CIIS Public Programs Podcast

TRANSCRIPT

[Cheerful theme music begins]

This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, featuring talks and conversations recorded live by California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit university located in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Land. 

Bayo Akomolafe is a posthumanist thinker, philosopher, poet, author and founder of the Emergence Network, a planet-wide initiative that seeks to convene communities in new ways in response to the critical, civilizational challenges we face as a species. Through Bayo's writings, speeches, and work he inspires new ways of thinking and being in the world, inviting us to ask questions that undermine everything we are told to believe. 

In this episode, Bayo is joined by artist, writer, mindfulness practitioner, facilitator, and emerging filmmaker Damali Robertson as they explore postactivism and how this concept, which is so imbued with possibility and creativity, can be supportive of pathways to healing. 

This episode was recorded during a live event on March 14th, 2024. CIIS Public Programs members can watch a video of this talk on their member portal. A transcript is available at ciispod.com. To find out more about CIIS and public programs like this one, visit our website ciis.edu and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms.

[Theme music concludes]

Damali Robertson: Wow. Hi, everyone. Yes, we're so grateful that you're here and good evening.

Bayo Akomolafe: Good evening. Hello, everyone. What's with the hi?

Damali Robertson: Just taking that breath in. Here we are. All right. So I mean, I have to ask, how are you feeling in this moment? How are you?

Bayo Akomolafe: I am, I've been traveling, and my body is a bit weary, but I'm excited at the same time. It's dancing between tensions. And I'm glad to be here. And thank you all for coming out to listen to me yarn and dance. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you. 

Damali Robertson: Yes. Okay, so I'm gonna dive in. I want to tell you that I've been thinking a lot about this conversation. I thought, you know, I would love to bring in, bring in my ancestors, my Jamaican ancestors, my African ancestors, my European ancestors, bring them into the space. I'd also just like to bring in people who are really feeling the weight of this moment. I feel like we're living in a bit of a turbulent time. And so if you will give me permission, I'll ask questions from that place, you know, thinking of the ancestral spaces, and then the spaces of grief that most of us are occupying and maybe the spaces of a little bit of hope and optimism. So given the weight of this moment, given where we are, what do you think is most important for people to know, to think about to keep in their hearts in this moment?

Bayo Akomolafe: Just to hold space for the conversation, to mark what we want to do here together. We're not just here to listen to us talk. You're here to co-create possibility. And so the storytelling and the story listening as well. So we weave the fabric of new sensuous kinds of solidarities. So my sister, you were saying about the moment and the weightiness of the moment, the burdens of this time. So most of you who know the stories that I tell the things that I talk about in my work, you might have heard me speak about the trickster, the deity called Eshu. Now I'm from the people called the Yoruba people from West Africa. And we tell the story of the trickster and his work and how he traveled with stolen bodies with the slave across the Atlantic Ocean. He, he and I'm not going to go through the whole story. Well, I might just do that.

Damali Robertson: Take your time.

Bayo Akomolafe: Okay. Take our time. The story and this is written by a professor. Now a professor, I think he's living in the United States now zero, the Yoruba man like myself. These are the stories we tell to make sense of that loss, the tragedy, the holding of this moment. It said that when the slavers came and brought their ships to our shores, the God of victory, who also doubles as the God of iron and metal works. His name is Ogun mounted up an insurgency, took his siblings and said, let's go and chase them away. We can win because it's right there in my CV. I'm the God of victory. Right. So we can win if we try. On the way Eshu, his brother, another Orisha, the Orishas are the super deities in the pantheon of gods for the Yoruba people. Eshu intercepted and his intercepting did not. He said, let's have a different strategy. Let's go in the morning when it's bright and sunny. You know, we can take them better this way. But it was all deception because Eshu's goal was different. He gave his brother palm wine. I don't know if you know what that is, but it's a strongly intoxicating brew. And he put his brother to sleep and nullified the insurgency and then proceeded to sneak onto those ships to travel with the slaves. He didn't heal the crack. He performed an act of radical accompaniment and stole into the heart of that sense of capture. If I were to say something about my work, it's that my work is about openings within captivity. I'm looking for strange kinds of openings within the heart of closure. Because the story is really that those slave ships, which were performances of capture, when those captains would count the bodies that they had taken, 76 and 77. And when they said, okay, we have 77 bodies, there was always a 78th body. There was something else that even colonization is never completely itself. There's something else needling through the enterprise and the machine of capture. So these moments, terrible as they are, grievous as they are, remind me of that story. They tell me that, the story tells me that our grief is a germ, is an emancipatory germ. I don't think of grief as mere sadness. Grief is mutiny against colonial forms. There's something about grief that composts the rectilinearity of the upright citizen. It's almost like the radical hospitality of the earth itself, drawing us to the earth, telling us to fall. So there's something about this moment, sister, that is inviting us to stay with the troubles, to hold space, to cultivate the capacity to hold each other. Even when we speak truth to power and it lands on a metal surface and it doesn't seem like it's going anywhere, there's something powerful, emancipatory, potentially liberatory about staying with the grief. And our people want to jump into remedy, but there's something about process, right? Process, not remedy, not solutionism, but process that is invited in this moment. And my sense of things is that when we stay there together, we will be met by something greater than ourselves. Does that make sense?

