Bayo Akomolafe: Slowing down and surrendering human centrality (ep317)
What does it mean that we have a crisis in form—that our problems go deeper than the visible systems we often attribute them to? What might we gain from surrendering human control and centrality, slowing down even as we feel increasing urgency to address social injustice and climate change?
In this episode, we welcome Dr. Bayo Akomolafe. Rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, Bayo is the father to Alethea and Kyah, the grateful life-partner to Ije, son, and brother. A widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, public intellectual, essayist, and author of two books, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak, Bayo Akomolafe is the Chief Curator of The Emergence Network and host of the online postactivist course, ‘We Will dance with Mountains’.
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Sarah Kinsley
“The times are urgent; let us slow down. Slowing down is losing our way—not a human capacity or human capability. It is the invitations that are now in the world-at-large, inviting us to listen deeply, to be keen, to be fresh, to be quick with our heels, to follow the sights and sounds and smells of the world.”
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Transcript
Note: *Our episodes are minimally edited, and we encourage further inquiry, seeing our dialogues as invitations to dive deeper into each topic and perspective. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Kamea Chayne: I would love to begin by holding space for you to share about the pivotal moments in your background and thinking that leads you to identify as a “practicing and recovering psychologist” and also the relationships that have guided you towards who you're still becoming today.
Dr. Bayo Akomolafe: Babalawo is the Indigenous term for a healer who is also a priest, who is also a cosmic advocate of some sort. As a psychologist-in-training doing my Ph.D., I decided to make the scandalous choice of starting with them as a way of responding to the psychiatric health care system crisis in my country, Nigeria.
It's scandalous because Nigeria is heavily Christianized or Islamicized, and traditional religions such as the Ifá traditional system, nature, religion, are not looked at well upon in most spaces. But I decided to study with them nonetheless, and they taught me about the agency of the world, in ways that preceded my eventual dabbling into a new materialist and post-humanist discourse.
Let me give a very practical, down-to-earth example of one conversation of a Babalawo saying, "Why would you want to medicate auditory hallucinations? What if that's your father or your mother or your grandfather, your grandmother trying to speak with you?" They saw the things that I'd learned to pathologize, because of my Western-style training, as spiritual crises. And that was a turning point for me. It was a coming-down-to-earth.
I'm still playing with those issues, matters, and invitations today. I describe myself as a "recovering psychologist"—recovering not only from my training, but from the cosmoperception and the cosmovisions that gave birth to my training. I'm trying to see beyond the pathologies, the diagnostic systems, the axiologies that created what we call Western psychology or Western psychiatry.
Kamea Chayne: Within the activism space, I see this journey that a lot of people go on, which begins with people focusing on their own roles in the greater system, changing their individual lifestyles, engaging in conscious consumerism, working to unravel our own prejudices and biases. And then at some point, we connect the dots to the greater system and reach the conclusion that our problems are systemic, which is why collective action is important.
But you challenge this with a message that the system is not the cause of our problems. Can you take us through your thought process on this?
Dr. Bayo Akomolafe: Systems are linguistic conveniences. We chart out algorithms, and systems are largely human matters, matters of language, matters of human-created terms and formulas. But the world exceeds systems. This might not be acceptable to modern cosmo-perceptions...
Liberal humanist, modernist thinking situates humans at the center of the room: We are in charge, generally superior to all other kinds of life on the planet, and we live on the planet... quite literally, we are not the planet in its ongoing materiality—we are lords of the realm. So we think in terms of this linear, anorexic space. We live in this tiny humanist bubble and we deal with the marks on the bubble, the hieroglyphics on the bubble.
Post-humanist thinking, animist thinking, even the Yoruba Indigenous invitations are suggestions that the world is too unwieldy to be systemic. The world is too messy, too promiscuous, too agential, to be predictable, to be algorithmically convenient or conservative.
Activism is usually framed in terms that we can understand: It's the bad guys against the good guys; it's us versus them. But there are other moves to be made, especially in times like this—times of fissures and cracks and fault lines, which start to upset the coherence of the body.
