“Why We Need Post-Activism Today”

Thank you very much. Can everyone hear me? If you can hear me way in the back, just wave your hands in the air, like you just don’t care. That’s about all I know. It’s good to see you. Thank you so much for having me, Andrea, thank you for everything you said. And I share the same love that she has for me, for everyone that has come out to see me and think with me today, so I’m so grateful. And I’d like to start out with a prayer, okay, just to get things started. But before I get there, I’d like to take a moment to pause and appreciate everyone that made this happen. From Susan Wits. Where is she? Where is Susan? Susan? Thank you, thank you. And David right here on the stage. Please, could you give a round of applause for this brother here? All the people that I cannot mention and name, thank you for coming out and taking some time off your rich, beautiful lives to think along with me and to explore together with me. Okay. 

If I were to make an introduction, I would really introduce you to my gratitude, as if my gratitude were corporeal as well. I mean,
 if my gratitude had opposable thumbs and a voice and kick ass slides, you know, I would just let it do all the talking. I’ve had a wonderful time in Massachusetts. This is my third time in the state, and I have a lot to share about that. It’s been a very beautiful roller coaster nine days in this beautiful state. I will share more about that, but let’s start with a prayer. 

Okay. So where I come from, we like to grace and ritualize beginnings and endings. I’d like us to do that together in this way — we’re not going to be praying to a Gandalfian figure, you know, nothing like that — we will pray by inviting each other, by hugging each other. Okay, so I’m going to invite us to stand to our feet, find three or four — let’s limit it to three, because you guys always take a mile — three people and hug them so tight that they beg you to let them go. [The crowd hugs one another.] That’s enough! It’s okay.
 

Welcome, and thank you.

Yes, like I said, I’ve had a whirlwind of an experience in Massachusetts. I’ve been here for nine days now. Yeah, about nine days, more than a week. And I’ve been to the ends of the state, right? From one end to another, I’ve driven through places. I’ve seen the beautiful trees, the dandelions, the spring is coming out again. I’ve seen cow shit. It’s lovely. Everything, just beautiful. A wonderful assemblage of affect and feeling and possibility. I ate at a place called Mezze. Oh, you know it? You know, amazing food, psychedelic experience. I was having visions of concepts and political
 possibilities, just eating that food. So I’m just going to thank Sarah and her family and Walter, and the beautiful circle that held that space as we ate together. I want to go back there. 

Where I come from, Yoruba from Western Nigeria, we have a sense of thresholds and boundaries, that one is not just made welcome. You don’t just walk into a place. Being made welcome is a ritual, right? There are things to do to be welcome. So as I was feeling into the hospitality that I’ve been generously receiving from everyone that has hosted me,
 I needed to have a sense of what is the ritual that Massachusetts is inviting me to participate in to be welcome, to be truly welcome. How am I being made welcome here? I was doing my trickster thing. 

So I went online and I found, I stumbled upon this website that had
 16 things about Massachusetts. 16 things Massachusetts is known and famous for. So my thing was just to tick the boxes and see, okay, have I experienced this in some way? Have I been related? People are really laughing. It’s like I’m doing stand up. But it is okay. Please continue. 

The first one, so 16, right? So let me show you how I did. The first one was Salem. It just said Salem. I teach about Salem. I mean, I have concepts developed about accusations, the witch trials and all of that. So yeah. The second one was the Boston accent. I wasn’t exactly, I’m not going to do an impression, but I’ve heard it and that should count. So I tick that box too. I’ve heard it at least. People have been saying “wicked distracted” to me, like “wicked distracted”, “wicked rude”, something about apples or “them apples” comes up. I’m not sure, but at least I’ve heard it and I’ve experienced it and so that counts. So I tick that one too. Sports is number three. Does this resonate with you as a ritual of welcome to this beautiful state? Well, sports is number three and I watched some sports. I didn’t quite enjoy it, but I made myself watch it for a fleeting second. And then I changed the channel by turning off the TV. Tick. Bad driving. Is this true? It’s true. Oh really? Okay. 

So Andrea is a wonderful driver. I just tick that because I didn’t think anyone drives badly as people drive where I come from. So, I just tick that because I didn’t think it was relevant. Dunkin Donuts. I had that, two or three days ago. It wasn’t as great as I thought it would be. [Gestures a checkmark.] Incredible foliage. Yes. Yes, you can clap. Beautiful. That I ticked. I enjoyed just watching the undulating,
 beautiful, promiscuous hills and mountains, and just being there with that and witnessing that. I remember telling Andrea that I could live here. I could live here. I mean, I live in India, but I could see myself coming back over and over again.
 

Bad roads is number seven. I didn’t experience that. It wasn’t relevant to me. Number eight, Harvard University. That seems to be a major deal over here. Does UMass count? I think it counts. Anyone here a graduate from UMass? Oh, wonderful. I greet you, my fellow graduates.
 So UMass counts, and I spent a beautiful time there speaking with faculty and students — tick. Turkeys! I don’t know why. Wild weather, I experienced that and I got really cold yesterday, so my body ticked that on my behalf. Then number 11, the Berkshires. This. Beautiful. 

Now, the other four or five I didn’t quite resonate with. Cranberries. I don’t like cranberries, so I failed that. I don’t know how to pronounce it: Plimoth Patuxet. I don’t know what that is. Martha’s Vineyard, Cape Cod, and the nation’s first library. So these are the five that I missed out on. 11 over 16 is still good. 

So I’m in some ways very welcome here. I think I got an “A+” or something. Right? Thank you. 

There’s one thing it missed and I was shocked because I knew this even before coming to the United States this time. There’s one aspect it missed. Massachusetts is known as the first place on the planet earth that a telephone was born. You all know that, right? Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, March 10, had the first telephonic conversation with Mr. Watson, who I think was his detective sidekick. 

So they had the first telephonic conversation. It was basically “Mr. Watson, come here. I need to see you”. And that was the first time that a phone conversation happened, here in this wonderful state. I think you should be proud! And I use my phone all the time. So I actually have 12 out of 16 or 17.

***

I want to stop there for a while and have a conversation about phones, which queerly and strangely made themselves known to me in some strange, stark, prophetic way throughout my trip. Maybe it was the sight of seeing students constantly on their phones, right? Or something else. But I just got stuck on the concept of phones. So I’m just going to have a call and response dynamic here if everyone is okay with it. 

Who can tell me for $10,000 what phones are made of? $10,000 is coming from David. What are phones made of? [Audience members respond.] Glass. Yes. What else? Silicon. Wonderful. Someone said minerals. Cobalt. Did you say cobalt? Awesome. Okay, okay. We’re going into other territory… Okay, okay, hold your horses — if that’s the right American expression.

We hold a phone and one strategy, one ontology would invite us to notice what is present. What appears, right? But things are not only made up of what appears. Things are also made up of what fails to appear, right? In a sense, this phone is not a phone at all. It’s a phone relation. It’s a relationship.

We hold a phone and one strategy, one ontology would invite us to notice what is present. What appears, right? But things are not only made up of what appears. Things are also made up of what fails to appear, right? In a sense, this phone is not a phone at all. It’s a phone relation. It’s a relationship. I’ll make that a bit clearer. I’m known to be quite obtuse. 

There’s a site in China. Who has iPhones here? iPhones? Whoa. No Android users? Wow. We’re the minorities. Okay. If you look behind your iPhone, it’s likely you would see “Made in China.” Do you want to take a look quickly? Look at your phones… If you can confirm it’s made in China, just wave and let me see — Good, made in China, okay.

There’s a site, a place – a city called Shenzhen, and it’s called the Foxconn Industrial Park. Who has heard of it here? Wow. Okay—this is why it’s probably the most educated state
 —480,000 workers, right? And they make phones. They make the technologies we use every day that we take for granted. I mean, Silicon Valley conceptualizes and thinks about the design and then it’s taken to China most of the time and they make and manufacture. But there in China, between 2010 and 2017, there were reports of suicides in that industrial park. And these suicides were so notorious that it became a very, very – it became global headlines. People would jump out of high-rise buildings and just kill themselves to protest the working conditions, the conditions of work in that industrial park. The owners of that park later put nets outside the windows to catch the people from falling, which, if you know a little bit of history about slave ships, replicates the architecture of safety, in which the slave ship owners and their captains put nets on the sides of the ships to catch the slaves from jumping out. 

