For The Wild - March 29, 2023


The Edges in the Middle, I： Báyò Akómoláfé and john a. powell

Topics
slip away from image play and multiple identities trickster work
TYSON YUNKAPORTA on Unbranding Our Mind [ENCORE] ⧸328 john a. powell on Institutions of Othering and Radical Belonging [ENCORE] ⧸329

Episode Stats


Length

55 minutes

Words per minute

138.21

Word count

7,687

Sentence count

470

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

23

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
00:00:00.000 And yet, we have no choice except to learn how to, as you say, get along or belong to each other.
00:00:09.260 For the Wild is honored to present The Edges in the Middle, a series of conversations between
00:00:15.080 Bayo Komalafe and thought companions like John A. Powell, Vee, Naomi Klein, and more.
00:00:21.900 These limited episodes have been adapted from Bayo's work as the Global Senior Fellow at
00:00:27.480 UC Berkeley's Othering and Belonging Institute. In this role, Bio has been holding a series of
00:00:33.160 public conversations on issues of justice and belonging for the Institute's Democracy and
00:00:38.900 Belonging Forum, which connects and resources civic leaders in Europe and the U.S. who are
00:00:44.700 committed to bridging across differences to strengthen democracy and advance belonging
00:00:49.320 in both regions and around the world. Bio's conversations encourage us to rethink justice,
00:00:55.300 hope, and belonging by sitting amidst the noise, not trying to cover it up with pleasant rhythms.
00:01:01.820 To learn more about the Democracy and Belonging Forum, visit democracyandbelongingforum.org.
00:01:08.500 This recording features Bio's conversation with John A. Powell,
00:01:12.520 director of the Othering and Belonging Institute. Bio and John play with trouble,
00:01:17.380 belonging, and breaks of transmission.
00:01:19.300 i think it is a beautiful thing to begin with gratitude gratitude is seems ironic maybe a
00:01:34.040 contradictory thing a paradoxical thing especially in times such as we're in but it's a good place
00:01:40.640 to begin so i want to give thanks to the other and belonging institute and the democracy in
00:01:48.940 Belonging Forum for inviting this queer aesthetic of inquiry to take root, which we call the
00:01:59.360 Umbari. And I'll just share a bit about that, but not before acknowledging an elder and someone I
00:02:05.760 deeply respect who is joining me in conversation. And this being the first of this adventure into
00:02:13.320 depths. And I just want to also welcome Elder John Powell. Thank you very much, sir, for this
00:02:21.020 conversation. I have to say that the reason I call him Elder is, among many other things,
00:02:31.040 you're about people, especially, you know, within the context, away from the cities,
00:02:36.820 do not know how to call people that they respect by their names.
00:02:41.320 So I respect him and his work, and I'm going to be calling him Elder John,
00:02:47.380 just so we position ourselves within that reality.
00:02:51.920 But I want to begin with this short introduction to an Umbari,
00:02:56.000 just to set the stage, to offer a libation into what this is about.
00:03:01.000 The ancient traditions of Igbo people, the Igbo people are from eastern Nigeria,
00:03:06.820 is to create a building and dedicate this building to a goddess, Allah. 0.98
00:03:14.260 This building is not designed to last. 0.98
00:03:18.380 This building is designed to be eaten up by the goddess, the goddess of the earth.
00:03:22.440 So it's an art form that is dedicated to decay, that is dedicated to rupture, that is dedicated to vanishing.
00:03:32.800 It's not built to last.
00:03:34.440 It's built to be given away, so to speak.
00:03:39.400 I'm inspired by the work of writers like Chinua Achebe.
00:03:44.400 One of the quotes of Chinua Achebe is that the impatient idealist says,
00:03:49.560 give me a place to stand and I shall move the earth.
00:03:52.560 But there is no place to stand.
00:03:54.940 Such a place doesn't exist.
00:03:56.180 We move at the world's pace.
00:03:58.840 Umbari is a desire to move conversation at the world's pace.
00:04:04.520 It's not a quest for truth, at least not truth in the final analysis in that Western notion of arrival.
00:04:13.480 It's not a quest for final arrangements.
00:04:17.300 It's not a quest for critique.
00:04:20.880 It's not a desire for agreement or consensus.
00:04:25.300 an umbari is a desire to have a conversation in such a way that it falls to the more than human
00:04:35.420 that it might be best expressed by a proverb an evil proverb that says if a meal is properly
00:04:42.840 cooked it will reach the ants so maybe we're having a conversation in such a way that it
00:04:48.980 might reach hands? How might it feel to have a conversation, to talk in ways that are not
00:04:55.260 about finding some universal notion, but about allowing it to decay, allowing it to wash away,
00:05:05.780 to disappear? The things that will be said between Elder John and myself are diffractively composed.
00:05:14.020 I don't think we're searching for consensus or a manifesto.
00:05:19.360 We're looking for a meal that might serve goddesses, that might feed ants.
00:05:25.180 So we invite you to take whatever, whatever is resonant.
00:05:30.900 And if there are questions that emerge from this diffractive experiment, then all the better.
00:05:38.140 And with that, I, again, Elder John, thank you so much for being in conversation with me.
00:05:43.900 I was struggling with how to start, the best place to start.
00:05:47.280 How do I start such a conversation?
00:05:50.380 Well, the first question that I feel might be a beautiful rabbit hole to get into
00:05:56.000 is the one that is already in the title.
00:06:00.300 Why don't we get along?
00:06:02.920 Why don't we just have peace on earth?
00:06:07.400 It's a low ball.
00:06:08.540 It's a soft ball.
00:06:09.420 I think that's the expression.
00:06:12.020 But I think we can swing.
00:06:13.260 We can swing away from there and see what happens.
00:06:15.760 So, Elder?
00:06:17.320 It's great to be in conversation with you.
00:06:19.300 I'm looking forward to it, both today and in the future,
00:06:22.800 and in your role with the Institute.
