Global Senior Fellow Bayo Akomolafe on slowing down, embracing complexity, and finding hope in a time of multidimensional breakdown
Bayo Akomolafe is the inaugural Global Senior Fellow of the Democracy & Belonging Forum, 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. As an author, poet, and public intellectual, his work often grapples with the unknowable, the spiritual, and the paradoxical aspects of our world—and seeks to make meaning out of the chaos. The Forum’s Evan Yoshimoto met with Bayo to discuss the gift of postactivism, the nature of belonging in an increasingly estranged world, and where he finds hope in a time of multidimensional breakdown.
What does belonging mean to you? And why did you want to join the Democracy & Belonging Forum as our inaugural Global Senior Fellow?
Inspired by Yoruba cultural understandings of the creative worldbuilding work of the trickster, there is a fascinating apocryphal story told about the arrival of slave ships to West African shores. It is often suggested that the slippery deity and trickster, Èsù, also known as the “Man of the Crossroads” and the wielder of the force of transformative change, may have had a hand in allowing the transatlantic slave trade to thrive. One account implicates Èsù’s treacherous duplicity in the unfolding of the voyages of the Middle Passage by casting him as the near-villainous opposition to Ogun’s (another deity of the Yoruba pantheon) righteous anti-slavery resistance.
Èsù is said to have intercepted his brother Ogun as the fierce god mounted an insurgency against the slave traders, drugging him with the most potent palm wine mixture and sending him to sleep. What follows this morally questionable intervention is a provocative recalibration of what it means to be at home, a posthumanist and/or more-than-human invitation to consider that there are hidden matters at work that exceed the usual explanations we give to our troubling circumstances. Èsù crept aboard the ships, entangling himself with the slaves on their way to the ‘New World’, imbricating himself with the subterfuge, opacity, occultic arts, and bacchanal aesthetics that would come to define African diasporic spirituality for generations to come.
For me, Èsù’s departure is a story about belonging. A treatise on belonging. On loss. On the flames that engulf our homes. On migrancy. On the departures that make arrivals. On destruction as an intimate act of creation.
At the heart of the trickster’s enterprise is a sticky question – usually attributed to a 17th century Dutch panpsychist philosopher called Baruch Spinoza: what can bodies do? What are bodies capable of? What does it mean to be embodied? What does it mean to belong? Èsù responds to these questions by performing the role of the spoiler, the one who departs, the edge that seeks a new middle. Èsù’s story is an invitation to see belonging through new eyes - not just as a cleaving, but as a cleaving (where the latter marks the dimension of falling away from coherence). His actions throw in disarray our usual notions of the appropriate and introduces new tensions and thresholds to our considerations about othering and belonging. By weaving an animist cartography that extends beyond modern binaries, beyond humanist notions of what it might mean to belong, Èsù allows us to ask what belonging belongs to and what it is indebted to.
It is from within the dynamic matrix of these interstitial comings and goings that the moral imperatives of inclusivity and equity, the gesturing towards a notion of justice, the quest for responsive systems of accountability, and the collective effort to rebuild for the marginalized fairer homes and worlds emerge. As such, I think of belonging as the social and material (or sociomaterial, affective, and ethical) fields of intensities that maintain, produce, and compost bodies. Through Èsù, we refuse to begin our analysis of belonging from the presumption of the independent human subject that belongs or fails to belong. Instead, we learn to see belonging as a dense material region “with its own mass and thickness” (to use Laura Tripaldi’s reconceptualization of interfaces). This material space is composed and maintained by human systems, language conventions, legal and policy frameworks, feelings of acceptance, and all the subjective and objective matters we associate with belonging. But it is also composed of microbial secretions, by texture, by colors, by architectural constraints, by viruses, by ecological conditions, by food-making practices, by more-than-human patterns and algorithms.
Belonging is an interface that gives bodies shape and definition. It is how home is made and unmade. A field of longing, unbearable loss, nomadic feelings, stretched out limbs, pain, constant devastation, constant leave-takings, and unexpected arrivals. It is not that human subjects belong per se. It is that this longing summons us, shapes us, convenes us, and practices “us” as a fragile artform. It is perhaps compelling to notice that belonging creates the human subject and not the other way around. Bodies do not precede what they belong to; it is from within the lively web of becoming and belonging that we gain definition: a coming-up-together that is already a falling-away-apart.