Damali Robertson: But I want to just ask you a little bit more about this grief, because I think so many of us work on pushing grief away. Not facing, not being with, right? Turning away, even jumping past, you know, the bypass of it. How do you stay with the grief? How do you, in your, you know, in your view, what does that look like for people to experience it fully?

Bayo Akomolafe: Well, I'm a recovering psychologist. I was trained to keep people productive. It's the reason why a colleague of mine would say psychology is the policeman of capitalism. Something about therapy. There are lots of anti-psychologists here. There's something about the ways that we've been habituated into being proper citizens that pathologizes grief. And I'm not speaking in abstract philosophical terms. I'm speaking in grounded realities. Because grief is pathologized in the latest diagnostic statistical manual of fifth iteration, which is the Bible for psychiatry. If you grieve for more than a year, there's something wrong with you. Right? So grief is pathology. And grief is pathology because it does something to the citizen that is not quite amenable to our program of productivity. Right? See, what white modernity, what it wants to do is to keep us within boxes of productivity, is to keep us in the plantation, the labor of productivity. White modernity is not white people. Okay? Whiteness is not white people. Whiteness is a racialized, socio-economic, and political and theological order that arranges body. In terms of their proximity to its fetish, the power, which is a way of saying that white modernity's greatest goal is to create dissociated selves. Right? What it wants to do is to create separability and separation. That's what it does. Right? But it's not reducible to white people. It captured white people as well. It used white bodies as its avatar to do its work in the world, to flatten the world. Right? And we all are habituated into this. All of us. We are the way we think, the way we act, the way we perform solidarity, the way we greet each other. All of this is a larger field territorializing us. And so when we push out grief, it's the way we keep ourselves in. But you see, there's this saying by Audre Lorde. “The master's tools will not dismantle the master's house.” It's a beautiful saying, and it has a lot of things attached to that. But I love the response of a dear friend of mine, Karen Barad. And Karen says in response, “But the master's tools never stay faithful to the master for too long.” So, yes, we may push out grief. The architecture of modernity is about building ramparts to block out grief and its meddling tactics and ways, the decoloniality of grief. However, I feel that we are all sensing into grief now and that the tides are, you know, sailing and flooding the walls somehow so that all our efforts to keep it out, you know, failing. We're feeling each other's grief, you know, we're sensing the grief of the world at some level. I don't know if you are sensing it as well. It doesn't even feel like it's your grief, reducible to your experience. It seems like we're sensing larger forces at work. Some of us might be driving and we just park on the side of the road and we just want to cry. Why? Because we're not as impervious as we think we are. You're not a good citizen, you're just pretending to be. And maybe this moment is reminding us that that grief has salvific and emancipatory potentials. It will find us.