00:06:29.180 You know, that question reminds me of Rodney King.
00:06:32.760 And I know some of the listeners are from the United States,
00:06:36.180 some are from other parts of the world.
00:06:38.700 But Rodney King was beat on film by the L.A. police.
00:06:44.960 He was down on all fours.
00:06:47.100 He went to trial.
00:06:48.120 The police went to trial, and they were acquitted.
00:06:51.640 There was a second trial, and they were convicted.
00:06:53.900 And then he became somewhat famous.
00:06:56.920 And one of his comments was, why can't we just get along?
00:07:01.240 And so in some sense, he posed that question.
00:07:06.360 There's a lot in that question.
00:07:07.980 like there are in many questions,
00:07:10.320 it's not clear that we want to get along.
00:07:13.780 Who is the we that want to get along?
00:07:16.680 In Rodney King's case, African-American man,
00:07:20.020 the police talked about him being big and scary.
00:07:23.560 They were not trying to get along with him.
00:07:25.400 They were trying to make him submit.
00:07:27.240 They were trying to dominate.
00:07:28.780 And so I think people, we and people around the earth
00:07:33.040 and in our communities and in our home,
00:07:35.860 part of the thing is what is our intention?
00:07:37.980 What is the way we're showing up?
00:07:40.580 There's also a question of what supports us,
00:07:44.640 how our physical space, our psychological space,
00:07:50.320 our moral space is organized.
00:07:54.800 Because we navigate through these spaces
00:07:58.040 and they activate different things.
00:08:01.600 And so I think it's not inevitable that we don't get along,
00:08:05.240 but it's certainly not inevitable that we do.
00:08:08.240 I think we have some agency in this
00:08:10.160 and the agency is not just personal.
00:08:12.480 The agency is also how do we interact with our environment?
00:08:15.920 So one way of reframing the question would be
00:08:18.840 what do we need to do if we want to get along?
00:08:22.320 Uh-huh, right.
00:08:23.740 I know the Rodney King story 0.82
00:08:25.540 and in fact, I believe it was part of the storing
00:08:30.800 of this conversation.
00:08:32.540 and that question is yes it is I feel it's theoretically dense and inviting it's juicy
00:08:42.120 there's something that wants to be said there and thank you for sharing that I want to go deeper
00:08:48.340 into how we frame belonging and how we think about belonging especially in these times when
00:08:55.220 And it seems, well, we're in a time of war and strife, not just on the African continent.
00:09:04.580 And Kenya just went through a largely peaceful election process.
00:09:10.640 It's not the same in Nigeria, where I come from, where there are warring tribes and parties that no longer represent the people.
00:09:21.120 America, the United States of America, seems to be an exemplar for weaponized divisions today.
00:09:29.040 And those of us in the so-called global self observing are asking these same questions.
00:09:34.780 How come there are these strange and rabid divisions where the left is unable to speak with the right or the right with the left?
00:09:46.340 and what does it invite us to do with our aesthetics and politics especially the ones
00:09:54.820 that seek belonging that seeks to build home for the many instead of the few so again i think a
00:10:01.900 very important question and one looking at the world whether it's the united states or kenya
00:10:08.200 or Nigeria, or India, or Argentina, there's a strife everywhere.
00:10:14.980 In some ways, we are, you know, it's almost like in the biblical discussion
00:10:20.560 of the Tower of Babylon, where people came together
00:10:23.220 and was building this tower to heaven, and then they were cursed
00:10:26.700 by having different languages and division, and they start fighting each other.
00:10:31.480 In some ways, we're being pushed together in the world. 0.96
00:10:35.260 It used to be that Nigeria was a long ways away. 0.99
00:10:38.000 It's not anymore.
00:10:39.000 It used to be that India was, from the United States perspective, was some strange, exotic place.
00:10:45.640 It's not anymore.
00:10:46.620 It's next door.
00:10:47.340 It's on your smartphone.
00:10:49.100 We have, in a sense, we're bumping up against each other.
00:10:53.160 And we haven't really gone through the process of actually living a world where we all belong.
00:11:00.220 From my perspective, our connection to each other is real.
00:11:05.620 It's not just an aspiration.
00:11:07.900 It's not just academic.
00:11:09.200 But we don't live that way.
00:11:10.740 Our connection to the earth, our connection to the ants is already there.
00:11:15.020 But we're objecting.
00:11:17.740 We're saying, no, not them, not them.
00:11:21.680 And yet we have no choice except to learn how to, as you say, get along or belong to each other.
00:11:29.060 And we see each other as a threat.
00:11:32.440 And we don't come to that by ourselves.
00:11:35.160 We're helped.
00:11:36.320 The stories that we inhabit, the movies that we inhabit,
00:11:40.160 the fear that animates a lot of our lives.
00:11:42.920 You know, we have, I think, tremendous capacity,
00:11:46.120 as you talked about in the beginning, to create, to tell stories,
00:11:50.680 to fix meals.
00:11:53.040 We'll also have deep anxiety, deep fear.
00:11:57.460 And so both of those things are there.
00:12:00.100 And unfortunately, we spend way too much time feeding one and not the other, feeding our fear, feeding our anxiety, feeding our threat.
00:12:14.400 And so we act that way.
00:12:16.420 Everyone seems like a potential threat.
00:12:19.660 Every group seems like a potential threat.
00:12:22.000 And part of it, I think, is also possessiveness, right?
00:12:24.940 It's like it's not our Earth.
00:12:27.020 It's my Earth.
00:12:28.380 It's not our country's country.
00:12:30.500 Our water is my water.
00:12:33.000 You know, where we have that my in opposition to everybody else, we're going to have conflict.
00:12:39.120 I think that's the challenge is can we recognize that not only is it our earth, our water, our food,
00:12:46.260 that the only way we really thrive is when we hold each other, when we see each other, when we recognize each other.
00:12:52.260 But that's not the way we've grown up in many cases.
00:12:55.480 It's not the way political systems are organized.
