What if the very indigestibility of the other calls for new ways of framing identity and the promise of politics? Where are the thirst-quenching waters in a time of fire and fury? Is belonging possible in a world rooted in othering? These are some of the themes that animated this crucial discussion between OBI Director john a. powell and our new Global Senior Fellow Báyò Akómoláfé in this Sept. 6 event. Check out coverage of this event in the Daily Cal here.
Transcript
Sara Grossman:
Welcome all to this first conversation that assured to be illuminating between Othering and Belonging Institute Director john a. powell and our inaugural Global Senior Fellow Bayo Akomolafe. My name is Sara Grossman and I am the director for the Democracy and Belonging Forum, which is hosting this conversation. The forum aims to connect civil society leaders in Europe and the US who are committed to bridging across lines of difference to counter polarization and breaking, while centering the needs and concerns of marginalized groups, which is certainly not an easy task. I'm joining you today from my home in Berlin, Germany, and I warmly welcome all of you from wherever you are in the world.
As I mentioned, Bayo is our inaugural global senior fellow, but I like to think of him as our provocateur in chief, whose central role is to help us rethink and reimagine our collective work towards justice. This conversation, in which Bayo and john will explore what belonging means beyond merely just getting along, is the first in a series of conversations that Bayo will be hosting entitled The Edges in the Middle, in which Bayo, as he puts it, will push away from the safety of secure shores and travel to the edges in the middle where strange frequencies, alien signals, post-human invitations and black noises might be heard. Before we begin, I'd like to thank our ASL interpreters, Jeffrey Bowden and Kenton Myers from Interpret, Educate and Serve, as well as our comms lead, Evan Yoshimoto, who is running the tech backstage.
As a quick reminder to our members, you all will have the opportunity to reflect on this conversation with Bayo directly after the conversation backstage. You should have received a Zoom link to do so, and if you haven't, please email me directly. If you're interested in future conversations, please sign up for our E-news, which you can find at our website, democracyandbelongingforum.org, and follow us on Twitter and Instagram @dandbforum. And with that, I will pass the mic on to Bayo to set the stage for this illuminating...
Bayo Akomolafe:
Good evening. My name is Bayo and thank you so much my sister Sara for the introduction. I think it is a beautiful thing to begin with gratitude. Gratitude seems ironic, maybe a contradictory thing, a paradoxical thing, especially in times such as we're in, but it's a good place to begin. So I want to give thanks to the Othering and Belonging Institute and the Democracy and Belonging Forum for inviting this queer, aesthetic of inquiry to take root, which we call the Umbari. And I'll just share a bit about that, but not before acknowledging an elder and someone I deeply respect, who is joining me in conversation, this being the first of this adventure into depth. I just want to also welcome Elder john powell. Thank you very much sir for this conversation.
I have to say that the reason I call him elder is, among many other things, Yoruba people, especially within the context away from the cities, do not know how to call people that they respect by their names. So I respect him and his work and I'm going to be calling him Elder john, just so we position ourselves within that reality. But I want to begin with this short introduction to an Umbari, just to set the stage to offer a libation into what this is about. The ancient traditions of Igbo people, the Igbo people are from Eastern Nigeria, is to create a building and dedicate this building to a goddess, Allah. This building is not designed to last. This building is designed to be eaten up by the goddess, the goddess of the earth. So it's an art form that is dedicated to decay, that is dedicated to rupture, that is dedicated to vanishing.
It's not built to last, it's built to be given away, so to speak. I'm inspired by the work of writers like Chinua Achebe. One of the quotes of Chinua Achebe is that the impatient idealist says, "Give me a place to stand and I shall move the earth", but there is no place to stand, such a place doesn't exist, we move at the world's pace. Umbari is a desire to move conversation at the world's pace. It's not a quest for truth, at least not truth in the final analysis in that Western notion of arrival. It's not a quest for final arrangements, it's not a quest for critique, it's not a desire for agreement or consensus. An Umbari is a desire to have a conversation in such a way that it falls to, the more than human. That might be best expressed by a proverb, an Igbo proverb that says, "If a meal is properly cooked, it will reach the ants." So maybe we're having a conversation in such a way that it might reach ants.
