosophers I named were against that kind of thinking. They were asking,

00:34:23.880 what if we, instead of thinking about the world in this dualistic way, what if we allowed cartoons

00:34:30.560 to do things only cartoons can do, instead of just being representatives of an ideal form,

00:34:38.340 right? What if instead of thinking of Pinocchio as less than a real boy, we ask,

00:34:47.940 what can a wooden boy do, right? What can Pinocchio do? So this turns the tree or dismisses the tree

00:34:58.180 kind of thinking, arboreal, arborescent thinking. And then we are introduced to rhizomes, roots,

00:35:05.640 searching from different directions, where there's no origin point, where there's no destination

00:35:11.300 point, where every point is originary, where every point is a destination, and every point is

00:35:18.400 simultaneously a middle, right? It's performing different things at once. It's duplicitous. It's

00:35:26.280 trickstery. If we think of the world as rhizomatic instead of arborescent, then the new has space to

00:35:34.940 thrive. Then we can understand differences. For instance, black bodies, not as approximations of

00:35:42.100 white bodies, but as ontological gifts doing their own thing. We can understand different kinds of

00:35:50.780 families that are being proliferated around the world right now, not as unstable, shadowy

00:35:59.040 reflections of the nuclear family, as we understand it, but as family itself, exploring the

00:36:07.360 meanings of family, it becomes rhizomatic. The world becomes abundant and promiscuous

00:36:16.900 and teenage right now i forget your question ayana because i just traipsed off into my poetic

00:36:23.740 i was with you i was i feel like i was on the ride with you sitting next to you and

00:36:29.440 waving my arms as we would swoop down and go up and i was really waving my hands here

00:36:35.500 yeah it's oh i was really i was in this inquiry of truth and god and how they relate and i think

00:36:45.760 part of where I was going with that is, I guess in my mind, when I think of capital T truth,

00:36:54.120 or God or right relationship, I think about the earth. And I think, well, it only makes sense

00:37:01.320 to serve our home. And we can look at home as earth as our ecosystems as the waters that flow

00:37:10.120 through where we live the trees that give us oxygen like we're serving our home instead we're

00:37:17.440 living you know at this point kind of globally the over culture is ecocidal we're killing our home

00:37:26.420 and to me that seems like truth and god were like put in a blender and what has happened to the

00:37:34.240 clarity that maybe some of our ancestors had that truth and God lives within the land that allows us

00:37:45.000 to be alive to become like all of this becoming and even the ability to think and to perform and

00:37:55.800 to imagine and to be trickster all comes from the earth allowing us to sustain life so i would think

00:38:05.780 that our moralities and our ethics would all come back to how do we protect that which allows us to

00:38:13.600 live i'm looking around this earth and the suffering and the pain and honestly just the

00:38:21.400 insanity of how we have ended up here and I want to believe that there is some trickster story that

00:38:33.900 we're living through and there will be some type of something on the other side where we're like

00:38:38.860 oh this is why we went through this mental breakdown but I'm not sure and I I'm definitely

00:38:47.240 not sure. So, yeah, I think that's the underpinnings of this question around God and truth.

00:38:54.980 You know, I really honor, I honor that and I celebrate that. It's, it's, um, I think of these

00:39:03.140 insights, these concepts, um, as, as world making in their consequences. And we do need that. It's,

00:39:14.220 It's, we can say that it's potentially problematically essentialist, right, to think about truth in the ways that are familiar to the modern, or even to so many indigenous groups around the world, even mine, right?

00:39:42.020 because maybe I should put it this way with a story stories are always a good way to enter

00:39:52.420 but this will be briefer this brother of mine tells me a story about

00:39:58.680 a group that traveled I think it's from the First Nation tribe travels to China

00:40:11.920 for an for a gathering that involves indigenous groups around the world

00:40:16.360 and i think they've been trying to re revive a project um that is about you know images and

00:40:25.640 connecting to the dream world and connecting to their tricksters and and things like that

00:40:30.760 um for a long time they're artists but they've not found their mojo they've not found this flow

00:40:37.980 they've not connected to ancestry something is missing well the story goes that they are in this

00:40:43.880 festival in China is it I think it's China yes and and they are in dancing on the streets

00:40:51.640 and they're they they fall into conversation with another indigenous group and from a different

00:40:59.480 part of the world and they're just mixing and sharing experiences when it seems all of a sudden

00:41:06.340 I think how the story goes. One member of the former indigenous group from the Americas

00:41:14.840 that I've been speaking about becomes possessed, so to speak, and starts to fling his arms wildly 1.00

00:41:26.520 on the streets, and does it so hard and so prominently that a police officer has to be

00:41:35.640 brought in to try to contain the situation, right? But some event happens, and this signals the

00:41:44.920 return of a trickster that they have been waiting on in their own lands for a long time, but did

00:41:51.400 not meet them in their own place, met them in the diaspora, met them in a foreign, strange place.