00:12:59.480 I think when you dig deep into belonging,
00:13:02.480 the idea of left and right starts to melt away.
00:13:05.480 We're talking about light.
00:13:06.480 We're talking about, you know, you look at a baby.
00:13:08.480 Is the baby left or right?
00:13:10.480 You know, most of us see a baby.
00:13:12.480 We're sort of moved with love and deep connection.
00:13:15.480 What's that baby's politics?
00:13:20.480 Maybe one more before I realize I'm asking more questions.
00:13:24.480 questions. But if that's all I have to do here, it's fine.
00:13:29.320 I have a few questions for you as well.
00:13:31.000 You have a few questions. Okay, just one more. Just one more. It's really about the political
00:13:36.880 imaginaries that are the contemporary political products of today, and whether they're able to
00:13:43.900 hold the weight, the ontological weight of this desire for belonging. I mean, you spoke about
00:13:51.560 gods and towers of Babylon, one unnamed god in the pantheon of gods in Yoruba land was a musician
00:13:59.820 who's widely considered a father of Afrobeat, Fela Anikulapokuti, whose music ushered us into
00:14:07.460 this session. And he would rail against democracy and call it demonstration of Chris or crazy
00:14:20.040 demonstration beautiful music hip jiving music but his point was this political imaginary seems
00:14:29.880 to have been imposed upon us as a people and it's actually carving us apart cleaving us apart so
00:14:39.240 that inspires me to ask about the dynamics of the politics of foot today which some might name
00:14:47.560 you know, in the cadence of inclusivity or justice? What is it about these approaches,
00:14:55.780 these modes of encounter that might actually get in the way of our desire to belong,
00:15:02.260 to build home projects for each other? Well, there's a lot in that question.
00:15:10.120 Yeah. And we, the other belonging institute, I'm the founding director, but the issue of belonging
00:15:15.980 You know, we draw inspiration from all over the world.
00:15:21.580 As you know, my daughter was born in Tanzania and I worked in South Africa.
00:15:28.320 And the concept of belonging, you know, and the reality of belonging, we literally are born as humans connected to another being.
00:15:38.920 and how we express that belonging may vary from band to band from nation to nation but all of
00:15:48.760 us need to belong we need to belong to the earth we need to belong to each other then we may have
00:15:53.400 our particular ways of expressing it just like we may have our particular ways of recognizing the
00:15:59.720 divine and sometimes that particularity becomes asafi you know it's like the way you eat your
00:16:06.200 foods. We all need to eat, but it doesn't mean we eat the same food. It doesn't mean
00:16:12.200 we eat the same way. Do we eat with a hand? Do we eat with a pork? Do we eat with a chopstick?
00:16:16.200 Do we eat with a spoon? And there's a concept called
00:16:22.200 Schizogenesis. I'm reading a book now called The Dawn of Everything.
00:16:28.200 Great book. Yes, and so an idea of
00:16:32.200 Schizogenesis is that sometimes we defined ourself against something else.
00:16:37.860 If you do something, you like jazz, okay, I like rock.
00:16:41.560 You know, you like hot, I like cold.
00:16:44.780 And it's not just that I like cold, it's that I'm trying to distinguish myself from Bayou.
00:16:49.240 So whatever he likes, I like the opposite.
00:16:52.400 I think even in that is a relationship.
00:16:55.100 That's a relationship itself.
00:16:56.600 And we have multiple expressions of ourselves within ourselves and collectively.
00:17:05.280 But I think sometimes we celebrate differences that are not necessarily as important as we think they are.
00:17:15.160 Right.
00:17:15.680 And it gets organized politically.
00:17:18.060 You know, when you look at strife and war and stuff, it's not just two people having a fight.
00:17:22.460 it's someone, usually a leader, the elites are saying, you don't like those people. They're not
00:17:28.200 like us. They don't eat like us. And usually we do a caricature. Most people become flat. We don't
00:17:34.740 really know them. We only know them in our imagination. We don't know their admiration,
00:17:39.800 their pain, their suffering, their joys. So that's part of it. I mean, we do need to get to know each
00:17:46.820 other. And we do need
00:17:48.860 to co-create. And the last thing
00:17:50.860 I'll say is on the issue of democracy,
00:17:52.920 we have people
00:17:54.760 at the Institute who are from Africa
00:17:56.480 and they raise the question,
00:17:58.780 is democracy a Western idea?
00:18:01.320 And you sort of indicated
00:18:02.920 by that you know that book,
00:18:05.220 Dawn of Everything, but the authors
00:18:06.900 make the point that many of these
00:18:08.800 concepts that were associated with the West
00:18:10.700 actually don't come from the West.
00:18:12.620 They come from indigenous people all around.
00:18:14.300 so we need to be careful not to just
00:18:17.600 both attach something
00:18:19.160 and then throw it out because we assume
00:18:21.260 this is western
00:18:22.280 the roots of democracy
00:18:24.980 at least as I understand it
00:18:26.220 is co-creation
00:18:27.780 that people get to create the thing
00:18:30.420 that they belong to
00:18:31.440 if they want to create something different
00:18:33.220 call it something different that's fine
00:18:35.000 but opposed to domination
00:18:38.300 opposed to someone imposing
00:18:40.640 something on it
00:18:41.940 And so there are many different expressions of democracy in the United States, which would
00:18:48.140 be a democracy.
00:18:49.140 It's never really been a democracy. 0.93
00:18:52.140 It's what my friend, Michael Loney and Howard Winnicott call a racial dictatorship, where
00:18:57.280 one group dominates another group.
00:19:00.980 And that's the antithesis, at least in my understanding, of what we mean when we say
00:19:05.000 co-creation or democracy.
00:19:11.940 Thank you.
00:19:41.940 I'm going to pause here and invite you.
00:19:59.600 Yes.
00:20:00.680 I have many questions.
00:20:02.700 You've traveled many parts of the world.