Perhaps this is why I said yes to the invitation to become Global Senior Fellow with the Forum: to follow the strange aesthetic of the trickster-spoiler who knows that it is often in the going-away that we visit ourselves more lovingly. At a time of sore political/racial/spiritual divides, I find a posthumanist-animist reframing of belonging as a worthwhile intervention to make, an artform to contribute to. Indeed, I suspect the planet is herself inviting these practices of reframe. Èsù, a spirit of ecology, is speaking through the unruly archives of his misdeeds, saying: “I depart; therefore, I belong.” We will need reframes of this sort as we collectively come to touch the material limitations of equity, of justice, and of hope.
You are known to push back on any kind of essentialism by offering counterintuitive takes on society and the proposed solutions used to address the various global crises we face. In your introduction letter to the Forum, you tell us that you want “to lean into the dissonance of the strange, to veer off the beaten path.” Why is embracing complexity important for creating a world of belonging? And how did you learn to embrace complexity and move beyond binaries in your thinking? Was there a pivotal point in time that brought you to this work?
The thing about thinking through essences, stable identities, and representations is that it risks obscuring the manifold processes that contribute to how ‘things’ come to matter. The word ‘obscuring’ is very deliberately chosen here in my response. To obscure something is to keep it away from view, to render it dark and indistinct. To cover it up. It is a very ocular concept, having to do with the way we come to see and know others and the world around us. Essentialism is a colonial strategy for knowing the world in terms of totalizing representations, a form of closure. It separates the epistemological question of how we know from the ontological status of what we know, allowing only the former to vary (thanks to Astrid Schrader for that helpful formulation) - so that the ‘Other’ (whether black bodies, nonhuman entities, or concepts) is nailed in place, constantly available for analysis, never unyielding to the gaze of the dissociated self, and denied historicity.
This is how colonization thrives: by stabilizing the other, and mobilizing the self. By insisting that the Other speak up to say “I’m here! Present, sir!” when it is called by its given name. Nothing quite unravels the colonial like the realization that the captured body has escaped its containment and now exercises a political refusal - a refusal to be named, to be available, to be productive. A right to opacity, as Afro-Martiniquais philosopher Edouard Glissant once articulated.
The history of colonization is the history of occlusions, of rushed essentialisms, and of settled identities. It is the morality of representation. An adherence to a stable cartography that always leads to the things we suppose we own, where we left them the last time we used them. As such, I situate the decolonial at the site of rupture, of exile, of excess, and of trans-moral transgressions: when objects refuse to answer to their purposes, where the world kicks back, where property ‘becomes’ agential, where things slip away, veering off beaten paths.
Veering off beaten paths is a form of contemporary (and ancient) analysis, a playful methodology of play, which recognizes that our very best attempts at addressing our problems often reinforce those problems. It is a post-binary gesturing towards the performatively new, the unspoken, the surprising, the humbling, the invisible, the crossroads.
This is an assertion that might be easier to grasp if we understood that we are not as individual or as separate from others as we think we are: we act as aspects of organizing patterns, larger archetypal flows, and ecological forces. In short, we are exposed, semi-permeable, reiterative practices in their becoming. We act and are acted upon.
Because we act within assemblages, what we intend to do is a small aspect of what we do. For instance, one could intend to do a whole world of good by becoming more conscientious about consumption patterns and waste management. I have often watched with great interest how devoted and near-religious some in the ‘Global North’ are about disposing of their trash in well-appointed and predesignated containers. They trust that their practices translate to meaningful attempts to reverse environmental degradation among other deleterious effects of the Anthropocene. And they often do. However, most recyclable materials are shipped away to parts of Africa and to parts of Asia, and then dumped on beaches, in slums, in playgrounds, or resold as spare parts in electronic markets in Lagos. This ironically creates a situation in which a solution becomes too caught up in how the problem it is supposed to address sustains itself.
What do you do when the way out leads back in? What do you do when medicine becomes sick? If we are incarcerated within a toxic cyclicity that reproduces the status quo, then perhaps we need a ‘break’, a falling-away, a leaving-behind, a veering off. This ‘break’ dislodges the powerful grip of binary thinking and allows something new to emerge from the cracks.
I consider myself a processual thinker - or better still, I consider myself enlisted by practices in processual thinking. I am oriented towards cracks, spillages, and exile - anything that addresses the stickiness of binaries with an ontological explosion of some kind. The fugitive is such a post-binary, apostatic figure because of how it navigates capture and refuses to be found. Spending time with Yoruba healer-priests (locally called ‘babalawos’) many years ago (while pursuing a doctorate in clinical psychology) introduced me to a world of animist considerations, errant identities, fugitive complexities, and prophetic play.