How might it feel to have a conversation to talk in ways that are not about finding some universal notion, but about allowing it to decay, allowing it to wash away, to disappear? The things that will be said between Elder john and myself are diffractively composed. I don't think we're searching for consensus or a manifesto, we're looking for a meal that might serve goddesses, that might feed ants. So we invite you to take whatever is resonant and if there are questions that emerge from this diffractive experiment, then all the better. And with that, I... Again, elder john, thank you so much for being in conversation with me.
I was struggling with how to start, the best place to start. How do I start such a conversation? This is not an interview. I know we're about to get into it together. Well, the first question that I feel might be a beautiful rabbit hole to get into is, the one that is already in the title. Why don't we get along? Why don't we just have peace on earth? It's a low ball, it's a soft ball. I think that's the expression, but I think we can swing, we can swing away from there and see what happens. So elder.
john a. powell:
It's great to be in conversation. Truly, I'm looking forward to it both today and in the future and in your role with the institute. That question reminds me of Rodney King. And I know some of the listeners are from the United States, some are from other parts of the world, but Rodney King was beat on film by the LA police. He was down on all fours and he went to trial, the police went to trial and they were acquitted, there was a second trial and they were convicted. And then he became somewhat famous and one of his comments was, "Why can't we just get along?" And so in some sense, he posed that question.
There's a lot in that question, like there are in many questions. It's not clear that we want to get along. Who is the we that want to get along? And Rodney King's case, African American man, the police talked about him being big and scary. They were not trying to get along with him, they were trying to make him submit, they were trying to dominate. And so I think people, we and people around the earth and in our communities and our home, part of the thing is what is our intention? What is the way we're showing up? There's also a question of what supports us. How our physical space, our psychological space, our moral space is organized, because we navigate through these spaces and they activate different things. And so I think it's not inevitable that we don't get along, but it's certainly not inevitable that we do. I think we have some agency in this. And the agency is not just personal, the agency is also how do we interact with our environment. So one way of reframing the question would be, what do we need to do if we want to get along?
Bayo Akomolafe:
Right. I know the Rodney King story and in fact, I believe it was part of the story-ing of this conversation. And that question is, yes, I feel it's theoretically dense and inviting, it's juicy. There's something that wants to be said there and thank you for sharing that. I want to go deeper into how we frame belonging and how we think about belonging, especially in these times when it seems... Well, we're in a time of war and strife, not just on the African continent, Kenya just went through a largely peaceful election process, not the same in Nigeria where I come from, where there are warring tribes and parties that no longer represent the people.
The United States of America seems to be an exemplar for weaponized divisions today. And those of us in the so-called global self, observing, are asking these same questions. How come there are these strange and rabid divisions where the left is unable to speak with the right or the right with the left? And what does it invite us to do with our aesthetics and politics, especially the ones that seek belonging, that seeks to build home for the many instead of the few?
john a. powell:
So again, I think a very important question. And one, looking at the world, whether it's United States or Kenya or Nigeria or India, Argentina, there's a strife everywhere. In some ways we are... It's almost like in the biblical discussion of the Tower of Babylon where people came together and was building this tower to heaven and then they were cursed by having different languages and division and they started fighting each other. In some ways we're being pushed together in the world. It used to be that Nigeria was a long ways away, it's not anymore. It used to be that India, from the United States perspective was some strange and exotic place, it's not anymore. It's next door, it's on your you smartphone. In a sense, we're bumping up against each other and we haven't really gone through the process of actually living the world where we all belong.
From my perspective, our connection to each other is real. It's not just an aspiration, it's not just academic. But we don't live that way. Our connection to the earth, our connection to the ants is already there. But we're objecting, we're saying no, not them, not them. And yet we have no choice except to learn how to, as you say, get along or belong to each other. It's already here, we only have one earth, and we see each other as a threat. And we don't come to that by ourselves. We're helped, the stories that we [inaudible]. The movies that we [inaudible]. The fear that animates most of our lives. We have, I think, tremendous capacity, as you talked about in the beginning, to create, to tell stories, to fix meals. Well we also have deep anxiety, deep fear. And so both of those things are there.
And unfortunately we spend way too much time feeding one and not the other. Feeding our fear, feeding our anxiety, feeding our threats, and so we act that way. Everyone seems like a potential threat, every group seems like a potential threat. And part of it I think is also a possessiveness, it's not our earth, it's my earth. It's not our country, it's my country. It's not our water, it's my water. Where we have that my in opposition to everybody else, we're going to have conflict. So I think that's the challenge, is can we recognize that not only is it our earth, our water, our food, but the only way we really thrive is when we hold each other, when we see each other, when we recognize each other.