00:20:05.060 You're living in Chennai right now from Nigeria.
00:20:08.200 Tell us a little bit about your journey
00:20:10.000 and about what keeps you grounded, what keeps you moving forward,
00:20:16.760 what keeps you sort of in this process of co-creating a future
00:20:20.640 that we might not live in.
00:20:22.440 Where do you draw inspiration from?
00:20:25.020 This might sound trite and ordinary, but, yeah, it's ordinary
00:20:29.960 and it's beautiful.
00:20:32.140 I draw inspiration from my family, from my children,
00:20:35.640 from my life partner, my wife.
00:20:40.280 My story of migration is,
00:20:44.480 and just in the back room,
00:20:45.780 we're speaking about the migration of a god, 0.99
00:20:49.840 a Yoruba god, a trickster, 1.00
00:20:52.060 who left the shores of Africa 0.98
00:20:53.680 and traveled with,
00:20:57.620 this is an apocryphal account
00:20:59.560 for those who are just hearing this story
00:21:01.220 for the first time,
00:21:02.040 who traveled with the slaves
00:21:05.580 as the elders in my part of the world tell the story,
00:21:10.820 aboard those ships.
00:21:13.740 And the question is always why?
00:21:15.640 Why did he do that?
00:21:17.060 Why didn't he just save them?
00:21:20.680 Why did he not just, why did he intercept his brother,
00:21:25.660 the god of iron and victory, Ogum,
00:21:29.280 from saving the situation,
00:21:32.520 from mounting, successfully mounting an insurgency,
00:21:35.580 And some of the tentative answers, responses given to that are, without these departures, belonging is impossible.
00:21:47.640 Without the going away, we may not be able to meet ourselves as if for the first time.
00:21:53.840 I think I've, I don't want to sound essentialist, but in many senses, I was, I feel I was conditioned.
00:22:02.420 my philosophies my politics my upbringing i i grew up in a very um traveling family my father
00:22:11.000 was a diplomat so i i grew up wanting always to travel like that god issue whose one desire when
00:22:18.760 when asked by the chief god all the others said we want the power of lightning i want the power
00:22:24.640 of the ocean and he said i just want to see the world i want to travel right i feel that desire
00:22:30.660 to travel kind of innervates me and activates my politics. It's brought me from Nigeria to India.
00:22:40.880 I dwell well within the foreign and the strange. Maybe that's part of my psychological resistance 1.00
00:22:47.420 subconsciously of learning the Tamil language, but that's a different story because I don't
00:22:53.460 want it to be familiar. At least this is what I tell myself for my failures, my repeated failures 0.70
00:23:00.140 to learn the language but this inspires me stories of adventure not adventure in the medieval sense
00:23:07.380 but adventure in the sense of novelty is just at the edge of the horizon that there's something
00:23:14.380 else something we're not able to think within our political imaginaries something we're not
00:23:19.560 able to calculate or anticipate or articulate within the lexicon available so we need a trickster
00:23:25.980 We need a trickster to burst open new pathways for us, if you will.
00:23:32.940 Thank you.
00:23:34.120 I have one more question.
00:23:36.180 Okay.
00:23:37.620 Having some attraction to the foreign and liking to travel, maybe even more than liking to travel, needing to travel.
00:23:45.960 One of the things as I look out at the world, think of the word alien.
00:23:51.560 Alien. 1.00
00:23:52.080 Alien and the word foreign are very close.
00:23:54.480 and people are being animated by fear.
00:24:01.240 Fear is a very old emotion.
00:24:03.560 Even animals have fear
00:24:06.480 and this is part of the oldest part of the brain.
00:24:10.000 So if you're acting out of fear,
00:24:11.680 you have a big playground to play in.
00:24:14.880 And apparently one of the things
00:24:17.120 that can be animated in our world today
00:24:19.120 is the fear of the other,
00:24:21.740 the fear of the foreign,
00:24:23.060 the fear of the unknown
00:24:24.820 and yet we're being
00:24:27.320 asked to actually engage with people
00:24:29.440 who are in some ways different
00:24:31.140 but in many ways like us
00:24:33.520 and so I wonder in your travels
00:24:37.320 if you're seeing that and how
00:24:38.920 I mean
00:24:40.280 virtually every
00:24:43.260 society that's roiling has a story
00:24:45.460 about the other
00:24:46.180 and they substitute different
00:24:49.260 people in the story
00:24:50.480 so the United States is blacks 0.70
00:24:52.360 immigrants. In India, it may be Muslims. In Europe, it may be Turks or Syrians. And it's 0.98
00:25:03.920 always foreigners, those foreigners, those other people who are not part of the we. And 1.00
00:25:11.760 in your travels, and just as a footnote, my daughter's first language was Tamil. We were
00:25:18.240 living in India, my daughter was muttering, and woman said, why don't you respond to 0.99
00:25:29.520 her? 0.99
00:25:30.520 I said, she's just babbling, she's asking for milk.
00:25:40.060 How have you sort of processed that, how do you, what do we need to do to sort of, you
00:25:47.300 You have a curiosity, I can tell.
00:25:49.340 You have a deep curiosity.
00:25:51.100 So what's foreign to you is inviting.
00:25:55.040 It's part of the knowledge.
00:25:57.760 But to a lot of people, it's the edge of fear.
00:26:00.580 It's the edge of the threat.
00:26:02.240 How do you move from the foreign being a threat to the foreign being the new and knowledge?
