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This is a conversation revisited with philosopher, writer, activist, professor of psychology, and executive director of the Emergence Network, Bayo Akomolafe.
Time notes:
00:00:29 – 00:07:50 The Sporulation of the Slave Ship
00:07:50 – 00:16:11 Beyond the Human – Blackness as Becoming
00:16:11 – 00:19:48 Entanglement and the Agency of the World
00:19:48 – 00:27:09 Language Beyond Vocality
00:27:09 – 00:34:32 Poetry as Prophecy and the Loss of Precision
00:34:32 – 00:41:12 – Learning from Children’s Agency
00:41:12 – 00:47:20The Tortoise’s Drum – Cracks and Openings
(This conversation originally aired July 2022)
Links:
Bayo Akomolafe: https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/
Post-listen recommended episode with Francis Weller here.
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Rough transcript, please excuse all errors:
[00:00:01] Bayo: Sometimes the prison only comes to be when escape is attempted. so maybe escape is not the thing here.
Maybe mere critique will not do maybe, trying to overthrow certain oppressive regimes, only strengthens the epistemology that made them possible. That’s what I’m trying to say here. So a different kind of operation is needed. And this is where I think we need the archetype of the trickster.
[00:00:29] Olivia: My name is Olivia Clementine, and this is Love and Liberation, conversations, exploring depth, wisdom, and relationship. Today’s guest is the philosopher, writer and professor Bayo Akomolafe. Bayo’s poetic expression and playful provocation may return to you, your own hidden wells of curiosity and unique expression. Do not be surprised if you see uncertainty, failure and the entangled world differently after this conversation.
You speak on the sporulation of the slave ship and that the shore became the slave ship that we refer to it in a past way, but we still function in the form of the slave ship in a multitude of disguises. And you speak of the listening and I’m just gonna quote you here. ” The posthuman lyrics of the subterranean migrant
the invisible guest who may be singing to us.” And there seems to be something really important in a lot of what you write and what you share about this, listening to this invisible guest and, why, what, what is in this listening and, and how does this listening impact the slave ship sporulation? And I know we’re jumping right in, but it’s precious times. Right.
[00:01:50] Bayo: I love it.
[00:01:51] Olivia: I hope it’s okay. Okay.
[00:01:53] Bayo: Um, I think we’re caught up in the modern. with categoricity and things, the thinginess of things by that, I mean, there is a very, very resilient, um, and stubborn and sticky way of knowing that presumes that humans are apart from the goings on the flows, the materialities in the world around us, and that things exist.
Outside of relationship, a laptop is a laptop because of its self-referential and internal features. Right. Um, Olivia is Olivia your whiteness, I presume is your whiteness. Your whiteness is a property of your body. It’s not relational. It’s not disputable. It is yours. Right? So we tend to think, and this is a very representational way of thinking about the world that the world is outside of relationship.
And in inadvertently that centralizes us as the ones who have access to this. Just a way of framing, what I’m about to say. you know, so when I speak about the sporulation of the slave ship, I’m saying that the slave ship was not a thing, right? The slave ship was a process. The world is a process.
The slave ship, wasn’t agential, I mean, that, that means it’s a coagulation or coming together of bodies in their materiality, in their ongoingness. It was not just a thing, clearcut and distinct from a relational universe. It was performance. Right. It was the assumption about supremacy. It was, um, it was sugar in its agency in shaping human appetites.
It was the theology and the doctrine of, uh, of salvation, right. And working hard for your salvation. And that certain bodies are colonially. that we can take some bodies and use them as props to rise to Heights of transcendence. All of these were part of the ecology of the slave ship. So the slave ship did not disappear.
It didn’t, it didn’t just vanish out of existence. It kind of, you know, I expressed this poetically and in saying that. It, it spill it, spill its guts and became the show. the very algorithms where we, you know, this is one, one helpful distinction that we’re, that we’re not in the age of the machine, where in the age of algorithms, that we’re not in the age of the image we’re in the age of algorithms, right.
the image blinds us to the processes that are happening. Right. And, and in today’s computerized world. I think that’s quite evident for us to see it’s more obvious you have gift images, PNG files, JPEG files, you know, all these files are programs in themselves, right? So we’re in the age of the soft image to youth hollow results, uh, term the soft image or the algorithm, the slave ship is not a mere image.