But that's not the way we've grown up in many cases, it's not the way political systems are organized. I think when you dig deep into belonging, the idea of left and right starts to melt away. We're talking about life, we're talking about... You look at a baby, is a baby left or right? When most of us see a baby, we're moved with love and deep connection. What's that baby's politics?
Bayo Akomolafe:
Yes. Maybe one more before... I realize I'm asking more questions, but if that's all I have to do here, it's fine.
john a. powell:
I have a few questions for you as well.
Bayo Akomolafe:
What did you say, elder?
john a. powell:
I have a few questions for you as well.
Bayo Akomolafe:
You have a few questions? Okay, just one more. It's really about the political imaginaries that are the contemporary political projects of today. And whether they're able to hold the weight, the ontological weight of this desire for belonging. You spoke about gods and towers of Babylon, one unnamed god in the pantheon of gods in Yorubaland was a musician who's widely considered a father of Afrobeat, Fela Aníkúlápó Kuti, whose music ushered us into this session. And he would rail against democracy and call it demonstration of craze, or crazy demonstration, beautiful music, hip driving music. But his point was, this political imaginary seems to have been imposed upon us as a people and it's actually carving us apart, cleaving us apart. So that inspires me to ask about the dynamics of the politics afoot today, which some might name in the cadence of inclusivity or justice. What is it about these approaches, these modes of encounter that might actually get in the way of our desire to belong, to build home projects for each other?
john a. powell:
Well, there's a lot in that question. And the Othering and Belonging Institute I started at UC Berkeley, I'm the founding director. But the issue of belonging, we draw inspiration from all over the world. As you know, my daughter was born in Tanzania and I've worked in South Africa. And the concept of belonging and the reality of belonging, we literally are born as humans connected to another being. And how we express that belonging may vary from band to band, from nation to nation, but all of us need to belong. We need to belong to the earth, we need to belong to each other.
Then we may have our particular ways of expressing it, just like we may have our particular ways of recognizing the divine. And sometimes, that particularity becomes classified. It's like the way you eat your food, we all need to eat, but it doesn't mean we eat the same food, it doesn't mean we eat the same way. Do we eat with our hand? Do we eat with a fork? Do we eat with a chopstick? Do we eat with a spoon? And there's a concept called schizogenesis. I'm reading a book now called the Dawn of Everything and-
Bayo Akomolafe:
Great book.
john a. powell:
Yes. And the idea of schizogenesis is that sometimes, we defined ourself against something else. If you do something... You like jazz? Okay, I like rock. You like hot, I like cold. And it's not just that I like cold, it's that I am trying to distinguish myself from Bayo. So whatever he likes, I like the opposite. I think even in that is a relationship, that's a relationship itself. And we have multiple expressions of ourselves within ourselves and collectively. But I think sometimes, we celebrate differences that are not necessarily as important as we think they are.
Then it gets organized politically. When you look at strife and war and stuff, it's not just two people having a fight, it's someone usually a leader, the elites are saying "You don't like those people, they're not like us, they don't eat like us." And usually we do a caricature. Those people become flat, we don't really know them, we only know them in our imagination. We don't know their aspiration, their pain, their suffering, their joys. So that's part of it. We do need to get to know each other and we do need to co-create.
And the last thing I'll say is on the issue of democracy. And we have people at the institute who are from Africa and they raised the question, is democracy a western idea? And you indicated, Bayo, that you know that book, the Dawn of Everything, and the authors make the point that many of these concepts that were associated with the west actually don't come from the west, they come from indigenous people all around the world. So we need to be careful not to just both attach something and then throw it out because we assume this is a western idea. The roots of democracy, at least as I understand it, is that it's co-creation, but people get to create the thing they belong to.
If they want to create something different, then call it something different, that's fine. As but opposed to domination, as opposed to someone imposing something on it. And so there're many different expressions of democracy in the United States, which would be a democracy. It's never really been a democracy. It's what my friend Michael Omi and Howard Winant call a racial dictatorship where one group dominates another group. And that's the antithesis, at least in my understanding, of what we mean when we say co-creation or democracy.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Right. Thank you, elder. I'm going to pause here and invite you, yes.
john a. powell:
Yes. I have many questions. So you've traveled many parts of the world, you're living in Chennai right now, you're from Nigeria. Tell us a little bit about your journey and about what keeps you grounded, what keeps you moving forward? What keeps you in this process of co-creating a future that we might all live in? What do you draw inspiration from?
