00:04:28.560But one solemn day, I fell and I couldn't get up again. I couldn't recover from the fall, which I now think of as the gift of the planet. It's the gift of my ancestors. And I started to see through the colonial, imperial interruptions of my received faith.
00:04:50.940And today I'm on a decolonial journey, a decolonial path that is bringing me to deeper crossroads, bringing me to deeper new materialist, feminist Yoruba mythologies about the planet and about the times we're in.
00:05:09.600Ironically, these spaces that are opening up in my journey are not a dismissal of the places that I've been, where I'm coming from.
00:05:20.120The past is not yet done. So even though I say that I fell away from my faith, I can never say that I have abandoned it. I mean, not practice Christianity, but in a sense, we never abandon anything in the relational universe so that I'm still entangled with the past that I think I've done this. There's no walking away from stuff like that.
00:05:42.920So I'm here because of this entangling chiasmus of mother and father and three sisters and beautiful Christianized settings with their shadows and troubles and meeting this beautiful, ravishingly beautiful Indian, African, Iranian woman, falling in love with her and becoming a father and becoming myself in small doses every day.
00:06:11.980Oh my goodness. Just the way you speak, your depth of love and your connection to your family is so, it's so beautiful. And it's, I think it speaks to a buried part in myself. And so when you speak, this unburiedness begins in me. And I just want to really thank you for that.
00:06:35.280Now, I know much of your writing circles around the many existential urgencies and processes of change that are rising up in this moment of planetary transformation.
00:06:47.740And in your essay, What Climate Collapse Asks of Us, you said a number of historical and contemporary articulations of climate change, from the early terminology of global warming to the tragedy of the commons to the Green New Deal.
00:07:02.740And despite the abundance of new models and vocabularies to deal with the climate collapse,
00:07:08.360however, you note that, quote, the current frameworks stretch and yawn, gasp and pant,
00:07:15.300choke and ache to name and localize a phenomenon that resists our taming, end quote.
00:07:22.220So I wonder if you could help orient us within this too small container we've imagined to hold
00:07:28.400the overflowing complexity of this time and lead us into some of the philosophical inquiries that
00:07:34.340you're exploring at the heart of our unwieldy ecological crisis. What does it mean for climate
00:07:40.900change to be unthinkable or incalculable? Beautiful. So one of the most persistent
00:07:51.300and sticky habits of perception that has possessed those of us gestating in modern civilizations is
00:08:01.340we tend to see things as separate from each other. The mic is separate from the one who speaks into
00:08:08.200the mic. The podcast is separate from the computer that broadcasts the podcast. Cars are separate from
00:08:14.960their drivers. We are separate from our technologies. We see things as boundaried and as atomized in
00:08:23.520some Newtonian, Cartesian sort of way. And it's a good strategy. It's a strategy that has produced
00:08:31.300a kind of world. I'm not in the habit of naming it as evil or bad, even though that's a strategy
00:08:38.780in itself too but i see the strategy of separation is to create safety permanence fixity for once and
00:08:48.160for all to name things in a final way that's the modern impulse i would say now you run into trouble
00:08:55.340when things like what's happening today start to crop up the first thing i'll say is that we are
00:09:02.100slowly coming to terms in a world that is more entangling and more relational and more processual
00:09:09.320than our modern habits of seeing can allow us to notice or appreciate. So we are noticing that
00:09:19.140we are not so much as distanced from our technologies as modernity would have us
00:09:24.880believe we are. In shaping computers, we are shaped by computers. In participating in networks,
00:09:32.100we are conducting and performing emotional labor of some form
00:10:59.080That is the lives and breadth and size and hopes of multitudes and the manifold that are mostly invisible seeping through and being performed so that we are always intergenerational, so that our failures are shared by a community that are not always noticeable or perceptible.
00:11:18.120So this idea that we are in community also has its risks because it means that there are ways of behaving that become resilient and that is very difficult to shake off.
00:11:29.740And basically, my work in thinking about climate change through the prisms of indigenous realities and poetry and entanglement is basically to notice that, yeah, those ways have become very sticky and they've become troublesome.
00:11:50.600And so we need to find other places of power with which we might respond to something that is beyond us.
00:11:56.680we're responding within a machine and the machine is tired and exhausted yes this machine is tired
00:12:05.100and exhausted and i cannot wait to hospice this machine to its next sleeping area as you've named
00:12:14.240we're spurred to action by catastrophe and crisis and it's this desire to fix to solve to post on
00:12:23.020social media to quantify and measure. Now, in contrast to this cultural twitch of frenetic
00:12:29.540production, you've invited us to consider a kind of slowness and deep listening that I think many
00:12:36.460are calling into this movement. This idea of, quote, coming to a place of an elderly silence
00:12:42.940so compelling that one yields oneself to its operations, longing to be defeated,
00:12:48.780a place of creative surrender the end of thought end quote so i'd love if you could share a little
00:12:56.180bit more on the teachings of slowness defeat and surrender and what is activated when we are
00:13:03.040finally still right you know i was really grateful that you started our conversation with
00:13:09.340inviting me to notice where i come from because i've been very fascinated with the wealth and
00:13:16.800abundance and the beautiful gifts of thought and conceptualization that were always around me that
00:13:25.420but I couldn't notice it wasn't time to notice that then the Yoruba people mainly in West Africa
00:13:32.180but also in Brazil as well in the so-called new world prostrate before their elders when they see0.90
00:13:39.880And it's a deeper form of genuflection.
