#16 | These Monsters In Perpetual Exile - Bayo Akomolafe
“There is no community unless you are willing to be wounded.”
I’m very excited to share my conversation today with Bayo Akomolafe, an international speaker, poet and activist in service of a radical paradigm shift in consciousness and culture. He is globally recognised for his unconventional, counterintuitive, and indigenous take on global crisis, civic action and social change. Bayo is also Chief Curator for The Emergence Network and the author of two books, including “These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home.”
I first crossed paths with Bayo at the New Story Summit in Scotland, back in 2014, and since then have followed his genre-bending wonderings about how things came to be as they are, often crafting his lectures and essays with surprising and beautiful associations of language and imagery.
In this episode, we cover a range of topics, including: Understanding fatherhood as a community, the need to confront the monstrosities of masculinity, and the tender wound that may lie at the heart of the patriarchy.
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SHOW NOTES
On fatherhood
Speaking of his own father’s death, losing the template for masculinity
Running to Jesus and Truth instead
Where did the idealized image of masculinity come from, colonial interruption? But the trickster god has both male and female sex, and defies easy categorization
The gift of confusion
Masculinity can be always becoming
Fatherhood as transmission of trauma
You’re not complete until you’re wounded in some way, otherwise community is not possible
The monsters of masculinites
Living in perpetual exile
Masculinity is about cutting yourself, the wound, rather than being put together
Nothing that is real shows up completely
FULL TRANSCRIPT
IM: Welcome, Bayo, to the show.
Bayo Akomolafe: Thank you, brother. Good to be here.
IM: Would you please begin by sharing a little of where you are in this moment?
Bayo Akomolafe: Hmm. How many ways to answer that question, where I am? Well, physically I'm in Chennai, India, in a little part of the city called Egmore and with my family. I'm so grateful to be with them. There's a long story about how that didn't almost happen. But in many other senses, I am…where I'm at is in a place of peace, and peace that is tensioned by the trauma and loss that is all around us, I think, at the moment. But it's a homecoming that is creeping up on me, that is teaching me to wash dishes, change diapers as if that was the last thing to do on the planet. That's where I'm at.
IM: How has it been there with the lockdown? I understand India has been much more severe in its response, I feel.
Bayo Akomolafe: Yeah, a billion people. Well, the gist of it is it's not easy here. It's probably easier to get people to issue a directive and say everyone go indoors, but it's much less…it's a lot more difficult to get people to comply. And so, because of the resilience of the culture and the manifoldness of India, and India just been India, it's been difficult to see things come through in the ways that you would expect them to, especially under these circumstances. It's weathering the storm. There isn't a lot of testing going on, as much as you would expect, but there you go. We're all in this together.
IM: You mentioned your family. How has it been to be with them during this time of quarantine?
Bayo Akomolafe: That is my single joy. It is. I'm so grateful to be with them. I just came off a call, like I said before we jumped on this one, where I shared with the people inviting me to do something that I've been flying for the past few years. I've been dwelling in airports. It got to a point where I was so used to flying that the people on board would recognize me and [say], Oh, you're back again! I would literally fly into India and the next day fly out to Brazil, and just time zone violations of the infinite order. But I'm so grateful to be at home right now to be disciplined by their screaming, their demands on my person, by ideas and notions that I'm not the keeper of my time. I feel like I belong. And this is just right. I'm grateful to be here.
IM: I'd love to stay on this thread of fatherhood for a little bit. I, myself, am a father to an 18-month-old named Oryn, who is getting more rambunctious and demanding by the day…
Bayo Akomolafe: What's his or her name?
IM: His name is Oryn.
Bayo Akomolafe: Oryn. Okay.
IM: And maybe similar story too, of being here and being at home. This is the longest stretch that I have not traveled as well and how it's introduced a real impetus to slow down, to be present. For me, even with a child, I've heard with fathers in particular that fatherhood kind of comes on over time. That it's not necessarily an immediate re-format. I wonder with you, how was it? How was fatherhood coming on for you? First, did you always know that you wanted to be a father, and therefore, a fatherhood came on, or was it something that surprised you?
Bayo Akomolafe: Well, as part of the technology, the cultural technology of the Yoruba people where I come from in Nigeria, West Africa, it's rare to find a person who is not already getting ready to be a father or mother. You would hardly run into a person on the street saying I don't intend to be a father or a mother. It's almost seen as taboo, because of the ways we see ourselves as holding the thread, not just for ancestry, but for progeny, for people that will come after us. So, we're all in this web, this thick web together.
I wasn't, even though I prepared to be a father, I couldn't have prepared, no one could have prepared me for what it actually entailed, what it actually asked of me. So much so that I'm finding it difficult at this point in time to see fatherhood as an ideal, in the sense that maybe an American would speak about a more perfect union, like we're striving towards becoming the perfect nation-state that would guarantee the American life for all people.
I don't know that I can subscribe any longer to a notion of fatherhood that is just down the road. My fatherhood is thick with failure. Thick with other kinds of becomings, thick with voices that I thought I'd walked away from, thick with expectations that are not mine, motivations that I have no idea it's part of my being and my processing and my psyche. I think fatherhood is a community, not just a stable archetype. It's a community. And what it means to be a father for me is to speak with, is to confide in, and to continue to partner with the nonhuman and the human that is part of this assemblage that we rudely call fatherhood.