Also in this letter, you make a call for us to slow down in these urgent times. Why slow down? And how?
When I was a kid growing up in Lagos (Nigeria), there were street legends of hidden crossroads and spiritual thresholds that accommodated ghostly and ghastly bodies in their monstrous goings and comings. Not everyone could see these otherworldly processions. Such a vision was reserved for those brave enough to bend down and look at the world behind them, between their legs - while in public. I tried doing this once, eager to catch a glimpse of one-eyed spirits and giant spiders invisibly mingling with ‘typical’ bodies in the rowdy marketplace. Somehow my uncle, with whom I visited the market, noticed what I was about to do, and stopped me from finishing the ritual, severely scolding me for even thinking of attempting it.
That aborted ritual has lingered in my theoretical attempts to convene posthuman assemblages that exceed humans and their doings. I cannot escape the sense that we live in worlds that exceed us, and that we are inhabited by, flanked by, populated with, dis/oriented by, and entangled with matters that cannot be summoned in language or known fully. As such, our visual and conceptual representations of the human leave out the molecular and the invisible dynamisms that render us more chimeric than we think we are.
This is what slowing down means.
It means we are not independent, not the only ones in the room. It means there are others here; there have always been others here. It means when we act, we act-with. It means when we think, we think-with. We are composite be(com)ings all the way down. We are marketplaces of multispecies practices. Slowing down is an invitation that gains its force at the site of displacement, where things lose their definitions, where the usual response might be to want things to get back to normal. When I say “the times are urgent, let us slow down,” I mean to conjure a posthumanist appreciation of the ways we are entangled with/in territories of acting; I mean to suggest that the way we think about the crisis of note is often that crisis; I mean to name the ways binaries often sponsor and rehabilitate the status quo we find so problematic - including the solutions we proffer to our most resilient challenges. I mean to break open the consultative pathways, to invite a postactivism that creeps away from the state-sponsored highway of solutions to find subterranean worlds of new political imaginaries and possibilities.
A lot of your work revolves around the concept you coined as “postactivism.” Can you tell us what postactivism is? And what do you think postactivism can teach us about bridging and belonging?
Postactivism, in a very uneasy nutshell, is the idea that there are others in the room and it’s not simply about us humans.
It is the diffraction of agency, where transformation and change are not situated within human doings or human society. It is the notion that there are aliens in the room, and we are those aliens as well. And so, we have to make do with a world that isn't central, available, readable, and intelligible at all times to human commentators or human researchers. What that terrible task of postactivism does is to allow us to be met by a world that exceeds us, allows our anxieties to cool off into different kinds of feelings and affects, allows us to open ourselves to the markings of stray, bovine, slothful, slimy, ephemeral creatures, earthkin and oddkin - the same ones we protect ourselves from behind our spacesuits calibrated to extract data from the world around us. A sociomateriality of matrixial subjectivities, infectious affectations, and new imaginations.
Postactivism is a moment of joy, grief and also great humility. It is shocking how powerful this feels—meeting people where they are and, with the spiritual-pedagogical generosity of postactivism, allowing something in their bones to sing out melodies of relief. Why relief? I think social movements for justice are stuck in a politics that is largely dedicated to —one might even say fixated with or entirely addicted to—seeking recognition. And I say this not to dismiss that politics: we do need a politics of recognition and a politics of critique. Minoritarian bodies do need a politics that calls out imperial and oppressive structures. We need that. We could use as much support as we can get, you know.
But over time, the gains of critique tend to become the gains of the critiqued, and the epistemologies we critique in the world start to become the ground upon which we seek to stabilize our own feet. It is like screaming for everyone to be “quiet” in a library: there’s something about the performativity of resistance that drags along that which it resists. If you lean on a wall for a long time, you’d take some of its shape. The chef kneads the dough, but is also kneaded by the dough. Like Robert Johnson trading his soul with the legendary trickster at a crossroads for the irresistibly sensuous sounds his divinely tuned guitar went on to produce, the devil lives between the lines, in the details, or - should I say - at the chiasmus.
Something gives. Sooner than later, the struggle for justice habituates us into silos of outrage that become part of the vast sprawl of the status quo we want to transform. Many might insist that resistance is all we have, and that there’s nothing more, nothing else - and that to speak about the limitations of resistance at a time when it feels most urgent to perform it is a form of philosophical sophistry or ‘spiritual bypass’. This is because they conceive responsivity as the call-and-response dynamic where a rigid and unchanging line that flows from a predetermined notion of accountability on one end to a lackadaisical apathy on the other is the menu of responses available, and the troubling goings-on around them are the call.