This is a crisis of form. We are now diasporic, our bodies are disorganized, we're disarticulated by the pandemic, by the Anthropocene, by racial issues, by poverty, by all these things that we name as crises. But we tend to repeat and inscribe these crisis events even with our best efforts to resolve them because we're still stuck within the same epistemological space.
Even with justice—I wrote recently in an essay that I'm still developing that—injustice requires justice to function well. It's no longer "justice versus injustice", it's justice-injustice. These systems call upon each other.
Even the state that guarantees or attempts to guarantee justice is already a bedrock of violence, displacement, annihilation, and invisibilization.
We need to go beyond critique and maybe edge towards experimental liminal spaces of transformation. That requires a different kind of movement and thinking altogether. It requires getting lost.
Kamea Chayne: And as you share with the concept of post-activism, "it's in part an invitation to move away from a notion of agency that situates responsibility, power, centrality, and control in the human figure.”
Especially in light of the Anthropocene, which is interestingly defined that way to center humanity's unprecedented impact on Earth, people may feel that accountability and responsibility are justified reactions to knowing how our dominant civilization has caused harm to our collective well-being.
But in what ways do you see this replicating the same pattern of human supremacy in the solutions that we hype up as what's going to "save the planet", whether with our climate actions or these sustainable development goals, or even our vision of harmony with Earth? And how do we navigate this feeling of responsibility—to be the ones to fix the problems that our humanity created?
Dr. Bayo Akomolafe:
With climate action, climate justice, and sustainability, there is a somewhat subtle reductionism that is at work here. We are trying to frame the unframeable.
It's almost the way we're dealing with a pandemic—it's easy for us to think about the pandemic as an enemy. We frame it as a war upon this infinitesimally small enemy—an act of reductionism—we reduce it to frameable terms, and then we try to stamp it out.
It's the same with cancel culture. We take a life and we pixelate the life. We reduce it and we put it into a box. We try to delete it or defragment the system by deleting the life, by exterminating it. We assume that we can dip in and out of different ethical temporalities. I can look at your life in 1970 and decide that I know better than the circumstances, better than the context. I have a God's eye point of view and based upon where I'm standing right now, I can judge that you are wrong and you ought to apologize or you ought to be accountable for this. And so I remove your life from context and then I stamp it out. In spite of the urgings and the good things that cancel culture wants to do, it's still stuck within the epidemiology of good versus evil, us versus them. Humans are removed from context. We essentialize and decide willy nilly who is a bad apple or a good apple.
Kamea Chayne: I'm interested to hear this contextualized with science. I have a lot of critiques on Western science, but I know that people will say, science attempts to contextualize the problems by looking at data across decades or even centuries and beyond. And a lot of our climate action is guided by science.
So how would you apply this train of thought to our ideas of solutions that have come about from Western science?
Dr. Bayo Akomolafe: There's a universalization of science—the idea that everything is knowledgeable. It almost replicates the extractivism of late-stage capitalism: We can take the knowledge and put it within our own terms, we can render it into data, and then we call it science. This is not to wipe out science, but just to situate science as a colonial-imperial trope. It's framed within a cosmo-perception that tries to render all other cosmo-perceptions useless.
Science is biased and political. It's just as culturally closed as all other forms of knowledge. Climate action is composed within these epistemologies that tend to leave out, for instance, the agency of the world at large. We've lost sight of the fact that we are way in over our heads.
We're dealing with something that is, in my calculations, fundamentally incalculable. It is unframeable. It is something that calls for a shapeshift, not for a resolution or solutions, or technological or techno-bureaucratic deletions, or funding.
It is an invitation to stop in our tracks and feel—like failure is the gift that we are looking for right now.
And we don't know how to do it, because we are trapped in this epistemology of continuity.
So science gives us this picture. It frames what is happening in the world, but it doesn't tell us about what subsidizes these framings. For instance, the Anthropocene just says this is a planetary or cautionary planetary ethic, that we are all in this together and that all humans are at risk of losing their planet. But it doesn't say that African bodies, Black bodies have subsidized the Anthropocene, that Africa was the continent that they extracted mineral resources from, that air quality is dwindling every day, that the Niger Delta is suffering seven thousand spillages a year, that the World Health Organization does not go to Africa or Lagos to measure air quality, but it does so in London, New York, Seattle. It doesn't say who is paying. It just wraps everyone into this humongous hoop or heap and calls them human.