00:41:59.000 And that night, as I've been told, all of them have dreams of images that come to them. And these

00:42:08.080 images of what to do with their art is nothing like what they would have expected. They would

00:42:16.460 They've expected to maybe create masks out of the original fabrics that their ancestors used.

00:42:23.860 But instead, they create selfies, like this trickster figure that alights upon them,

00:42:31.040 inspires them to use modern images, to use modern tools and modern objects to create the sacred.

00:42:42.680 and i just want that to sink in for a while and and my sense here and that's the end of the story

00:42:48.740 anyway my sense here is is to notice how the sacred travels right there there's sometimes this

00:42:59.700 um reconstructionist way um that comes to mind how we speak about the past you know and i'm

00:43:09.240 always wary about the story that this narrative that there was once a time where everything was

00:43:16.060 harmonious, where we had this indigenous alignment with truth and right relationship, and then

00:43:24.380 something happened, and everything went wrong, and now we're trying to restore that relationship.

00:43:30.700 First of all, it doesn't do justice to the complexity of the lives of our ancestors.

00:43:36.900 Summarily, it also contains them in static temporality, as if the past is done with, as if, you know, those lives are not still consequential and material and political, hidden constituents of our social material realms, even right now. 0.91

00:44:00.080 It kind of romanticizes the indigenous. And this is why, you know, sometimes I find that in the recent upheavals and desire to center indigenous realities, there is a romanticization of those indigenous technologies that kind of instrumentalizes them for modern anxieties.

00:44:28.080 anxieties, like grabs them by the scruff of their necks and says, you know, here's climate change,

00:44:34.060 what do we do about it? Do we take ayahuasca? We'll do it. Do we sit in the desert for seven

00:44:39.500 days? We'll do that as well. But it's like a museum, it's like a museuming, like a quarreling

00:44:50.440 or coddling of the indigenous. Even the naming the indigenous, I know it's useful for political 0.99

00:44:56.840 reasons, and divorcing it entirely from the modern does not allow for the complexity of

00:45:05.020 movements and shifts that are still happening, right? That the sacred travels, it's not that

00:45:13.420 still. So to the question of right relationship, I think my heart's yearning is to bless that,

00:45:23.360 is to acknowledge that yearning, that desire for a different relationship that is not

00:45:31.120 supported by our modern suburban arrangements. But also to caution that sometimes in our quest

00:45:40.280 to go back, we actually re-entrench or reinforce and re-inscribe the modern. It's a deeply modern

00:45:49.360 way of thinking to situate time on a simple linearity and to conveniently locate the indigenous

00:45:56.860 in an originary Puritan past that can be resuscitated by some kind of advocacy or

00:46:05.480 conservationism or preservationism or reconstructionism. I feel that the indigenous

00:46:14.020 is melting and moving and traveling and migrating. 1.00

00:46:18.920 That the modern too is a form of indigeneity 0.91

00:46:21.420 and it too is traveling. 0.98

00:46:24.000 And that we cannot easily parse or divide the world

00:46:28.040 between we're in an evil world right now

00:46:31.600 and once it was good and fine and dandy.

00:46:35.140 So that our work is much more complex.

00:46:37.800 It's about listening more than just restoring an image.

00:46:44.020 So right relationship is as useful a concept as it can be. There's danger there too. There's something, not even remotely, but presently and urgently essentialist about it.

00:47:07.020 But that still might do some good work in turning our heads, you know, our attention, our hearts, our bodies to a different cultural formulation. But nothing appears in the world that does not appear with risk and with tension.

00:47:37.020 Thank you.