IM: Hmm. I love that. Fatherhood is a community. Reading...I'll pull it up. I know it's only an audio, this podcast, but I'm gonna hold it up.
Bayo Akomolafe: [Laughs] Oh, you got one of those,
IM: Yeah, I recently acquired a copy of your book, These Wilds Beyond Our Fences. And one, I have not been able to get as far in as I wanted to before this call because it arrived not too long ago. And two, I was really struck by a theme or at least a constant surprise with your writing, which is that it's so devastatingly beautiful.
Bayo Akomolafe: Thank you, brother.
IM: [00:09:55] Consistently, yeah, consistently. And the book[’s subtitle] Letters to my Daughter is very clearly, at least from what I can tell so far, aimed at or oriented to speaking to her about your life, about maybe all of the complex ways that have governed the moment for you to be together. I'm looking forward to reading the rest, and I'm curious to know… already, in the opening, you speak about the significance of your own father, and his early death. I love there's a line in there that you actually repeat a few times in a few of the paragraphs, which you say, he's cool like that.
Bayo Akomolafe: Yes.
IM: He's cool like that. I've heard you say, I think in another podcast, that he really was this ideal model of masculinity for you, as fathers [are] for many men. I would love for you to speak more about that. In particular, who he was to you then, and how his death ended up launching you on so much of your adventure in your quest, it feels.
Bayo Akomolafe: Well, I feel Daddy, cause that's what I called him, Daddy. And Daddy was a...he continues to give today. He was…well, when I say he was an ideal model of the masculine for me, I don't mean he was perfect, obviously. There are many things that I knew about my father, that we all knew about my father, that we felt he should work on. You know, this is something you have to work on. He had his shadows, obviously. But at that time, as this young kid trying to navigate the burdens of masculinity…
…because being a man in Africa…and I shouldn't say Africa. Africa is many worlds, many Africas…but in the part of Nigeria that I grew up in, being a man is to be brought into this almost factory-like processing. It's like masculinity is imposed on you. You have to be tough. You have to know how to hustle. Sometimes you have to have a deep voice. There's almost these expectations that come with being a man. And sometimes my father's expectations about how his boy was manning up didn't quite pan out the way he would have wanted it to be.
I had sisters, I was very effeminate, I spoke with this nasal voice that I still speak with today. I wasn't very manly. If a rat came by, I would jump on the table and scream, like a little girl, like my sister, which I will still probably do today. So I wasn't very masculine. I was quite comfortable with my lack of masculinity, but it was problematic for him. But he stood as this shining example of this archetype. He spoke different languages: Portuguese and French and his own native language, which is a dialect of the Yoruba, a generic language. He traveled far and wide. He was an ambassador. He had great hair. He was six foot plus. He was very handsome.
I wouldn't count myself in any of those categories. I was just his son, so when he died, it's like I lost my cookie-cutter model. I not only lost my best friend, I lost my template. Now what do I do? It was just like a meteorite, just like something penetrating and dismantling and liquefying the soil that I was supposed to grow up in.
So I started to look for a different model, and then I ran to Jesus. I ran to the next great model of masculinity. I ran to truth, formidable truth, absolute truth, unchanging truth. The Christological, canonical, Calvinistic, Newtonian model of a universe that was unchanging. Something in the image of my father. And then along the way, I think in some senses…because I think ancestors are still lively and generative…in some senses, my father gave me the gift or became the conditions of my recovery from that toxic notion of masculinity, from that toxic ideal of arrival.
I'm still recovering, in many senses. I'm still seeing…I'm still learning to unsee the abs and the good hair and all of that. But even more importantly, I'm learning to unsee the binary with which I constructed the masculine at a distance, at a pathological distance from the feminine, as something other than soft and loamy and gushy and microbial. I'm learning to dismantle those archetypes. I don't know where it’ll take me, but there you go.
IM: Thank you. I'm struck by hearing a little of what you said, the ideas about what a man should be in the Yoruba, you said?
Bayo Akomolafe: The Yoruba people, yeah.
IM: Yeah, and this idea of the deep voice and this image of masculinity that in some ways actually sounds familiar from a sense of maybe in the modern industrial West, this idea again of a kind of muscle-y or confident, like low voice, good hair. I'm curious, is it fair to say that might also be an image of masculinity devised by colonization? Is that what your people would have understood an ideal masculine to be, back before colonization or is that part of the imposition, this idea of what they should be?
Bayo Akomolafe: I think it's a complex story. I don't want to create an easy villain here, which would be the easy and convenient thing to do. But I think it's noteworthy that some of the tricksters and gods and goddesses that are part of the pantheon that feel archetypal and primal and primordial seem to defeat or disturb those binaries that felt very Eurocentric, especially in those transatlantic arrivals. Eshu, for instance, who is the god [of the Yoruba]…well, it's always violent to speak about Eshu or to speak of Eshu, because Eshu, he disturbs the speaking of him or her or it. There is something that does not want to be conceptualized easily.
It is said that Eshu has both a vagina and a penis at the same time. This was prior to Eurocentric encounters or interruptions. There seems to be this notion that the world is far more promiscuous, far more fluid than a single Jungian, stabilized category of the masculine or feminine would be.