00:14:40.780The habits of war are already being heard
00:14:44.140when we say things like we're going to fight climate change,
00:14:47.780we're going to defeat climate change, and stuff like that.
00:14:50.780That's war lending itself again to how we're framing it.
00:14:54.640But these other teachings tell us to stay still, you know, to be perfectly still in the face of the storm.
00:15:02.580And it's from these that I was able to tease out this beautiful idea that the times are urgent.
00:15:08.500Let us slow down. Slowing down has been interpreted by many communities as basically doing what we're doing, but at slower speed.
00:15:17.820that is we're literally slowing down the pace of things we are not typing our memos as fast as we
00:15:26.120once were i literally had a german brother write to me and say that i'm you're slowing down
00:15:32.840invocation isn't working because my bosses are still on my neck slowing down to type a memo
00:15:39.140isn't really working and i responded by saying slowing down is not a function of speed it's a
00:15:44.100function of awareness. And I don't want to make awareness a mental construct. It's a function of
00:15:50.140presence. So when I invite slowing down, I'm inviting us to research, to perform research
00:15:57.200into the ancestral tentacularities that proceed from us. I'm asking us to touch our bodies and
00:16:04.940touch our colonial bubbles. I'm asking us to listen, as you say, to witness. No, not just to
00:16:11.700witness, to with-ness, to be with land and community and ancestor and progeny and children
00:16:19.820in a way that isn't instrumental. Activism is increasingly instrumental. So it's performing a
00:16:26.460form of power that is tied to the logic and algorithm of the status quo, which makes activism,
00:16:33.840even in a search for justice, a creature of the status quo, which makes hope and justice,
00:16:38.840as ironic as that sounds, a creature of the things we're trying to leave behind.
00:16:44.300So slowing down seems to be a hacking of the machine. It's like we're taking on other forms
00:16:49.240of body, of embodiment that allows us to penetrate into different kinds of realities,
00:16:55.520other worlds, if you will. Let me stop there for now. I could go on and on.
00:17:01.060Well, I do want to go on and I really do want to lean further into this topic.
00:17:05.560and I've been meditating on the real challenge and friction of slowing down. Now, Trisha Hersey
00:17:12.120of the Nat Ministry describes rest as a radical threat to the system that feeds on the grind of
00:17:17.940urgency, writing, quote, we are living and participating in violence via a machine level
00:17:24.380pace of functioning. Anyone who goes against this pace is living as an outlier and a risk taker.
00:17:31.260It is warrior-style resistance to push back and disrupt this reality, end quote.
00:17:37.320In context of so-called modern capitalist life, I find that rest can only be non-threatening insofar as it's carved out of the shadow of work, as say, consuming or vacationing rather than a generative expression and worthy endeavor in its own right.
00:17:54.980So how can we reorder this kind of dualistic thinking around work versus rest or progress versus stagnation and embody the power of a slow, humble pace?
00:18:07.360I would think of rest. Let me apply Fred Moulton's, let me do some wrapping here, even though I don't wrap at all, and stretch. I think the beautiful gift of wrapping is to disrupt linearity and binaries, is to tease out branches, what the French philosopher Deleuze would call deterritorialization, is to tease out branches from the singular,
00:18:36.220to tease out the many streams from the mainstream. I would take that word rest and stretch it
00:18:42.040further. How about we think of rest as marionage? Marionage being the process of extricating
00:18:49.060oneself from slavery, and rest as fugitivity, that is, moving away from sites of productivity.
00:18:59.180That is, are there other ways we can be generative and productive without taking on the
00:19:05.480singular definitions of a capitalist neoliberal structure? Are there other ways that we can defy
00:19:12.320the stentorian voice of progress? If we're not progressing, then there's something wrong with
00:19:19.180us as a community, as individuals. If we're not producing, what if rest is, as I've said before,
00:19:26.380listening to one's elders, dreaming? What if that's a form of rest? What if working is play
00:19:31.780or what children do you know the university structure is one example of a colonial imposition
00:19:39.300that sees study and learning as only one thing if you're not studying in some disciplinary manner
00:19:46.000then you're not studying that's not real learning that's what the university will tell you but what
00:19:50.740if having a conversation with a friend is a form of study so um yes i agree that rest is
00:19:58.860decolonial in its relational entanglements with a capitalist structure. Like you said,
00:20:06.060I don't want to see it as a binary thing, rest versus non-rest. I want to move outside of that
00:20:10.080binary altogether and create fugitive communities where rest takes on new meanings altogether.0.74
00:20:15.460And I don't know what that is. Only in the performing of it can we speak about it.0.99
00:20:21.200And that's just fine. It makes me think of an interview I did with a dear friend, Bronte
00:20:28.060Velez where she speaks of Fred Moten. I know Bronte. Oh, amazing. Right. Great. Yeah. Yes.