With postactivism, I resist this ontological closure, this finality of things, this scarcity of power. It cannot be that the only way to conceive accountability in these moments is to ‘resist’ - and I say this knowing that resistance can take many forms, and that it is also not an ontologically pure category to itself. What is lost in the overwhelm of ‘fight-back’, what is often not noticed, is that the tensions of push and pull often reproduce realities and subjectivities beyond the imperatives of resistance, as is the case in the incident of Samudra-manthan, an episode in Hindu mythology: the churning of an ocean of milk by oppositional forces (devas and asuras struggle with Vasuki the king of serpents or Naga wrapped around a pole at the heart of the conflict…a pole that extends deep into the ocean) creates an ocean of curds. An “ocean of curds” feels like a very potent metaphor to think with, and especially to think about the intra-molecular exchanges and material porosity between apparent polarities.
I think many people are sensing this, but are going through the motions. They’d rather do as they are told or act as they are expected to act - if only to get by. Somewhere in the screaming silences of privacy, they understand that their side and the ‘other side’ are stuck in a feedback system that heightens their sense of carcerality. As such, we need a break. We need a politics committed to breaks. Cracks. We need something different. Elizabeth Grosz, inspired by Gilles Deleuze, might call this something a supplementary “politics of imperceptibility”; and, Timothy Morton might think of it as the vocation of the “hyposubject,” beneath the subject. I think Ben Okri once referred to it as an “existential creativity.” Earl Lovelace, the Trinidadian author, on the other hand, spoke about it as “bacchanal aesthetics” - an unafraid invitation to appropriate the methodologies of the captured slaves to convene a new ecosystem of response-ability.
What has this got to do with othering and belonging? A lot. When we come to see belonging and othering through each other - and, more emphatically, as territorial convenings of a posthumanist sort instead of merely humanist matters - then we arrive at new ideas of how our bodies are manufactured, subjugated, racialized and subjectivized beyond human doings. Postactivism takes us to those conditions of embodiment. Like the babalawo, whose immediate concern is not his client but the vortices of principalities and powers and parliaments of voices manifesting as the symptoms of his client’s discomfiture, and who therefore leans away from centralizing the human subject, postactivism poses new questions about agency and orientation, navigating away from the usual sites of discourse that keep us contained within civilizational impasses.
At this time, we’re witnessing what you call a multidimensional breakdown across the globe. The Covid-19 pandemic, climate crisis, and seemingly endless social, political, and economic struggles have left us feeling depleted and dispirited. Where do you find hope? Is hope naive at this time?
It is at the place where we fall that our deepest treasures dwell.
These days do feel like the end of the world. Russia, brain-eating amoebas, pandemics within pandemics, mutating viruses, proto-fascist eruptions, distrust, heatwaves with names, concentration camps in China, police brutality. It’s near-biblical.
But life is a constant devastation. Or as ecophilosopher John Muir wrote: The whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.
The ‘world’ has ended many times before. I return again and again to the endings inscribed upon the bodies and bones of enslaved Africans, stolen and dragged to the New World. Ending where we began, with the story of a fugitive god stowed away aboard departing vessels of oppression, it is instructive to think that the hope of safe arrivals and good business animated the slave masters and captains of those vessels, but was effectively denied to their slaves. What might it have felt like for one of those slaves to intuit that the god of their lands they prayed to for salvation was coming along for the ride? Perhaps such things are only imagined in retrospect.
The loss of hope was devastating, but queerly productive in ways no one could have anticipated. Perhaps not even the traveling trickster could have foreseen the many ways his subterfuge would influence a creolized world of dance, rhythm, spirituality, and political novelty.
Hope is not always a choice we can make. Sometimes things get so crippling that we find a strange glimmer of emancipation in the darkness of the moment. I suppose that little glimmer, that crack, is the trickster reminding us that not even loss can be fully itself. Nothing can be fully itself, nothing can belong, without the strange other hiding among the ranks, squeezing itself between the lines, the devil in the details. Not a slave ship bound for the Americas. Not a pandemic threatening destruction. Not a climate crisis with no end in sight. Not death. Something always steals in. Maybe there is a powerful political move there. Maybe there is a way of sitting with the trouble and inadequacy of hope. Maybe there is hope in the hopeless.