It’s a process, it’s a program, it’s an algorithm. It’s a cybernetic pattern. And that brings me to the place where I’m, I’m able to say quite shockingly, that we are still interacting with the slave ship and the slave ship is still a political constituent of our times. It is not done with it’s not past it is contemporary.
It is now it is here. It was a technology of racialization. And it is still part of how bodies are racialized. Right. Um, so my question then is how do we exit the slave ship if we’ve not quite disembarked? How do we exit the slave ship? How do we move away from the slave ship? My, my intuition is that we run, we make the , we run, we escape, but, but the thing is escape.
Isn’t that easy in an entangled universe. In fact, sometimes escape extends the program, right? Escape deepens the resilience of certain structures. Sometimes the prison only comes to be when escape is attempted. right. So, so maybe escape is not the, is not the thing here.
Maybe mere critique will not do maybe, um, trying to overturn certain oppressive regimes, only strengthens the epistemology that made them possible. That’s what I’m trying to say here. Um, So a different kind of operation is needed. And this is where I think we need the archetype of the trickster. It is what I was referring to when I said, um, issued a trickster with, with great specificity stole into the slave ship and became the invisible guest upon those voyages, you know, in those voyages.
And I think listening to. Treating these times as an issue scene, not just as an scene is, is really the vocation that I’m leaning into listening is an act of renouncing our centrality and performing some kind of fugitivity that allows us to find other places of power, hopefully without reiterating the regimes that we are oppressed.
[00:07:50] Olivia: You talk about this need to remove ourselves from the spectrum of humans, this Euro American creation. And I heard you say that blackness is the end of man. And I’m curious, I mean, these are all very provocative statements that, that bring actually a lot of
[00:08:09] Bayo: brings some relief. Okay, good.
[00:08:11] Olivia: Yeah, like there’s, I mean, there’s some.
Beyond word part that it just brings relief. And I’m curious, when did we become human and, and what were we before? Hmm,
[00:08:25] Bayo: well, I don’t know what we were before. Um, there’s a sense in which you can speak about us as a proto human, um, species. Um, And even the idea of speciation is also a political project. Um, I wouldn’t venture to, um, you know, attempt to try to name us prior to this as if there were monolithic us.
And as if those labels capture some kind of objective reality, every attempt to name is already political and is already perspectival and grounded in where we are at this moment. It’ll be creating history. Which is what history is a creation or co-creation what I’m deeply interested in is the, the outburst, the almost miraculous outburst of the rationalizing project of the human, right.
And by the human, I’m not referring to the anthropomorphic Figures we’ve resumed evolutionary. I’m I’m speaking about the terrior, the territory of acting and feeling and becoming the things that we occlude the colonial project is the human. The human is a terraforming project and it’s not bad. It’s not evil.
It’s colonial the it’s Imperial. Every Imperial project will use prop. To use concepts to prop itself up it’ll use, um, bodies to prop itself up. It’ll use things to gain stability. If we came to a state where we all had to evacuate planet earth and find refuge in on another planet, we will colonize it.
And in colonizing it, we will. We will probably in the moment form theologies while and why we should treat XXX population, you know, badly, because cuz that’s what our God says. You know, we will find ways to, to impose stability by instrumentalizing other bodies for that to happen. And I don’t know that. Any form of material stability is possible without a form of coloniality.
I’m not saying it’s necessary. I’m not saying that it’s hard baked into reality. the pain and suffering that comes with it is huge and yes, no words for that, but every act of inclusion, every act of arrival. Already draws on networks of harm and suffering and pain.
even the most harmonious community.
If you will. The most utopian project will, will be based upon the suffering of some kind of being or becoming whether it’s ants or plants or something. in order to live, we need to be in pain. but, but your question is really about, fugitivity like, you know what we’re gonna do today? Let’s just stop being human.
Is that the human is not individual. the human is this spacial temporal project that gives us speech and language and signification and. anticipatory models. We are immersed in the human, right. So we can’t just, you know, decide like some, like some university, you know, uh, classrooms that I’ve been to that are built around studying multiple cosmologies.