I'm seeing the toxic effects of that, of delimiting the masculine from the feminine, most importantly in India where I live right now, which is my new home, when it is streamed into the public consciousness that boys don't cry. It literally is a thing here. When men beat up their wives and there's this almost over-sexualized terrain where they have to divide how people sit on trains, that men sit on this corner and women sit on this corner and then when they come together, men usually touch the women in unsavory ways. They just touching them and derive some sense of pleasure from that. If they resist, they just flare up and become really angry. And so, you have all these constant reports (they're not even new anymore) of men beating up women and so much so that the government had to release public announcements to say boys also cry. Boys can cry. So I am, of course, taking this as data, as a gift in meeting my own son, who is named after my father, ironically, unexpectedly, as well. I'm learning to say to people that he can cry as well. That's a gift.
IM: [00:19:56] Hmm. There's so many threads that I want to dash off down, but one thing that strikes me about your work is it defies prescriptive answers. Because I really see it as a great capacity to wonder differently about things. And I will say that you may or may not know I've spent many years with another teacher, Stephen Jenkinson, who also I believe really displays such an achieved capacity to wonder that is often infuriating to those that really want the, “Okay, so what do we do about it?” kind of answers. One of the things I really would love to talk about in this conversation is around the subject of masculinity, but perhaps to bring your great capacity to wonder about this subject, this happening, because I think that there's something that is largely absent from the cultural conversation around masculinity, maybe in the same way that you've spoken about climate change or activism, that there's something around masculinity which still is part of the constructs of masculinity. Like it hasn't stepped outside of it to be able to really invite different questions or invite different perspectives. And so that's I guess what my curiosity is with you. What could we wonder about masculinity that is not being wondered about?
Bayo Akomolafe: Mmm. Well, thank you for that very beautiful description or a non-description of what you might term my work. People ask the same thing. I respond by saying I'm very confused, and it's a gift to be confused. I have, apart from a doctorate, which doesn't mean much these days, I take it as a gift…yeah, I think that's the word there…as a gift to be wounded, to be open. Maybe that speaks to what we're trying to invite here, to call the womple together, down the street. To explore what masculinity might help us read through are the issues of our times.
Well, one thing that has been paramount or sticking with me is the notion of justice. Occurring in my dreams and haunting my imaginations is how justice could often get in the way of transformation. The very notion of justice is…the way we speak about it, the way we've been inspired to speak about it as citizens gestating in modern projects is as this transcendental or transcendent, not transcendental, transcendent ideal. Like something outside the fray, something outside the messy materiality of the world. There is this extra-planetary ideal, if you will, called justice and our work is to reach towards it.
And so, when we speak about climate justice and racial justice and environmental justice and whatever forms of justices we gather around, there's this notion that it's already made. It's out there. It's just a product waiting to be discovered. I find that this discovery/arrival/closure, they seem like very masculine ideals. Like it's this will or imperative to close up the threadbare areas, to make tidy, to put together seamlessly instead of to open up, instead of a gushing, menstrual wound or wounds that he senses that is always alive to what is becoming.
So it's like being that pathologizes becoming. And so justice seems like this anticipates resumption that hides and lurks in our imaginations about how the world ought to be. The oughtness of things. Sometimes that gets in the way of the kinds of movements and the kinds of…a friend of mine says that I vogue sometimes and I do it. I never knew the name. I never knew what voguing was. But the idea that I can move my body in ways that are probably perverse to a sterile notion of masculinity, it seems generous and beautiful and a gift.
So, yeah. Closure, arrival, foreclosure, rapture. I'm really intent on exploring descent and rupture these days, not as the Other of the masculine, but as a making forth of the masculine, as the masculine is always yet to come from me. Like the meaning of the masculine isn't there already. It's defracted, it's postponed, indefinitely. When I say that fatherhood is a community, it literally means that the meaning isn't there like an orb, shining outside of the sweltering heat or compost heap of bodies mangled into bodies. It's being made in the moment. I don't know. I'll stop there for now.
IM: Yeah, I love that image, that I do think that there's almost like a construct or a maybe an intellectual, rational construct of this idea that there is this thing that we're striving towards, and whether it's related to this idea of truth, which I think you spoke about in the Christian understanding that the truth is like this floating orb or this thing that can be approached as somehow outside of the messiness of becoming.
I feel like perhaps there's similar constructs that can happen with this idea of masculinity, especially when there's something that is sort of constellated and labeled, currently, around this idea of toxic masculinity. Which I think can be really helpful in a sense of identifying, again, certain behaviours or certain trespasses, certain entitlements that are certainly past due to be composted.
Yet at the same time, it feels like there's this kind of, Therefore, here's the idolized masculinity that we're actually now all meant to aim at. A sort of universal nobility of the masculine. Again, that's what I wonder about, because I feel like you're pointing towards something else, like a certain way of orienting but never landing on the thing that we're supposed to get to.
Bayo Akomolafe: Right. I'd approach responding to that in this way. That I feel…let me use the lenses of a father or a father-in-the-making to respond to this.