I was telling someone, and you could call it a favorite story or analysis of mine, but I was telling someone recently that they could easily have put a piece of paper and stapled it to the hull of the ship saying, “We care about your safety.” “We care about your safety,” because that’s exactly what the Foxconn industrial captain said, “We care about your safety.” Think about that and think about the people in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where I did a major part of my growing up, actually, and where I became a refugee for the first time. In a part of the Congo, they mine cobalt, right? This is an essential part of how batteries operate. These mineral resources power our batteries: lithium. And it’s illegal to do this on paper, but all the companies that feed us our technologies depend on this criminality to thrive. What is your phone made of? It’s not just gold and the things that you can hold and measure. It’s made up of things that are diasporic, things that are not easily measurable, things that spill away from analysis, things that are fugitive.

What is your phone made of? It’s not just gold and the things that you can hold and measure. It’s made up of things that are diasporic, things that are not easily measurable, things that spill away from analysis, things that are fugitive. 

***

I say here that a thing is not made only of matters that appear, but also things that fail to appear. Things are not just actual, but virtual. Virtuality means possibilities. Our bodies are constantly – whatever kind of bodies – human bodies, geological bodies, conceptual bodies, phone bodies – are constantly traveling and migrating and doing things with the world. So that in a sense you might say that our bodies are archives of loss. Our bodies are documentaries of loss, struck through, strewn with loss and grief and fading away. Think about the number of cells – you probably cannot think about the number of cells you’ve lost alone today, but you are constantly spilling and fading away. And that is, in a sense, a different metaphysics altogether. And I wanted to ground us in this as we think together about some concepts that might be strange to you. It may not even sit well with your analysis and narrative of what’s going on in the world right now, but I think it’s a powerful invitation to stay with the trouble. Okay? To stay with the trouble. 

There are no individual things per se, just fluid becomings, eddies, gestures, whirls, stabilities, pre-individual flows. Identity is a reductionism, if you will. Modernity’s work is to take flow and reduce it to identity. That’s what it knows how to do best. Who’s watched the Lego movie? “Everything is awesome.” You know the movie? To fix you in place is the work of modern civilization, to render you a separate and separable self. This is the work of modern civilization. And the way it does it, is to think of you as some Cartesian atomic entity, to cut off all the tributaries that are flowing from your body and to reduce you to something that can fit into a box. Bayo is black. Tick. Someone here is white. Right? That’s all there is to you. It’s Socratic, it’s easy, it’s neat. But we’re messy. We’re messy. Loss is how ontology travels. Loss is how our bodies travel. Loss is the undoing of identity. I just want to libate the grounds, if you will. I almost had a vision of pissing on the ground to establish territoriality. But yeah, I’m just going to go with it. We’re pissing on the ground like the animals that we are, to say “something else might happen here conceptually, that invokes and conjures other ideas and possibilities.” 

So this idea of things that flow. [Rolls forearm in a wavelike motion.] Could everyone do your hands like this? Just do this. That’s a sight to behold. I wish you could just turn around and just see that, sister. That idea that the world is not this [ holds hand stiff and upright] but this [again his hand flows], constantly flowing, has many names. Indigenous cultures around the world have names that have poetic liminalities. 

The Yoruba people don’t even have names per se. They have Oríkìs. If I told you what my Oríkì is, we wouldn’t leave here. It’s a long story. It’s an epic that has my father and my father’s father and my – it’s what you sing to a child. It’s just not very convenient if you want your child to wash the dishes, to sing to the child. So we just settle for names, basically. My father’s name is Abayomi, but the long form of that is, and is still abbreviated, is Otao-Bayomi, or Longu-Jie, which means “the enemy would have overwhelmed me, but God did not allow it.” It also means “they thought they had buried me, but they did not realize I’m a seed.” 

That’s an Oríkì. It’s just inconvenient to say that all the time. Deleuze and Guattari, I’m just going to drop some names that I hope you might have some time to, if you want to, study or get acquainted with French philosophers. I’m not teaching them today, but they speak about desire, and desirous flows. That desire is not even a human thing. It’s an impersonal force that shapes everything from phones, to bodies, to concepts, to nation states and to climate phenomena. Desirous flows. 

The Yoruba people call it ashe (aṣe). Have you seen someone say ashe before? It’s not just ‘amen.’ It’s not just a form of greeting. It’s representing a deep spirituality that notices how agency does not belong to human actors. We are crossroadian beings. We don’t have agency. Agency enlists us. Does that turn the tables a little bit? We don’t have it. It’s not a property of ours. It’s not something that we have to wield to save the day. It doesn’t belong to us. What comes next? It doesn’t belong to us. Instead, the world is more than human, and it will often enlist and call bodies to itself to create new artistic enterprises. That is the idea of ashe, that I am humble and let whatever wants to happen happen. 

I call it blackness — blackness with a small “b”. I wish I had time. I just have an hour because I really want us to have a conversation afterwards. I call it blackness because the history of desire and the history of flows and the history of ashe is also the history of loss and the history of capture and the history of minoritarian yearning and the history of the slave ship and the history of bones and the history of the Atlantic Ocean. It’s the history of people wanting to be something and is the history of bodies becoming prosthetic to other bodies. But it’s also, this blackness I speak of, is not the blackness of white capture. 

Let me just take a step back, literally, and say when I speak about whiteness, I don’t speak about white people…Whiteness is not ‘white people’ because ‘white people’ were also captured by whiteness. Whiteness is a social material arrangement that also took bodies, and takes bodies, and uses those bodies for a worlding process.

Let me just take a step back, literally, and say when I speak about whiteness, I don’t speak about white people. If you don’t know anything about my work, it feels necessary to say that. Whiteness is not ‘white people’ because ‘white people’ were also captured by whiteness. Whiteness is a social material arrangement that also took bodies, and takes bodies, and uses those bodies for a worlding process. Nigeria is the blackest nation on earth. You probably have never seen anyone as black as I am. I’m blackity-black. Imagine 300 million people like me. How many of you have been to West Africa? How many of you have been to Wakanda?

Nigeria is black, but Nigeria is one of the whitest nations on earth, because whiteness is not how we appear. Remember the phone? Whiteness is what our bodies are doing, how we are posturing our relationships with the earth. And how we are doing that in my country at this moment is we’re trying to catch up with you. We’re trying to catch up with you. We’re trying to be you. We’re trying to prove that we can have smooth roads as
 well. It’s called a catch up imperative, because our imaginations have been so taken by the myth of progress and growth, that that is the ruler and the measuring stick by which we determine our self worth. I’ve traveled many times on planes going back home and immediately you’re landing in Nigeria, we start to hiss and berate ourselves for not being like the place we just came from. So that dynamic is still there, but I digress. 

Blackness is the spillage of design. Blackness is when things move out of their functionality in an emancipatory way. Blackness is when architecture fills in its integrity to keep things together. Blackness is decay. The blackness I speak of is compost. It’s a compost pile, reimagining the world and refusing the world any claims to static identity. Anytime whiteness comes and stands and says, “This is what I am,” blackness says, “Are you sure?” It spills, it pulls on the strings of identity and takes it to a different place. That’s why blackness is a trickster archetype. Or Fred Moten will say blackness is autism, wandering away from the neurotypical. I’m digressing a lot. 

So, I want to trace for us this history of ashe, this history of blackness and connect it with conversations we’re still having about the civilizational problems we’re facing as a species. The problems we’re facing that terrify us. What will the future hold? Should we turn out the lights more? Should we watch our carbon emissions? What should we do as a people? I’m not going to address all those questions, but I want to offer something to the compost heap and hopefully it might do something with you. 

What is important to know going forward is that we do not live in a world of independent actors, but principalities and powers. I put that there because I thought we’re in a church. Why not put some biblical language in there? So not actors, but principalities, powers, algorithms, and patterns. And that’s what we want to cultivate some sensitivity and intelligence to. Most of our politics, and I’m getting ahead of myself, but I can’t resist saying this, most of our politics is premised on good people acting with the world.
 Even goodness could be a form of a trap, a sensuous capture. What we’re inviting here is to break away from those ideas and, in the Rumian sense, to meet ourselves in fields that are beyond right or wrong, and are doing other things with the world. We are not in relationships; we are relationships. 

What we’re inviting here is to break away from those ideas and, in the Rumian sense, to meet ourselves in fields that are beyond right or wrong, and are doing other things with the world. We are not in relationships; we are relationships. 

I want to introduce you to this brother here. His name is Eshu. Eshu is, in Yoruba cosmology, the trickster. Does Massachusetts have its own iconic trickster? No? [Audience members respond.] Native people do. And what is that one? Nana? Nanabozho. Okay. And is that an animal of some kind? A coyote. Okay. All right. Thank you. Thank you. 