Bayo Akomolafe:
Could you say that last question again, elder?
john a. powell:
Where do you draw inspiration from?
Bayo Akomolafe:
Oh, where do I draw inspiration from? This might sound trite and ordinary, but yeah, it's ordinary and it's beautiful. I draw inspiration from my family, from my children, from my life partner, my wife. My story of migration is, and just in the back room we were speaking about the migration of a God, a Yoruba God, a trickster who left the shores of Africa and traveled with, this is an apocryphal account for those who are just hearing this story for the first time, who traveled with the slaves, as the elders in my part of the world tell the story, aboard those ships.
And the question is always why, why did he do that? Why didn't he just save them? Why did he not just... Why did he intercept his brother? The God of iron and victory Ogun from saving the situation, from successfully mounting and insurgency. And some of the tentative answers, responses given to that are without these departures, belonging is impossible. Without the going away, we may not be able to meet ourselves as if for the first time. I don't want to sound essentialist, but in many senses I feel I was conditioned, my philosophies, my politics, my upbringing. I grew up in a very traveling family. My father was a diplomat, so I grew up wanting always to travel like that God Eshu, who's one desire when asked by the chief God, Olodumare, all the others said, we want the power of lightning, I want the power of the ocean, and he said, I just want to see the world, I want to travel.
I feel that desire to travel kind of innovates me and activates my politics. It's brought me from Nigeria to India. I dwell well within the foreign and the strange. Maybe that's part of my psychological resistance, subconsciously of learning the Tamil language. But that's a different story, because I don't want it to be familiar, at least this is what I tell myself for my failures, my repeated failures to learn the language. But this inspires me. Stories of adventure, not adventure in the medieval sense, but adventure in the sense of, novelty is just at the edge of the horizon. That there's something else, something we're not able to think within our political imaginaries, something we're not able to calculate or anticipate or articulate within the lexicon available. So we need the trickster, we need a trickster to burst open new pathways for us, if you will.
john a. powell:
Thank you. I have one more question. So you mentioned having some attraction to the foreign and liking to travel, maybe even more than liking to travel, needing to travel. One of the things as I look out at the world, I think of the word alien.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Alien.
john a. powell:
Word alien and word foreign are very close and people are being animated by fear. Fear is a very old emotion, even animals have fear and it's the oldest part of the brain. So if you're acting out of fear, you have a big playground to play in. And apparently one of the things that can be animated in that world today is the fear of the other, the fear of the foreign, the fear of the unknown. And yet we're being asked to actually engage with people who are in some ways different, but in many ways like us. And so I wonder in your travels if you're seeing that and how... Virtually every society that's roiling has a story about the other.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Yes.
john a. powell:
And they substitute different people in the story. In the United States it's blacks and immigrants. In India it may be a Muslim, and in Europe it may Turks or Syrians. And it's always foreigners. Those foreigners, those other people who are not part of the we. And in your travels... And this, just as a footnote, my daughter's first language was Tamil. We were living in India.
Bayo Akomolafe:
You're kidding.
john a. powell:
And my daughter was muttering and her mother said, why don't you respond to her? And I said, she's just babbling. No she's not babbling, she's asking for milk.
How do you process that? What do you need to do to... You have a curiosity, I can tell you have a deep curiosity. So what's born to you is inviting, is [inaudible] knowledge, but to a lot of people, its the edge of fear is the edge of threat. How do you move from the foreign being a threat to the foreign being the new and knowledge?
Bayo Akomolafe:
When I first came to India, I felt culture shock. It was the shock of being in a place where I wasn't part of the crowd. Nigeria is the largest black nation on earth, I would disappear in an instant, but I suddenly stood out. And not just that I stood out, but it felt like I was called out because the billboards around our home were plastered with advertisements around Fair & Lovely cream. I remember, you can get fairer cream. And when I walked down the street to the grocery store, people would gather to look at me like I was this strange being, it was very uncomfortable at first. And it tested me for a bit.