00:26:09.140 i mean when i first came to india there was um i i was there was i felt
00:26:18.560 culture shock it was the shock of being in a place where i wasn't part of the crowd right
00:26:27.140 nigeria is the largest black nation on earth i would disappear in an instant but i suddenly stood
00:26:34.100 out. And not just that I stood out, but I was, it felt like I was called out because the billboards
00:26:42.100 around our home were plastered with advertisements around fair and lovely cream. I remember like you
00:26:52.040 can get fairer cream. And when I walked down the street to the grocery store, people would gather
00:26:58.740 to look at me you know like i was this strange being it was very uncomfortable at first and it
00:27:08.360 tested me for a bit um i won't go down that rabbit hole except to say this that i started to
00:27:16.720 open up myself to the experience of even being objectified right i could touch what it meant to
00:27:24.440 be stabilized by a different gaze, the gaze of an other, right? What would it mean to stay here
00:27:33.340 and to inhabit this place and to touch it and to see what happens? So instead of enacting
00:27:41.440 an approach of reactivity, of just lashing back, I embraced conversation. I embraced hospitality
00:27:53.120 as a way of breaking the spell of the image. 0.60
00:27:57.400 I, like Ishu, slipped away with the slave ships.
00:28:00.380 I also slipped away from the image that I'd been assigned to,
00:28:05.000 the pre-designated boxes that had my name on it.
00:28:08.380 And with that, I met new people, new friends, new community, new ideas.
00:28:16.200 Maybe the point here for me is societies co-create their monsters
00:28:22.000 and they need monsters sometimes, right?
00:28:25.360 In order to say, this is where you dwell.
00:28:28.500 This is the boundary of sanity.
00:28:30.720 This is the boundary of morality.
00:28:32.760 Don't go to the places where dragons are.
00:28:35.700 Dragons are yonder.
00:28:37.260 We create monsters
00:28:38.380 and monsters have been cultural tools 0.61
00:28:40.460 for us to create settlement.
00:28:43.200 But over time, settlement starts to get carceral.
00:28:48.380 It begins to get incarcerating.
00:28:50.880 So we develop something that I call settlement cognition in our ways of thinking and organizing and marking the world.
00:29:00.400 At those times, I think the work to do is to embrace the monster, such as I've been embraced here to the community that I call family, is to embrace the monster, to take monsters for picnics.
00:29:15.020 The monster is the edge of settlement, is the edge of novelty, until we come to a place of where there's shadow, where there's depth, where there's uncertainty, until we learn to live with the noise.
00:29:29.700 You know, what scholars like Fred Moulton, Sadia Hartman will call black geographies, black noise, until we learn to live with that noise, we will continue to live within this toxic cyclicity of repeating the same old images we're used to and continue to authorize even the angels that have been sent to us.
00:29:50.400 So I was a monster in many senses, still am a monster, but I'm learning to live within that paradigm and to embrace it and to also see that as an invitation for me to cast my eyes on the horizon and see the masks dancing beyond my own fences.
00:30:11.500 Maybe then new political imaginaries might be possible, gifted to me by the monster.
00:30:17.040 so so i i want to make space for other questions and for questions from i have one
00:30:25.200 what you just said was so beautiful and powerful i just want to
00:30:29.360 excavate it a little bit um okay um and excuse me if i'm in the translation
00:30:36.320 but one of the things we talk a lot about is bridging how do you connect with people who are
00:30:42.240 supposedly others how do you connect with people who are supposedly the monster
00:30:45.440 uh yeah what you described in part was you're being cast as the monster but you did the bridge
00:30:52.840 you did the opening up you did that and a lot of people say why should we we'll be why should we
00:30:58.600 do that work have to be one doing the bridging why do we have to actually extend ourselves which
00:31:04.980 sounds like what you've done uh yeah a lot of people say you know we're experiencing trauma
00:31:09.840 Are we experiencing pain?
00:31:12.300 No, I'm not going to extend myself.
00:31:14.660 In fact, some people even go so far as to say, I'm going to be that monster.
00:31:19.300 And I'm going to breathe fire, not love.
00:31:22.760 So, one, so how do you respond to that?
00:31:26.240 And when you talked about the trickster, one of the things I think about is play.
00:31:31.660 You know, play sort of turns things on their head.
00:31:34.040 You know, you don't quite see it coming.
00:31:35.920 and it takes
00:31:39.620 an openness to really play
00:31:41.580 it takes a curiosity
00:31:43.940 to really play
00:31:44.660 and I don't know that we
00:31:47.360 know how to play anymore
00:31:49.080 most of us have forgotten how to play
00:31:51.160 that's one of the sad things, children know how to play
00:31:53.600 adults have by and large
00:31:56.080 forgotten how to play
00:31:57.020 so what do you say to people who say
00:31:59.640 you know, I'm being other
00:32:01.820 and I'm pissed and angry and I'm
00:32:03.700 slapping back, I'm not
00:32:05.640 going to extend myself in conversation otherwise to the other. I think with great compassion to
00:32:14.420 those responses, I think most of the time when we respond in that way, we fail to see or we obscure
00:32:22.260 the gift that is refusal, that is the invitation to play. As you eloquently said, Elder, the trickster
00:32:32.080 is the invitation to move from side to side, to break the posture that we're used to, to play
00:32:38.600 like children. That's a gift. That's the decolonial. Decoloniality for me is playful
00:32:45.300 cosmology. It's the call to create anew. It's the call to leave the familiar behind and dwell
00:32:52.400 within the black noise of the uncertain, and then to see what happens there. Just like the people,
00:32:58.400 the Inuit people that have this beautiful ritual called Katsiluni. I think I'm pronouncing that
00:33:06.160 right, which is sitting in the dark and waiting for something to happen. And it's part of this
00:33:12.240 wailing tradition of co-creating a song, but the lyrics are not clear to you at the point of
00:33:20.140 creating the song. So they go into this room and they sit and they're still. And somehow through
00:33:27.240 the ordinary, and I started our conversation by speaking about the ordinary being more extraordinary
00:33:34.720 than the extraordinary, but somehow the ordinary gifts the moment, the darkness, the lyrics of the
00:33:40.820 song that wants to be born. So in that way, I feel that when we say, for instance, that I don't want
00:33:52.420 extend myself, I deeply understand that in my bones because I was there as well. But the invitation
00:34:00.580 to extend oneself exceeds conversations about entitlement and rights and privileges. It's the
00:34:10.500 trickster. It's the trickster giving us an advantage to break outside of the settlement
00:34:16.100 cognitions and colonial bubbles of identity with which we framed our worlds and our homes.