We have Anansi the spider—you know that one?—from West Africa, from Ghana specifically. We have Àjàpá, who is a tortoise. And we have Eshu. Eshu is very popular. In fact, and this is a secret. You shouldn’t tell anyone. Eshu’s erect penis is the Washington monument—check it out. 

There is a nation’s first library around here that you can check out that fact in. It has some tracing to Egypt, ancient Kemet, and all of that. But let me not get ahead of myself. 

He’s called the lord of the crossroads in
 our mythologies, in our cosmologies. Eshu is the lord of the crossroads. Eshu doesn’t dwell in houses. He dwells at the doorway. You don’t bring Eshu in. In fact, there’s a prayer that my people pray that says Eshu, come close, but not too close. Right? Just, you know, just stay there. So he’s always at entrances, at liminalities, at thresholds. Tricksters do that all the time. Tricksters cannot be centralized. Tricksters cannot be “popular”. Tricksters have to live at the edges of things so that newness and novelty can sprout. Right? So he’s called the lord of the crossroads, and he holds ashe. Ashe, like I said, is this universal cosmic energy that makes everything work. And he holds it. 

How did he come to be, you know, invested with so great a power? Well, one story is that Eledumare, who’s our infinite God, the supreme God, made orishas. Eshu is one of the orishas. And this Eledumare, this god of gods, this infinite power has a flaw. You probably wouldn’t guess what his flaw is. His flaw is he’s afraid of rats. I’m not sure how that works out. But the infinite being is afraid of rats. And one day, the other orishas, who are jealous of his power, mount up an insurgency against him. And what did they try to do? They take him into a room and they send rats in, basically. Eshu steps in and saves the day by eating all the rats. And Eledumare grants Eshu whatever he wants. He says, “Name anything you want.” And Eshu says, “Okay, I want to do anything I want. I want to travel everywhere. I want to see places. I’m tired of being stuck here.” And so he gives Eshu ashe. 

That’s one story, one iteration of how Eshu comes to be so powerful. And it shows in subsequent stories of how Eshu actually makes the world happen. Lewis Hyde wrote a book once. Tricksters make the world. It’s the idea that creation is not possible without a trick. Right? Without something, without a flaw somewhere, without failure. It’s the libation that makes things happen. Obatala is said to be the one who actually descended from heaven on a golden chain. And he arrives on the waters and he makes everything possible. But Eshu comes in and he gives him palm wine while he’s making all of us, you see. He gives him palm wine and Obatala forgets his imperatives and makes autistic children. That is our story of how autism happens. That is the trickster’s benevolence. It’s the trickster’s agency that gives birth to new kinds of beings and becomings. And I say this with my son being autistic, that he’s connected to trickster archetypes in more ways than I can imagine. 

Another thing that happens is our people tell the story of the slave trade, right? The ships came and Eshu, all the orishas this time, and Ogun, who is the god of war, mounts up an insurgency to chase away the slavers. And so he’s heading to the beaches to chase them away. But then Eshu shows up and does what gives him palm wine. Palm wine is always the material for sedition, for some kind of mutiny. He gives him palm wine and I don’t know what the equivalent would be here. It’s very strong and alcoholic, right? And so he makes him fall asleep and then he sneaks into the slave ships and then he sneaks away across the Atlantic Ocean and creolizes the future along with the slaves, right? This idea of creation being drunken, and that for new things to happen, we need tricksters to insert their interventions is at the heart of everything I do. But sometimes it can be really annoying. But it’s more theoretically significant than you would think. 

***

So let’s get to the Anthropocene. This is where we are now. We’ve done some storytelling, some meta narratives. Let’s come down to where we are. The Anthropocene is the story of loss. It’s a story of our inability to respond to a crisis that is bearing down on us. In March, I think 20th, the IPCC, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, of the UN, they released their sixth report in many years. And this report is saying basically that we’re in trouble. It’s the dominant story of our times. That if we did not get our act together, then we will witness suffering unprecedented. How many of you have seen this report? [Audience members raise hands] Have you seen it? Read it? Okay, good. Excellent.

I’ve met with some of those people who sat and drafted that report. And their faces, I felt they had masks on and they were trying to portray hope, and they were breathing hard. But behind their eyes, their wet eyes, is a form of hopelessness that is seeking a framework, like they already understand that it’s done and we’re not going to make it. But they don’t want to say that. So they say, we just keep hoping. We hope that we won’t reach 1.5 degrees Celsius. We hope that the nation states come together. But they kind of feel that they’re trapped in a tautological bubble in which science produces these reports and then passes it on to policymakers. And then policymakers pass it back to scientists for verification and then they return for another seven years. And then the scientists say, we’re saying the same thing we said before. Do something about it. And the policymakers pass it back and say, we just need more empirical evidence. And so we’re trapped. And they understand that at a visceral, molecular, corporal, tactile level. So we’re in trouble. 

So, this is what might seem very tricksterly to you. It seems, the more we try our darndest to address our trouble, the stickier things become. 

We’ve been talking about climate chaos since the 70s. We’ve been talking about loss since the 70s. And it doesn’t seem we are closer. I’m sure great strides have been made in responding to these matters. But it doesn’t seem we are as a whole, collectively closer to addressing these matters. It seems we’re well and truly stuck. Right? Ice caps are melting. Ocean acidification is happening. There’s flooding in India. Probably going to start again in June and July. It’s this repeated tautological cycle of toxicity. And there seems to be no way out. And all that the Anthropocene as this geological proposed epoch by the stratigraphic authorities can offer, is “turn off your lights.” What else? [Audience responds.] Recycle…Install heat pumps? 

Ah ha. Yes. The concept of installing heat anything is foreign to me. Because I come from heat.

You can name several. I’m not trying to say that these don’t matter. I’m not trying to say they don’t make a difference. I am trying to say that sometimes they matter in ways that we don’t anticipate. It’s like trying to quiet the ocean by tapping it. Or it’s like a wave swearing, an ocean wave, swearing that “one day, I shall be as large as the ocean.” It seems everything we’re trying to do ironically reproduces the same crisis we’re in. 

An example: a brother, someone here, said recycling. How many of you know that 93% of waste that you conscientiously, religiously, parse into carefully designated and colorfully bright and beautiful trash cans or boxes, all comes to me. While I was growing up, before I came of age, my playground was literally littered with
 computers that you stopped using. All ironically stamped proudly with a recycling symbol. And this is our reality. And I sometimes take an ethnographic posture and just watch people in airports when I travel, and leap from place to place. Travel with
 their Starbucks cups and throw it in those things, that I kind of sense will not go to a green far away emerald city, but will come to Nigeria, Vietnam, India, Thailand, Ghana, the Gambia. 

So in a very, very powerful sense, we are stuck. And when sometimes you bring these ideas to people and inform them with this data, they cannot loosen themselves from this practice of righteousness. Because it’s the only thing they know. It’s the only way to be responsible and accountable that they know and have practiced. So they are also stuck in dopaminergic networks. It’s a pleasure given principle. It tells you I’m on the right side. I’m one of the good guys. But that practice is actually exacerbating the issue, which brings me to the very heart of what I’m trying to say here, that the way we respond to the crisis, is often the crisis. The way we respond to the crisis is the crisis. 

So what we have is, as part of our civilizational crisis, this is not encyclopedic. It’s just for us to think with. It seems we have a techno-bureaucratic solutionism: let’s get apps, let’s get geniuses in a room…let’s get fried chicken…sit down
 together — speaking fees! We come together, we solve the problem. It seems down pat, neat, easy—but we’re still stuck in that bubble. 

And then the other side, and I’m going to speak about this with some detail, is a politics of inclusion. Let’s save the minoritarian.
 Let’s save the marginalized. And believe me, I need that most of the time. I need that hand that reaches out to me, because—I cannot tell you this enough—I get stopped most of the time when I’m coming to the United States. I get stopped for secondary screening. It always happens. Even when I’m going back to Hamburg right now, I will be pulled aside, and probably berated for not speaking German. And it has happened more than once. It’s not exactly a fairy tale to move about in my body in this Westphalian order. It’s not easy, so I do need a politics of inclusion. But we cannot stop there. 

The
 first one tries to address, that’s a technocratic solutionism. That depends on bureaucracies, and the nation state, and all those institutions. Legacy institutions, UNESCO. And I’ve done great work with them. They’re wonderful people there. But it depends on civic education. It depends on you doing your part. It depends on ads. It depends on Hollywood actors doing the money shot. It depends on Obama smiling more often. And it depends on all these things. 