I think fatherhood-masculinity is a crossroads event. Except, in modernity, it's treated as a highway, road rage, speedster stuff. I feel it's a crossroads event. I feel it's a meeting of bodies. Something deeper than just an intersection. I think it's a diffraction. And in that sense, I've come to this uncomfortable…I call it a realization, just for conversational purposes. I don't want to treat anything I say as some kind of revelational dispatch from some outside realm to my head, like revelatory stuff. But let's go with realization.
So I've come to the uncomfortable realization that fathering is also the transmission of trauma. That seems nothing new. I mean it in more ways than just we are inadvertently gifting our children our own shadows, our own toxicities. In microbial ways, in bacterial form, in intergenerational lingering, behavioural modes and strategies of survival that have been encoded in our DNA, or encoded in flesh, or encoded in ecology, or food types or fecal patterns. We gift shadows to the world. We give shadows to our children.
But I want to notice another way I'm seeing this. I don't just mean we inadvertently give it. I feel that the task of fathering is to come to a place of giving children intent[ion]…I rarely use the word intention, but intention comes to a place of saying this is a wound. Take it. I will stab this part of you so that you never are complete. So that you’re never full or whole.
[00:30:04] Can I tell you a brief story maybe that could illustrate this? I wrote a story once about a father. When this started to come to me…a father in the village writing to his son in Lagos, the city, saying I'm about to die, so I think we should just meet each other again for the last time. The son leaves his work in the city, travels all the way to the village, as you will do in my culture, and they take on a project together. Let's build a house, a mud hut. And they start to build this hut together.
Along the way, the old man becomes too weak to continue. He retires to his bed while the son does the good son's work of completing the task. He builds, puts the thatch roof, sweeps the compound, the house is done. He rushes with gusto to his father's bedside, and he says, Father, I have completed the work. Just wanted you to know that. The father said, Are you sure it's complete? The boy says, Yes, it is complete.
With surprising strength, the father jumps up from the bed, takes a mallet from under his bed, a hammer, and then walks in his old man's strength to this house. Inspects the walls, looks around while the son is wondering what's happening to my old man. Then he breaks a hole into the wall. Just one, with one mighty swing, breaks a hole into the wall. The son is like, What are you doing?! Why did you do that?
The old man said, “You see what just happened now? Now our neighbours will pass by, and they will point to the hole in this one. They will say, What happened there? And they will come around and they will greet you. They will ask you your name, and you will tell them your name. You'll ask for their name, and they will tell you their names. You will invite them for tea or for pounded yam egusi soup, and then you become neighbours. The son says, Where is this going? And he says, You're not complete until you're wounded in some way.
That completion is a myth. It's this illusion or ruse of modernity. Until you find a place where you are wounded, community is not possible. And so, to notice masculinity as community is not to fall, for me, into this binarization of toxic versus non-toxic masculinity. Maybe toxic masculinity is masculinity that has not learned to meet its trauma. Has not learned to meet its own monsters. The monstrosities that is always part of our being.
Most of the circles that we're a part of, Ian brother, there is a tendency to purify concepts of their material embellishments. To rush into a zone or a domain, a fundamentalist zone or domain where everything is pure, harmonious, right? That's why we tend to speak of consciousness all the time. It's because the material is too uncomfortable, but I think masculinity needs bodies to be itself.
Fathering is literally a vocation of bodies meeting bodies. So I'm hesitant to remove the material from this spilling of bodies into one another. In the spilling forth of bodies, we have to learn, I think, to come to see that maybe how we make differences, maybe how we come to see justice, maybe how we tend to see or come to see healing and wellbeing is always a vocation of monstrosities, and masculinities as intentional monstrosity.
IM: Hmm, wow! I'm really curious about this thread of meeting the monsters, the monstrosities of masculinity, or maybe the willingness to meet them. And this relationship between the wound or the sense that…a question that's come up in the school (this is with Stephen Jenkinson, again) was this thread around…this question, What monsters a monster? Meaning, what is the, I don't know, maybe the conditions or the monstering, or maybe you could say, Who monsters the monster? Is it the monster that monsters itself, or is it the way in which we banish or we outcast or we pretend what's not part of us is what monsters the monster.
And I hear a little bit in what you're sharing there, that the sense that there's perhaps some kind of wound or some kind of tenderness or something that wants to be given the light of visibility or to be seen. In its absence is when the monsters roam free.
Bayo Akomolafe: Right. I like the question, Who monsters the monster? I think the monster resists articulation, resists intelligibility. That's what makes it monstrous. What the monster wants to do is to help you attend to your own seams and sutures and fractures and ruptures. For you to also notice that you're not as well put together as you think you are.
You're not all that, and that it has been the gift of the monster to the city. The city becomes this externalization of the monster and the monster becomes the externalization of the city. But in a way, they are always entangled with one another. They're always a part of one another.
There's this beautiful…speaking to your question or to the sentiment you're expressing there…The Hunchback of Notre Dame. You probably…I don't know if you've watched it.
IM: I certainly know the Disney version.
Bayo Akomolafe: Yes. I'm speaking about the Disney version, not the Victor Hugo [version]. The Disney version is the one that I grew up with, which is a very powerful filmic gift. It has a question, I think…what's the character? I forget his name.
IM: Quasimodo?