00:20:35.800Yeah. I'm definitely going fugitive and you bringing those things up. I'm thinking of them
00:20:41.260so clearly in this moment. So I'm happy we're bringing Bronte into this. Yes. Right. So
00:20:47.440within our connection to this dynamic, fluid universe, I'm also thinking about quietness
00:20:54.980as an elemental ingredient of relationships and enactment of reciprocity, how is cultivating
00:21:02.160a humble quietness imperative to creating alliances and collaborations with our beyond
00:21:07.240human relatives for our collective earthly survival? And I want to just make a personal
00:21:13.540note on this. Since I've been living out in the forest, I do realize that it isn't until
00:21:20.100I get quiet and I get humble that I'm able to listen and connect with the more than human world
00:21:27.720I realize that if I'm too busy or I'm too crowded with the distractions of modernity
00:21:34.560the voices from the more than human world won't enter me they I can't hear them and so I really
00:21:42.160feel that my relationship with the forest and with the more than human world has come from me
00:21:48.380quieting down and really offering a lot of myself patience and trusting in this connection that
00:21:59.420will come if I'm just able to, like I said, kind of leave modernity at the door and walk away from
00:22:06.480it for a while. Yeah. I'm happy for you, sister. Not many people have the privilege, the space,
00:22:17.680the opportunity to be in the space that you are in you know to to go to the forest to build a cabin
00:22:26.520and to live it's entirely unimaginable to do that in a place like Chennai for instance
00:22:34.800where there there's hardly any green life here it's almost entirely structures and asphalt and
00:22:43.700steel and buildings and parking lots. So it's almost unfortunate, but I envy you.
00:22:53.420And at the same time, your question inspires me to think about quietude as not an event or not a
00:23:02.240space or a moment that is internal, like in one's subjectivity, in one's mind, but quietude as an
00:23:12.020enlistment of bodies just like a wind rushing into a space and making everything shiver like
00:23:19.240making the leaves rust shudder and making the the hollow spaces and the branches sing
00:23:26.940just enlisting all these bodies to perform the world in a particular way i want to think of
00:23:32.780quietude as as an assemblage of bodies and if i were to do that i would be very much invited to
00:23:41.640notice that it can happen here. This space of slowing down, this place of achieving rest,
00:23:47.160this place of critiquing or diffracting modernity, right in the belly of modernity,
00:23:53.100right in the city. And I say this this way most of the time, that enchantment is never a short
00:24:00.940supply. Most of us, and it's beautiful again what you're doing, sister, but I want to stress that
00:24:07.760most of us are caught in the habit of thinking of escape as a way towards the sacred. That is,
00:24:17.120the sacred lies in the distance. If we can leave the mundane and the banal behind, then we will
00:24:24.460find the sacred. But I think the sacred is more pervasive, more fugitive than just something that
00:24:33.220is exterior to the conditions we want to live behind. I think fugitive spaces, and I think
00:24:38.660they're very beautiful examples of a fugitive space. The Great Dismal Swamp is one example.
00:24:44.220That is, it's a swampy place. It's smaller now, but in the 17th century, when slavery was really
00:24:51.500beginning, it was this fugitive space between Virginia and North Carolina, where African
00:24:59.300Americans, Maroons, they call them, built new communities in the swamp, basically. And it was
00:25:06.880in the heart of empire they did this. It was right there in the heart of the slavery enterprise that
00:25:12.440they built their fugitive communities. So I feel invited, I feel led and inspired to ask if quietude,
00:25:20.780if rest, if fugitivity isn't a space of reckoning with the banal, isn't a space of teasing out the
00:25:29.280sacred from the mundane. Isn't the space of actually noticing that being with one's computer
00:25:34.760can be a time of quietude, a time of ancestral connections, that our imaginations of what the
00:25:42.520sacred looks like often gets in the way of our transformation and that we can be enlisted in
00:25:48.680ways that are surprising and unexpected to slow down. And it's not our work to do that. It's not
00:27:54.420of living in the forest and with that privilege for me has come this feeling of immense responsibility
00:28:01.680of how do I take this honoring of being in relationship with a land like this and support
00:28:10.700communities and support the land in their own survival and so I think it's such a complex
00:28:16.580time to be alive and there's no one size fits all or blanket solution that everyone can achieve
00:28:25.420in the same way so how do we challenge our assumptions of how to find self-care and find
00:28:32.960what we need in our particular circumstances and now i'd really like to call the words of two
00:28:40.220thinkers that have helped me navigate the dark waters of extinction and the existential immensity
00:28:47.140of climate change deborah bird rose and tom van duran in keeping faith with the dead mourning
00:28:54.240and de-extinction they write quote mourning is a process of learning and transformation to
00:29:00.260accommodate a changed reality mourning is about dwelling with a loss and so coming to appreciate
00:29:05.980what it means, how the world has changed and how we must ourselves change and renew our
00:29:11.640relationships, end quote. Could you take us deeper into this notion of tending grief as an opportunity
00:29:18.800for transformation or rebirth? And within your answer, perhaps you could speak to your project,
00:29:25.620Vulture, Courting the Otherwise in a Time of Breakdown with the Emergence Network.
