Introducing our inaugural Global Senior Fellow, philosopher Báyò Akómoláfé
We are proud to announce that author, poet, and public intellectual Báyò Akómoláfé has joined the Democracy & Belonging Forum as its inaugural Global Senior Fellow. In this role, Bayo will act 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.
Born in Nigeria to Yoruba Christian parents and now living in India with his life partner and children, Bayo currently lectures widely throughout the world, including at the Pacifica Graduate Institute, University of Vermont, Burlington, and in this online postactivist course “We Will Dance with Mountains.” The 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’s work often grapples with the unknowable, the spiritual, and the paradoxical aspects of our world—and seeks to make meaning out of the chaos.
As Bayo has written about his own path: “The whole world was about being either right or wrong. I was either lost or found. That was many years ago though. Today, when I meet people, I recognize how utterly beyond right and wrong they are – how their lives are symphonies beyond orchestration, how their mistakes and failings are actually cosmic explorations on a scale grander and of a texture softer than our most dedicated rule-books could possibly account for.”
Bayo’s fellowship with the Democracy & Belonging Forum will be structured in the form of mbari, an architectural-spiritual art form and aesthetic unique to the Owerri Igbo people of Eastern Nigeria that takes the form of a house or structure dedicated to the goddess Ala. As Bayo has explained, what is 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…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.”
Bayo’s mbari will take the form of a series of writings and talks under the name “Edges in the Middle, Rethinking Justice, Hope, and Belonging,” in which he will engage with a number of leading thinkers on issues as diverse as identity, climate crisis, reparations and other key challenges of our time. The title of this mbari comes from an essay Bayo published in 2017, in which he wrote:
“This is what it means to be entangled: it is to see that we are not complete, removed, or boundaried. We are not independent. To speak from a place of manicured morality, to attempt to stand outside the mess of it all, to try to be sincere, is to be blind to our rapturous entanglement with the multiple. A ‘flower’ doesn’t ‘begin’ at its roots and terminate abruptly at its petals; it is the ongoing intra-activity (notice I do not say ‘inter-activity’, for this would suggest that ‘things’ pre-exist relationships) of clouds, rain, sunlight, swirling dust, the keen attention of the gardener, and a cocktail of colourful critters and ecosystems of organisms. One might say that there are no ‘things’ at all. To come to the edge is thus to come to the curdling middle, where wild meets wild, where we meet the universe halfway in acknowledgement of our intra-dependence and co-emergence with ‘movements’ we cannot control or assuage…In order to really account for ourselves, in order to tell the stories of what is happening, we must come to the ends of ourselves, we must gravitate towards the edges in the middle…towards the incomprehensible, where wholly new ways of thinking are gestating in puddles of the forgotten.”
On Sept 6, Bayo will host his first mbari conversation with OBI Director john a. powell, in a talk entitled “When ‘just getting along’ isn’t enough: Is Belonging possible in a world rooted in othering?” Register to join us here.