00:34:22.860 So it's actually a gift. It's a plus to exceed those boxes, to move our side of the way.
00:34:30.860 And this is what I think of as refusal or what I often write of as untold fugitivity. It's about
00:34:38.100 us escaping the plantation that belabors or uses our labor to create worlds. And one of the ways 0.93
00:34:47.080 that I think that is done is through very colonial, stabilizing, static notions of identity,
00:34:54.800 that we're here and there's nothing else to be known about us. This is who you are. It's very
00:35:00.080 Aristotelian, Platonic. This is where you sit, that's all there is to you. This is not my
00:35:06.060 cosmology. The world that I come from means that I always travel, that the local and the diasporic
00:35:11.740 are entangled with each other. My response to that is duplicitous. I understand on the one hand 0.75
00:35:22.280 why people would respond that way, and I understand the politics that makes that possible,
00:35:28.480 but I also long for something more than critique. I also long for something more than just
00:35:35.000 the one we're used to, the politics we're used to.
00:35:37.840 I long for flight.
00:35:39.500 I long to move away from the shores that I'm used to
00:35:43.860 because it doesn't seem to be working
00:35:46.620 for even those that are privileged anymore.
00:35:50.540 Thank you.
00:35:51.740 I see questions are coming in.
00:35:52.980 Someone turned it back to you.
00:35:54.120 I'm reminded of, you know,
00:35:56.040 Toni Morrison basically said,
00:35:57.940 paraphrasing that if you want to destroy people,
00:36:00.700 take away their dreams.
00:36:02.720 Yes.
00:36:02.900 And to me, that's partially what she's saying.
00:36:05.320 Dreaming is one of the places that we play,
00:36:08.180 one of the places that we break out of the static.
00:36:12.080 So sometimes in terms of being colonialized,
00:36:15.220 it's not just our physical bodies,
00:36:17.140 it's our minds, our capacity to dream and fracture.
00:36:22.160 Yes, yes.
00:36:26.360 It's that even sometimes in our attempts to redress,
00:36:30.360 redress, to address the ills, the oppressive ills of colonial arrangements. We feed those
00:36:39.960 arrangements. We reinforce them. We re-inscribe the hurt and the pain. So the gift of refusal,
00:36:48.700 the gift of play, is to dance away from those algorithms so that we might find other ways to
00:36:55.500 compose reality, to compose belonging. And this might be, I'm noticing the question,
00:37:01.380 how do we play when we feel physically and emotionally unsafe with others?
00:37:06.020 For me, Elder, belonging isn't something that comes from human longings. Belonging is a dense
00:37:12.680 materiality. It's animacy. It's multi-species saloon. It's not just how we feel. It's not just 0.98
00:37:18.800 the legal frameworks. It's not just the architecture. It's not just inclusivity.
00:37:23.960 Of course, you've written extensively about that. It's also viruses and microbial activisms in our guts. It's also texture and color and a non-human world. So that bodies do not precede belonging. Belonging creates subjectivity. It creates our bodies.
00:37:44.240 So there will be moments when we feel unsafe physically and emotionally. And I don't think I can speak in some universal sense and say, stay there and see what happens. We have to deal with each specificity as it comes.
00:37:59.820 But there is, I think, even in the most oppressive circumstances, as African elders would attest to, even in the most oppressive, dark places, there is a glimmer of hope.
00:38:12.180 There is a glimmer of light. There is a trickster traveling with a fragile, precious treasure to plant in the diasporic, to do strange things with it.
00:38:22.460 Um, so on safety, uncertainty might produce strange things. 0.94
00:38:30.140 Um, the work then is to create community for us to hold and cultivate the resilience to stay with that trouble together.
00:38:38.340 I'm using Donna Haraway's phrase, stay with the trouble.
00:38:43.980 The questions are pouring in.
00:38:46.280 and so I'm going to take another one, but people have heard me talk about my family.
00:38:53.720 You mentioned that's part of your inspiration. It is.
00:38:58.120 Both the parents have passed now, so I'm an orphan in a way, but they left me so much, including
00:39:07.000 my siblings. But if I were to chronicle all the difficulties of my parents' life in terms of
00:39:12.680 of being sharecroppers in the South in terms of watching and being aware of people being
00:39:18.300 killed and literally lynched of when I was a young man and my dad, a furnace blew up
00:39:24.780 in his face and we're driving around Detroit looking for a hospital that will accept a
00:39:30.700 Black man into the hospital.
00:39:33.700 There's a lot of what we might call trauma or pain.
00:39:37.180 and yet if you had met my mom and dad
00:39:40.400 and some of you have
00:39:41.720 the story of that pain
00:39:44.900 and their story would seem to be incongruent
00:39:47.200 there was so much love 1.00
00:39:49.300 my mom was a trickster 0.99
00:39:51.360 my dad was a bodhisattva 1.00
00:39:53.000 and
00:39:55.480 I feel blessed
00:39:58.700 not just to have them as parents
00:40:00.100 but that some of that
00:40:01.620 maybe has rubbed off on me
00:40:03.420 and I don't want to belittle people's pain
00:40:06.100 and suffering root pain at the same time if we just stay there then that starts to define us
00:40:12.860 the pain it's like there's a second and third injury from the pain it's not just a
00:40:17.540 it's the second and third injury we can't see anything else uh one last story before we take
00:40:24.560 another question i had an uncle uh he passed away when we were a young man he was not much older
00:40:31.880 than me, but still my uncle, a yellow jacket flew into his ear, and his response was to
00:40:39.300 cup his ear.
00:40:41.180 And he's running down the street, streaming, and we were saying, you know, Lloyd, remove
00:40:47.340 your hand.
00:40:48.920 And of course the yellow jacket, as you know, is the wasp, and it kept stinging him over
00:40:52.720 and over again.