There’s always this sense in. Here is the cosmology of the Yoruba people. And here is the cosmology of the Inuit people. And here’s the cosmology of the Tamil people in India. So you can choose which one you want. You know, it’s like a marketplace of cosmologies and that’s another liberal project it’s liberal because it re emphasizes
the traditional subject, the human that is isolated and is a-gential and has free will and is rational up here. And you know, it, it rein reinvigorates that idea of separation. But I digress. My sister. That’s good.
[00:12:56] Olivia: I like your digressions.
[00:12:59] Bayo: I make many digressions. It’s a rhizome to me. It’s always difficult to get to the point.
I don’t think we can leave the human, but I think that the fabric of emergence is constantly creating rifts and ruptures that as things deterritorialize as things spill, as things become other. Right. They create cracks. They create openings, these openings. We often call disability, you know, um, these openings, we have many names for it.
Death is one of these cracks. It’s kind of, we’ve, we’ve learned to put death in a family way, even though there is this creative tension in how to think about death, that is constantly at the edges of the modern. um, as those cracks emerge, I think of them rather entrepreneurial as opportunities, opportunities that don’t decentralize human agents, but that invite generative incapacitation, failure.
That’s a, that’s a eye rolling. Um, You know, term for failure. I think of failure as generative. It’s incapacitating. It’s an unlearning of mastery, but it, it is also, generative in surprising ways, just like disability, just like autism, you know, might be seen as a disability to cure, but it actually offers new ways of being in the world.
And if we paid attention to and follow. Might take us elsewhere to elsewhere. So we don’t know how to articulate. Now that is the fugitivity I speak about. Blackness to me is the counter hegemonic murmuration of becoming think of it as the, how the world is never still how the world spills away from names and instrumentality and categories.
That is anticolonial. Right. Coloniality is built on stability. It’s built on the concept of being right. It wants to define once and for all, but the greatest disability to being is becoming right. So blackness, in a sense, arising from the experiences of the transatlantic arising. The experiences of, people displaced and colonized arising from the – aesthetics of new world slaves.
I, I think of blackness as this underground subterranean politics that is not even human it’s microbial, it’s molecular, it’s constantly eating at the edges of the colonial and the Imperial. And frame the edges, right? That is the fugitivity. I speak about that. Can we have a politics that is dedicated to getting lost that is dedicated to research, not in the search of data, but research in the search of lostness.
Can we find art beyond critique?
[00:16:11] Olivia: It reminds me of your talk on agency and the agency of trauma, like the, the agency of grief and yeah. Uh, these kinds of breaks or this, these avenues in, and in this place of not solving that you’re speaking of like this, uh, the fraying of the edges. What does it look like to invite the agency of the world as allies?
What, what does that look like? Um, beyond concept.
[00:16:40] Bayo: It looks like you and me, it looks like tables and laptops and chairs. We don’t need to invite nothing. it’s the very ground of being and becoming right. We, you know, there is this idea that, okay, let’s now step into emergence. No, you are not outside. oh, let’s now let’s now start being entangled with the world.
No, no. whether you are intended or not, we are becoming with the world. there is no standing outside of the world. We are becoming with the world and it means we’re dying all the time. It means Olivia only shows up in part, and this is biologically, um, resonant, right? This is right now or today you’ve, you’ve spill out fugitive communities of dust from your cells, right?
Your cells are spoilating with the world right now. You didn’t invite that to happen. Did you, you didn’t think about it or meditate upon the process? It’s it just is the condition for your being, if you stop giving up cells, then there’s no, Olivia right. So to be is to travel is to be nomadic in a sense.
And I guess maybe, maybe the question then to ask is, or to the way to frame it, cuz it might be confusing. So if we’re in it, Why are we still in problems or something? Why aren’t things harmonious because emergence or entanglement is not heaven. It’s not harmony, right? It, we, we don’t pitch entanglement against separation as if there were choices to be made.
Do you choose separation or do you choose entanglement? Separation is what entanglement is also doing right. Even to be separate. The, the dissociation that comes along with being a modern citizen is a form of entanglement. It’s just the performative exclusion of our entanglements with the environment, which is another form of entanglement.
It’s like turning away from the threads that bind us to the world. So the question then becomes what if we gave attention to that? What if we. What if we ritualized that, how might that, how might that transform us? How might, how might that change us? If we are processes, not things. If we are networks, if we are flows, then attention is just as much material.