But many people have been denied access into "human".
Kamea Chayne: So the tools of science or whatever frameworks we come up with can be helpful, but they're merely tools and frameworks. The problems come when we ground our realities in these frameworks alone and give them too much power in helping us to understand the untameable, unframeable world.
In terms of reorienting the role of people wanting to play their parts to address all the suffering and injustices that various communities and more-than-human communities might be facing today, how would you reframe the goal? Or is even setting a goal towards reshaping the world anthropocentric—if the vision is based on human understandings of the problems and solutions, based on our limited, human-centric, human-exceptionalist desires and ways of knowing?
Dr. Bayo Akomolafe: When a crisis, of the kinds that we're experiencing contemporarily, happens, there are, at least for the purpose of our conversation, two basic kinds of moves.
There is the move of reconvergence. Our guts have been splattered across the walls, we're flailing, and we've been exploded, so to speak—our body is not as coherent anymore. We're trying to articulate ourselves again.
One move is to converge, based on memory, the image that we've received. In theological terms, it would be the image of God (which is still an archetypal and active image that is quite central to the algorithms of modernity), which is most closely associated with a white male—which stands above all other kinds of bodies, closest to the divine. So we're trying to repackage ourselves, trying to defeat the virus, get back to what we knew before, into our consumerist, capitalist perpetuity.
Or we can decide to do something with our wounds, that might recall what that Babalawo told me... that wounds are sometimes not to be cured—that some wounds are portals, access points in a rhizomatic universe to other ways of being and becoming.
We have a politics of recognition and a politics of invisibility or imperceptibility. A politics of recognition is conservative in that it seeks to reinforce and reinscribe the same old patterns. When we're seeking out, anchoring, and grieving for climate justice, we're still dealing with the same powers. We're gathering at the foot of the nation-state, seeking giant corporations to be more responsible. We're giving them legitimacy and saying, "you have the power, so do something about this".
It's almost like we take these forms without knowing them. Protests tend to look like long, linear lines heading towards where power is. I think there is more power available—queer power available. So this is why I talk about fugitivity.
There are other kinds of moves we can make that aren't about reinforcing these humanist, exceptionalist measures.
That is not to say that there is some pure way out. And I'm not trying to make some kind of strict binary configuration here. We will seek justice, we will pay our bills, we will still need to do gigs, podcasts, do courses, use Zoom, use Facebook. But there is another kind of activity, maybe supplementary politics, you might call it weird politics, that is ongoing, that is about resuscitating the agency of grieving. There is another kind of work that brings us to meet the world in a new way that gives us permission to fail—like to follow our poop.
This is the ongoing framing that I call post-activism, or what you might think of as post-disaster spirituality.
What do we do after we fall? What do we do when we can no longer have hope? Or what do we do when hope becomes toxic because it leads us back on the highway?
Then we need to find ways of creating a cartographical project that honors failure, that honors desires, that looks for other beings to meet us halfway. But unless we do that, we'll be stuck in repetition and cyclicity.
Kamea Chayne: And when you talk about new materialism or the rejection of human centrality, you've shared in passing that you try to exclude yourself in the category of humans. I'm not sure if I misinterpreted what you said, but if this is what you meant, I'd be curious to hear you share more about this and whether this is another way that you're embodying fugitivity.
Dr. Bayo Akomolafe: I think I am embodying fugitivity. And there's some embellishment, tricksterism, and playfulness there as well.
When I say I reject humanity, or that I'm speaking not as a human, I'm trying to shine light on how more-than-human we are or how post-humanist we are.
The human is a Euro-American creation. It is not just a concept; it's not just the bipedal figures that we associate ourselves with. It is a territory of acting and becoming and thinking. The human is the transatlantic slave trade. The human is the westward pushing of the pilgrims on the so-called new world to find gold, home, or acceptance, and recognition. The human is the extractivist politics that thinks we can build and build and build towers like Babel and gain linguistic superiority in an ongoing fashion without stopping forever. It is the transhumanist vocation to continue to build until we reach a singularity, so to speak. It is the dreaming that situates us as lords and masters. It is an algorithm, a cybernetic network, a forcefield.