I won't go down that rabbit hole except to say this, that I started to open up myself to the experience of even being objectified. To touch what it meant, to be stabilized by a different gaze, the gaze of another. What would it mean to stay here and to inhabit this place and to touch it and to see what happens. So instead of enacting an approach of reactivity, of just lashing back, I embraced conversation. I embraced hospitality as a way of breaking the spell of the image. Like Eshu slipping away with the slave ships, I also slipped away from the image that I'd been assigned to, the pre designated boxes that had my name on it. And with that, I met new people, new friends, new community, new ideas. Maybe the point here for me is, societies co-create their monsters and they need monsters sometimes in order to say, this is where you dwell, this is the boundary of sanity, this is the boundary of morality. Don't go to the places where dragons are. Dragons are yonder, we create monsters and monsters have been cultural tools for us to create settlement.
But overtime, settlement starts to get carceral, it begins to get incarcerating. So we develop something that I call settlement cognition, trapped in our ways of thinking and organizing and marking the world. At those times I think the work to do is to embrace the monster, such as I've been embraced here to the community that I call family, is to embrace the monsters, to take monsters for picnics. The monster is the edge of settlement, is the edge of novelty. Until we come to a place of where there's shadow, where there's depth, where there's uncertainty, until we learn to live with the noise. What scholars like Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman will call black geographies, black noise, until we learn to live with that noise, we will continue to live within this toxic cyclicity of repeating the same old images we're used to and continue to otherize even the angels that have been sent to us. So I was a monster in many senses, still am a monster, but I'm learning to live within that paradigm and to embrace it and to also see that as an invitation for me to cast my eyes on the horizon and see the masks dancing beyond my own fences. Maybe then new political imaginaries might be possible, gifted to me by the monster.
john a. powell:
So I want to make space for other questions and for questions from the audience, but have one more. What you just said was so beautiful and powerful, I just want to excavate it a little bit. And excuse me if in the translation... But one of the things we talk a lot about is bridging. How do you connect with people who are supposedly others? How do you connect with people who are supposedly the monster? What you described in part was, you're being cast as the monster, but you did the bridging, you did the opening up, you did the... And a lot of people say, why should we who've been otherized...
Bayo Akomolafe:
Why should we do that work?
john a. powell:
...have to be the one doing the bridging. Why do we have to actually extend ourselves? Which is sounds like what you've done. And a lot of people say, we're experiencing trauma, we're experiencing pain, no, I'm not going to extend myself. In fact, some people even go so far as to say, I'm going to be that monster and I'm going to breathe fire, not love. So one, how do you respond to that? And when you talked about the trickster, one of the things I think about is play. Play sort of turn things on their head, you don't quite see it coming and it takes an openness to really play, it takes your curiosity to really play. And I don't know that we know how to play anymore. Most of us have forgotten how to play. That's one of the sad things, children know how to play, adults have by and large forgotten how to play. What do you say to people who say, I'm being othered and I'm pissed and I'm angry and I'm slapping back, I'm not going to extend myself in conversation or otherwise to the other.
Bayo Akomolafe:
With great compassion to those responses, I think most of the time when we respond in that way, we fail to see or we obscure the gift that is refusal, that is the invitation to play. As you've eloquently said, elder, the trickster is the invitation to move from side to side to break the posture that we're used to, to play like children. That's a gift, that's the decolonial. Decoloniality for me is playful cosmology, is the call to create a new, is the call to leave the familiar behind and dwell within the black noise of the uncertain and then to see what happens there. Just like the people, the Inuit people that have this beautiful ritual called Qarrtsiluni, I think I'm pronouncing that right, which is sitting in the dark and waiting for something to happen.
And it's part of this wailing tradition of co-creating a song, but the lyrics are not clear to you at the point of creating a song. So they go into this room and they sit and they're still and somehow through the ordinary, and I started our conversation by speaking about the ordinary being more extraordinary than the extraordinary. But somehow the ordinary gifts the moment, the darkness, the lyrics of the song that wants to be born. In that way I feel that when we say for instance, that I don't want to extend myself, I deeply understand that in my bones because I was there as well. But the invitation to extend oneself exceeds conversations about entitlement and rights and privileges. It's the trickster giving us an advantage to break outside of the settlement cognitions and colonial bubbles of identity with which we framed our worlds and our homes. So it's actually a gift, it's it's a plus to exceed those boxes, to move outside of the way.