Bayo Akomolafe: No, not Quasimodo. He's one of the gypsies and he sings the first scenes of the movie into being, and he's also the outro. He asks a question in the beginning, and I think the end, Who makes the monster and who makes the man? Or who is the monster, and who is the man? [Sings:] Who is the monster and who is the man?
That's a beautiful riddle. I think Stephen Jenkinson's question about who monsters the monster is heard in that. For me, speaking from my culture and the cultural wealth that I'm now deeply decolonizing myself into and through and with, I'm learning to appreciate…I'm learning to see the monster as not a vile thing, not an evil thing that is…
I'm learning to also see our performances of maleness or masculinity as an imperative of our time. That hasn't always been the case. It certainly wasn't the case in our societies prior to colonial interruptions. But over time, we performed this imperative that we ought to be in a certain way. We ought to be clean and tidy. We ought to do the anthropological task of pushing away the wild things to the wild places, to protect those that are around us, so that in a sense, our own colonial learnings from that as people from the global South is that you have to hustle to be a man. You have to be a man to be a man. It's a man's world. And that man's world is devoid of gift, is devoid of sharing. It's completely warped by notions of property, by notions of ownership, by notions of independence, by notions of secularity as being the pathological twin of sin and sinfulness and righteousness.
So for me…maybe let me bring this home, let me tidy this up…is that masculinity, for me, is seeing through the eyes of the monster. The gift of the monster here is for us to see masculinity as a strategy. Not as a thing, not as an object, not as an essence, not as an archetype even, but as a bodily/corporal/trans-corporal strategy, intergenerational strategy, that is always and has always involved post-human processes.
IM: [00:40:03] Wow!
Bayo Akomolafe: I just left an open end there, a curve ball, to see if you jump in there.
IM: Well, I'm still with that “masculinity as a strategy.” Whoa. Hearing what you said about almost seeing through the eyes of that kind of masculinity, the one that looks on the world as basically competition and devoid of gift and needing to hustle. Hearing you say that too, it just makes me…I can feel sadness welling up in me. Like this feeling of such a, I don't know, life-devoid...just burden that is entrusted to men to participate in, and to enact, in the willingness to go along with it. So I'm recognizing my own sadness in that and the places too in which I feel almost internally banished from the rest of those places in myself. The tenderness, the one that wants to give, that deeper place of connectivity to the vital materiality of life, and how deep that goes for me who has grown up in the Western culture. That is largely the water that so many of us men are swimming in.
Bayo Akomolafe: Right. In cultures in South Africa, in Africa…I’m bringing in a lot of African epistemologies here…
IM: Yes, please do.
Bayo Akomolafe: …to become a man is to be wounded, is for something to be taken out of you. I feel the sense of sadness that you feel too, because I look back on the day I turned 18, and it was a birthday cake. My father had been dead three years. My father died when I was 15 and it was a birthday cake and [sung] happy birthday to you. Taking on the academic, the loneliness and the solitude of the academic, public, intellectual life teaching in the university, I started to learn deeply about my own cultures.
The cultures that have been the condition of the one that I call my own and how, for instance, in the southern part of Africa, or even in some parts of Nigeria, or west Africa, a young boy would leave the village, would embark, would be exiled. His task would be to kill a lion, to bring back something that is impossible, back into the community. It's like a sending forth.
Modernity is when that kid, who is supposed to be received by community, has no one to welcome him home. It's like perpetual exile. There's no reception. There’s no rite of passage. There's no hugging. There's no patting on the back. It's literally perpetual exile. When I hear you speak about the sadness of being banished, it's like there is no home to return. You're banished, not only from home and community, you're banished from being able to hold hands with another person, without being pathologized as, Oh, he's just homosexual or he's less of a man than he should [be], than he really is.
You're banished from emotions. You're banished from cosmic duties that are pressed upon you by ancestors, because there's no one to receive it. There's no home to return to. There's no one to scar your skin.
The Yoruba people employ some form of facial scarification in some parts of Abeokuta, which is not the part that I'm from, but it's also a Yoruba community. They would mark…the men would mark the corners of their mouth with three slits, and that is to say that they're children of Yemoja, who is the mother of children who are fish. Her name literally means “the mother of children who are fish.” The men identify with this maternal instinct, this geological, mytho-poetic imperative that is Yemoja by marking their skins, by cutting out of their flesh. This masculinity is cutting yourself open, as wounding yourself, is entirely missing in an epistemology that encourages you to put yourself together. That is what I was trained to do as a psychologist: to tell men to put themselves together. You're a man. Literally, what we're trained: you're a man. You're a man. Put yourself together.
IM: Wow! I'm really touched by that phrase you offered. This idea of perpetual exile, and how…as I really let that land, even tears came to my eyes. Something in this idea or this strategy of masculinity, as it is performed by many who have been, maybe broadly saying, banished and innerly exiled from that sense of home… Earlier in this conversation, I was even wondering, What is the wound of masculinity? This kind of masculinity, what is the wound in it? And what comes to me now is the sense that we have, en masse, this kind of mania for doing, constantly, and in a culture and a civilization that's constantly just on go, all the time, up until probably this moment with COVID and the rest. But what animates the mania to just keep doing and doing and doing, at the expense, of course, of everything else?
