An Introduction and an Invitation
I vaguely remember the moment I decided I was going to get lost. Generously lost.
I had just read yet another article about the mental health crisis gripping the largest black nation on earth. Nigeria had 200 million people and – conservatively – three well-equipped psychiatric hospitals. The papers bemoaned a poorly articulated health policy, a lack of skilled staff, a dearth of bedspaces, and tight budgets. They begged for a compassionate government or sensible philanthropy. It was 2008. But that didn’t matter: the problem was a sticky one, as resilient as our claims to peoplehood.
The trend for doctoral researchers like myself was to lean into these problems, vacillate between exhausted data points, and tie up our theoretical conclusions to the same ‘solutions’ everyone else had already figured out: we needed more money to take care of our people. But solutions are often products of fields of resonance, marking the ways we have been trained to reproduce sounds and images with which we are already familiar. The trick is in learning to listen to the noise.
I wanted to do something different, to lean into the dissonance of the strange, to veer off the beaten path. So, I asked: what if the ways we are responding to this crisis are the crisis? I met with members of a largely hidden world of Yoruba traditional healers, practitioners of arts that connected the impasses of modern healthcare to the limitations of modern ways of thinking. One healer told me, speaking with the cadence of proverb and irony: “You have to get off the highway to see that the bushes are alive with medicine.” I heard that as an invitation to a cartography of loss. To find your way, you must become lost.
These questions and tensions live with me and have largely informed my theoretical contributions to the very urgent conversations we are having today about hope; about identity; about justice; about belonging; about social transformation; about the disappearance of cohesive threads of trust in a time when the threat of fascist arrangements feel alive; about the future, and about our children. I believe not only that we are living in times of stuckness, when the solutions we throw at our problems reinforce them, but that we are being invited by trickster archetypes to chase new questions, to stay with the trouble, to sit within cracks, to perform fugitive gestures that stray from the plantations of familiar images. This sitting-together to think-different will mean we have to learn (in the words of Rilke) to be defeated again and again by imperatives that exceed us.
How do we convene conversation in a way that does not privilege consensus, enshrine ‘truth’, or merely disseminate information? In my new role as Global Senior Fellow for the Othering and Belonging Institute’s Democracy and Belonging Forum, an appointment I humbly and excitedly accept, I offer an invitation to you, a trickster’s invitation – perhaps the kind that comes from a flute. This is an invitation to play, to think diffractively, to hold space for seditious new questions we often close our doors to.
Working with an old artform by the Igbo people of eastern Nigeria called mbari, tied to decay and diffraction, we will be convening a series with the Democracy and Belonging Forum. I call this series ‘The Edges in the Middle: Rethinking Justice, Hope, and Belonging’, a living journeying losing of our way together that braids posthumanist thinking, ecopsychological approaches, material ecofeminist insights, and African indigenous geophilosophies in cornrows of zigzagging novelty and surprise. The very first event in this series (which will explore everything from climate chaos as a symptom of becoming Human to cancel culture and the ubiquity of trauma as weather events) is a conversation with OBI Director john a. powell titled ‘When "just getting along" isn't enough: Is belonging possible in a world rooted in othering?” Join us on September 6 for the launch of this multi-month descent into inquiry.
My name is Báyò Akómoláfé. The times are urgent, it is time to slow down.
Báyò Akómoláfé is the 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. Learn more about his role here.