And this is what I think of as refusal or what I often write of as ontofugitivity. Its about us escaping the plantation that be labors or uses our labor to create worlds. And one of the ways that I think that is done is through very colonial, stabilizing static notions of identity. That we're here and there's nothing else to be known about us. This is who you are. It's very aristotelian, platonic. This is where you sit, that's all there is to you. This is not my cosmology. The world that I come from means that I always travel, that the local and the diasporic are entangled with each other. So my response to that is duplicitous. I understand on the one hand why people would respond that way, and I understand the politics that makes that possible. But I also long for something more than critique. I also long for something more than just the one we're used to, the politics we're used to, I long for flight. I long to move away from the shores that I'm used to because it doesn't seem to be working for even those that are privileged anymore.
john a. powell:
Thank you. I see questions are coming in, so I'mma turn it back to you. I'm reminded of, Tony Morrison basically said, paraphrasing, if you want to destroy people take away their dreams. And to me, that's partially what you're saying. Dreaming is one of the places that we play, its one of the places that we break out of the static. And so sometimes in terms of being colonialized, it's not just our physical bodies, our minds, our capacity to dream are fractured.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Yes, yes. Even sometimes in our attempts to address the ills, the oppressive ills of colonial arrangements, we feed those arrangements, we reinforce them, we reinscribe the hurt and the pain. So the gift of refusal, the gift of play is to dance away from those algorithms so that we might find other ways to compose reality, to compose belonging. And this might be... I'm noticing the question, how do we play when we feel physically and emotionally unsafe with others? For me elder, belonging isn't something that comes from human longings. Belonging is a dense materiality, it's animacy, it's multi species salon, it's not just how we feel, it's not just the legal frameworks, it's not just the architecture, it's not just inclusivity. Of course, you've written extensively about that. It's also viruses and microbial activisms in our guts. It's also texture and color and a non-human world.
So bodies do not precede belonging, belonging creates subjectivity, it creates our bodies. So there will be moments when we feel unsafe physically and emotionally. And I don't think I can speak in some universal sense and say, stay there and see what happens. We have to deal with each specificity as it comes. But there is, I think even in the most oppressive circumstances as African elders would attest to, even in the most oppressive dark places, there is a glimmer of hope, there is a glimmer of light, there is a trickster traveling with a fragile precious treasure to plant in the diasporic, to do strange things with it. So unsafety, uncertainty, might produce strange things, the work then is to create community for us to hold and cultivate the resilience, to stay with our trouble together. I'm using Donna Haraway's phrase, stay with the trouble.
john a. powell:
The questions that are pouring in. So I don't know if we're going to take another one, but people have heard me talk about my family. You mentioned that's part of your inspiration.
Bayo Akomolafe:
It is.
john a. powell:
Both my parents have passed now, so I'm an orphan in a way. But they left me so much including my siblings. But if I were to chronicle all the difficulties of my parents' life in terms of being sharecroppers in the south in terms of watching and being aware of people being killed and literally lynched. When I was a young man and my dad furnace blew up in his face and we were driving around Detroit looking for a hospital that will accept a black man into them, into the hospital. There's a lot of what we might call trauma or pain. And yet, if you had met my mom and dad, and some of you have, the story of that pain and their story would seem to be incongruent. There was so much love. And my mom was a trickster, my dad was a bodhisattva.
And I feel blessed not just to have them as parents, but that some of that maybe has rubbed off on me. And I don't want to belittle people's pain and suffering, at the same time, if we just stay there, then that starts to define us. It's like there's a second and third injury from the pain, it's not just the event, it's the second and third injury, we can't see anything else. One last story before we take another question. I had an uncle, he passed away, when we were a young men, he was not much older than me, but still my uncle. A yellow jacket flew into his ear and his response was to cup his ear. And he's running down the street streaming and we were saying, Lloyd, remove your hand. And of course the yellow jacket, as you know is a wasp and it kept stinging him over and over again and his holding his ear made it so the yellow jacket couldn't get out. And he essentially lost his hearing. His reaction was understandable, but in many ways it made things worse as well.
Bayo Akomolafe:
That feels like a trauma response. Its how we hold it in, the efforts to get rid of the pain, become the efforts to contain it.
john a. powell:
Right. So here's another question, it says...