Attention might take us in a different direction altogether. And maybe, maybe there’s something there. Maybe not. It is not even our attention. Maybe it’s the attention of whale. Maybe we need microbial communities to attend differently. And in performing their activisms differently, we change.
I’m just trying to decenter the human, you know, from the, from the control room of social change and say, there, there are so many other things that are happening that are the condition of.
[00:19:48] Olivia: I love that. And it reminds me, I was listening to the naturalist, David Haskel the other day. Do you know him? He was talking about how, um, nine tenths of, of the earth of the time earth has been here. We haven’t had sound or language and sound in the way that we think of it. It’s mainly been primordial sound and it just reminds me of what you’re sharing right now.
shifting our attention and our awareness. And you’ve also said around sound or around language, that there is language that exists in the absence of speaking. And it kind of also feels like it plays with, you’ve also used this term, like a queering of things like the mix of the two, this kind of
other way of listening and communicating and queering beyond human. And what are your feelings on that in terms of what is a world of language beyond, you know, this queering of things in the realm of language?
[00:20:47] Bayo: Well, vocality is power in the modern to speak is to be seen and to be seen and recognized is associated.
Power, right. This is why we have celebrity culture. So the bigger, the mic, the bigger, the influence, and we have influences today, who are influential cause they’re influential yeah, right. Like why are you influential? Because I happen to be influential. It’s just by it. It’s not because I worked hard or because I
didn’t work hard or something or something remarkable happened. It’s just, I have followers. Why do I have followers? Because, uh, it becomes absurdly tautological right? But it, it goes to support that conversational thesis that, vocality is power today. And, and so we, we tend to think of language as speaking out or as associated with speaking out.
And the nuances of speaking out, but I think the project that is the post humanist animist invitation to decenter the human might lead us in very surprising directions might lead us to consider or reconsider language as vocality. Right. Um, a brother of mine shared with me recently. And I don’t have empirical evidence to support this, but he asked a very intriguing question about accents and how accents are embedded with place.
Right. It seems that certain accents come from the ecology or are secreted from the ecologies that produce them. So that language is not this structural code. That come from the ether. It is, it’s kind of emerging in the middle. Right. And then he said something else, and I still don’t have empirical evidence to back this up, but he said, he notices that speaking a language kind of makes you look like the people who speak the language.
There’s something very fascinating about that, that, he speaks Chinese and, and he, he was just speaking about. His ability to tell, um, an American speaker of Chinese from another speaker of Chinese, even though even, I mean, American Chinese speaker, right. Someone who has maybe an American parent and a Chinese, parent that he can tell, um, even though they’ even generations removed from their foreignness.
That someone has a different cadence or a different relationship with a language based on how they look. And I found I’ve really find out intriguing. It leads me to this non-representational account of language. That language is not about something in the world, or outside of the world rather, uh, language is not even about meaning, right?
Meaning is just a small aspect of what language is doing. Language forms, bodies. Language shapes our jaws and how we eat and how we move in the world. It is part of our anticipatory models. It’s more, more than just communication that is happening. If language is material in that way, if it is in, in a sense physical, then what are the other things we can see about language?
Um, that might be shocking to linguistic theory today. Possibly that even the desire to speak a certain language is already the language. And that maybe in the conversations that we have around language extinction, which are very dire and urgent, right. I’m a subject of a, uh, I mean, I’m part of a culture that the U that UNESCO has said the language is dying..
The language of that culture is dying and might be extinct in a couple of years in a couple of decades. And my government is trying its best to restore the vibrancy of the language by introducing new curriculum in schools. And so people are graded and they’re passing. And I did that because this project started even while I was in secondary school.
And I did very well in the language. I passed with flying colors, but I don’t speak the language. Olivia I don’t speak it. Well, I don’t speak my language. Well, my siblings and my mother still make fun of me that I don’t speak my own language. Right. And I think it’s, you know, it’s because we kind of reduce language to certain metrics that we’re comfortable with.
Like repeatability, like syntax, like grammatical structure, like words, translation, sentences. Signs and symbols, accent marks tonality. We kind of reduce it to all of these things, but I think language is more than that. It’s something spiritual. it’s something, especially the Yoruba language is oral deeply oral.