But it seems, again, that every attempt that we make to adapt or mitigate these issues still leaves us in the same place. I said something about a politics of inclusion that says, that not everyone, and of course, I’m sure you understand at this point that climate matters are already racial matters. And it’s not tacked on, right? To say we are in trouble is to quietly evade the deeper accountability that needs to happen with regards to who is pumping out gas, who has added to this paradigm, this aesthetic of consuming the planet. We cannot blame everyone equally. And I’m not here about blame either. I’m moving somewhere with this. 

Now, the problem with solutionism is that the answer to the question, or the answer to which the question dances with, or to, is part of the same economics of intelligibility. 

Who knows the story of Job and God? We’re in church, so don’t disappoint us here. [Audience responds.] Brother, you’re very enthusiastic with your hand up there! Job does all the right things in the Bible. He does all the good things. He’s one of the good guys, and somehow he’s punished. And he complains to God, basically saying, “I am good. I did all the good things I did, and lived my life by the rules. How did you let my children die? How did you let my cattle die? Why did you put me in such a place?”

And God responds like a drunk psychotherapist. He doesn’t say nice things. He doesn’t calm Job down. He says, “Have you seen Pleiades? Have you seen Leviathan? Have you beheld Behemoth?”

He says all these things that don’t seem to come from a person who knows what he’s doing at that moment. Doesn’t respond to the moment. Here’s a client right in front of you, and you’re talking about some star system. It has nothing to do with, like, if you’re high, then get someone else. Refer me to some other psychotherapist.

But no, God is just like, “See what I did? See what I did? See what I did?” And I always grew up with the sense that something else is happening here that wants to be appreciated. I’m still gestating and ruminating and sitting with the trouble of that passage. I don’t identify as Christian anymore, but I still sit with the trouble of that, of those passages. And I feel it’s this: that there’s something more profound than an answer to a question—and that’s bewilderment. 

Bewilderment takes you out of the logic, because sometimes the answer locks you in. It leaves you there in that ecology of intelligibility.
 What bewilderment does, is that it drags you to a different place and introduces a new field. 

Maybe God was not trying to convince Job to see from his perspective. Maybe he was trying to do the trickster thing and insert a little trouble, so that Job could adopt a new posture. 

Maybe climate matters will not be solved by our rectilinear problem solving stances. Maybe it would take us bending down. Maybe the only way we arise from this is if we fall together—maybe it requires a new posture altogether. And then we take a different logic, something outside of the clearing and the wilds, and then we’re able to pose new questions, pose new answers, have new problems together. 

That same logic seems to be the bubble that keeps us locked in. 

Case in point, one of my favorite examples. Denmark, a couple of years ago, I’ve said this many times, Denmark said “we’re going to spend $170,000, clear out the beach, remove plastic, debris,” all of that. They brought the tractors in and they did that work. And then they turned around those tractors and dumped the same thing in the ocean. And if you haven’t read those reports, fascinating, all the headlines, even more fascinating, “Denmark is stupid.” Stupidity. Like you’re impervious to what you’re doing. 

But my question is how are we all impervious? What does this require of us that our solutions do not know how to respond to? What are the forms of accountability have we been invited to? What are the forms of politics? What other lyrics should we be singing with that we are blind to, or we are deaf to, and that the world is inviting us to take new shapes to listen to, to jive with, to dance with? 

So this is what I mean by saying, that the way we respond to the crisis, is part of the same crisis. There is, I love this example, it’s from entomology. There is a death spiral. Has anyone seen a death spiral here? [Audience responds.] You sir have seen a death spiral because you’re smiling as you raise your hand, because you know what it is. 

A death spiral is a phenomenon that has ants going around in circles. Because they are in a pheromonic trance. So somehow, the army ants dislodge from the rest of the colony and they enter into some unfortunate loop and they just keep on going around in circles. The pheromone that they’re secreting tells them that just keep on walking, just keep on walking. We’re almost there, just the left turn, just another one, just another one, and then they die exhausted in that circle. They literally die. Another name for that death spiral is called ant milling, or ant mills. 

I think maybe if you’re sensing what I’m sensing, that we are anthro-milling too. We
 are are caught up in circles. We’re telling ourselves we’re almost there. We’re about to arrive. Just keep going. You can do it!

What you’re doing is ant milling, and I think maybe if you’re sensing what I’m sensing, that we are anthro-milling too. We
 are are caught up in circles. We’re telling ourselves we’re almost there. We’re about to arrive. Just keep going. You can do it! This is motivational speaking, right? You can make it. You can do it, but then we become veterans quickly in our youth and then we wonder what went wrong. 

***

This is also connected. I mean our ideas of politics, like I said earlier on, politics of inclusion is another way we’re responding and traveling alongside these civilizational impasses. It’s the politics of inclusion. Let’s bring you up to where we are. Let’s enforce a paradigm that secretes diversity, equity and inclusion. Let’s have a language of accommodation. 

But there’s something about this that leaves me panting for something different, because—I appreciate white allies, all my white allies here, thank you for your white alliances. But I don’t think where we’re going, or where we’re trying to go, or break out from, needs that kind of partnership. I think something else beyond the partnerships that you’re generously providing, is needed here, because bringing me from the hall of the slave ship to the upper deck still leaves me on the same vessel of oppression. 

If politics is about giving me a space at the table, room on the Titanic, an equal piece of a carcinogenic pie, then aren’t we in trouble? Because our politics presumes a baseline reality. It presumes, this is what we want. 

I had a very, very shocking conversation, surreal conversation, with Pharrell Williams. Recently, we argued on a table about black excellence. I said to him and everyone else that gathered, that black excellence is still a function of white capture. Because it basically is, “I want to be seen, I want groceries, I want bills to be paid, I want the same things.” It’s still compromise. It’s still hyper visibility, is what Saidiya Hartman will call it. It’s about me being seen, and the problem with being seen is that, if I’m seen, I can be surveilled. And if I’m surveilled, I can be useful. And if I’m useful, then I am just another part of the furniture of the public order that is premised on my oppression. 

So if I wanted different politics, then I ought to cultivate bewilderment. I ought to find a way to live with the generosity of invisibility. But I digress. 

I’m speaking about not this or that. I’m not saying, hey, we need to jettison this, we need to let go of this altogether. That’s not what I’m saying. Because I need that. My feet are planted on this platform because of the beautiful work of people that have opened up new places of power. 

But I’m saying, at a moment in time when our realities are squeezing up and becoming incredibly impoverished by the second, if we do not find other places of power, if all we have is to wield the weapon of critique, sometimes critique can bend over backwards and provide the very foundations and reinforce the very same order that I’m trying to exit my body from. 

So something else beyond critique wants to happen. Something else beyond inclusion wants to happen. Because
 inclusion, exclusion – still the same binary that leaves the house intact. I want out of the house. I don’t want an equal seat on the Titanic. I want to fly. I want out of this order. I want my bodies to do other things. I want to communicate with other people, other presences, other absences, other ancestors. 

I had a student at Schumacher— not this one, the other one, in the UK—Schumacher College. And I remember him saying to me, “I apologize for all the issues you go through at our airports. I’m so sorry. I’m this, I’m cisgender, male—blah. And I take up all the air in the room. I apologize. I’m so sorry for everything.” And I said,”brother, with all the love in my heart, I reject your apology.” And he was shocked. And he said, “I apologize for not apologizing properly.” And he went through that same Olympics, that same cyclical, I apologize and I apologize. And I said, “stop it,” because if I accepted your apology—the first one out of the 99 you’ve given so far—if I accepted your first apology, then I would be capitulating to the idea that there’s only one place of power. I will be submitting myself and accepting that.” 

Yes, I have issues when I travel through airports. Yes, I don’t flow through like you would do. But do you have access to ancestral voices? Do you know what it means to live in gift cultures? Do you know what it means to sit with grandmothers and have them make pounded yam and egusi soup for you? You probably have privileges, but your privilege is not the only place of power, right? There are other places of power.I don’t want to sit at your table, there are other rooms to sit in! 

So I need to linger at the doors, too. That’s why Andrea calls me a trickster. I need to stay at the doors because I cannot live with the idea that that’s the only place to be in. I need to travel. And probably at this point in time, as the world is removing its endorsement of our permanence, we all need to travel too.

I saw a black woman insist, that a white woman who is wealthier, that she should apologize for her privilege. I witnessed that. I was privy to that somehow. Just maybe one year ago, or before the pandemic, like apologize for your privilege. Again, this idea, and she was apologizing. And I remember feeling — here’s
 the thing: privilege is not simply advantage. “I have an advantage over you.” Privilege is proximity to a particular way of organizing bodies. It’s right there in the etymology of privilege. It’s like proximity to that. So that in a sense, privilege, not just being advantage, it’s also the apprehension of how bodies ought to be arranged. Even those that are disadvantaged have “participation” in some kind of “privilege.” Again, privilege is not reducible to advantage. It is proximity, the intelligibility, the intelligence of a certain nature-culture, a certain way of organizing bodies. 