And I think fugitivity, and rejecting the human, is about losing our way, meeting the world in a way that hacks that algorithm. What does the human, as in the city, as in the nation-state, invite us to do? What does it invite us to notice? And then how do we notice differently? This is how I want to invite this post-humanist politics—hopefully, an emancipatory politics of acting that goes beyond the tropes that we're used to.
I could say just to add to that, and this is something that Marisol de la Cadena shared with me some time ago: When the slaves from Africa were brought across the Atlantic, they were humanized. Their vast, fleshly, carnal, embodied states were reduced into these boxes of humanity, and they were placed at the end of the spectrum of being human, closer to the animal, closer to nature, while white bodies were perched at the other end of the spectrum.
I think we have been fighting within the spectrum for too long. Our task now is to remove ourselves from this spectrum and find other ways of being in power with the world.
Kamea Chayne: That certainly invites a different understanding of the term "humanizing", because I think oftentimes it's framed as something that is positive, like you're being recognized as a person. But in a sense, you're also being limited by this framework, by this language. So I'm going to keep marinating on that.
A critique you have of activism is that so much of it has become representational—about identity, about being heard, being seen, having a seat at the table. And in a sense, fugitivity, which is a major theme of your work, is rebellious against the idea of inclusivity, which has been the goal for so many who believe it to be the way to achieve justice and collective healing in this unjust society.
So while people might yearn deeply to belong, to finally be accepted, to finally share the same freedoms as others with greater privilege, what limitations and constraints are there when we uphold ideas of inclusivity politics as the way forward?
Dr. Bayo Akomolafe: The trouble with that and the shadow with seeking recognition might just be neatly articulated by that old, supposedly Chinese saying, I think. There are three curses. The first one is, "May you live in interesting times." The second curse, growing in intensity, is "May you be seen and recognized by the king and the empire". And the final one is, "May you get what you want."
Many people will not take them as curses. But there is a risk in being saved, because once you are included, you behave, you are entrapped, and incarcerated within the systems that you've bought into.
We've lost sight of the violence of inclusion. Inclusion is no less violent than exclusion. To be included is to give up our names, something, just to be seen. Recognition is not to be beheld, it is to be reformulated in ways that are acceptable to a dominant force. So there's something lost in the act of recognition.
Being seen is just a way of glossing over the fact that there's something missing when we are not recognized. So if I recognize you, I might be playing into the very colonial dynamics that you're trying to extricate yourself from.
This is not just me speaking. This is Spinoza, Deleuze, authors and speakers, decolonial writers that have been warning us for a long time that Blackness, for instance, is not about this adversarial quality, fighting for a place within white modernity.
Blackness is the end of “man”, the end of the Anthropos. It seeks cracks so that it can fugitively extricate itself, exile its body from the plantation.
I don't want to be a house n*gger; I don't want to be a house N*gro. I want to find other places of being in power with the world.
And that is not to belittle the politics that seeks justice; that is not to dismiss those heartfelt, passionate attempts to find a place for us within white modernity.
Kamea Chayne: And the last thing to help us ground this conversation, I would love if you can share how you're embodying fugitivity in your personal life, how that's shaped your decision for unschooling your children, and how moving away from being directive in your relationship with your children has maybe brought you to new ways of thinking and being that you didn't know could be possible before.
Dr. Bayo Akomolafe: We were perfectly schooled, if there is such a thing, my wife and I. We're high-flying students, overachieving academics. And then we decided to unschool our kids, which really is our decolonial practice, our fugitive practice.
We're learning, from our kids, surprising things... how to fail. Our children are teaching us as prophets of the realm. They're inviting us to see things that we never noticed before and to meet the world anew.
*** CLOSING ***
Kamea Chayne: What's an uplifting social media account or publication you follow or a book that's been really profound for you?