Damali Robertson: I love that idea of having emancipatory potentials. You know you brought up Audre Lorde, and I was actually going to bring her up because when we met last year, I don't know if the audience knows but we met last year and had lunch and we had a wonderful conversation and I in that conversation said something about the master's tools, never dismantling the master's house and you said something that startled me and I think when I listen to you in different forums, you often say things that startle me a little bit like well I go, and so I want to ask you a couple of those things tonight, because I think of the activists, and I think of the people out there who are resisting and fighting and pushing against what you described as whiteness, you know, I'm paraphrasing. And there are times when I feel like you'll say something I'll be like well, what does that mean for those, the activists for the people pushing and resisting. So when you said last year you were like, I'm going to paraphrase you know but you almost said something like well, there's something you can learn from. So you can't just abandon the master's tools all together. And I was like what can you tell us a little bit more, can you say a little bit more, especially since you brought it up I was like yes, Audre Lorde, bringing her into the space and thinking about what else we, we need to know about the master's tools.

Bayo Akomolafe: The way that I want to respond to this is to help us think about how we bifurcate the world. We often do this. We do this all the time we think in terms of binaries, right. I was in Belgium, one time and I just gave a talk, keynotes to start the event. And then afterwards, this is many years ago. Afterwards they had this very rich and engaging and exercise for everyone in the room. There's a huge white board. And there was a line in between. And the facilitators, very energetic and lively. And they invited the people to think about everything that was that they would like to get rid of, right, everything they would like to get rid of in the world. So, maybe we can do that together. I'm a very very breaking the, the divide between the people and the stage kind of thing so if you were to say one word, the thing you want to get rid of in the world just shout it out, wherever you are. Okay, I heard that one. Beer. Why are we doing that? Why would you want to do that? I don't drink beer but I want to get rid of it. Did you say fear? Yes, I was just kidding. Dictatorship, fascism. Okay, what else? The nation state, just wipe it out. Off with the nation state.

Damali Robertson: Right.

Bayo Akomolafe: Capitalism. Okay. All right. Oil.

Damali Robertson: Greed.

Bayo Akomolafe: Okay, greed. One more, one more for the room. Memory. Let's get rid of memory.

Damali Robertson: I wasn't expecting that one.

Bayo Akomolafe: Do you remember what you just said? No, that's a very powerful thing to say actually. Okay, well, what are the things you like to bring then? The things you like to see. Those are the things you like to get rid of. Okay, you're gone  Now, the things you like to see. Love. Employment. Abundance. Okay. Anyone else? Diversity, freedom. Okay. Omniverse. 

Damali Robertson: Hummingbirds.

Bayo Akomolafe: Hummingbirds. Okay, all right. We have hummingbirds. Okay. All right. One more for the road. This one. Troy. Joy.

Damali Robertson: Joy.

Bayo Akomolafe: Okay. I feel like let's bring back Troy. The city of Troy. Not to have been destroyed. Okay, so we have all that. So, so this is the exercise they had, you know, the good things and the bad stuff and then the line between. And I was just watching, and the facilitator gave me the marker and said what would you like to add to the board. And I got there and I put a question mark on the line. And, of course, the facilitator didn't know what to do with that, and just continued as usual. And then someone came to me afterwards and said what's the meaning of the question mark. And I said to the person said, brother, I'm not so sure that if we got rid of these things that these things follow by consequence, but sometimes we have this utopian imagination. That if only we can get rid of the other side, you know, just wipe out the people who don't think like we do, just get rid of the other side in totality, then we can have all of these things. That's not what an emergent entangling and entangled universe teaches you. What an entangled universe teaches me is that the more you dive deep into the meaning of light, the more you start to get some intimacy with darkness. That darkness and light work together. Right. That shadows come with illumination, and that sometimes clarity can get in the way of transformation. So, the, the, the, what was the question again. Where were we going with this sister,

Damali Robertson: we're talking about the master's tools, how those can be.