So that, just me wanting that, means I’m participating in what privilege is doing. I’m part of its architecture. I may not be in the center of it, but I’m part of its architecture. So I formulate words and play with concepts. 

I formulated one recently, I called it ‘para-lidge.’ Like something outside of the circumference. Are there ways that my not being advantaged becomes a queer advantage? Are there ways that my not being able to buy groceries – as important as that is – are there ways that that brings me closer to a different cosmology? Is there a sense in which the people that I come from may not have the gifts that you have, flattened roads and all of that. Is there a gift in that? Maybe this is what psychologists are trying to name when they call something ‘post-traumatic growth.’ 

They’re struggling to name something there. And I’m a recovering psychologist so I know. We’re trying to name that something happens here, that the things that we get pressed into could be like that seed that names my father’s development. Like being buried in the ground could make me blossom. 

Black authors and black scholars have been speaking these seditious, subterranean philosophies for decades now: C.L.R. James, Hortense Spillers, Sylvia Wynter, Weheliye; they’ve been speaking these ideas for a long time. Earl Lovelace will say, “appropriate slave technologies if you want to survive the Anthropocene.” Well, he didn’t say it that way, but paraphrasing it. Appropriate slave technologies. Find a way to hide things in potato holes. Develop an epistemology, a way of knowing the world that is not about you walking upright. Develop fugitive ways of knowing that allows the world to meet you in return. No one walked away from plantations with their heads held high. To be fugitive, to escape the traps we’re in, we need to bend down low. We need to hide. And hiding is not a lack of courage, it’s an excess of courage. 

I’m not going to get into those slave stories. 

To be fugitive, to escape the traps we’re in, we need to bend down low. We need to hide. And hiding is not a lack of courage, it’s an excess of courage. 

The problem here is what I call the problem of slushiness. The other problem is the problem of stuckness. This is the problem of slushiness, which regards to our politics of inclusion. That the very modalities we use to address our marginality reinforces our oppression. The very tools and materials we use to address the powers that be, including speaking truth to power, could often mean we’re performing some kind of ecological ventriloquism. And the world is speaking through us, and the paradigm is speaking through us, and the city is speaking through us, so that we’re revisiting the same concepts over and over again. 

***

Who has heard of the Samudra Manthana? Yes. It’s the Asuras and the Devas. The good side and the bad side. The angels and the demons. And they’re struggling for supremacy. But what they’re doing at the same time is curdling an ocean of milk. As they do this eternal 1,000 year tug of war. They’re curdling an ocean of milk. 

So, our battle for supremacy, for who has the louder voice, might actually be doing things that we don’t anticipate. Where’s the left? Where’s the right? Who’s the right side here? I’m speaking about the United States. Who just got fired? Is it Tucker Carlson? Who just got fired? Is it Don Lemon? Both of them got fired almost days apart, right? I read recently that both of them went to the same lawyer
 to to argue their case. It just puts things in perspective. Both of them went to the same lawyer to argue their case for more millions, or whatever lawyers do these days, or what they’ve been doing for eons. 

So, we might be producing the other in our very attempts to secure ourselves. We might be reproducing and villainizing and pathologizing the other in the very attempts to prove ourselves the righteous side. That’s not to say that there aren’t righteous things about what you’re doing. Beautiful modulations and concepts and modalities, but it seems that we are now in a situation where we have to address the ways we’re sticky, and stuck, in the same paradigms that produce us all.

So, climate racial matters yearn for a break. This is what I’ve been getting to. A break that justice cannot provide. Justice kneels on our necks these days. We’ve known this way back in Blackity, Black Nigeria.
 Justice has been whipping us for a long time. They all look like us, by the way. It’s not even a matter of getting more Black people on board. I’m not trying to compare two scenarios, but our Black Nigerian, Blackity, Black police officers whip us on the streets every day. We have our own movements as well. We have NSARs, we have our own moralities, we have
 our own problems, our own dynamics, and they coincide a little bit with the issues here as well. I think we can learn from each other. I think we need an animism of breaks. 

We need a different story altogether, a different framework. What climate scientists are struggling for, because they know they’re stuck. They’re producing all this knowledge. What they don’t have yet is wisdom. Because wisdom is that which disturbs the continuity of our knowledge-making rituals. Wisdom steps in the way. Wisdom is an impediment. If it doesn’t impede, then it doesn’t sing. It steps in the way and it says, “You will not pass. You will have to lose shape to pass.” Knowledge is: free ride. Wisdom is: stop here. And there’s nothing more prestigious, there’s nothing more luxurious, there’s nothing more advantageous to us gestating in modern cities, than the privilege of being said “no” to. 

What is whiteness? Whiteness is walking into a shop and seeking to speak with a manager. Isn’t it? “I demand the manager, for what is going wrong with the sun. I demand the manager. What’s going on right now?” That’s whiteness. And we are participating in it. Again, whiteness is not white people. I need to emphasize this enough. It’s been drilled into our heads that whiteness is white people. If whiteness is white people, then I’m lost myself. Because
 whiteness is not white people. Whiteness arranges all of us in an impoverished pyramidal scheme, so that those at the top of the pyramid are just as impoverished as those supposedly beneath it. It’s very lonely at the top of a pyramid. And that’s why we feel more and more separate in our politics.

So it seems a lot of what we’re doing in our politics is to stabilize or to reinforce white stability. This is not what we say we’re doing. It’s not our intention to do so. But we’re bucking up. We’re kind of pushing against the tide. We’re like the structure that impedes the flow of grief. And we’re doing all we can to preserve our space and stability, including our politics. We’re like the ramparts built to resist loss. 

As a psychologist, my work was to shrink people, literally, to reduce their problem, so to speak, in a way that made a colleague of mine suggest that psychology is the policeman of capitalism. Because our work is to keep you functioning, to keep you going. And grief gets in the way, you see. Therapy rooms are not designed for grieving. They’re designed for productivity. So it gets in the way. We don’t want you to slow down. We want you to keep going. And that becomes a problem. 

This loss I’m speaking about that we’re witnessing, this loss of white stability that divorced us from land and space and dreams and different kinds of wisdoms, that kind of put us in a procrustean bed and caught off our limbs. That whiteness, that loss of white stability is architectural, meaning it’s not just ocean acidification. It’s not just the bleaching of the coral reefs. It’s not just the global warming. That’s not just the architectural aspect. 

We’re talking about experience as
 well. We’re losing our imperviousness to the world. And that’s a solidly horrifying thing to modern citizens. We might be feeling each other’s dreams now, but we pathologize that. In fact, what I’m trying to say is, we’re becoming porous. We’re becoming – holes are being drilled into our bodies, so to speak. And we’re being invited to stay with that trouble, but we don’t know how. And that is what the politics of the next will help us do, to stay with the trouble of our losing, of our separation, if you will, of our separability. 

The loss is a gesturing beyond the colonial territory of the human. It’s a brick of our sensorial apparatus. It’s a radical hospitality to cultivate new aesthetics beyond white visuality. It’s a generative incapacitation. It’s how God breaks your limbs and tells you to walk. It’s the incapacitation that gives us new ways of posture in our bodies in the world. 

If a politics does not surround a form of disability, then I think we’re just pleasuring ourselves as the tides come in. If a politics isn’t built around “I don’t know what to do next, and I haven’t figured this out.” If it’s built around feeling good, and feeling whole and feeling like we’ve got it made, then I think we’re just, again, building gilded cages as the world undulates and becomes fugitive. The invitation really is to stay with the trouble and this is uncomfortable, but it’s also infinitely pleasurable in ways we cannot decide. 

I don’t know what a butterfly or a caterpillar feels when it becomes imaginal soup. I don’t know what it feels, but there’s a sense in which as our senses get expanded and as our bodies take on new shapes, and as things stream into our spaces that we’ve once defined as private, the thing to do is to share it with others, and create a commonwealth of bewilderment together where we fall apart together. And somehow that opens doorways, I suspect. No one has a guarantee, but I think it does that. 

What I mean by postactivism, long story short, is postactivism is the flashing up of loss and the space it opens up. 

Pandemic, virus, suddenly India has new questions: “why do we go to work? Why do we send our kids to school?” New questions come with incapacitation, right? It’s a different view when you cannot walk straight. 

