Among the interesting concepts that I am learning from Dr Bayo’s message is the Yoruba concept of crossroads, or Orita.
I understand that most of the things he is sharing came from the culture he comes from, so he is speaking as a subject of the middle (Atlantic) passage instead of an African, and has planted his feet on trickster’s grounds, situating himself in a crossroads – a place where things are so dense that we no longer have final claims to our identities, where our bodies are shimmering or glowing with other intersections, as the idea is that nothing is independent and still.
I also learnt that tricksters are archetypal truths that disturb boundaries or borders, and they invite us to think beyond identity, to lose our way to transform, to explore and experiment with concepts, for these matters, once categorically stable, are suddenly soft, tactile, tensile, and so the Anthropocene, riskily offered as a catch-all term for the disenchantments of industrialisation, is a useful way to talk about the limitations of progress.
Like he mentioned, the pandemic is a creature or symptom of the Anthropocene, disturbing our liberal humanist claims to static borders, fixed individuality and closed bodies, and the viruses all of a sudden become part of the human, so to speak.
I noted that in a sense, the Anthropocene is ironically the age of un/settlement as our very modern attempts to create settlements for the Anthropos project exacerbated the conditions of unsettlement – indeed, we are in the age of viruses, climate change, rising ocean levels, atmospheric volatility and insurgency of animals revolting against humans’ attempt to stamp their “authority” on the planet, and in order to find a home, we are becoming lost, such as exemplified in the example of the city of Melilla, which is owned by Spain but is located in the northwest part of Morocco – where this part of Africa is actually seen as European.
I learnt that the exclaves of Europe, such as Melilla, in Africa illustrates that every day, Black bodies try to access the city during the night via various migratory means and many end up injured or killed in the process, while the people living in Melilla are afraid of the Africans getting into their part of Africa and making it “unsafe”, which is ironic.
Hence, Melilla raises the question: What does it mean to be at home when home no longer recognises you?
Perhaps the ‘ultimate’ form of unsettlement is to be ejected from one’s mother’s womb, to be orphaned and denied recognition on the lands that gave birth to you – to become Black.
I also learnt about two stories of unsettlement that Dr Bayo wanted to share, which juxtapose the condition of becoming Black with the promise of becoming black – a blackness of two cadences, and how art, prophetic imaginations, curate this promise of transformation amid colonisation.
Like Moroccans, modernity is mounting an irredentist offensive to reclaim to itself the territories lost to the more-than-human; it wants to win.
As he noted, the problem of the Anthroponcene is: How do we measure the cost of reparations or restitution for the genocides, such as those in Namibia in 1904-1908 carried out by Germany, the cost of lives lost and intergenerational trauma, homelessness, loss of families and relationships in ancestry, mountains, stones, sacred, stolen lands, etc that has been incurred in the name of building the anthropocentric cities of white modernity?
He asked another good question – do climate justice and racial justice go far enough to address loss and trauma suffered by Black and Brown bodies and their environment?
The act of the Anthropocene pathologising unsettlement by putting band-aids on wounds demonstrates its lack of imagination, hence he wants to stretch it to do more, to account for loss, to notice archetypal longings and algorithms beyond the quest for survival at all costs, to acknowledge the political nature of “the human”, to move beyond human-centredness and guilt and navel-gazing analyses of complicity, to see ghosts.
Anthropocene as a trope of unsettlement might go far enough to speak about becoming Black, but it doesn’t know of the grace of unsettlement: becoming-black.
In spite of the UN declaration of human rights in 1948 to restore things and cover wounds with band-aids such as justice programs, Dr Bayo wants to question how much is trauma worth, and whether the justice programs feel adequate to the feelings of loss suffered by people, and whether unsettled bodies feel justified by the coverage of justice?
For example, the Anthropocene could tell him about being black, or a subject of a city, even though a reduced, minoritarian subject of the global order, but it doesn’t tell him about the grace and gifts of unsettlement, that being unsettled is to invite other ways of being in the world, just like to be sick sometimes can give you a vision of life that you could not have by being whole and healthy.