00:48:07.020 wow thank you for bringing us there 0.98

00:48:32.540 i really resonate with the problematic nature of romanticizing indigeneity and i want to dive a 0.89

00:48:43.580 little bit into this idea of post-activism and where you see us tripping and i also want to

00:48:49.540 read this quote that i think ties in with this and it's from let's meet at the crossroads from

00:48:55.600 your pacifica graduate commencement speech and it goes quote the world has ended many times

00:49:02.240 I'm not speaking about extinction-level events and spectacular arrivals from the skies.

00:49:08.820 I'm speaking about all the ways something unexpected slips through and breaks the familiar

00:49:14.220 so thoroughly, like an accusation in Salem that forward movement becomes impossible. 0.56

00:49:22.020 Critically, the world has ended many times to make room for whiteness, the world performing 0.93

00:49:27.580 imperative that enlists bodies of all kinds to perpetuate secure arrivals and safety even more 0.86

00:49:34.940 critically there isn't one world one dominant already made world the world has never been

00:49:41.900 coherent or okay for many of us and endings are plentiful often happening at the edges of our tongue

00:49:49.500 yes it was good to listen to that and to be reminded of what i often call the afro scene

00:50:02.060 not so much the african anthropocene and definitely not singularly the anthropocene

00:50:10.740 but the afro scene i'll make some distinctions here the anthropocene is the proposed geological

00:50:16.760 epoch that is defined by heightened industrialization and the rise of the human as an organism superior

00:50:26.600 to all others. It's the terraforming project of the man and the geological effects of that

00:50:36.840 constitutional approach to homemaking, placemaking.

00:50:49.320 But what that concept doesn't do well is acknowledge the legacies of slavery, of extractive

00:50:56.760 capitalism, of pathologizing the desire to escape the cotton plantation, of the scientific

00:51:09.540 method, right? The idea that the world is geometrically stable, Euclidean probably, 1.00

00:51:19.640 and can be known in any final way.

00:51:23.880 This liberal, traditional, humanist sense of things.

00:51:28.160 What the Anthropocene does not do well

00:51:30.120 is bring that in and fall to the ground 0.93

00:51:34.660 to acknowledge the legacies of the slave ship.

00:51:40.080 And so in its clarion call

00:51:42.140 to do something about climate change,

00:51:44.360 which is just one aspect of the Anthropocene,

00:51:46.680 it makes this brazen attempt to wrap us all into its royal we as some authors call it so we need

00:51:56.860 to do something about this we are all in this trouble together we need to get our axe to get

00:52:02.120 that we it just it's a it's a mess right it's a it's a monolithic heap of a we because it it 0.98

00:52:13.840 doesn't it kind of lumps the United States for instance together in the same boat with Zambia 0.90

00:52:22.060 you know as if they were equally complicit that's one way of looking about it or looking at it

00:52:29.040 and so authors distinguish the African Anthropocene to talk about the other effects

00:52:35.640 You know, the racializing effects of the Anthropocene in world politics today and how the history is considered and how knowledges are considered and how our playgrounds and landscapes are still being terraformed by biochemical, industrial, economical projects of the West, right?

00:52:58.620 and how, for instance, wind or rather air quality in Lagos will hardly be a project of the UN

00:53:09.400 or World Health Organization. That data will probably not be found as easily as air quality

00:53:18.540 will be found in New York, or rather data about air quality will be found on the internet about

00:53:24.960 New York. So that's the African Anthropocene. But I coined the term Afro-scene to do some 0.99

00:53:32.680 other kind of work, to invite a noticing of the more than human constituents of our politics

00:53:45.180 today, to say that the world has ended many times, like I say in that, like I said in

00:53:52.800 that speech. And with the world ending, and with these cracks emerging, we're suddenly, so to speak,

00:54:02.020 exposed to the diasporic quality of our bodies, right? So that in a sense, we are no longer as

00:54:13.900 composed as we were and the idea here is that the human or whatever colonial project you can

00:54:23.140 that can come to mind is not as resolutely stable for all time as we think it is that when

00:54:30.840 the world ends when hiroshima is exploded when time stops something happens to our bodies with

00:54:39.520 Hiroshima, for instance, CO2 and radiation just blasted into the environment, settling into our 0.72

00:54:50.280 skins, into the ocean, so that every one of us born after that time, I think up till now,

00:54:59.320 has a little bit of that radiation from Hiroshima still exploding in our cells, right? So we are

00:55:06.600 changed by cracks, by events. The idea of post-activism is not a way of dismissing activism,

00:55:16.400 not a way of saying after activism. It's not another post-project. It's a way of saying

00:55:22.080 that we cannot continue forward because the road is exploded. The road is gone. And now we're in

00:55:31.040 very awkward circumstances because the map, the terrain is no longer familiar. Vision is

00:55:39.860 gone. Plumes of smoke everywhere. There's a pandemic with the market space in our bodies

00:55:48.520 everywhere right now. The public is haunted. That's the idea. And now we must meet these monsters.