00:40:54.420 And his holding his ear made it so the yellow jacket couldn't get out, and he essentially
00:40:59.720 lost his hearing.
00:41:00.720 His reaction was understandable, but in many ways, it made things worse as well.
00:41:06.680 That feels like a trauma response.
00:41:10.280 It's how we hold it in.
00:41:12.080 The efforts to get rid of the pain become the efforts to contain it.
00:41:17.980 Right.
00:41:30.720 Thank you.
00:42:00.720 so one question is how can we teach one another to play the role of the trickster
00:42:10.340 identity smasher new world creators i'll start but then i'll turn it over to bayou
00:42:17.580 bayou shared with us his tradition and uh family and in nigeria many of us i would think
00:42:27.500 not nigerian maybe some of you are many of us have had different traditions so i don't know
00:42:34.260 if we can completely without more work without more investigation interrogate tricksters i think
00:42:43.440 it's something to sort of orient us in a certain way and we may have our own way of playing our
00:42:48.300 own way of actually engaging what i call our multiple identities i think that if we i think
00:42:56.780 we are multiple identities. And the reason we don't experience that is that there's something
00:43:01.360 holding us back. There's something we're taught not to actually investigate, experience, relax
00:43:10.720 into our multiple identities. And one of the things about play, when you think about kids,
00:43:15.220 when they play, oftentimes they play from the space of multiple identities. They take
00:43:21.440 on different characters. They take on, there'll be a bird, there'll be a river. So they're doing
00:43:29.060 that very early. And then we teach them to stop. You're not a bird, you're not a river. You stay,
00:43:36.000 you're this, you're John. It's like, so I think part of this is going back to that. And then
00:43:43.300 Bayou talked about different traditions and even rituals that help us play. We may need that as
00:43:49.120 well. And so, for example, obviously, music, dance, that's about playing. That's about taking on
00:43:57.160 something different. So I think that we may have to think about and invite playing back into our
00:44:03.360 lives, both individually and actively. But Rao, you're back now, so let me turn this over to you.
00:44:08.760 I think we started to speak about tricksters too much, and so the place got dense. The technology
00:44:14.560 you cannot hold the weight of our conversation. I apologize. My first response to that, the
00:44:21.620 question about identity bursting work smashes and the trickster is that I do not think of humans
00:44:30.960 as tricksters. I think of the trickster as this energetic flow, this liminal quality
00:44:39.100 that shapes new possibilities, which enlists humans as well as non-humans. And it's always
00:44:47.360 invitational. It's an invitation like the elder. I heard you saying it's an invitation to play.
00:44:54.540 Now, the trickster's deepest work is to break open binaries, is to disturb binaries,
00:45:01.960 whether it's between God and man, man and woman, or heaven and hell, or language and reality,
00:45:12.380 or reason and emotion, is to burst the idea that these are binaries and to find a way,
00:45:19.620 one might call it a third way, between the cracks of binaries. So I often think of a politics or
00:45:27.280 an aesthetic or an art that is in response to the trickster as post-activism or as making sanctuary.
00:45:36.420 That is an invitation to play, to compose from the fabric of our loss and our grieving
00:45:43.860 and our not knowing an art, a way of keeping track of our bodies, so to speak.
00:45:51.740 um so in the places where we don't know in the places where we're not sure any longer
00:45:57.480 in the places where we feel defeated where we feel um like we're failed and we're failures
00:46:04.920 and there are lots of stories to be told about the educational system in india and how it co-produces
00:46:10.460 um failure as a phenomenon in those places i think i think the the trickster abides the trickster
00:46:18.960 dwells in the cracks in modernity. So where you think that things don't add up, you want to
00:46:26.760 gravitate towards those things and find community to hold you and hold that precious thing that
00:46:33.780 wants to emerge. Grieving together is trickster work. Playing together is trickster work. Sitting
00:46:40.260 in the dark and waiting for something to happen is trickster work. So wherever you find openings
00:46:45.460 in the explanation we give to things,
00:46:49.140 that is the invitation to the trickster, I think.
00:46:52.500 Thank you.
00:46:53.500 And I'm going to read one more question.
00:46:55.940 Okay.
00:46:57.200 We may have time for two more.
00:46:58.900 I am Asian from an all-white community in Ohio.
00:47:01.560 I spent time in Kenya where I was in Zunyu,
00:47:06.640 if I know what that means.
00:47:07.880 It means basically...
00:47:08.940 Zunyu.
00:47:10.100 Yes.
00:47:10.560 Monster.
00:47:11.740 Yeah.
00:47:11.980 But it was easy to embrace being a mother there.
00:47:16.280 I find it impossible to do it in this country, though.
00:47:19.280 Why?
00:47:21.600 Let me just speculate.
00:47:23.100 Obviously, we don't know why.
00:47:25.560 But I lived in Africa.
00:47:27.380 I'd lived in an indigenous, what's now called Navajo or Hopi.
00:47:34.840 And I remember people coming up to me and seeing me as the other.
00:47:38.520 but there was no it was almost like just a fact it wasn't like I'm gonna beat you up it wasn't that
00:47:45.700 it didn't have the kind of uh toxicity that uh I find sometimes in black in America carries with
00:47:54.580 it and so I was the other but I was there was a certain I don't know what the right word is but
00:48:01.580 there's a certain openness curiosity uh just matter of fact and so in a sense there was place
00:48:08.160 to move. I remember
00:48:10.280 one of the things I used to do when I lived on the Navajo
00:48:12.460 and Hopi Reservation, I used to stand on my head
00:48:14.400 a lot doing yoga. And people
00:48:16.280 sometimes when they would get
00:48:18.160 a little frustrated with me, they'd say,
00:48:20.760 go stand on your head.
00:48:25.980 But I've never heard
00:48:27.900 someone who was being hostile to me
00:48:30.160 because of their racism
00:48:32.200 say, go stand on your head.
00:48:34.880 It's like they say, cease to exist.