Bayo Akomolafe: Yes, yes. So, so, so, so, the thing I've been calling myself a sit down for stand up philosopher or sit down philosopher for some time now. It seems to me that our politics is not sensitized to emergence, you know, our politics is sectoral and it's calibrated to bifurcation. That's why we don't even know how to talk with each other anymore we've, we don't have complexity and nuance, you know, we don't know how to hold space for nuanced and complex conversations. And so we're kind of reproducing this is what I say, sometimes it is the case that the way we address the crisis is the crisis, right, masquerading as a solution. Right. So our politics lunges and and yearns for purity. Right. If I told you here that all of you, and I mean all of you because I'm sure all of you have phones that your phones are subsidized by the tears and the suffering of Congolese children who dive into mines to fish out cobalt. If I told you that how would you stay with that. We don't know how to sit with that. If I told you that eating donuts, for instance, means that a tiger in Indonesia is dying. Right at the giant oil industry depends on the decimation of entire ecologies to give you the oil that fries your beautiful crispy cream. If I told you to sit with that you wouldn't know what to do with that. Some of you might say, All right, I'll get rid of the donuts. I'll get rid of the phones. But even if you got rid of everything you think imbricates you with suffering, you still haven't touched the logic that keeps you within a web of relations. We need a politics that's that says, we are all complicit. None of us is pure. That means that we have to cultivate new ways, sister, of even noticing that the master's tools are not solely or exclusively the masters. Eshu proved that. The master used the ship to capture bodies, Eshu used the ship to creolize the world. Does that make sense?

Damali Robertson: You know, you touched on something there about, you know, the ways that we make one person wrong, or one person, the issue, and we don't look at ourselves, you know, and see how we participate in various things. But if we're sitting with the idea, what if more of us did that? What if more of us said, you know, I am responsible as well for what's happening in the world. I'm responsible by virtue of having the phone or buying the Krispy Kreme donut, I'm responsible. Well, what would be different about our world do you think if people could take that and be with that. And, and not push away responsibility. It sounds like you're saying there's a responsibility that we all have.

Bayo Akomolafe: Well, I don't think we're lacking in a sense of res— I think the world is so connected these days that we get a sense of how things move in the world. I think what doesn't feel quite popular to say, or to hold space for is the idea that even our solutions, even our solidarities can become a form of bio political control, right, the very thing. What what is at heart here sister is whiteness is the quest for purity. Whiteness is the quest for transcendence. What it wants to do is to escape the messy entangledness of things. Politics allow us to notice that our bodies are tied with the other that we would rather get rid of is a politics that isn't quite available yet not on in the mainstream. Right, it wouldn't thrive on CNN, or what are the others, Fox news, or MSNBC. Yes, and you see it doesn't thrive in the typical. It is atypical. It is an underground spiritual thing. It doesn't thrive on the surface, it thrives in descent descending into the cracks. What we need is a politics that holds space for failure. That that can hold the fact that we are in this, and none of us, no one is is a pure. And if you think you can cut out, you know, all your implications with suffering, you're doing exactly what colonization wants to do, which is to cut our implication with the world. Right. So, yes, I feel that invitation. Maybe more people, knowing how these things work. But it's not that easy to to come across, or to invite people into that space. Every time I come to the United States, I'm always baffled with the level of religious engagement around throwing your trash in the right in the right in the appropriately colored. What's it called, trash can or something right there's there's there's there's green what's green for

Damali Robertson: Its compost.

Bayo Akomolafe: What's blue? 

Damali Robertson: Recycling, land fill is the other one.

Bayo Akomolafe: Yeah, there's blue and there's red and there's there's signs and stuff like that. And, and people from the global south, where I come from, with probably chuckle. You know they would laugh if they saw this, the, the, I saw this I tell the story all the time I saw this lady at an airport in the United States, and she was carrying her Starbucks, you know, she was going around looking for the color to take her indulgence coin, right. And she couldn't find it and I was just watching her going around the same gate just going around looking for it. If I stopped her and said that, sister, you know, wherever you throw it. Whatever color you choose at the end of the day, it will come to my home. 90% more than 90% of discarded trash doesn't go to some green Emerald City, or some place where it comes back as a tote bag. No, it goes to playgrounds in India, in Vietnam in the Gambia. I knew about the recycling symbol before I knew what it designated. But you see people are in dope aminergic networks is what my sister, Vanessa and reality would call it. We are in territories of acting. And so because we want to feel good about responding to the world in particular ways, we keep on doing those things that I must save the world, we have been subsidizing the righteousness of the global north for too long. And this is the time I feel for us to notice we need a different kind of politics saving the world now, I think, let's retire, the idea of saving the world I think the world wants to save us.

Damali Robertson: Well, your story about the different receptacles that we throw everything in

Bayo Akomolafe: the name receptacles.