00:55:55.380 We must meet these alien bodies at the crossroads, right? 1.00

00:56:00.020 Post-activism is always a matter of disability. 0.99

00:56:04.660 Not so much spanking new capacities, but disability.

00:56:10.660 Where something breaks, that agency becomes distributed.

00:56:15.900 That's why, in a sense, post-activism means or suggests that the territorial,

00:56:22.260 agential, humanist, dissociated self. The citizen is dead. And suddenly, we are all exposed to these

00:56:33.540 immersive waters. And now we now have to take into consideration what these others, these strange

00:56:40.080 others are doing. Doing is no longer our thing. You know, doing is now a shared co-production of

00:56:47.840 the next. So post-activism asks questions like, so who do we meet? Who becomes our new ally?

00:56:58.460 You know, how do we even ask that question, given that the future is broken? What does time mean

00:57:05.160 right now? How do we live in a world that is uncertain, right? So post-activism, I like to say,

00:57:13.380 is the creolization of agency from creole, a mixing, an estrangement, is that forward movement

00:57:22.220 is no longer possible. We now must dance awkwardly. It's the proliferation of monstrous tentacles,

00:57:29.180 Ayana. It's like suddenly we're no longer human, we're monsters. And we're now living in a time

00:57:36.920 of failure. And the promise of post-activism is the political project of making sanctuary,

00:57:44.060 where making sanctuary is not about keeping people safe. It's not a politics that can be

00:57:52.280 reduced to safety. Sanctuary is not safety here. Sanctuary is, from our point of view,

00:58:00.020 how do we take care of the fugitives, right? We become the temples offering sanctuary to the

00:58:06.860 criminal. So how do we gather around the criminal? How do we nurture this panting, fugitive,

00:58:16.640 possibly a murderer? How do we make room for this, you know, disability? And what do we do 1.00

00:58:24.620 with this place of fugitive power and in my estimation that is one way the new can be

00:58:33.940 sustained or can be supported the danger is always that we relapse into the familiar we get back to

00:58:42.000 normal bio that was just i don't have words right now i at the beginning of this conversation i was

00:58:59.600 mentioning that after so many amazing conversations and so much research i feel like

00:59:05.640 i am more confused than ever and really in so many ways at a loss of how to understand this time

00:59:16.720 and how you just navigated this really bumpy trail that i think so many of us are are conscious

00:59:27.220 of being on was really comforting in, uh, in a strange way. It's like, it's, I don't know.

00:59:36.460 I'm trying to understand where the comfort lies for me in that, but maybe it feels comforting

00:59:41.760 because it's, it's almost like the most authentic understanding of what it is to be alive right

00:59:49.860 now is this way of not understanding and I think maybe also when we're when you're speaking of

00:59:58.140 the murderer or the the one that we're taking in it's almost like we're taking in that side

01:00:04.320 of ourselves as well oh yes oh yes yes yes it it's it's like we are we're imbricated with the

01:00:16.540 things we're trying to escape from that's the that's the trouble right there it's it's um

01:00:24.840 it's a story of um you might get you might get some chuckle and laugh out out of this

01:00:32.480 it is this story of the of the atmospheric atmospheric chemist Jonathan Williams I think

01:00:40.340 works at the Max Planck Institute I've spoken about him and his work for some time um

01:00:46.540 You want the Ig Nobel Prize.

01:00:49.860 I said Ig Nobel.

01:00:51.420 So there's a prize called, not the Nobel Prize,

01:00:55.220 but the Ig Nobel Prize, which is about scientific work

01:00:59.220 that is more likely to make people laugh and then think, right?

01:01:04.120 So that's the Ig Nobel Prize, which is shocking

01:01:09.680 because his work, even though speculative,

01:01:13.240 is theoretically abundant.

01:01:16.540 And I'll cut the long story short, it's about this guy who is trying to answer the question, do humans contribute to climate change?

01:01:28.700 Do we actually emit those gases, those greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide, to significant levels to actually alter the environment?