00:29:31.160oh thank you sister those are powerful words um and mourning i know it in my bones not just in a
00:29:41.100poetic sense when my father died in in nigeria um we traveled to the village to bury him he was
00:29:48.220an important figure in the country's politics and governance we're approaching the village in a
00:29:53.980convoy and i remember the uh the market women women i'd never seen before women i'd never heard0.55
00:30:00.860of before. Literally tearing their clothes, you know, as the cars approached and as his coffin0.99
00:30:06.800was seen, wailing by the side of the street, crying, shedding tears. And then I felt in a
00:30:14.460moment annoyed because I felt they were taking my moment to cry. Like, who are these guys? Who
00:30:22.680are these people crying for daddy? They didn't know daddy. Daddy didn't know them. So who are
00:30:29.320these ones to be crying. I felt it was a politics of scarcity. Like, if I cry, then you shouldn't,
00:30:37.920or if we cry, at least acknowledge a hierarchy of grief here. I should be the one noticed here,
00:30:46.400the son, the only son of my father. And then I learned again, as part of my decolonial journey,
00:30:52.940about grief as ceremony grieving as ceremony that is when we when we grieve it's not instrumental
00:31:02.300to anything but that it's an opening it's an opening it's an it's a performance of indeterminacy
00:31:09.080that is somewhat stifled by the psychological um i should say the psychological military
00:31:16.840industrial complex. An ironical, but mantle of words, yes. But as a practicing or as a recovering
00:31:26.560psychologist, I was taught to help the grieving subject recover, to probably offer pills or
00:31:37.480something, to help you get back in the game, to get back into the cycle of productivity,
00:31:42.400You know, to pull yourself together, if you will. And this noticing is what has manifested in my writing as a need for us to find spaces where we can fall apart, which is what I call grieving.
00:31:56.660I think of grief as a falling apart, not as a falling apart in only human terms, but as a falling apart that is part of the motions, part of the processes that is stitched into the fabric of matter itself.
00:32:13.840the materializing world is grieving. Wherever movement is, there's always loss. And wherever
00:32:20.280loss is, there is the desire for grief. There is grieving. There is a need to fall down.
00:32:27.240Unfortunately, in modern settlements, we hardly have spaces for falling apart. We don't know how
00:32:34.620to stay in the indeterminacy and the slowness of the compost. We want to get back into the game
00:32:41.580quickly. Applied to the climate change discourse, you can sense the techno-materialist
00:32:49.240machine doing its work all over again, producing bits, binaries, ones and zeros. It's either
00:32:56.920climate justice or climate chaos. That's it. That's all this machine produces. And I wonder
00:33:04.740if there aren't worlds in between that we are not able to notice. I wonder if the trickster
00:33:10.520isn't beckoning at the wilds beyond our fences, wanting us to dance between the binary, between
00:33:16.900the ones and the zeros, to notice a place for climate grief. What if that was actually an
00:33:22.520objective of UNESCO, you know, to gather people together and to just grieve? That doesn't seem
00:33:29.800instrumental to salvation or redemption, but it's a place of noticing that the world is shrewder,
00:33:37.460wiser and more trickstery than our systems know how to appreciate so there are other sites of
00:33:45.200power the otherwise is shining if you will it's it's being illuminated by poetry today and i'm
00:33:54.220and i'm still giving to it my work with the emeritus network is and some of our projects
00:34:00.300like vulture even vunja which is a festival we're holding in brazil next year is to notice these
00:34:06.620other many streams in between these other multiple worlds between that lie between justice and
00:34:13.560failure the worlds between victory and defeat the worlds between the ones and the zeros the space
00:34:19.860between the stories we tell what if there were a climate saudade you know what if there were a
00:34:25.780climate ambido i'm using queer words you know a place of nostalgia what if there's a place of
00:34:33.360just sitting with the trouble of noticing that the things we've lost may never come back to us?
00:34:39.840What if there's a place of just doing that? That can be funded, I guess. Most people who are hearing
00:34:45.700this right now would say, what good does that do? You know, we need to save the world for our
00:34:50.440children. We need to get into shape as quickly as possible. We need to call out the capitalist
00:34:57.740structures, the people, the enemies that knew about this shit storm before it happened, before1.00
00:35:04.540it began to spill through our doors. Yes, I think there's a space for that. But I think0.97
00:35:09.560most of the time in doing that, in pursuing justice, we're reinforcing the system we're
00:35:14.980trying to escape. In trying to climb out of the pits that we've dug for ourselves, the pit becomes
00:35:21.780resilient in trying to escape the prison. The prison gains its form. So in a very critical
00:35:29.340sense, we're in a crisis of form. And this form is the indeterminacy of things. The background
00:35:37.000has crashed into the figure, into the foreground. And so sense-making is at a crisis point now.