Damali Robertson: Well that's the one maybe that I use the different bins. It reminds me of a poem my grandmother wrote probably in the 60s 50s. She was living in Jamaica. And there were no plastic bags yet. And they started to bring plastic bags to the country, and she felt immediately like this was not going to be good for the environment. And she wrote a poem about ghosts, you know in Jamaica to call them duppies. And it was the bag was the Duppies and it was going to be here long beyond her. And I find that, you know, when I look back at that poem there's like a prophetic wisdom that I think is still alive now. And still trying to warn us about some of the things that we've decided to pursue as humanity and this moment. Is there anything that concerns you? Is there anything that comes up and arrives in this moment for you as something that we need to be paying attention to as humanity.

Bayo Akomolafe: I am a post humanist thinker. And my work is to de center the human that acts. Okay. My notions of activism are premised on the idea of the human that acts upon the world to save the world. What that obscures is how the world acts upon us in return. Think about all the dreams the modern fantasies we had coming into these moments. Each body here carries a strand and irradiated cell of that explosive turbulence that gave birth to white modernity, you carry a morsel of this dream, the dream that one day, if we can get AI we can some really dispense with menial tasks, and then we can focus on the high quality fine things of life we can lazy about we can laze about and talk about philosophy and stuff like that, you know, but what does it feel like, even with these technologies now we have less time. Right, we have less time to focus on what matters, if you will. And I think we forgot in our calculations on how to save the world. We forgot that the world has plans of its own. That it has agency and intelligence. And this is what I call post activism. Right, we can no longer tolerate the idea that we are that it's left to us. Right, it's it that it comes down to your acting. We need a sense of humility that reminds us that we never act alone. We act with every behaving is a behaving with every acting is an acting with. And this is important to say, because a lot of the things that pass off as activism today feel like we're installing solar panels on a slave ship. To tell ourselves we're doing the right thing. But the larger systems and principalities, the neural typical ways of acting only get reinforced. Even with your most abrasive and radical forms of solidarity. The state is entrenched and reinforced in our acts of salvation we need something. I don’t think that you heard of the Chinese curses. It's an apocryphal process. Apocryphal because we don't have empirical evidence that they actually said this but this is some story. The first curse is. May you live in interesting times. The second curse is. May you be seen and recognized by the Emperor. May you be seen. You want to be seen. Get seen. But there's a risk of quality the wisdom here is there's a risk in being seen and recognized. The last one is the most profound curse of all curses I've ever heard is, may you get what you want. We have to be, we have to notice we're not, we're not isolated bodies acting. We are often secretions of the very paradigm we're trying to upset. And even when we think about the future. You know, we are thinking with the past, the epistemology the resources of the present and the past to think about the future. Some of us we have ideations about the world we want to escape into, and we never realized that those ideations are gifted to us by the very world we're trying to leave behind. So, when that happens, we need a break. And my work is about breaks and cracks and openings and the gift of failure. A theology of failure. 

Damali Robertson: There is something you said about the third curse that I want to follow up on

Bayo Akomolafe: you get what you want.

Damali Robertson: Yes. Because it almost invites me to think that if the curses may you get what you want, what would the blessing be in and the other side of that it almost feels for me personally and like, maybe if I'm listening to what the cosmos want, or the, you know, what the earth is asking them, is there another side to that to that curse is there something else we should know.

Bayo Akomolafe: I think, I don't know what the opposite would mean, but I think it might look like the words of how the stem in the book. The queer art of failure. And echoed in the opening words of the book by Fred Norton and Harvey about. We need to tear shit down is what you say we need to tear shit down before we even know what we want. Right. Because wanting is state. State imperative. How we want, how we need, how we think about what we want. These are not things that come from the isolation of our gilded interiority, your feelings on never yours. They've never been yours. They are the public's emotions are not even human. There's a sense in which emotion is territorial. We want how we feel is a matter of spaces is a matter of architecture and texture and thresholds. So maybe the idea is to be sensitized to those places where things don't add up. You know, where things are coming on done, you know we speak about the cracks and Leonard Cohen and what does he say again, the crack is where the light gets in. I, I, I respect Leonard Cohen but I like to disagree about it's the cracks and not just about light getting in cracks are about the excessiveness of a world that cannot hold the burdens of this time. Like, something wants to escape the incarceration of white modernity. And it will show up as failure as excess as a fall from grace. Right. And it's those moments when desire is doing something that that cannot be calculated. Those are the moments we are invited to follow. And that's a new kind of wanting. It's a new kind of desire and is a new kind of experimenting with. I think if politics looks more like that. I mean I don't care about partisan politics and institutional politics. I'm speaking about politics as a microbial event as what we're doing in the moment as how grandmothers are meeting their neighbors as how we're telling stories to each other, as how we're telling stories to each other. This is a conspiracy right here, this here doesn't have a party name, but you're here because a conspiracy has brought you, you know what conspiracy means right, a breathing together conspiracy to conspire together, we're breathing new futures, just by being and sitting here together. That's a new kind of wanting. Yes.