Bayo Akomolafe:
Elder, you were saying?
john a. powell:
Yes, here's another question, I was going to read it. It says, can we teach one another to play the role of trickster, identity smashers?
Bayo Akomolafe:
You want to take the other question, elder?
john a. powell:
Yes, can you hear me okay?
Bayo Akomolafe:
Hello?
john a. powell:
Bayo, can you hear me? Are we having technical problems?
Bayo Akomolafe:
Elder john, do you want to take the other question, the next question? Or do I go for it?
john a. powell:
I could could start it. Shall I start it? Bayo, can you hear me? Okay-
Bayo Akomolafe:
I see there is-
john a. powell:
Yeah, I think we're having some technical difficulties, but I'll try again. So one question is how can we teach one another to play the role of the trickster, identity smasher, new world creators? Hopefully that came through. I'll start, but then I'll turn it over to Bayo.
Bayo shared with us his tradition and family in Nigeria, many of us I would think are not in Nigeria, maybe some of you are, many of us have had different traditions. So I don't know if we can completely without more work, without more investigation interrogate tricksters. I think its something to orient us in a certain way. And we may have our own way of playing, our own way of actually engaging what I call our multiple identities. I think that we are multiple identities. And the reason we don't experience that is that there's something holding us back, that's something we're taught not to actually investigate, experience, relax into our multiple identities.
And one of the things about play, when you think about kids, when they play, oftentimes they play from the space of multiple identities. They take on different characters, they take on... they'll be a bird, they'll be a river, so they're doing that very early and then we teach them to stop. You're not a bird, you're not a river, you stay, you're this, you're john. So I think part of this is going back to that and then Bayo talked about different traditions and even rituals that help us play and we may need that as well. And so for example, obviously music, dance, that's about playing, that's about taking on something different. So I think that we may have to think about and invite playing back into our lives both individually and collectively. Bayo, you're back now, so let me turn this over to you.
Bayo Akomolafe:
I think we started to speak about tricksters too much and so the place got dense. The technology could not hold the weight of our conversation. I apologize. My first response to that, the question about identity bursting work... smashers I think, and the trickster is that I do not think of humans as tricksters. I think of the trickster as this energetic flow, this liminal quality that shapes new possibilities, which enlists humans as well as non-humans. And it's always invitational. It's an invitation like, the elder, I heard you saying, it's an invitation to play. Now the tricksters deepest work is to break open binaries, is to disturb binaries, whether it's between God and man, man and woman, or heaven and hell or language and reality or reason and emotion, is to burst the idea that these are binaries and to find a way, one might call it a third way, between the cracks of binaries.
So I often think of a politics or an aesthetic or an art that is in response to the trickster as post activism or as making sanctuary. That is an invitation to play, to compose from the fabric of our loss and our grieving and our not knowing, an art, a way of keeping track of our bodies so to speak. So in the places where we don't know, in the places where we're not sure any longer, in the places where we feel defeated, where we feel like we're failed and we're failures. And there are lots of stories to be told about the educational system in India and how it co-produces failure as a phenomenon. In those places I think the trickster abides, the trickster dwells in the cracks in modernity. So where you think that things don't add up, you want to gravitate towards those things and find community to hold you and hold that precious thing that wants to emerge. Grieving together is trickster work, playing together is trickster work, sitting in the dark and waiting for something to happen is trickster work. So wherever you find openings in the explanation we give to things, that is the invitation to the trickster, I think.
john a. powell:
Thank you. And I'm going to read one more question.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Okay.
john a. powell:
You may have time for two more. I am Asian from an all white community in Ohio. I spent time in Kenya where I was [inaudible]. I know what that means, it means basically...
Bayo Akomolafe:
Monster.
john a. powell:
Yeah. But it was easy to embrace being a monster there. I find it impossible to do it in this country though, why?
Let me just speculate. Obviously we don't know why. But I lived in Africa, I've lived in indigenous... what's now called Navajo [inaudible]. And I remember people coming up to me and seeing me as the other, but it was almost like just a fact, it wasn't like, I'm going to beat you up. It didn't have the sign, the kind of toxicity that I find sometimes black and America carries with it. And so I was the other, but there was a certain, I don't know if what the right word is, but there was a certain openness, curiosity, just a matter of fact. And so in a sense, there was places to move. I remember one of the things I used to do when I lived on the Navajo Hopi Reservation, I used to stand on my head a lot doing yoga. And people sometimes they would get a little frustrated with me they'd say, go stand on your head.