00:35:43.460We need trickster approaches. We need ways of dancing away or dancing to fugitive spaces, dancing to sanctuaries where we can shapeshift. And I think grieving, mourning, even allowing ourselves to partake in pleasurable activities in the face of the storm, which might sound like a very, very privileged thing to do, I know.
00:36:08.360And yet, you know, doing that, I think, might be productive in ways that I do not even want to talk about.
00:36:16.480I resonate really deeply with that bio.
00:36:20.020And I have been sitting with this thought the last year, year and a half or so, with one of my mentors.
00:36:30.860And I don't know if I'll say it super clearly at the moment.
00:36:33.840But this question I'm asking myself of what would I do if I accepted that the Anthropocene will not be stopped? What would I do with my life? Who would I be? How would I live?
00:36:49.840And I don't mean that necessarily in where would I move to or what would I do with my job so much. It's more an internal questioning of how will I live in my body, in my spirit, if I'm not clinging on to the hope of solutions as a way to fix everything that's gone wrong?
00:37:11.560What if things can't be fixed in the way that I hope they could be? And I think this speaks to what you're saying. What would happen if we sit in the grief of this and not grasp for a way out, but rather just realize this is what's happening?
00:37:29.640And I do struggle with feeling that there could be a type of deep connection on the other side of sitting in that. I struggle between that and then this feeling of duty, this feeling of responsibility that I have to quote unquote fight or I have to figure quote unquote figure things out.
00:37:55.500And I don't even like those words, because I think that it's the terminology that has been used in the environmental movement, climate change, justice movements, this power behind this urgency, which, and of course, it also makes sense. People are suffering. We're all suffering in our own ways. The planet is suffering.
00:38:14.860I'm thinking about Australia and all of the humans and more than humans that are burning right now.
00:38:24.040And what do we do in the face of what feels like an apocalypse?
00:38:29.160And I really appreciate what you're saying and thinking about what you won't talk about in terms of what could be on the other side of this sitting with the grief, sitting with the trouble.
00:38:41.720It reminds me of Donna Haraway and the interview we did with her.
00:38:44.860So, yeah, I'm really I'm with you. And I I wonder how we can not stop our work to to serve justice, because I think serving justice is is an ethical way to live.
00:39:03.840I think it's a moral way to connect with being alive is to see the injustices of our world and try to be strong figures or at least figures that are standing and saying no, but at the same time realizing that it is so complex, the trouble that we're in and urgency and that type of mentality of the fight may not be what quote unquote saves us or quote unquote saves the world, whatever that means.
00:39:33.840i really resonate with you so thank you bio i want to talk about one of your lectures and
00:39:41.140you share that the etymology of the word demise traces back to the transference of property
00:39:47.200and if we hold this time as an expression of a greater collective demise a system malfunction
00:39:54.020and you know the categorical collapse of the quote human then i wonder how this could give
00:40:00.340away to a radical recomposition of power? How are the dominant logics of mastery and white supremacy
00:40:07.360swallowed up inside the compost pile of the Anthropocene? And how can our movements of
00:40:13.180justice actively tend decomposition? So many things swirling, and let me see if I can pick
00:40:20.700one strand. I got a question from a magazine recently. A German magazine asked me to answer
00:40:28.080a question like what are the skills and capacities you think we need to develop in order to meet the
00:40:36.200Anthropocene and I wrote back and I said I'm quite reluctant to name a skill you know to say
00:40:45.200this is a skill without disparaging your question or throwing it away I want to hold it in deep
00:40:52.160tension with what I'm feeling, but here's what I'm feeling, that I think instead of capacity
00:40:58.160development, which seems to privilege the same old human development paradigm of us developing
00:41:04.780new skills in response to an environment in disrepair, adapting, becoming more sophisticated,
00:41:12.780that same narrative tends to you know sneak back in so i wonder if it's not a question of
00:41:22.300capacity development i wonder if it's a it's a question of incapacitation that is i wonder if
00:41:28.660this isn't a call to die to die well and here's where demise plays a role like what if this is a
00:41:38.620time to fall down to to know how to die to notice the myth of permanence and to trace out the how
00:41:47.740bodies tend to congeal take on resilience take on weight take on structure and also lose structure
00:41:56.020what if we're in cycles of creation and destruction and modernity has shaped us in such a way that we
00:42:04.460believe in this idea of stability? What if this is nature, what I rudely would call nature,
00:42:11.000and nature is a destabilization of itself. But what if what we conveniently call nature is
00:42:16.540calling us to a composting? And so I once asked the question of myself, you know, I'm on a
00:42:23.500decolonial journey, and this is not my journey. There isn't a sense of arrival. There isn't a
00:42:29.260sense of victory. It's a journey that my children might complete for me. And it's a journey that my
00:42:35.080grandchildren may start for them, their own parents, so that it's really an intergenerational
00:42:41.320fabric we're weaving of endings and beginnings. No totalitarian thing here. But I'll ask myself
00:42:48.280a question. If our gods are really powerful in Yoruba land, how come they didn't rise up to stop1.00
00:42:54.420the europeans from taking away those african bodies to the new world you know what if i'm0.99
00:43:00.120wrong that the why shouldn't i just give in to this colonial idea that white always means right0.70
00:43:06.520or white always equals might because really think about it they're more powerful they came with guns
00:43:14.040they came with gunpowder they came with the bible and they defeated us so where is our power what
00:43:21.740does it mean to have other places of power if our own indigenous realities were unable to meet or0.95
00:43:27.860rise to the occasion of colonial interruptions? But you see, I was working with a very conventional
00:43:34.920notion of power, power as dominion over an other, power as control, power as supremacy.