Damali Robertson: Yes. I want to ask you something, because when you talk about coming on done and you know reference some of that, I often feel like I'm coming on in the society. I feel like I constant state of rage and maybe even grief from the disappointment of what I'm looking at, and what I'm experiencing on some days. And I wonder, you know, sometimes I look at capitalism militarism. these isms and work on finding my way back to a power, to us, to something that says, that's not all there is, that there's more. When you think of what we're witnessing in the world, what we're experiencing, many of us, you know, is there a power that we can find to face that? To?

Bayo Akomolafe: Yes, there is.

Damali Robertson: Tell me about it.

Bayo Akomolafe: There is. Does anyone here like movies? Let me see your hands up in the air and wave them like you just don't care. Sci-fi people here, sci-fi? Excellent. My favorite sci-fi movie is Contact. Jodie Foster, right? Okay. And Jodie, there's a scene that I like. I'm not going to, so let me say here that I've been warned not to spoil movies when I'm in the United States, but I'm Nigerian. I'm Nigerian. I don't really care about that. So I'm going to spoil it. But if you haven't watched it, I'm sorry. I'm just going to tell you the entire plot. Some multi-dimensional vehicle is made, and Jodie Foster is the cosmonaut. She's the traveler. She's in that huge vehicle, and the instructions for how to build this vehicle is given by an unknown, possibly extraterrestrial civilization. They build it up. I think the United States government builds it up in collaboration with other states, and she's in the sole traveler in this vehicle. It vibrates, and it transports her to a place that is impossible to language. She looks outside the window of this vehicle, and there's something about this moment that speaks to me, such a powerful cinematic moment. She glimpses something. She catches the glimpse of something that will not be shown. The director refuses to show the audience, just leaves it to our imagination, and her face starts to change as she views this thing, as she looks out upon it, and she says the words, they should have sent a poet. They should have sent a poet. She says it three times, I think. They should have sent a poet as she gasps as this beautiful thing morphs and changes. One of my deepest fantasies is to catch a glimpse of what she saw, right? Is to behold that generosity that is not glimpseable in the architecture of the city. Is there something more to look forward to that isn't reducible to heaven or utopia? Is there a prior generosity that can hold our bodies? I come from an indigenous people that have a technology of noticing that prior generosity. The people that they put in charge of this prior generosity are called elders. Elders, elders hold the space. They're weird enough to know that it doesn't come to you and your skills and your CV and your aspirations that there's a way to be in community with others where you start to speak and someone else finishes what you're saying. Because I don't have to be entirely eloquent because I know that my body is not mine. My body is of the web that is still mattering. That's the prior generosity that is truncated in white modernity. White modernity is the orthodoxy of the obvious. It's the paradigm of the persistently visible. Only what is visible counts. All the threads that connect us with ancestry, with indigeneity, with other cosmological forces are pushed aside. So you show up for a job. What's your level of education? It's very neurotypical. Neurotypicality is a system, a value system that forces us to behave in ways that produces good bodies, a proper body. And your proper body, when you shake someone's hand, what do they say? You shake your hand and you shake it firm and you pump and to give an impression that you're confident. All those things that are whispered to us that habituate us, those things that are whispered to us, like when you're in public, regulate your emotions. That's neurotypicality speaking. Regulate your emotions. Don't do that. Don't do that. Regulate yourself. Watch where you are. Present you, put your best foot forward. All those things that we learned in the class to do. Can you know those lessons I'm talking about? I'm not speaking to myself here. All those things we learned to do in order to get by, to be successful, to be seen as intelligent. All those things we said to the mirror, when we look in the mirror, before we get out there, we tell ourselves, you can make it. You can do it. That's neurotypicality. That's the vocality, the agency of neurotypicality that is forcing us to see the world and perform it in different ways. And that is why we are cut off from the other kinds of abundances that the world provides my politics is an autistic politics. It seeks to stray away from neurotypicality, which is not a romanticization of autism. My son is autistic, but it's a way of noticing that autism is potentially emancipatory in the way it brackets neurotypicality. It seeks no explanation. Eshu is autistic. He didn't provide an explanation for why he traveled with a slave. He just knew he had to do it. My son was practicing this prior generosity recently in my home. He started to go around in circles. He's six years old, and he just started to go around in circles. And I just observed him for a while, and I said, Kaya, why do you do that? Why do you just go around in circles? And he had this cheeky smile and glint in his eye like he knew the answer, but he wasn't going to tell me. And he kept on doing it, just kept on going around in circles. And I persisted my neurotypical intellectual persistence. Why do you go around in circles? And then he responded with some declarative manifesto. He said, I go around in a circle because I want to make a big O on the ground, which was not an answer to my question. And yet there was something about it that felt like God speaking to Job when Job said, why do good people suffer? And God, like a drunk psychotherapist said, have you seen the deer? Have you seen Leviathan? Have you seen Behemoth? Never at any moment answering the poor man's question. There's something liberating about moving away from the logic of the question, right? Because sometimes the answer leaves us within the economy of the question. The solution leaves us within the logistics of the problem. And that's why I seek bewilderment. Bewilderment de-territorializes the logic and takes us to other places of power. That's the prior generosity we need, and that's the kind of politics we're looking for.