Dr. Bayo Akomolafe: I'm just going to look at one on my desk and say The Incorporeal by Elizabeth Grosz and Material Ecocriticism by Iovino and Oppermann. And Meeting the Universe Halfway by Karen Barad is always, always, always a great book to read: dense and difficult to read for, I think, most people, but a beautiful book.
Kamea Chayne: What do you tell yourself or practice on a day to day to stay grounded and inspired?
Dr. Bayo Akomolafe: I journal a lot. That's my deeper spirituality. We have our gatherings in our family, where we check-in and decide things. And I know that seems trite and probably very familiar, but it's very grounding for me because I'm very atmospheric and volatile. I could float away in thinking to another planet, so that's very grounding for me—to be with my children, my wife, and then to journal, to write.
Kamea Chayne: And I usually ask what makes you most hopeful for our world at the moment to give our listeners something to hold on to. But I know hope is another word that you like to deconstruct. So let me ask you this, what role can hopelessness play for us?
Dr. Bayo Akomolafe: We don't know yet, and that's probably the point. There isn't some treasure at the end of this rainbow, like if you follow this path, things will be fine. I don't know that. But I just know that following a different path is not the same body walking the path. Bodies are instruments of the journeys that they undertake.
Maybe in dismantling the universality, supremacy, surface-like tension of hope, we find that there is a subterranean abundance that we're missing when we frame the world as this binary between hope and hopelessness. I'm not thinking of hopelessness as a pure category unto itself, but I am saying that there are ways of disabusing our minds of the eternal positivity that we're invited to approximate. And maybe in losing a bit of that positivity, we might catch a glimpse of some other work that we can be doing. The promise of that is surprise, fugitivity. Maybe just leaving the plantation is enough. Then we might find the magic in other worlds and other becomings.
Kamea Chayne: Bayo, every conversation I've listened with you has challenged me a little more, and this is yet another one of them. So thank you for sharing this time with us. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
Dr. Bayo Akomolafe: Oh, the times are urgent, let us slow down. Slowing down is losing our way. Losing our way is not a human capacity or human capability. It is the invitations that are now in in the world at large, inviting us to listen deeply, to be keen and to be fresh and to be quick with our heels, to follow the sights and sounds and smells of the world, which is now no longer mute and dumb as modernity would have us believe it is. It's now alive, it's alien and wanting us to do more than just save ourselves. So let us slow down and listen and maybe we might hear something magical.
Kamea Chayne: And if I can just ask one last follow-up—a lot of this conversation has been about perspective shifts, relational shifts, invitations to different ways of being. And I just wonder if some people might ask, are only those with privilege able to slow down and give room for these deeper transformations in this way? What would you say to this, in light of so many people being so burnt out and not having additional time or headspace for this sort of deep transformation?
Dr. Bayo Akomolafe: I once gave a keynote in South Africa, during which I spoke about slowing down. And a German brother of mine wrote me about his experiments in slowing down. He said he went back to work, he tried to do things slowly, write the memo slowly, do stuff slowly. And then he felt it wasn't working.
So I wrote back to him and said, “Slowing down is not a function of speed. It's not, ‘let's take a break’, ‘let's go on vacation’, ‘let's leave it all behind.’ It's none of that.
Slowing down is a function of deepening awareness, noticing the others in the room. And in fact, for my book, These Wilds Beyond our Fences, I needed to go to a place where there was, I felt, a deeper privilege that modernity does not know how to recognize.
I spent some time in the slum, which is what a UN expert or official would say is an impoverished, horrible place. And I'm not trying to romanticize the dark issues there, but I'm trying to say there's a strange sort of abundance and the liminality in those spaces, that is missing when we raise our rulers and GDP and measure people in that way.
Slowing down is not a function of privilege. It's a function of intimacy with a world that is agentially alive; it's crossroads dynamic.
Black bodies, repressed to nature, positioned as animals in the spectrum of humanization, have historically been closer to nature. We've been trying to climb up the ladder of humanity, but I think there's power in those places.
So this is minoritarian politics we're speaking about here. It's not a function of privilege. In fact, those who have privilege might have difficulty slowing down, in the shamanic senses that I invite.