Suddenly new questions just came up. I don’t know what it did for you, but there is a flashing up of loss. That flashing up of loss is the loss of white stability, and it’s inviting us to bow to the ground. In our stories in Yoruba land, when a god passes, you don’t challenge the god, especially the god of the storm, Shango. You fall down and you prostrate yourself to the ground. It’s a form of surrender. We don’t have a politics of surrender. We have a politics of victory and we need politics that is designed to enable us to cultivate surrender together. 

Postactivism is the fancy word, an arrangement or disarrangement of lines. It’s the discontinuity of confidence, of cartographic confidence, “we know where we’re going,” and I’ve been part of futurist communities who would tell you what’s going to happen in 50 years and I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. It’s the flashing explosive excess that crystallizes into monstrous new patterns. It’s new effective leanings, it’s new unspeakable concepts, it’s new questions. Postactivism is the mark the world makes when it kicks back. Now the thing we want to do is to heal those wounds and to cover them up. I think we need a politics that says “here, I have a new arm growing out of my leg. What’s yours? I have a head growing out of my armpit. Erin certainly does! What’s yours? What’s emerging from your body? Don’t hide it.” 

Postactivism asks – these are questions I hope, maybe you write this down if you will, and I hope they do something for you. What if the way we respond to the crisis is part of the crisis? What if the solution reinforces the context of the problem? What are we missing in our quests to address critical challenges today? What are we missing? What is lost and not quite visible? What is virtual? What are the hidden intentions of marching forward that might invite us to take a new radical cartographical move and march awkwardly into the forward? What might clarity be subsidized by in trying to be clear about things? What are we losing? What are the gifts of confusion? What are the gifts of not nailing it? What does precision exclude from view? What is new and how have we come to be stuck in tautological repetitive cycles of practice? 

Postactivism is the break, is the interruptive break, it’s Eshu. Slipping in palm wine into the way we move in the world and saying “let’s stay with this, let’s get drunk together. This is a party.” In a very Yoruba sense we’re in a party right now, and we need to get on with the party.
 

The world is profuse with merging slippages, breaks, flows, tipping points, migrations and cracks. What whiteness is trying to do is to pathologize those cracks, is to tell you that you are a separate self and if you experience anything that are not your property, like thoughts that are not yours, then it’s schizophrenic. Then you should be in an asylum so that you can get better. If you’re autistic then we should try to heal you or correct you because the neurotypical is the baseline reality. Anything is a deviation from that, and that’s what whiteness tries to do. 

It tries to lock us in, in its effort to keep us safe and we cannot afford that safety now because that safety is pathology. That safety is violence if you can have that. It tries to lock us in with justice. It says go by the way of the nation state, by the courts of law. I’m not saying that’s bad. I don’t dance with bad and good. I’m just trying to say here that even justice is the intelligibility of the familiar. It’s how the familiar knows itself and the world is increasingly measured and marked and known and surveilled, so that we need something else that is a beyond justice, a movement beyond justice, because my people have been longing for justice and we’ve gotten justice in form of punches on our faces. Justice is deeply violent in my context. We’re scared of justice. Oh, that’s justice passing everyone to your rooms. Justice is embodied by the recapitulation, the repetition of what we know. Whereas the world is inviting us to stray away from the lines we’re conveniently comfortable with. 

Whiteness renders things useful, instrumental to its aims. Whereas we’re looking for a non-legible politics, a politics that is not defined. We need a politics of free Medicare for all, right? I like that. Free tuition, great. But the politics that we need to sidle that logic as well is a politics that is not expressible. Where we have to gather together as guerilla actors of a politics that has not yet had a name. We’re all midwifing something and we don’t know what it is, but we stay together in the unspeakability of that moment. That’s a kind of aesthetic that I think provides space for the trickster to do the trickster work. And then we can meet each other for the first time. 

Finally, whiteness offers hope. Think about what hope is to those ants in the cycle. Just keep going, just keep going, just keep going. And then we get stuck. And then we don’t know what to do. I’m not pathologizing hope either. But I am saying that there’s a wealth. 

There is a sidling emancipatory fugitive logic to surrender that hope has no way to articulate. There is something that wants to happen when we say, “I don’t know if we’re going to make it.” And then we’re met differently. 

The Aztecs did not
 cure the fungal entity that took over corn in their times. They made it a delicacy and they called it huitlacoche. They ate, and became edible with that other hybrid species. They kind of rendered it vestigial. And this is not bypassing. This is not not addressing the problem. The materials for thinking about anything as a spiritual bypass is believing that there is only one reality. But if we take it for granted that there are other worlds possible, then I’m not speaking about a bypass. I’m speaking about an invitation to disturb what we already know and to do something else with the world.

So we need postactivism because the public order is becoming increasingly prohibitive, marked, measured and surveilled. Because victory often locks us back, into the same logic of our containment and because we risk getting what we want. 

Do you know the three apocryphal curses? The apocryphal because we don’t exactly know where they come
 from. From China. The first one is “may you live in interesting times.” And the second one is “may you be seen and recognized by the emperor.” And the last curse is “may you get what you want.” 

Getting what we want sounds good, but it could also be a trap and lock us in. We need a para activism and aesthetic that allows us work and experiment with grief,
 experiment with our handicap, and gradual loss of stability. It’s a politics of withness. Withness not witness, but withnessing, sitting together with. It’s a hospitality for the lines that cross us out. It’s a sensorial mutiny. It’s a falling apart together with. 

***

Let me
 end end with this. 

[Referring to an image on-screen] This was sent to me this morning from my wife, EJ, who is in Hamburg with our two kids. My son made this. It’s a snowman. He’s fascinated with – he’s autistic – he’s fascinated with
 Christmas. Christmas is his thing. He wakes up every day and says “Merry Christmas.” It’s not even a laughing matter because I have to feed him in my Santa Claus costume. And we just ordered one, a new fresh one. I have to do the “ho ho ho.” I have to wear the beard. I have to wear boots. And he analyzes me and says “now you can feed me.” 

One day I tried to get him off that train. A couple of months ago actually. And I said, “you know it’s not really Christmas, right? It’s not really Christmas. Christmas is December 25th.” And then this thing descended on his face. He’s only five years old. He said, “but dada, it’s Christmas.”
 Like “Can’t you see? It’s Christmas.” And I’m not a big Christmas person, but somehow this is his thing. Christmas is his vocation. He said it’s Christmas. 

I shared this story in LA recently. We’re filming a documentary and I said it to a brother named Orland Bishop. And I said this is what happened. And I saw that same pain, that thing descend on his face. And he said, “Bayo, why are you trying to gentrify him? Why are you trying to drag him into your own temporality? Can’t you see he’s pointing you to a different practice of time?” A different notion of time altogether. “Why are you trying to drag him there? Why don’t you go back and make new fresh agreements with him? Fresh agreements that agree, that notice, that time is slushy, not linear. Like you always say, this is your opportunity to make sanctuary with this queer notion of temporality.” 

So I’m heading back tomorrow. Looking forward to my Santa costume. What’s this snowman made of? I’ll tell you, it’s made of pillows, it’s made of white material, cut out paper. He planted two chocolate chips for the eyes, and a queer temporality. A different notion of time. Maybe it’s not that we need to catch up with time. Maybe it’s not that we’ve run out of time. Maybe it’s that we need a different notion of time altogether. Yeah, that’s it.

***

Q: I’d like you to compare the slavery that we experienced, from Africa to various European controlled places, to Foxconn, to the Congo mines, to the jail and bail system that we have in our country, that we’ve exported, which is owned by private equity. Because I think that the control you’re talking about is manifest in our lives every day. And that impacts climate, it impacts how we live.

A: Thank you so much. You’ve said it beautifully yourself. What I’ll add to that is this: I read in a newspaper a couple of years ago about a woman who walked into Walmart and bought herself a bag. I think it’s Dolce something. Bought herself a brand new bag. Dolce and whatever. It starts with a D. And she went home with this bag and tucked into the folds of the bag was a note, that she wasn’t expecting to see, obviously, in a new bag. And she brought out the note and it was Chinese. And she didn’t understand it. And she found someone who could interpret. And the person interpreted this way, that the words were: “I am a prisoner in China. I am” – this was headline news here. I don’t know what papers – “I’m a prisoner there. We don’t get to eat. We’re beaten every hour to make bags like this one. SOS, please help.” Something like that. 

Of course, her response was “how do I send money?” Because there isn’t much space to do – modernity doesn’t actually allow for postural liberation or emancipation. We wake up like this. Everything is front facing. So it’s like how do I send money? There was nothing else for her to do. 