Damali Robertson: So you said so much there, and I kind of cued into one thing and I want the audience to forgive me in advance for the kind of heaviness that this next question is going to bring about. But that is what struck me because as you were talking about your son, I believe, right, and autism, I was thinking about my son who is now 26 years old. But he's been one of my biggest teachers because I spent a long time trying to parent, to control, to keep him safe. So especially in these United States, it's about he's a young black man, how do I keep him safe? Don't be out the box. Be in this box and be as kind of like conformist as you can. And I say this coming from a place of a recent killing by a police officer of a young black teenager who's 15 years old. He's had autism and was just killed. And so there's this fine line for so many parents here in particular of protection versus the full expression of self and that liberatory, what do you say to folks who feel that, that feel like, I wish we could be that. I wish the imagination had taken us there already, but people die for being their full expression like this young man, Ryan Gaynor, who was just killed in San Bernardino, California.

Bayo Akomolafe: Well in the literature, there is a name for this sense that the public isn't just the public. It's replete, it's teeming with death and obstacles to some people and maybe not to others. This is called the black outdoors, right? And there are many ways that we understand how bodies are used and deployed. The philosopher called Foucault that speaks about bio-politics and bio-politics is a way of saying that life, the kinds of ways that bodies are managed these days replaces the old notion of sovereignty. We are disciplining ourselves as a regime and our bodies are part of this regime. So when you talk about the ways large populations are managed, we're speaking about a bio-politics. In comes my brother, Achille Mbembe, who is a famous Cameroonian philosopher. He says, well, not quite, it's not just the case that bodies and populations are managed. It's that in order to properly manage those populations, some aspect of the population has to die. And so he called it necropolitics. And the necropolitics is how bodies are racialized, how it's easier for some others to be discarded because they're not worthy. They're not worthy. It's not, it doesn't come down to intention or volition. It's just something that is behind that. It lurks behind that, despite your political affiliation. It creeps up behind you. And at some molecular level, there's a knowing that this body is not as worth, it's not worth the kind of value that mine is. So I understand the feeling of anxiety around protection. I am constantly worried about my son. The godmother of my son is here. So she knows I have these conversations with her. My wife is in India with my children. And we have these conversations all the time. I'm worried about him. I'm worried about the world he will enter into. Will they make fun of him? Will they say he's not good enough? But sometimes I notice in my embrace that my embrace subtly becomes asphyxiation. At what moment does our urge to protect become part of the paradigms way of keeping our bodies still? At what point do I become the secretion, the tentacular extension of a neurotypical regime? And I found my son, I found myself wanting to keep my son in lockdown, right? Despite my public facing persona and all the things that I say that make people smile. I struggle with these demons. Some of you all know the story of me and my son and my wife and my daughter walking through a shopping mall. And my son has a big moment. We don't call it meltdowns anymore. My wife forbade that expressly and said, we will call it the passing of a wild god. We will not call it. I don't care about your PhDs or your clinical psychology. We will call it the passing of a wild god. And so that's what we call it. And I had that moment. We had a big moment. My wife said, when the god passes, we build an altar to it. This is not a casserole family. We're not locking my son down. But that's exactly what I tried to do at that shopping mall that day. It was in India. My anxiety levels were creeping through the roof. And he started to scream and roll on the floor. Now I said it was in India. And I happened to have this color skin. And so all eyes were on me. And