It’s not even literal so that even the attempt to save a language might actually eradicate it. Right. So. Maybe language lives as ancestral formulations. Maybe it lives in diet. Maybe it lives in mountain forms in the environment, the landscape, maybe it lives in the pheromone, secreted by ant trails.
Maybe it lives in different ecological ways, archived in memories, archived and lost archived in pain and trees and new species. Maybe it lives in different ways that already suggests that language is a dying. And language is a living. And maybe in order to, you know, the, the idea of trying to entrap it and capture it and conserve it for all
time is already, uh, zombification of language.
Hmm.
[00:27:09] Olivia: And what do you think about poetry? There’s an old saying that that muse won’t visit poets. If they don’t speak the truth and you seem to be a poet that still has muses. And yet so many people in the modern world are turning now to like, you know, the mass media and, and government agencies and institutions for truth and, and poets are kind of seen as like meek, like.
Just focused on, you know, the, the flimsy things of imagination and childlike play. And, and what are your thoughts in, in terms of why have we turned our gaze away from poetry as, this gift of, of disruption and, the spilling of, of truth in a way that actually intoxicates us in, in we need,
[00:27:57] Bayo: I, I think, um, I think poetry is the dare I say language of collapse and I don’t mean collapse as a historical event, um, down the line, like, February 24 Putin invaded Ukraine. Whereas where are the poets? You know, I don’t mean, I don’t mean a mark on the tarmac of time. I mean, that collapse is already embedded in temporality. I mean that to be stable
implies collapse that we are living and dying life is already a dying in some sense. and so this trickster duplicity is the effort or the vocation of poetry or prophecy. I think of poetry as prophecy, prophecy, not as a prediction of things to come, but as a rearrangement of time. As a re invocation or, or a different way of conjuring the past and the, and the present and the future, you know, an invitation to look again at the arrangement of things, which is more powerful at the time when the arrangement of things become a problem.
Right. it’s more powerful when everything is falling apart. And precision no longer counts. Um, there, there’s a, there’s a movie Interstellar by Chris Nolan. I think the first time I watched it, I watched it seven times. It’s wow. In a row. I just, it’s probably three hours long, but I, I, I cannot get enough of it.
I dunno if I can do that now. I like sci-fi that, that pulls on not just my heartstrings, but all my strings just tears me apart and leaves me undone. Right. Um, in the movie, a black hole emerges somewhere in space and it’s like a gift. It’s a crack in space time that emerges at a time when humanity needs this crack
because, I mean, Christopher Nolan escalated the climate chaos, anxiety levels, everything is dying. There’s no food. The planet cannot not produce anymore. And so we need to vacate the planet. So the story is that we’re, we’re not meant to die here. We’re meant for the stars beside that, you know, back to the story, a black hole emerges.
They send engineers, thinkers, you know, to go through it. scientists and they actually succeed as they’re going through this worm hole, theoretically connecting them to a different space, time, coordinate, reducing the distance between them and salvation to come. the pilot starts to speed up, you know, it’s just rumbling.
They’re like in a tunnel, think of a storm and they’re in the eye of the storm, except the storm is. Vertical is horizontal. it defies language in a sense. And he’s trying to speed up through the storm. And I love what the scientist says, who puts his hand on the, on the pilot and says speed doesn’t matter here.
Right? Right. The very concept of speed. The very concept of distance is called into question here. It’s undone in this Einstein Rosen bridge of thoughts. I think in the same way we are, we’re being invited into what were we talking about again, Olivia?
[00:31:53] Olivia: Well, I originally asked you about poets,
[00:31:55] Bayo: yes, yes, yes. So I was going to use that. I was going to use that at traipsed off easily. I was gonna use that idea of speeding up in a warm hole to speak about how precision actually gets in the way sometimes cuz we’re addicted to calculability, we’re addicted to intelligibility, to legibility, to be able to pre preside over the future.
You know, part of being in the modern is the safety it guarantees us, you know, it promises us safety that you don’t need to deal with the wilds we’ll take care of it for you. Just stay here. Take on an identity run within. the lines of that, the race track of that identity and all will be fine.