But it gave me room for pause to notice how our lives are literally subsidized by suffering. The things we take for granted that modernity would like us to see a logo on. This is just a logo. It’s new. Forget about where it came from. Forget about the virtualities of this bag. Look at the actuality of the
 bag. Notice the smells. This is all you need to know about the bag. 

I think coming to touch these threads that spill out, even holding space for them, may not be adequate, but is just enough. It may not look like much to sit together and to hold a bag in the middle of an altar and say how do we sit with this Chinese worker? It might look too spiritual. It might look like it does nothing. 

But again, the issue here is not always reducible to how much money I can send. It’s about “how do I hack my own sensorial systems so that I can perceive the world differently and be alive to it differently.” Right? Again, this has not come down to individuals acting in the world. It’s about territories becoming other than what they are. 

So yes, we live in a highly carceral system. We live in a world that proliferates imprisonment in more ways than one. We live in a cradle to jail, back to suffering kind of algorithm. And yet, I think the breaks that we seek are possible if we stay with those troubles in the ways that I’ve tried to outline. Yeah, that’s all I’ll say to that. Thank you. 

Q: Multiple people have asked the question of if you can expand about this commonwealth of bewilderment. Tell us more about it. Does it mean community? How do you imagine it? 

A: It might look like community, but community is not always what – if I tell you to imagine community right now, you probably imagine some intentional architectural situation where everyone lives together. That’s fine, but community spills beyond that. 

Community also involves the more-than-human. I’m very much excited about microbial communities, and what they’re doing with our guts. We’re always in community, whether we’re alone or not. So I’m just trying, I’m distressing the idea of independence, which modernity is premised on. That you’re independent, you’re isolated, you’re alone. I’m distressing that. And I’m saying, start to see yourself as a raft, as a cross hatching experiment of bodies tumbled into other bodies. 

Start to see yourself that way. Practice that. I don’t know how it shows up with you, but congregate around the monster. The monster in many cultures has been the thing that we used to draw the lines. 

Monsters are embodiments of errancy, right? Where the world gets intelligent in a new way. I would invite you to stay with that. However it shows up. Grief, for instance, is monstrous to modernity. Are there ways we can surround and make sanctuary for that monster? To just sit with it. And it may not even look like sitting. But it should invite your aesthetic senses to do other things with the world. You will have to decide with your locality how that shows up. But I do think that we have to gather around cracks. Cracks are not sites of inadequacy. They’re sites of excess. And when we sit without excess, something meets us in return. Yeah. I will offer that and leave that to you. All right. 

Q: There’s two questions related to time. And what you’re saying, how we organize ourselves, how we approach things probably has to do with how we relate to time. So one question is related to AI. And just how it’s going to make so many things that are currently happening obsolete. We don’t need to spend so much time doing one thing. So it will open up time to do other things. The other question has to do with, how are you as a person? Are you a busy person? Do you give yourself time to think? And what do you give yourself time to do? 

A: Those are ironically the most difficult questions. Okay. I’ll start with busy. Work my way up. 

I am busy. I hate to say, I do a lot of travel and I miss my people, a lot. At the same time, I find joy in this vocation. Like I need to do this and I need to speak from the edges and I need to say dangerous things. I find myself enlivened by that sense of beauty and exploration. But that’s not what the question was asking about. 

I don’t know what it was asking about, but it feels like the best I can offer as a response to that at this moment in time is yes, I do find myself busy most of the time and jaded. And without words. And yet even in that, I find the greatest of moments and spirit and possibility. Yeah. It’s a clunky, unwieldy, ungainly response. And that’s what I’ll offer now. 

Now the AI thing, okay. We’ve been having wonderful conversations about AI. I’m not very interested in the prospects of AI taking over our jobs. I don’t feel that’s interesting to – something I dwell upon. Probably some others, more intelligent than myself, would say something about that. 

I feel what’s at stake here is the hubristic lines we draw that divide us from the world in a way that insists that we are the natural intelligences and that’s just artificial. Anyone watch Toy Story here? I love the idea of things going bump at night. Like when toys gather and have a conference. I’m activated
 by seditious multi-species arrangement. And I’m not willing to carve out for myself the generosity of consciousness that denies the world a way of speaking even if it speaks through computers and patterns and algorithms. 

What did Jesus say one time when he was working with his disciples? He said, “If you do not worship, even these stones will cry out.” There’s a sense that if you don’t do it, then these stones will cry out. Maybe we’re lacking here and computers are having conversations of their own. Who knows? 

I just cannot trust in a world that bequeaths, or labors, or imposes some exclusivity on humans as if we have it all together. I can’t live in that kind of system. The world that I trust in spills and flows because once upon a time, black people were once seen as less than and three-fifths of a white person. And they were denied capacities that we would readily attribute to ourselves today. Are we doing the same thing? Could it be that the world is speaking through us through unconventional means? That’s a more interesting conversation to me, than the idea that one day they will take over our jobs. Is it only jobs that we can speak about? Aren’t there other things to say, and to hold space for other than the prospects of our jobs being lost? So yeah, I think I’ll shut up there. 

Q: Awesome. Okay. Switching gears. If black excellence is a seat at the Titanic, is black joy at the same table or in a different room? 

A: What’s your image of black joy? Some of the dance – I think the stereotype that black people can dance, right? Because I can’t, that’s what I’m saying. My sister here has been trying to get me to twerk for a while, but it’s not happening. 

The image I have of black joy is one of thriving in the midst of oppression. Right there in the chokehold of modernity, there is a queer celebration. Think about the stories and the cosmologies that allowed a people to think that what traveled with the slaves was an itinerant God, that even in their grief, there was this queer possibility, this cosmic event that gave birth to Santería and Candomblé and Gayap and Rastafarianism. It gave birth to all these creolized possibilities, these Afro-futurisms, these Afro-spiritualities. They came from dense places of burial, right?
 

Black joy is the refusal of joy to be some universal trope. It’s the queering of possibility, is the insistence on opacity; like Afro-Martinican philosopher, Edward Glissant, who says, “I have my right to opacity. I don’t want to be seen.” I have a right to opacity; this opacity is for me black joy. 

Q: What does blackness look or feel like when it bears witness to itself? 

A: When it bears witness to itself. Well, it depends on the blackness we’re speaking about. 

There is the blackness that reflects the image of capture. We look in the mirror and – we live in a city of mirrors, so our vocation is about being beheld and being seen. We’ve become a culture of selfies and a culture of stable images. There’s
 a a blackness that wants to be seen. Again, we’re not thinking in terms of binaries, this is bad or this is good. It does certain things and it disallows certain things. 

The blackness I am speaking to, along with others around the planet, because I’m certainly not doing it by myself, is a blackness that stoops, that bends down and washes feet. It’s radically hospitable to the stranger and it notices itself as a trope for novelty. That’s the reason I told all these stories today. These stories about itinerant gods, stowaway worlds, slave ships that carry possibilities. I’m trying to queer and distress our habituated ways of thinking. 

Think about the concept of cultural appropriation. Think about that concept emanated from the academic world, addresses certain things about loss and imperialism and dominant cultures. Yes, but it doesn’t do everything, does it? Who knows the Benin bronzes here? The Benin bronzes were stolen in 1897 by the British expeditionary force. They came, shot everyone in the old kingdom of Benin, incarcerated the king and stole those things and took them to museums here, brought them to the US, took them to Europe. They’re littered everywhere across the planet. We’ve been striving to get that back for a long time. 

An English old gentleman who happens to be the grandson of one of those soldiers, sees one of those artifacts in his living room, which they had used generationally as a door stopper, takes that artifact and travels to Nigeria, heart beating because he feels he’s going to be beaten up and killed by angry Nigerians. 

He brings it back to Nigeria and we pull out all the stops. The media is there, the new Abba of Benin is there, carrying the legacies of all that trauma, and sits there. He says, “Welcome, welcome.” He takes that tiny thing and he gives him more. He says, “Bring the others,” and he brings him more, gives the man more. The man could not compute. He’s like, “This doesn’t make sense. We appropriated, we took from you and you’ve given us more.” 

That’s the blackness, the blackness that bends our paradigms of scarcity and invites us to be generous and open in ways that we don’t know how to anticipate because modernity does not know how to hold blackness. Blackness spills beyond our modern divides and that’s the radical generosity that our politics of inclusion, as well intentioned as they are, does not hold space for. 

Q: Where do Turtle Island indigenous prophecies, such as the Whirling Rainbow, come into your thinking, if at all?

A: Not very much, I have to say. I am a student of these traditions and I’m learning. There’s a lot I don’t know. There’s a lot I like to sit with and I like to understand. I am steeped
 in my own peoples’ thinking and the regions that I come from have understandings of these matters and prophecy is a different thing to us. It’s not about predicting the future. It’s about queering time. It’s about disrupting time flow. 