I wasn't feeling the groove of that. It felt like 1 billion people were looking at me all at once. So I turned to my son and I tried to regulate him. Like, it's going to be all right, just keep quiet for now so we can get home. I'll give you a cookie. I'll give you a cookie. I promise. And of course, you cannot do that. And my son was not having it. You cannot rationalize out of the passing of a wild god. And my wife, who should be here and sitting here with you, Dumali, my sister, and having this conversation because it's a lot more grounded than I'll ever be and wiser and everything. And I say that because she told me to say that. Comes all the way to me and says, Bayo, you're not handling this well. Just walk away and I'll handle this. So I walk away with all my PhDs and all my philosophy and all my eloquence. I walk away and then my wife does exactly what I talk about to people. She performs it. She doesn't just talk it, she does it. And what does she do in the intelligence of that moment? She gets down on the floor and she doesn't say a word. She doesn't say it'll be fine. I'll give you a cookie. Regulate yourself. Nothing. She just stays next to him in the same way as she traveled with the slaves. Didn't say a word to them. She performed this act of radical accompaniment. And it was simultaneously a way of protecting without affixation, holding space for his emergence without trapping him in it. It was also a way of acknowledging that she didn't have the answers, that maybe neurotypicality is at a loss and maybe that's what the world wants to do at that moment. Lie down on the ground and scream. But we have no space for that because we're so good. We're good, proper bodies, you see. But my son was feeling the moment. I do not understand what his critique was. Maybe he knows something about the shopping mall that called for an outrage. Maybe there was something about it that felt no way, no way. And he went on the ground, but he was just four or five years old. He could not articulate it in the words that I would use. And so in the performance of that fugitivity, my wife stayed next to him, put her body next to him. And I think, yes, the world is becoming troubling, even more troubling than we already know. It's turbulent, but in the tremulousness of those intimate vulnerable moments, I think we can find the infre-thin space of companionship, of traveling together with. But we must watch that we do not asphyxiate those that we claim to protect.

Damali Robertson: I mean, I just thought to myself, what if I companion more and try to control less, which is the asphyxiation anyway, I'm going to say.

Bayo Akomolafe: Because our children are telling us something. They are with their anger, with their outrage, with their not getting with the program. They are inviting us to lose our way. My people say in order to find your way, you must lose it. There is a time for building settlements and there's a time for fugitivity. This is a time for fugitivity. We have to get lost. And even if you don't want to get lost, home is slipping away beneath our feet anyway. We just have to build new materialities of care that can hold bodies where they fall. And if our politics looks like what it is today, politics of sides, politics of other rising, politics of I'm better than you, or I have all my shit together, I think we'll keep on going around in circles, toxic cyclicity, repeating itself. 

Damali Robertson: Thank you so much for this. Thank you, everyone. Good night.

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Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live.

Podcast production is supervised by Kirstin Van Cleef at CIIS. Audio production is supervised by Lyle Barrere at Desired Effect. The CIIS Public Programs team includes Izzy Angus, Kyle DeMedio, Alex Elliott, Emlyn Guiney, Patty Pforte, Nikki Roda, and Pele Shalev. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe wherever you find podcasts, visit our website ciis.edu, and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms.

CIIS Public Programs commits to use our in-person and online platforms to uplift the stories and teachings of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color; those in the LGBTQIA+ community; and all those whose lives emerge from the intersections of multiple identities. 

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