The Edges in the Middle: Rethinking Justice, Hope, and Belonging
An mbari* with Dr. Bayo Akomolafe and Friends
Upcoming Events:
About the Edges in the Middle:
“Bring something incomprehensible into this world!”
- Felix Guattari
By one account of the matter, the Yoruba trickster, the dreadlocked òrìṣà named Èṣù, a promiscuous god with a lust for travel and the number three, stole into a seabound slave ship once nested by a West African shore and sailed the tempestuous Atlantic to beckoning and unknown worlds. In his tiny wandering bag, he carried the crossroads and its àṣẹ, the unwieldy agency and vibrant fertility of all things. The world’s ability to world itself.
Stowed in the wailing hulls of those sailing vessels, Èṣù corrupted the master’s gaze, the slave’s claims to despondency, and the purity of the distinction between the two. He seeded new realities in the crack of the wounds left in the wake of the snarling whip; he whispered in the ears of the captured that dance was also a form of self-defense. And he himself danced with molecular kin and viral critters as they braided electric festivals of possibility in the dark corners of the colonial.
To those who know how to listen, there are rumors that he still dances…somewhere in the curdling froth of the Atlantic Ocean, where edges meet and greet each other.
In this series of crossroads-like conversations for the Democracy & Belonging Forum, OBI’s Global Senior Fellow, Dr. Báyò Akómoláfé, pushes away from the safety of secure shores and travels with his friends to the edges in the middle, where strange frequencies, alien signals, posthuman invitations, and black noises might be heard. In a time when the highroads of justice no longer seem to lead to interesting places; in a time when our boldest solutions tend to reinforce the very paradigms we struggle to upend; in a time when speaking truth to power seems like our only recourse for living well with the planet, we must travel to the edges of what we know: to the precipice of hope, to the interstices of belonging, and to the shadows of justice.
There, in the noise and the rush and frothing end of things, in the thick of our failure, we will be met by something keener than mere arrival.
*About Mbari:
In eastern Nigeria, especially in Owerri, mbari refers to a conciliatory ritual convened by local priests in response to the call of the all-powerful earth goddess, Ala, whose agency infuses the land, blesses the communities that are devoted to her worship, and prevents disasters from happening. As an indigenous art form that continued well into the 1960s when Nigeria gained independence from the British, and just before a combination of the Biafran War of 1966 and the colonizing reach of Christianity and schooling that decimated communities of mbari practitioners, the now extinct communal project of mbari consisted of constructing two-story roofed mud houses, often with four pillars and a square or rectangular perimeter. Lining its edges were visually striking clay sculptures of deities, personalities, and objects. Some of these objects, inspired by contemporary life, “included vibrant depictions of banks, automobiles, radios, telephones, offices, uniformed soldiers, and maternity clinics, reflecting modernization and Nigeria’s recent independence.”[1]
What is perhaps most unique about mbari houses is that they were never maintained: their decay, their falling away to earth once more, seemed to mark a sentiment that creation (the literal meaning of the word, ‘mbari’) must work hand in hand with destruction. Moreover, it is believed that the anticipated collapse of the structure was Ala’s way of eating it, blessing the rite and the participating communities.
One more thing stands out: anyone could have been an mbari practitioner. It was the call that made the artist. Accordingly, no subject matter was too mundane to be part of the mbari’s clayey archive. It might be said then that the mbari was like a bump on the road, a crack in the fields into which practitioners were invited to fall to deposit their exhausted visions of the ordinary. Their visions purged, their perceptions reinvigorated, their bodies shapeshifted, the artists learned to see the world in ways that honored Ala, the earth goddess whose teachings reminded them, as it reminds us, that every moment is a creation event – a concatenation of forces so profound that it needs to be destroyed to be itself.
This series of talks and writings convened in the diffractive, binary-bursting aesthetic of an mbari house, is a humble sitting-with-Ala, an expedition-to-edges in the Esucene, the ‘age’ of the Yoruba trickster and his-her-its shape-shifting antics. The aim of these conversations is not to disseminate information, not to arrive at the truth, not to reach consensus, but to touch each other – in all the animal senses the word ‘touch’ might convey. Working with liminal, fluid, and oceanic becomings as a desirous field, instead of rectilinear trajectories that terminate at a lofty truth, Dr. Bayo Akomolafe will work with his invited friends to read popular ideas and assumptions about hope, justice, belonging and the future through posthumanist lenses, teasing out sites of convergence and divergence in their encounter.
These explorations are not ‘safe’. These encounters will probably be offensive (we hope they are). This is not a preaching to the choir. This is a jumping-off-from-tightropes into potentially risky and emancipatory waters. This is a material inquiry of the unsayable, a leaning into the places we are not supposed to go to, a reconsideration of the ordinary, and a refusal to reify anything touched as finished, declared, transmitted, or final. As a ritual of inquiry at the end of the world, this is a material-discursive-pedagogic attempt at breaking through the sensory monoculture of compliance and cyclicity. Most importantly, this is a call for you to create-destroy with us, to with-ness, to greet more-than-human entities, to be pierced through, to be undone.
To meet at the edges in the middle.
A prayer for you: may your road be rough, and may the disturbance be our collective sanctuary-making work, together-apart.
“I am looking for conversations that are fugitive, that escape, that grant themselves permission to do what they want to do, and do not look towards the plantation, saying can you allow me to be seen? The fugitive does not want to be seen.”
- Dr. Báyò Akómoláfé
About Bayo Akomolafe:
Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.), rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, 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 (North Atlantic Books) and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak, Bayo Akomolafe is the Founder of The Emergence Network and host of the online postactivist course, ‘We Will Dance with Mountains’. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California and University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont. He sits on the Board of many organizations including Science and Non-Duality (US) and Local Futures (Australia). In July 2022, Dr. Akomolafe was appointed the inaugural Global Senior Fellow of University of California’s (Berkeley) Othering and Belonging Institute, where he acts as the Forum’s “provocateur in residence”, guiding Forum members in rethinking and reimagining our collective work towards justice in ways that reject binary thinking and easy answers. He has also been appointed Senior Fellow for The New Institute in Hamburg, Germany.