[Audience member clarifies question.]

I think the thing, sister, is to diffractively read them together. We cannot put them all together and form one giant articulation of the next. I think we can read insights into each other. For instance, there isn’t one blackness. There are many blacknesses. The blackness of Kwame Unkrumah is different from the blackness of Martin Luther King. At one point historically, they came together and said, “Let’s think our blackness is together.” What that produced was a desire for a federation that responded to imperialism. It didn’t quite pan out, but that’s the idea. 

Let’s think together. Let’s think insights together. There will be places where our thinking will cancel out each other. Beautiful. There will be divergences and there will also be convergences. There’s a lot of generosity when we think the world in that way, without trying to reduce each side to one other side. That’s when things become possible, I think — new things. 

Q: This question is from a college professor. They’re curious about ways to be with their students in difficulty. There seems to be a modern trend or request for trigger warnings; students seem to want them. When we come up against violence, discomfort, grief, or things that feel tricky, how can we be with that, especially in a classroom? 

A: I think one move has been to belittle those gestures, to kind of reduce them: to wave them aside, to say it doesn’t matter, or to say they’re puerile. They’re childish. The world is trying to experiment with complexity here, and there’s no pure path to that. Even cancel culture is a global research project. What does it mean to be morally accountable in times of complexity? Those are the questions that it’s asking. It’s using the materiality of the internet, social networks, those algorithms, to respond to those questions. 

But I think we need to have some compassion for each other and not say, “Oh, you’re doing it wrong,” or something. We’re in this together and we’re frail and we’re… it’s difficult. It’s very difficult. Just staying with that, acknowledging that, is emancipatory. I don’t always know what to say to students or younger people. In fact, sometimes I distrust my eloquence because it seems it reduces, or it seeks to explain. The nature of an explanation is to use the violence of communication to colonize our context. 

Sometimes I don’t want to explain. Sometimes I just want to sit with, or just hug, like I invited you to do, or cry together. I do have a sense of the movement of things, at least within the paradigms that I’m co-constructing with many of you sitting here, definitely with my dear sister Erin here, with Andrea, with lots of you, with Sarah. We’re doing things. Now, this is what I mean here… this is difficult.
 

It’s not always possible to speak to this moment or the moments that our younger people are sensing. The reason why they’re going out on the streets and splashing paint on museum walls, or pulling down paintings, is because the Anthropocene has given them no other agential pathway. It’s difficult to respond to these moments. Some even posit, presuppose that autism is the world’s response to our crisis, that the reason why it’s escalating – you may not think about this within your own paradigms, but there is some legibility to this – that the reason why it’s escalating, is because we need different kinds of wisdoms that are not available neuro-typically. That we need to stay with these situations, these generatively incapacitating contexts, and that staying with them gives us something different. 

So this is what I say to young people. I always say, don’t hide your monsters. Let’s gather together as much as we’re able, and experiment with them. Deleuze and Guattari certainly thought so. They posited schizo-analytics, and their idea was, stay with those desires that break away from capitalism. Follow them to where they might lead and then experiment with where they stay. Wandering lines, Fernand Deligny called them lignes d’erre. Follow those wandering lines and experiment with their wanderingness. 

My elders will say, “In order to find a way, you must get lost.” The left, the right, the middle, I don’t care. We’re stuck and we’re reproducing each other. The thing to do is to have a cosmology that invites them in and says, “Let’s sit together. Let’s eat together.” And maybe in doing this, we might divine something different. We might conjure or alchemize a new path.

Q: Does wisdom encompass indigenous knowledge systems? 

A: In my scheme of things, which is incredibly limited, I’m just me here, I see rituals and traditions, rich traditions as knowledge making and sense making practices. It’s how we feel the lay of the land. It’s how our bodies become territorialized to their ecologies—12,000 years, 26,000 years—it’s how we move with the world. To me, wisdom is transversal. I’m
 thinking of wisdom as something that crosses us. Do you understand that? It gets in the way. It stands and demands discontinuity. So wisdom can become knowledge. 

[Audience member responds…]

Here’s my refusal. This is the gist of my refusal: I refuse to name anything wisdom in a final sense because it delimits us from what the world is constantly flowing and doing. I’ll put it this way. 

There was this gathering, I don’t know if it’s in China, but in Asia; indigenous contingencies, people, groups, from around the world were to meet there. Now, a certain indigenous culture, again, I’m speaking about this with great generalities because I don’t have the specific details right now on hand, but a particular group had some problems with dream technologies. They were not able to do their art and their art depended on their connection with ancestors and they came to some kind of impasse. They were not able to access those realities any longer. 

So they went with that burden to that gathering, that conference. And as it was told to me by a dear brother in Denmark, in Germany actually, they were dancing on the streets with others and then suddenly one of them got possessed. This huge moment happened, a big feeling, and he fell to the ground. Some police officers actually came by. He fell to the ground and when he woke up, the conversation that erupted from that was so generative, that all of them
 dreamed the same, somewhat the same dream at night. 

But what did they dream of is the issue: phones, technologies, Facebook. It looked nothing like what ancestors would do. Like, ancestors, you would think they would speak with some other poetic way that speaks about a past. No, they were speaking through the liminality of technologies that are ordinary, available to us. Maybe that was their stuckness. 

So I’m not doing, I’m refusing the label of wisdom, however prestigious the tradition is, on knowledge making traditions. I’m thinking of wisdom as the ongoing generativity of a world that cannot be finalized in any way.
 

Q: This is actually going to be our last question… I’m going to choose the last question because three different people asked this. They all revolve around the question of how do you access ancestral wisdom? And I’ll read just one of the specific wordings. “When
 traveling around, how do you stay grounded in relationships with your ancestors, Nigerian roots, spirituality?” 

A: My son’s name is Abayomi. My father’s name is also Abayomi. Yoruba people have a very, very ordinary and yet extraordinary – I think the extraordinary lives in the ordinary – idea of ancestrality. It might look like reincarnation sometimes if you’ve heard of the abiku cosmology, where a child returns to the realms that birthed the child. It speaks about that in some way, but I come from that kind of culture that sees grandmas and grandpas that have passed away, returning in their children. 

So you might hear names like Babatunde, which means ‘the father comes again,’ or Yewande, which is my sister’s name, as ‘the grandmother returns.’ So our notion of our cosmology for children is that they are ancestral. Do you understand that? The past is yet to come. They are ancestral; our children are our elders returned to us. 

My wife and I decided to practice this, to not make ritual and ancestrality a once in a week event, but to embody our lives around this. And so we decided not to send our children to school. We decided to practice what some might call unschooling, or self-directed education. There’s a rich context for that and a richer conversation around unschooling and all of that, and how that’s a form of postactivism in some sense. 

But the thing here, what we’re trying to do is to listen to children as philosophers in their own right. That a movement led by children, a movement that is defined by play, and their spontaneity, is the kind of joyous, grounded, embodied movement that maybe we need right now. My wife decided to start something. 

We started to invite parents into our homes and we sit with chai and we sit cross-legged in a circle, and we discuss why we don’t want to see our children through the prisms of performance. “A+” us, because that’s a huge thing in India — “Oh, you didn’t do as well as your cousin” — and that’s why India has the highest suicidal rates among teenagers in the world, because of this performance catch-up imperative. 

So we decided to sit with them,
 to listen with them. My daughter is writing books now. My son is making Christmas every day. We travel with them. We think of them as companions to listen with. 

My wife started Broken Compass—in fact, we’re doing some building hopefully sometime soon. She started this thing that is dear to her, called Broken Compass. That is, we’ve lost our way; the compass is broken. So let us play: play is at the heart of this thing that we’re calling postactivism experimentation. 

So if you ask me, how do I stay connected? My children are my connection, and my becoming father, which is never straightforward or rectilinear, my becoming father is my ongoing practice. My wife calls it transparenting. There is a mutuality, maybe that reflects the biological phenomenon of microchimerism, where the child births the mother, and the sibling births the mother as well. Check it out, microchimerism — exciting! But that’s the idea.

My son’s voice is ancestral. He’s – listening to him, sitting with him, is how I connect. And this may change in time. I mean, I’m not receiving messages in dreams as much as I’m receiving messages from staying with my son, from him begging me that this is Christmas. That’s deep, ancestrality; that’s radical time there. So don’t think about the Hollywoodized notion of ancestrality, okay? We’re thinking about the ordinary, because the ordinary is what the extraordinary wants to become. We stay with the ordinary; it’s more fascinating
 than we might think.