00:48:36.460 they say you're a threat in a way.
00:48:39.220 So that was my experience,
00:48:40.700 but I do have had the experience
00:48:43.060 of being in other different cultures
00:48:44.860 where it wasn't a threat,
00:48:46.400 where it wasn't quite as hard,
00:48:47.920 where it wasn't crusted in some way,
00:48:50.180 and there was a possibility of movement.
00:48:52.020 In the United States,
00:48:52.760 I feel like it's much harder in some way.
00:48:55.860 There's a much larger narrative
00:48:57.140 and there's structure to support that narrative,
00:49:00.000 and it's a collective narrative.
00:49:02.320 So that's my response.
00:49:04.140 Byron, do you want to respond to that as well?
00:49:06.460 Yeah, I do. I think the United States has, this is where this speaker is from, is speaking from Ohio, right?
00:49:17.860 Yes.
00:49:18.260 In the United States. So I think the United States has a lot of practice at being empire.
00:49:23.920 And empires eventually start to, after using up all the resources, natural resources, human resources, when they run out of resources, they start to, they might commodify monsters as well, right?
00:49:43.020 and take the other and contain it, and in an algorithm of indigestibility, put it in a family
00:49:51.900 way so that it continues to reproduce for them, which is my highfalutin way of saying that some
00:50:00.000 of the cultures that I've also had the privilege of living with always have others. It's almost
00:50:07.940 inescapable that we co-produce the other in co-producing place. But they have healthy
00:50:15.280 encounters with the others. Yoruba people have a sense of orita. This is the crossroads.
00:50:22.620 That is, they say that the crossroad interpenetrates everything. That if you go to a marketplace and
00:50:28.560 you bend down and you look at the world between your legs, you know, the world behind you,
00:50:33.300 you will find monsters, so that they're not far away. They're not in the wilds beyond fences.
00:50:39.760 They're right here with us, and we're indebted to them. So there is, and Yoruba people pray to
00:50:46.700 Issue. They say, Issue, come close, but not too close. So there's this healthy fascination with
00:50:52.060 the trickster, but also a deep respect that to engage the trickster is to engage risk.
00:50:57.840 I feel this is entirely missing in empire, or at least so repressed or pushed down as to be of no consequence. It's that even monsters are now game for capitalist reproduction. And so it's almost impossible to have that conversation in that space.
00:51:19.920 what needs to happen maybe I would venture out to say is a break a break in transmission
00:51:27.880 or else empire will keep on reproducing itself so something needs to interpenetrate that model
00:51:35.480 and invite a falling apart and I'm not speaking in terms of nation states falling apart I'm
00:51:42.200 speaking in terms of people meeting the trickster in local poddles of refusal and finding a new
00:51:51.640 a world of play that could not have been possible if they stuck within those empiric assemblages.
00:52:00.080 So we're almost out of time. I'm going to throw out one more question and give a quick response.
00:52:04.920 The question is, is emotional justice and belonging linked? Is emotional justice and
00:52:10.860 belonging linked and let me just add one thing to what bio just said um i'm here in the united
00:52:17.400 states i'm in berkeley california so things may seem very solid but they're not um i was in
00:52:28.120 africa doing work on um ending apartheid when steve vico was killed i was actually
00:52:37.000 doing postgraduate work.
00:52:39.280 So I was studying what was happening in Southern Africa.
00:52:42.760 And when Steve Biko died or was killed,
00:52:44.860 I felt like South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe,
00:52:51.060 they will never become post-Colombia.
00:52:54.420 And a few years later, apartheid had began to crumble.
00:52:57.840 I missed the fragility of it.
00:52:59.720 It looked like this huge empire, if you will,
00:53:03.780 and yet it was fragile.
00:53:05.520 And so I think that even as we think about empire,
00:53:08.420 there's a fragility to that.
00:53:10.060 And part of the fragility is the people themselves.
00:53:13.300 And we're running out of time, so I'm not going to go into it,
00:53:15.180 but I want us to sort of distinguish between empire and the people.
00:53:21.340 All of us, for the most part, white, black, straight, gay,
00:53:25.940 are trapped in this empire, sort of.
00:53:29.240 And we're not all in the same position,
00:53:31.900 but this empire is weighing upon all of us, and it's fragile.
00:53:34.580 the fragility in part
00:53:38.140 can be accelerated
00:53:40.620 by belonging
00:53:42.600 by the trickster
00:53:43.680 but if we see it as this big thing that can't
00:53:46.660 change it actually freezes us
00:53:48.500 as well
00:53:48.940 and so in terms of your question
00:53:52.200 is emotional justice and belonging
00:53:54.600 I would say yes but they're not
00:53:56.460 the same
00:53:57.020 and to me belonging
00:54:00.440 already exists we don't live it
00:54:02.340 we don't celebrate it we don't
00:54:04.580 acknowledge it but it's there we're always connected we're always belonging to each other
00:54:10.800 we already belong to the earth we may not recognize it justice is something different
00:54:15.820 justice is not something that's already there um by let me have the last 60 seconds
00:54:22.640 60 seconds i would say yes but i would also want to i struggle with the term emotional justice
00:54:31.560 the phrasing of that maybe I would invite more conversation about emotional justice as a concept
00:54:41.120 but yes justice and belonging play with each other but there are also moments when it seems
00:54:48.340 this trope of belonging that we're we're building concepts around where it pushes out and it seeks
00:54:57.360 new ways of traveling? When home is no longer hospitable, what do we do? Maybe that's how I end
00:55:04.840 that or respond to that question. Thank you. It's time. Thank you. Thank you very much.
00:55:16.880 Thank you for listening to this special episode of The Edges in the Middle
00:55:20.560 with Bayo Akamalafe and John A. Powell. The music you heard today was by Sitka Sun.
00:55:26.140 Graciously provided by the Long Road Society record label
00:55:30.200 For the Wild is created by Ayanna Young, Erica Ekrem, Francesca Glaspell, and Julia Jackson