But I've never heard someone who is being hostile to me because of their racism. They say go stand on your head. It's like they say cease and desist, they say to threaten away. So that was my experience. But I have had the experience of being othered in different cultures where it wasn't a threat, where it wasn't quite as hard, where it wasn't crusted in some way and there's a possibility of movement. In the United States I feel like it's much harder in some way, there's a much larger narrative and there's structure to support that narrative and it's a collective narrative. So that's my response. Do you want to respond to that as well?
Bayo Akomolafe:
Yeah, I do. I think the United States has... This is where this speaker is speaking from, Ohio, right?
john a. powell:
Yes.
Bayo Akomolafe:
In the United States. So I think the United States has a lot of practice at being empire. And empires eventually after using up all the resources, natural resources, human resources, when they run of resources, they start to... They might commodify monsters as well and take the other and contain it. And in an algorithm of indigestibility, put it in a family way so that it continues to reproduce for them, which is my highfalutin way of saying that some of the cultures that I've also had the privilege of living with always have others. It's almost inescapable that we co-produce the other in co-producing place.
But they have healthy encounters with the others. Yoruba people have a sense of orita, this is the crossroads that is, they say that the crossroad inter-penetrates everything. That if you go to a marketplace and you bend down and you look at the world between your legs, the world behind you, you will find monsters. So they're not far away, they're not in the wilds beyond fences, they're right here with us and we're indebted to them. So there is... And Yoruba people pray to Eshu, they say Eshu come close, but not too close. So there's this healthy fascination with the trickster, but also a deep respect that to engage the trickster is to engage risk. I feel this is entirely missing in empire, or at least so repressed or pushed down as to be of no consequence. It's that even monsters are now game for capitalist reproduction. And so it's almost impossible to have that conversation in that space. What needs to happen? Maybe I would venture out to say is a break, a break in transmission or else empire will keep on reproducing itself. So something needs to inter-penetrate that model and invite or [inaudible] apart. And I'm not speaking in terms of nation, states falling apart, I'm speaking in terms of people meeting the trickster in local portals of refusal and finding a world of play that could not have been possible if they stuck within those empiric assemblages.
john a. powell:
So we're almost out of time, I'm going to throw out one more question and give a quick response. The question is, is emotional justice and belonging linked? Is emotional justice and belonging linked? And let me just say, add one thing to what Bayo just said. I'm here in the United States, I'm in Berkeley, California, so things may seem very solid, but they're not. I was in Africa doing work on ending apartheid when Steve Biko was killed, I was actually doing postgraduate work. So I was studying what was happening in Southern Africa. And when Steve Biko died or was killed, I felt like South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, they will never become post-colonial. And a few years later, apartheid had began to crumble. I missed the fragility of it. It looked like this huge empire, if you will. And yet it was fragile. And so I think that even as we think about empire, there's a fragility to that and part of people themselves, and we're running out of time, so I'm not going to go into it, but I want us to of distinguish between the empire and the people. That all of us, for the most part, white, black, straight, gay, are trapped in this empire, sort of. And we're not all in the same position, but this empire's weighing upon all of us and it's fragile.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Indeed.
john a. powell:
The fragility in part can be accelerated by belonging, by the trickster, but if we see it as this big thing that can't change, it actually freezes us as well. And so in terms of your question, is emotional justice and belonging linked? I would say yes, but they're not the same. And to me, belonging already exists. We don't live it, we don't celebrate it, we don't acknowledge it, but it's there, we're always connected. We're always belonging to each other, we already belong to the earth. We may not recognize it. Justice is something different. Justice is not something that's already there. Bayo, let you have at last 60 seconds.
Bayo Akomolafe:
60 seconds. I would say yes, but I would also want to... I struggle with the term emotional justice, the phrasing of that. Maybe I would invite more conversation about emotional justice as a concept. But yes, justice and belonging play with each other but there are also moments when it seems this trope of belonging, that we're building concepts around where it pushes out and it seeks new ways of traveling. When home is no longer hospitable, what do we do? Maybe that's how I end that or respond to that question.
john a. powell:
Thank you.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Thank you elder, thank you very much.