And if you stray away from these boundaries that we agree is the human, then you are pathological and we will lock you up in the psychiatric hospital. I’m not saying it’s written in stone, but those are the implicit contractual terms. It seems that boundaries us. Poetry is about the loss of precision.
It’s about not getting to the point, right? It’s about the ectasy of becoming, uh, in a sense. And I don’t even want to use the word about as if it’s intentional that way. It, it just kind, I think the work it does is to, is to disturb is to, open up other reality possibilities. The reality tunnels that we may not be used to, by disappointing calculability and this is why I’m often invited to places and people, some people I think, want me to get to the point, right.
Okay. Just say the solution to climate change. I’m sure your culture has its archived somewhere in your library or something. Just pull it down, tell us what to do. And I’m, I often say that it’s not about, you know, getting to the point is, is the point of our issue. You know, this precision, this landing, you know, sticking a landing is the, is the generosity of the modern.
But at this time, I think poetry has been in, you know, the poetic is inviting us to stray away from calculability. And it’s only by doing that, you know, through the agency of disability that we might encounter other possible worlds.
[00:34:32] Olivia: I’m thinking of, um, the fact that you homeschool your, I mean, it’s weird saying homeschool, cause the way you talk about homeschooling sounds more like you’re all schooling each other or learning with each other. Right. And this idea of time, like, um, the blurring of past present and future comes to mind that you’re speaking of this, um, not getting to the point and also.
Being being fully in like being fully available to the full spectrum of yourself and your wife and your children in the process. Um, how is that looking these days in terms of the learning and environment? Like, how does that look for you? Because you also have quote unquote, all the higher degrees, like you’ve come from the
the formal educational world and yet you’ve chosen to educate in this other way. So curious how, how you invite a, a fuller experience of not getting to the point in, in this process.
[00:35:32] Bayo: You know, there, there’s this strand of thinking that presumes, That we are in a terrible situation, especially with climate change, climate collapse, and to bring children into the world at this time, might be a bad thing to do, I’ve actually had conversations, unexpected conversations with people who
those who are still having children are evil, right. That there’s something wrong with you if you could think of having a child at this time. But the thing about having children is that it changes us potentially i’m not saying this is a universal sure bank, uh, thing. I’m I’m saying that there’s a very strong thing.
even sometimes outweigh the social pressures of schooling. In a sense, I often think about schooling as an attempt to shield adults from the agency of children and then we tell ourselves it’s about education, right education. That’s what we’re doing we tell ourselves is education. Now I say this because, well, let me use the idea of fetal microchimerism, which is this, uh, you might have heard of it
it’s this strange thing that happens when a child starts to gestate and grow in the womb. It’s it’s not just that the mother. bequeathes and gives cells from her body to the growing child is that the child actually sends her own cells, his own cells into the mother. Right. And I think I read somewhere that cells of a child, 18 years after the child was born, were found in the brain of the mother.
I mean, where do, where do mothers get cravings, particular foods that they want to eat suddenly springing out. I want to eat this food, right? Maybe it’s the agency of the child. Well, anyway, fetal microchimerism means, uh, as the word microchimerismra might suggest microchimerismra means monster. It’s the linear idea that we are actually parenting children is upset by this reading, this analysis that children are also parenting us.
They’re shaping us. We’re being born in the moment of giving birth to right. And that many things that are actually amiss in the mother’s. Is addressed by this child in the womb. So I asked the question, how else can we change if we are not changed by those that we rudely call ours our children, and then to take this vocation even further, my wife calls it
transParenting. TransParenting is if we actually had a politics around this. Which is not utopian, which is experimental, how do we follow our kids? How do we treat them as researchers, as agential, you know, in their own, right. I’m finding and learning in my interactions with my children, how hypocritical I am, how far my theory strays from my lived experiences and how.
You know, I rolling off course. I am and yet they do this without judgment and invite me to play over and over again. I speak glowingly poetically about falling into cracks and refusing the band aid of solutionism if only for a while, but with my son who is on the spectrum. It was very difficult to do that.
It was easier said than done at some level I was very comfortable with it at a level that I could write about, but my emotions were all over the place because we’re not our own as well. it’s like this intergenerational pressure came dashing down. And overwhelming me so that most of the time I was with my son, I wanted to fix him.