00:43:42.700There is a different view of power that is possible, that is faintly discerned in a relational universe, and that is power as how bodies gain difference and power as how bodies become similar.
00:44:00.280Let me explain. In some maroon conceptual islands of Yoruba cosmology, there is an understanding that Eshu, who is the trickster archetype in the pantheon of Yoruba gods, he's quite popular in, I should say Shihib, since he defies gender, but that's too complicated.
00:44:39.820Our own gods permitted the slavery to happen.0.93
00:44:41.960It said that the god of war, Ogun, rose up and was in furious haste to stop the shipping from happening, to stop the chattel slavery from happening.0.95
00:44:53.940But Eshu approached him and gave him alcohol and made him drunk.
00:44:58.640And Ogun slept on the road and forgot what he was supposed to do.0.91
00:45:02.100and Ishu traveled with the slaves and became the Creolized bodies and universes and economies0.91
00:45:11.080that are now present in the new world. Without Ishu doing that, there wouldn't have been rap,0.93
00:45:16.760there wouldn't have been Rastafari, there wouldn't have been the marvelous people and
00:45:22.360communities and social technologies and realities that we now experience in the so-called new world.
00:45:28.640Now, this is not a justification of slavery. It's a noticing that the world is and exceeds our notions of power and justice.
00:45:37.960What if in opening my back with your whip, you were also undoing yourself?
00:45:44.720What if in unzipping my shorelines and ravaging our villages, you are also undoing your worlds and introducing new worlds in the process?
00:45:56.660What if in rendering me useless, you were also participating and waltzing with me in creating new realities?
00:46:07.840What if in burying me as a seed, you were allowing me to grow into something different?
00:46:13.060That is a different notion of power altogether.
00:46:16.600What I would tend to notice about activism and movements around justice today, and I've been speaking, I teach at Pacifica Graduate Institute.0.51
00:46:24.120And in my recent lecture there, I pointed out that intersectional theories of Black feminism are, unfortunately, still tethered to modern power, still tethered to a modern notion of power.
00:46:39.580And the highest you can reach in this assemblage of bodies is representation.
00:46:47.040And we can speak about identity politics, which is a beautiful strategy, but has deep limitations and shadows of its own. So it's again a noticing that most modern movements to the contemporary movements are tied, they're anchored to this island of power.
00:47:04.960They know no other way of being in the world except for claiming inclusivity or seeking inclusivity.
00:47:11.780I am itching to move away from the inclusivity, exclusivity paradigm.
00:47:18.740That is, I tend to notice due to the demands placed on me by my own body that even getting included is a form of violence.
00:47:29.440Even becoming a citizen, if I were a refugee like many of my sisters and brothers are,
00:47:34.160knocking on the doors of America or knocking on the doors of Europe,
00:47:38.020even with all of this, even to get accepted is a form of violence.1.00
00:47:42.360There is a procrustean bed dynamic that is at work that cuts away the flesh of the refugees and the immigrants0.95
00:47:49.380and makes them adapt to a way of being that is not theirs.0.96
00:47:54.000So I wonder if there aren't fugitive justices.
00:47:57.280fugitive hopes fugitive spaces unspeakable apophatic realities that are outside of this
00:48:06.100performance of power that we can notice there might be scandalous to the modern ear like saying
00:48:12.380for instance that issue traveled with the slaves condoned all that suffering and yet was using that
00:48:19.840as a way of ritualizing other bodies into being and so this is my question this is the question
00:48:25.860that animates my work with the Emerges Network, to hold the gift of this inclination, I call it
00:48:32.020post-activism, these thoughts, not to signal a move away from contemporary activism, not to say
00:48:38.660we're the new guys on the block, not to say there's a sacred kind of activism that is materialized by
00:48:44.800tethering contemporary activism to Eastern spiritualities. No, it's none of that. It's
00:48:51.080basically a way of asking what if the ways we respond to crisis is part of the crisis what if
00:48:56.800there are other spaces of power and what if we could touch these spaces of power and be touched
00:49:01.480in return what happens i would love to know what happens yeah i think what may happen is something
00:49:09.880that i certainly can't begin to comprehend and yes that feeds me that nourishes me in a way to
00:49:19.900think about the things that i cannot even begin to metabolize in my mind and i think when
00:49:28.000human supremacy white supremacy tell us that we can understand everything it's really detrimental
00:49:35.920to our own connection with ourselves and with the world yeah in preparation for this interview i
00:49:45.060listening to a lecture you gave last year in Victoria, BC, and I was really profoundly
00:49:50.500affected by the response you shared with an audience member on their question about allyship.