01:01:40.880 And his data says no, not to that significant level.

01:01:44.280 But a new question emerges in the in the meantime, as he's exploring that question, and it is about this gaseous entity that is the human because we're bags of gas right.

01:01:57.280 And he's asking a question about is it possible to to decipher human emotions through atmospheric gases.

01:02:14.280 So he gets this cinema, this theater contained and runs 106 sessions, 9,500 people, 16 genres of film, romance, adventure, blah, blah, blah, the Hunger Games, you know, and basically spools air through the theater on one end.

01:02:42.980 then measures the outcome on the other. His idea is to try to, in plain scenes, detect the chemicals

01:02:51.980 that are emitted from the theater goers and are associated with certain scenes. And they do this

01:03:00.300 and are able to come to some sort of exactitude, some sort of certainty that tells them almost to

01:03:09.660 a T, based on the composition of, you know, VOCs, they're called volatile organic compounds.

01:03:21.120 They're able to tell what scene is at play within the theater, right? So it's carbon dioxide that

01:03:29.600 is mostly emitted, and isoprene, another hydrocarbon entity. And it literally suggests

01:03:41.860 that suspense is in the air. You know, one article I read, you know, put it that way,

01:03:46.860 suspense is literally in the air. And I think this is just shocking stuff. This is beautiful,

01:03:57.060 rich theory making work because what it does is it suggests like teresa brennan would do with the

01:04:05.100 transmission of affect her book of late memory right now um that we are we are atmospheric beings

01:04:15.580 ayana we are not just contained flesh we are spread out quite literally and that in a sense

01:04:24.520 we are participants in an ecosystem of feeling, right? That shock and laughter and despair,

01:04:36.880 you know, they were able to notice the parts where people were actually anxious

01:04:41.260 for the life of the protagonist of some given film they were watching. That, in a sense,

01:04:48.320 is not just greenhouse gases that are floating up into the atmosphere. It's that despair and sadness

01:04:56.880 and laughter and joy could actually become territorial entities. So feelings are more

01:05:04.140 than just human products. They are atmospheric, geologic, doing other things other than being

01:05:11.020 felt. And so they enlist bodies in their territoriality. So joy could become a principality

01:05:19.420 and a power. Despair, depression could become a principality and power speculatively, right?

01:05:26.240 We're only beginning to understand the sense in which we are more than our bodies. We exceed

01:05:32.400 ourselves. If we're swimming in those waters, if we're swimming in afrocenic waters, if we're

01:05:40.940 participating in ghostly becomings, ghastly becomings, chemical becomings, microbial

01:05:47.820 becomings, neuroparasitological becomings, theological becomings, then it's not really

01:05:55.540 easy to collapse the world to safety, to collapse the world to a sense of isolated

01:06:02.520 cells to collapse the world to pristine identities then the world is undone you know not in a 0.98

01:06:11.580 permanent way but in a way that it suggests that categoricity is also a becoming also migrant also 0.96

01:06:21.140 nomadic this is where post-activism does its terrible work because it's now about how do we

01:06:28.460 travel? What new questions are powerful? What should we listen to right now? It's not easily

01:06:35.340 collapsible to compassion, or let's just all love each other. Love is all we need. No, the universe

01:06:41.500 loses that kind of moral coherence. And suddenly, even its physical laws shapeshift, and we're being

01:06:49.060 invited to thrive, to die, to travel along with it. But I've gotten too far ahead of myself.

01:06:58.460 No. Oh, Bayo, I am just so grateful for this time with you, and it was truly medicine for me

01:07:11.340 on a personal note, and I can only imagine what all those ears out there will be soaking in from

01:07:21.200 this exploration with you and i really appreciate you thank you so much for this time and this

01:07:29.320 winding trail that we've navigated through together my pleasure my sister so grateful

01:07:38.520 thank you for listening to this episode of for the wild podcast the music you heard today

01:07:48.680 is by Zidzor and Lady Moon and the Eclipse.

01:07:52.820 For the Wild is created by

01:07:54.920 Ayana Young,

01:07:56.800 Ali Constantine,

01:07:59.120 Erica Ekrem,

01:08:00.860 Emily Guerra,

01:08:02.200 and Julia Jackson.

For The Wild - August 17, 2022

Dr. BAYO AKOMOLAFE on Coming Alive to Other Senses ⧸300

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