What comes to me is the sense that masculinity so often understood to be bound to doing an achievement, that I feel like there's a wound in there below which is almost like, Maybe if I do enough, I can come home. Maybe if I do enough, I can come home. But there's never enough in that whole construct. You'll never do enough to be allowed to come home. For me, there's something that detonates me in that recognition that the tender wound below this mania to achieve all the time, it's actually this deep desire to come home and not being allowed to.
Bayo Akomolafe: It's like completion searching for its wound, right? It's like this vocation of arrival searching for departure. You've been exiled and then you want to be received. You might even create, you might even perform reception. You might create, you might hire actors. You might put all the props together to give you a sense of arrival of homeliness, if you will. But being at home is to be wounded, is to be wounded again and again. Being at home is a cartographical project of finding ourselves and remaking ourselves. It's not just occupying space. It's making space. Space is never just occupied. Place is a vocation. Places are not born. They're made, right?
And so the modern masculine, we do harm to it by making it villainous, by pathologizing it, by saying it's evil, we need to get rid of it. It's just like what I said: boxes think all day about how to think outside the box. They're constantly thinking about how to subvert their own selves. This paradigm of completion is just strategy that is not traced out into some evil thing that just popped out into the world, that has no roots or pedigree. I think that if you touch the tentacularities of modern masculinity, you will find strategies. You will find prayers. You will find a yearning to be seen, to be heard.
America is such a glorified trope ground for the modern masculine: the huge GM cars, the bulking and hulking models of masculinity there, and the outsized notion of empire and exclusivism. “It's us. It's about us. We save humanity. We will...” And Trump being a model of that.
I think it just needs a wound. It's not a wound that we can inflict on ourselves, and this is the reason why I say masculinity is an earth vocation. It's an ecological project. It's not just a human project, in a sense a virus could be part of what it means to be masculine. It could render the cut that helps us meet our shadows, and might instigate the kinds of cartographical products we need to make sanctuary. To make sanctuary, to melt, if you will.
IM: [00:50:00] I'm struck by…you brought up Trump there for a moment and how very much that model of masculinity and leadership, as well, as really: don't let him see you sweat, don't let them see any sense of doubt, any sense of wound, and in some ways…
Bayo Akomolafe: Don’t wear a mask.
IM: Oh yeah, exactly. And it's easy to, of course, demonize Trump or that kind of leader. And yet at the same time, it seems like they directly correspond to a populace that actually demands that of their leadership.
I guess I'm wondering this question about how do we make a place for the wound to show up? Is it a question of safety? How do we make…I don't want to say safe space because that's a problematic phrase often…but how do we make a place for the wound to be seen and to be received with masculinity?
Bayo Akomolafe: That is a question that I'm constantly struck, wounded, floored by. From one, I have no easy answer to that, to be deeply honest with you. I'm doing a lot of work around centring this methodology or invitation that I call making sanctuary, which is part of a larger project that I call post-activism, which is also part of a larger project that I called weird politics.
And none of it, none of what I've mentioned [is] humanistic. They are not products of human ingenuity. They're not necessarily things that we are to do, right? Like, Oh, this is what you do now. So just do ABC, and you're it. You’re woke. You're now this...you're now good. Or you're now true. It’s not.
It's such a difficult thing to even mention to my own brothers in the African American community and sisters. When I say that decolonization isn't human work, decolonization isn't our work. We can only show up modestly and partially. Nothing that is real shows up completely. Everything shows up in part. That's because an aspect of being or becoming is always the deterritorialization of itself, the postponement of itself, the virtualization of itself.
We show up locally and virtually. We're constantly streaming. We're constantly falling apart, and I'm not speaking in metaphors. I'm speaking about in biological terms where we're relinquish or letting go of millions of cells every time. So that we're never really in place. We’re never statutory or static.
This invites a very, very tense or humble response to your question, What do we do then? How do we make space? I think the creativity for…what my generic response would be…I think the creativity for what might want to happen next [is] instigated by the moment. The imagination of what to do is not sourced from human beings. It's a product of a morphogenetic field, if you will. The feud creates its own dynamics.
Right now, there are imaginations we're having in this moment, being part of the COVID-19 phenomenon, that would have been impossible in pre-pandemic states. There are dreams you might be having right now that are instigations to explore and experiment with the next ideas, the next threads or strands or embroidery marks that we can make on the fabric of masculinity that were not possible or could not have been possible if some infinitesimal visitor that we rudely call a virus did not penetrate and disturb our economies.
The spirituality of this moment, the spirituality, the politics, the microbial activisms of this time will create the gift. Will create the moment. Will create the new kinds of questions that we can ask. The question you've just asked, brother, is not an Ian MacKenzie thing. It is ancestry. It is community. It is so many things that came together. Probably the cereal you ate this morning, or I don't know…that made this question possible. I see constellations and worlds where others might see a reductionistic essence. You want to tease things apart and say there's a community here where you only see an an identity or a thing.
With my invitation to making sanctuary, I'm working with others to develop this invitation, that is a non-proselytizing invitation, by the way. It's not supposed to be universal, to work everywhere. I don't deal with universals that are not already contingent. The invitation here would be to find places where we can map and mark out trauma. By trauma, I mean the cuts that have been made to define the image of God.