00:49:55.620And you said, quote, even our failure matters. A failed star shines brighter than a coherent one
00:50:02.540because a failed star has burst its guts into the universe and become stardust and come into our
00:50:08.400skin and made us human. It doesn't end with you. It doesn't end with me. End quote.
00:50:15.060And I'm just interested to hear what are we hospicing out of our movement cultures when we hold space for failure beyond the paradigm of good allyship?
00:50:27.180How does accountability and agency take shape differently in the shared process you call making sanctuary?
00:50:34.480It's always a good moment to be thankful to our white brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers.
00:50:42.440If I could prostrate to them, even though it embarrasses some of them, people that I deeply respect.
00:50:48.140Karen Barad being one of them. Helena Noberg is one of them.
00:50:53.440People who have touched my life and whose milk I suck and it nourishes my bones in my mind, in my spirit.
00:51:04.940So it's always a good moment to offer gratitude to allyship.
00:51:09.740It's from reading and struggling and wrestling with these revered ones that it is possible to notice that everything in the world, and it's not just white allyship, is, as it is dimensional, as it is three-dimensional, it is also fraught with tensions.
00:51:31.540And there isn't some kind of self-sufficient progress narrative that we can latch onto, like holding a basket to a butterfly catcher to a comet and zooming into another universe.
00:51:47.140There isn't a place of those that would ease away or release us from the trouble of just being alive.0.92
00:51:54.300But I will say this, that, and again, it's in response to what you notice about white allyship, that it's a beautiful thing. It's a struggling and a yearning to be present for suffering, to stay with suffering, to notice the ways that some bodies are privileged in a power structure to the detriment of other bodies.0.76
00:52:23.220Everywhere I travel, the people that come out to hear me speak, the people that put me in their homes, you know, that's a form of allyship that we rarely talk about.
00:52:34.380At the same time, sister, I tend to think of white allyship in the same vein as the intersectional politics that I've just referenced.
00:52:42.980Because it's still, in centralizing the body and the experiences of Black women, for instance, it ironically creates a savior narrative for white people or for whiteness.
00:53:00.000As a Yoruba person and dwelling with our cosmologies, identity is not a stable thing for me. So I even hesitate to label people white or Black. And I'm not colorblind either.
00:53:12.980It's a tension here. But yes, white allyship seems to be a creature of intersectional politics. It's still tethered to that same place of power, kind of centered paradoxically, we centers, it makes possible a savior narrative that is problematic.0.59
00:53:32.400and it incarcerates black bodies into positions of eternal victimhood so that because this is0.79
00:53:40.120your identity we're going to predispose you to behaving in this way you're going to antagonize0.91
00:53:46.760you're going to be angry all the time you're going to demand your own say you're going to0.76
00:53:52.540seek a seat at the table and this is how you should be as a black body and leftist politics
01:03:07.640Well, one very impoverished way I would respond to that beautiful invocation, sister, is I don't know that our present educational systems, writ large, are able to hold or appreciate children.
01:03:27.840Children are resources to be, generically speaking, resources to be fashioned into proper citizenry.
01:03:37.640good citizens. And that is deeply problematic. It's because we're creating the spares for the
01:03:47.840system. We're creating the spares for a machine, a spare bolt, a spare knot, a spare nail here and
01:03:55.720there. And teaching in university, my wife and I, even before we got married, we just decided
01:04:03.840is that we're going to experiment with this.
01:04:06.720I have to admit that we had very romantic notions
01:04:10.000of what unschooling, which is what we called it,
01:04:12.760which is what we still sometimes call what we're doing
01:04:33.840She has ideas about school, some of them imprinted by our own conversations.
01:04:40.800But by and large, she's a being in her own self.
01:04:45.760And the things she can do and the things she can say and the things she's permitted to say, the places she's already probing, you know, shocks even us, her parents.
01:04:57.900We're like, you never do that as children.
01:05:00.220And yes, maybe a general argument could be made that even schooled kids do that.
01:05:06.400But there's a sense in which we notice there's a difference here with what's happening with Aletheia.
01:05:13.480And I wonder if that isn't a sacred dance with wonder.
01:05:19.340There's something deeply political about what we're doing as well.
01:05:22.480It's not divorced from climate change or Trump or Bolsonaro or Modi here in India or the rise of ethno-nationalist fascism.
01:05:32.540What we're trying to do, and I think we'll tell ourselves this in many articulate moments,
01:05:39.720what we're trying to do is we're trying to twat the productivity of the status quo.
01:05:45.960We're trying to learn again how to play.