I wanted to cure him. Right. And I can understand that I’ve had, I have some compassion for myself as well. Um, but these days my son is teaching me to ask new questions. Like, what if I don’t give you eye contact? What if I don’t return your gaze with mine? What if I don’t appear to fit the images that you’ve created for me, what if we don’t play catch, as you would want me to, can I still be your son?
Are you willing to play with me to get lost with me? So being with my son in this way, and my daughter is the greatest education beyond all our concentrations about jobs and certification that I think that most of us need at this time. It’s my spiritual vocation. It’s all I’m up for now.
[00:41:12] Olivia: Mm. I know you’ve told some stories from your descendant heritage, from your Yoruba background. Are there any fables that feel ripe in this moment?
[00:41:25] Bayo: It’s a story of Ijapa who’s the tortoise. The tortoise is one of the most critical trickster in your. Like the, the tortoise is like a Anansi, the spider from Ghana, I think more recognizable to people in the west Ijaba is the tortoise’s name.
And in this time of famine and hunger and pain and strife and suffering, where the animals of the jungle do not know what to do to live tortoise finds fruit. He finds a fruit and, He, takes this fruit, but as he’s about to eat it, it falls out of his hands and rolls into a hole. He chases it, but it falls away and you know, he’s not going to give up this wonderful gift that has happened to him.
And so he digs into the, into the, um, hole. And comes out in another world, the spirit world, see in folklore, in our storytelling, the spirit world lean in so intimately that it is indistinguishable from the material,
it touches it so, so lovingly and and, and frightening as well. So tortoise arrives in the spirit world and he’s baffled by it, but down, a few inches away from him is a spirit.
And this spirit is feasting on the fruits that has just popped out of the hole. Tortoise is livid. He doesn’t care about who this person is and starts to scream. Do you know who, who owns that? That was mine. It took it away from me and stuff. And so the spirit grants tortoise. A gift basically gives him a drum and tells him, go home to your house and beat this drum.
Why, why should I do this? Just, just do it. And so he takes the drum home and beats the drum and comes. Food plenty, just feasts ice cream. When I think of feasts, I think of ice cream that should tell you about the kind of person I am. ice cream, lots of ice cream, lots and lots of ice cream with different varieties of ice cream nearby, and other varieties of ice cream nearby.
Well, he eats and he eats/. Till he’s full and he beats the drum again and he eats and he eats and he eats. He gets so greedy with this, that he beats the drum so hard one day that it bursts open and it’s broken and it’s no longer producing food. And so he hatches upon a plan. He takes one of the the fruits that he has, uh, from the magic drum and goes to the hole and tosses it into the hole, hoping it will arrive in the spirit world in the same way he did
last time. The spirit takes the fruit. And waits for him. Tortoise comes out and says, do you know who owns that fruit? The spirit says, I didn’t touch it. Here is your fruit . And tortoise says, no, no, that’s another one I threw and you’ve changed. Well, the spirits gives him another drum and, Tortoise takes the drum.
Goes to his house, beats the drum and out comes, other spirits, and they beats the hell out of . Now, why did I tell this story? Why, what is, what, what what feels urgent here? It is not a story of greed. It’s not, uh, lesson about greed or, or. You know, being content or food and feeding, it’s definitely not about ice cream.
However, I think it’s about cracks. It’s about openings. It’s about the architecture of social change. I’m trying to say that we cannot do this on our own, whether it’s to address the impasses of modern civilization, whether it’s to address police brutality, we will often act as the systems or as the ecologies.
I prefer ecologies to systems the world exceeds the systemic. We will often act as ecologies and sometimes as ecologies that we produce certain toxic cyclicities, you know, and products and phenomena. So we need a break. We need something that would Pierce through that repeatability, that it a spirit, maybe with a mango, a drum, whether it’s a drum that beats us the senses out of us or gives us food, we need something.
Um, and I do not position the divine above the human. Like some hierarchical relationship. I think the divine and the material are in constant conversation. Right. And at this time it seems that even the divine has no answers, right. It’s not just there in a library, that we can Just pick out a book, what to do in times of trouble.
I think this is the call for us sitting with a humbling of ourselves together, somewhere in the middle. In the world of the material and the world of the spiritual. If I can parse things that way temporarily, we will find the otherwise waiting.