That's another name that I give the masculine: the image of God. The selfie that has this image of the dominant in its poles, in its centre, in its heart. Is there a way we can ask questions together to build what I call minoritarian assemblages. That is, an effort not to bring people to our place of power, but an effort to go to other places of power, to kind of descent the two…rather, to descend to the depths. To ask questions of furniture. Which is the really why I called this weird politics. To ask questions of our cereal. To share in a fugitive network. Questions, recipes, for meeting the world in new ways.
I feel in doing this, we might come to exquisite new visions of masculinity that are not possible just by putting together new archetypes, and just saying this is toxic and this is non-toxic. This is a program for you to develop non-toxic masculinity. If you go through my course, at the end of this course, you will have a halo on your head.
I'm wondering if there are places outside of holiness, outside of the holy, righteous notions of non-toxic masculinity that are inviting us. Maybe a disruption of the archetype. Maybe a shedding of the notion of humanity altogether.
IM: Hm. Whew. Wow. Let me just sit with that for a second.
Bayo Akomolafe: Okay.
IM: Hearing you speak, I'm really struck by this…at least what I've come to understand as what feels like a quality of emergence, the phenomenon of emergence. I know you're deeply part of the collaborations or cofounders of this emergence network as well.
So, just a little sidebar as well. For me, since probably 2011, actually during Occupy days...I was working on a film with a fellow named Velcrow Ripper, and I was helping co-produce that film. Then around that time, I really started to tune into what felt like this, I don't know, this rising awareness around this quality of this phenomenon of emergence, in lots of different spheres. I began to start to see how it interacted with or showed up within, in this case, kind of activist dimensions, in gatherings.
Then of course, when both of us…I think we met for the first time at the 2014 New Stories Summit in Findhorn, in Scotland. What happened with Charles Eisenstein and I think Jody Evans and another where the trickster showed up and they reformed the schedule for the day and the chaos that ensued, and also that really beautiful possibility of something being different, of something new showing up.
There's lots that could be said on that, but I want to also draw a line to what you were just sharing. For me, I hear that there's this ability or possibility of meeting the question of What is masculinity becoming? To be able to meet it with a kind of partnership with emergence instead of a kind of prescriptive, “Good, let's go through the program,” and kind of arrive at what we've already decided is “good masculinity.” There's something in that.
The other kernel of what you're saying too, which for me is very exciting, because I do think so much of the kind of response to even toxic masculinity or men's work now does have a kind of a quality of a sort of, yeah, we've already got it and now we walk you through it. And yet, there's something that I feel is missing. There's a kind of radical intelligence that also wants to show up in this conversation, in meeting this moment. I love the way you brought that awareness, to begin to kind of open up…I guess, to me, this is what's been missing with masculinity…this capacity to see it also as an unfolding, also as many things.
Bayo Akomolafe: [00:59:52] Yeah! Oh, that's so beautiful the way you put that. Yeah, masculinity as an unfolding and as emergent and non-static. This is the reason why I emphasize fugitivity. Instead of destinations…and not that I'm against destinations, not that I'm against resolutions and solutions or manifestos and blueprints…but I feel that part of the creativities of the Anthropocene is to be suspicious of our claims to agency, of our claims to unilateral agency.
I've been part of many, many efforts to chart, to describe the next few years. And I even got invited to this documentary, which is no longer in existence because I wrote a very…and he's now my brother and dear brother and strong collaborator…where he wanted me to speak about the year 2030 and how the world will look like. I understand that, but I came from a very strong place in noticing that there are people like me who do not have the luxury of envisioning a future, that do not [plan]…how futurists plan and think about what's your five-year plan or 10-year plan, or this is a trending thing, this is all analysis for the next hundred years, and stuff like that…without noticing that to be able to do that, to make those, is itself privilege.
There are people around the world that are stuck in the indeterminacy of things. They have no notions of grit or plausibility leading the way as it would come to the hero's aid, like that ex machina construct, to pluck you out of trouble with your human rights or your Karen-ism…[laughs] I just created the word. Forgive me!...to just pluck you out and help you see the manager. There's some people that do not have access to the managers and cannot call upon the manager.
Where was I going with this? I speak about fugitivity to signal a modest recognition that we are part of the knowledge systems. When you're part of the picture, it’s difficult to see the frame. We're not outside of the frame, looking on the picture, and then devising a new portrait. We're part of the portrait.
Knowledge and knowing is always made by navigating through the world, not prior to it, or transcendent, hovering over it. So that, in a sense, sometimes or most times…and I know this as a recipient of Western benevolence…sometimes we will inadvertently repeat the same dynamics that we're trying to escape, which is the reason why I formulated the very large constellation of feud of post-activism. Our imaginations of the future are often instigations of the present, wanting to reinforce itself.
Fugitivity is not a description of a new future. It's sustained with the trouble of a curdling present. It's something that resists description, but it's not even escape, because escape sometimes reinforces the plantation. It's exile. It's a different form…it's an inversion, it's an inflection of the powers that be. And the powers that be here are the dominant, modern, masculine in its vision of the next, in its colonization of the next, in its wanting to transfer its power to the future by determining what the future will look like for peoples across the world and in its banishment of hopelessness.