01:05:48.940Not that we believe that this is a fix-all,
01:05:52.320that unschooling is some kind of self-sufficient paradigm.
01:05:56.040And if you keep your child away from school,
01:05:59.000that is tantamount or equal to some kind of sacred activism.
01:07:41.560makes space for our children to be powerful.
01:07:44.420What an inspiration to realize that there's other ways. There's other ways of being and growing and learning. And I think that part of the prison of the dominant culture of capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and so on and so forth is having us believe that there isn't another way.
01:08:12.340That there is this one way and that is the way. It's the way of raising citizens. It's the way of school. It's the way of urgency. It's the way of instant gratification, so on and so forth.
01:08:25.580And I think this dominant culture has come in and infiltrated our minds to have us believe that there aren't other options or not only either even tangible options, but even options in our own imaginations.
01:08:43.340And so when I imagine your daughter and the space you give her and her imagination to go beyond 2 plus 2 equals 4, I mean, just that in and of itself is revolutionary that you are allowing her in this time frame especially to question everything and not just feel like she has to believe what she's being given.
01:09:10.180And I think so many of us just don't even know that we can question what we're being really like forced down our throats.
01:09:22.040So now I'd really love to think more about the resilience held within the bonds of intergenerational lineages of struggle and resistance.
01:09:32.600And a few months ago, I came across the word Atavia, meaning great, great, great grandmother in Latin.
01:09:40.180And related to the word atavism, which in biology refers to an ancestral trait that reappears in an individual after having been lost in previous generations through evolutionary change.
01:09:52.080so as i'm meditating on this word my mind wanders to the hopeful re-emergence and turning of worlds
01:09:58.960that we can't always see worlds that camouflage in our dna or hide in our bones flow through our
01:10:06.360blood memory or unfurl as seeds and i just think there is an immense resource of wisdom
01:10:13.600in life's ongoingness and thorny will to survive that is far beyond our capacity to understand or
01:10:20.140quantify. And so I'm wondering, how can we learn to place trust in these temporalities?
01:10:27.240And how can we be partners to the mysterious and the unseen, to healing a vibrant mythic cosmos
01:10:34.120that perhaps lives beyond our human perception? And I know we've been touching on this thread a
01:10:40.060little bit as we've been speaking, but I would really like to focus on this for a moment with
01:10:44.820you right right well i would say it's already happening sister it's um in many ways it's not
01:10:51.960something that we now have to do like let's put this in the plan now we know how to do it again
01:10:58.840agency is not a human property agency is is the movement of is the movement of material it's
01:11:08.880mattering is the becomingness of things so there isn't um the efforts you know we tend to speak
01:11:16.880about decoloniality as a human project when it's so anchored to humanism it it tends to um
01:11:25.680it tends to occlude the uh the work of the post-human it tends to occlude the as you
01:11:32.860beautifully say the turning of other worlds the ways that technology the inhuman the non-human
01:11:39.920the modern human is also at work asking these questions experimenting with the concepts and
01:11:48.520breaking through and writing into being as an example of some of the ways that we are
01:11:56.420you are beginning to notice the invisible if you will and this is another instance of irony
01:12:04.400is the development of the ancestry testing DNA testing technology if I were to ask you
01:12:13.380what is ancestry testing made of it's made of those biological instruments it's made of
01:12:22.260capitalist systems of profit and profit making is made up of the endless hours of servitude it's
01:12:30.460made of very problematic things and yet this very problematic thing we call ancestry testing
01:12:37.220is allowing us to you know is territorializing modernity that is it is hacking at the heart of
01:12:47.960modernity is the hacking of modernity just like quantum physics becomes this which is produced
01:12:55.980in modernity becomes this tool that disturbs and unfounds modernity unfurls modernity ancestry
01:13:04.580testing is allowing us to notice keener worlds that you know disturbs the story the dominant
01:13:11.740story of identity. The dominant story of identity is that our identities are more or less fixed.
01:13:22.040Take one box. You're either white or you're black or you're brown or you're something else.0.78
01:13:29.180You always fall within a box. The very conditions that make those boxes possible, those categories0.99
01:13:35.620as possible are the same conditions that is producing these technologies that is allowing
01:13:42.860us to say, for instance, that I am not just white, I am brown and green and yellow and
01:13:51.340the enemy of my ancestors, also my ancestor, as Stephen Jenkinson would say, so that I am wide,
01:13:59.280I am a multitude and I make no apologies for it.
01:14:03.940I am so incoherent, so chaotic that the product of identity making, the identitarian dynamics of modern settlements and modern epistemologies break down in the face of what I am.
01:14:19.220In fact, I am is a rude remark to make in the face of what I am becoming.
01:14:26.100and language cannot bear hold the thing that is me and so that is a noticing of worlds that
01:14:35.300that that is made possible by that is made possible by the conditions around us so it's
01:14:40.520not just something we must do to create space for it is something that is happening around us
01:14:46.480it's in art it's in technology it's in um spiritual sensitivities and and new movements