Saying hope is the only thing, is the central thing, I imagine and recall Winston Churchill (not that I was there with Winston Churchill saying, “Never, never, never, never,” in his jolly Britishness, “never give up”). I wonder, I really wonder if that invitation, that imperative to never give up is keeping us from and excluding enough from swimming in waters, or in colours that we do not know how to describe right now.
Yeah, something just came to mind about the way India, where I'm at, of course, treats the masculine as just one of the number, which in a postmodern sense will give any postmodern philosopher pride. There's a masculine, there’s a feminine, but there's a transgender…what? Sixteen gender types or something. There are many different ones. Amazing. But I'm not speaking about the proliferation of genders.
Postmodernity just proliferates as a response to modernity. It proliferates the incarceration. It creates more grids in order to leave behind the one grid that modernity has named for itself. It proliferates the same problem, and it's all plantation work. I wonder if there's something we don't know how to describe, which is the reason why I keep myself perpetually confused.
What I think we need to do is to stay with the trouble. This is Donna Haraway's phrasing: stay with the trouble. The kid that has been perpetually exiled, what does that kid do to find home? Maybe not to rush down the highway. Maybe not to rush down the highway, because the highway wants you to rush down its body. The highway wants you to speed up, to accelerate, to keep on scrambling about, looking for your people. Maybe we should stop trying to outpace the highway. Maybe there is a place of sitting down and being met, perchance, possibly, by wiser beings, but we'll never know until we slow down.
IM: Thank you, brother.
Bayo Akomolafe: Thank you, bro.
IM: I think we're getting close to closing this conversation this evening, and…
Bayo Akomolafe: Wow!
IM: I know. I can't believe it. I would love to do round two at some point in the near future.
Bayo Akomolafe: We should. We should.
IM: But I'd love to end this conversation with bringing it back again to fatherhood. You left us with this sense of slowing down, and I wonder, again, at the risk of being prescriptive, but what might you offer fathers in this time that may invite them to approach differently or to wonder differently around how to be with this time, with their children in particular.
Bayo Akomolafe: My wife and I are learning to see Alethea, our daughter, as an elder. It's hard, it's really hard. It's not a thing of striving, but we also have been the recipients of particular ways of seeing that we find really problematic. But, we are performing a way of parenting that my wife calls trans-parenting that is about noticing that children are in many senses, in the Yoruba sense of the world, are our elders.
There is this Yoruba epistemology [that] thinks of children as not just coming into the world, but coming out of the ground like ancestors returning. So you have names like [Yoruba names]…means the Baba has returned. [Yoruba names], “our mother has come back again.” It's not reincarnation, like a soul being transplanted into another. It's like we're part of ecology, and the world itself in its wisdom regurgitates or (regurgitates is not [the right word])…belches forth another body.
I don't even think we live true to the nuances of that myth. We don't…Yoruba people, at least the people that I grew up with, didn't quite swim in those waters. We had our bath in Christological streams that think of children as blank slates and stuff. But especially in these times with the virus is at large…the virus at large, such a rude thing to say…with viruses everywhere and have always been everywhere, I think we're looking at an insurgency of the invisible.
[01:09:56] The things that have been invisibilized are now being noticed, including our children. We gave them up to schools. Now our children are now sitting with us in the awkward. They're resisting forward movement and insisting we stay with the awkward. Sitting with the awkward is probably my deepest definition of fatherhood at this point in time. This is where I'm coming to, then. That staying with the awkward, staying with the idea that fatherhood is being remade and constantly being questioned.
My father's name…it'll be good to name him since we conjured and invoked him in this conversation...his name was Abayome Ignatius Akomolafe. And my son's name is Kao Abayome. So they share the same, Abayome and Abayome means “they thought they buried me, but they did not realize that I'm a seed.”
It's this querying of power, this disturbing of surfaces. It's just turning inside-out of things. In a sense, I think fathering is a middling concept. Just like I find myself in the middle of my father, and my father and my son, and my son. I feel that I'm constantly being called to revisit my practices of the father. To practice meeting my children as elders, as philosophers, which is the reason why we haven't sent them to school. To do philosophy with them and to get into their program, not just impose our own projects and exercises and activities on them.
So it's really this fathering or fatherhood as not a reflexive concept, not something that just pushes back our images to us, but something that breaks us down to meet our children as compost heaps, as thresholds, as liminal spaces. What that means will be different for people in different contexts. But for me, Alethea is now my mother. Yeah. I’ll stop there.
IM: Hmm. Stay with the awkward.
Bayo Akomolafe: Yeah, yeah.
IM: Beautiful invitation, and what may come from the willingness to stay with that.
Bayo Akomolafe: Yes. Yes.
IM: Hmm. Well, I feel beyond grateful for our time together, Bayo.
Bayo Akomolafe: I feel grateful for meeting your beard. [Both laugh]
IM: It's a life of its own. It's a happening.
Bayo Akomolafe: Yes, I was in conversation most of the time with your beard and then 30% with you. Yeah. [Both laugh].
IM: The mystery deepens! Well, I would absolutely love to have a round two at some point, because I know the cosmology of your work and where you wonder is vast and deeply transfiguring in the most potent way. So, thank you so much for wondering today on masculinity during this time.
Bayo Akomolafe: Thank you, brother.