Hence, I learn that the invitation is to lean into these gifts and the treasures of being broken open, which the Anthropocene, or the present order of the nation states, does not know how to do, beyond trying to restore climate and lives using countable reductionistic value because the entrepreneur doesn’t trace the legacy of displacement and cannot account for the bodies lost in the Atlantic slavery or the bones buried with the modernity order.
On the other hand, the Afrocene is the story of becoming Black – as identity – and the promise of becoming black – as the unfurling of identity – the story of displacement of extraction, of capture of coloniality.
As he puts it, becoming black is the desirous, un-language-able, atrophisation/flowing of bodies beyond coherent units of identity.
Dr Bayo explained that Black studies examine the arrangement that creates identity boxes, and how we are faster than the arrangement and bigger and vaster territorially than identity.
Like he said, what you are is continually fugitive, escaping those little boxes that modernity tries to incarcerate you within. I appreciate that he explained this part, as I have been wondering about the metaphor of fugitivity that he often uses in his posts and articles.
To him, identity isn’t just a mark of presence in the world but also the absence, and in that sense, we aren’t human beings but rather human becomings because we are still becoming and unfurling.
I learnt that his thesis is called transraciality, which deals with the view from movement, bodies as processual exterior, and bodies as dance, and I think his analogy of the shifting murmurations of starlings is apt.
It is interesting to know that bodies are not static – they are ecstatic – now I know what ecstasy really means, when viewed in terms of movement and dance.
I also learnt that fugitivity is moving beyond the grammar of the plantation – beyond the duality of black and white skin colours – requiring an animism cosmo-vision that goes beyond justice and technologies of the modern public – and there is a story called Abayomi about the grace of unsettlement.
Abayomi is a reiteration of the stories that have been told about Exu, which have been borrowed from Afro-Brazilian, Europa, Atlantic spiritualities, to tell the story of how at the heart of coloniality is something throbbingly alive, that will not be captured, that art can only curate.
He heard a story during his visit to Brazil regarding rag dolls, in which a rag doll was once made by a slave woman on a slave ship to console her baby to sleep after praying to the god Exu for help.
The name Abayomi means “they tried to bury me, but they didn’t know I am a seed”, or in other words, “the enemy would have won, but God prevailed.”
It means that even in suffering, underneath the boots of colonial oppression, there is a strange kind of vitality that will not be snuffed out by the bullets, that is alive even in death.
His version of the story is that of Esu the god dancing with the slave throughout the slave ship journey.
The dancing of Exu in the midst of capture and suffering is the surprising grace of displacement, of un/settlement – queering the heart of containment and telling a subaltern speculative fabrication about bodies un/settled.
Even as the police officer’s knee was pressing on George Floyd’s neck, he cried out “mama”, illustrating the fact that he remained connected to his ancestors in the midst of oppression.
So, becoming Black is the speculated fabulation that bodies unsettled are not bodies denied or eradicated, but are invitations to meet ourselves in new ways that there is a hidden trickster indigenous emancipating decolonial spiritual art in being oppressed that might help us navigate the world in different ways.
In order to counteract the story of the Anthropocene, the only way we can meet trouble, climate change, pandemics etc is to try to solve them (through) what he coined Afrocene, which is the territory of falling apart.
The Afrocene is the idea that the insecurity of loss hides joy, and that art only happens in cracks.
Art is not possible where there is settlement. Art needs unsettlement to work. Art is the technology of settlement, the texture of cracks. Whenever there are openings in the world, that is where art thrives.
What we see as art in cities today is mostly furniture. To Dr Bayo, art is something that is alive, moving, instigatory, entrusted with the act of disturbing identity.
When a dance is happening, when performative arts are afoot, the dancer isn’t just dancing, but rather speaking beyond words about the ecstatic movements of the body – how the body cannot be contained and how we are always living in a teenage indeterminate-verse, where things are still figuring themselves out.
His question is: How does art help us stay in the trouble of unsettlement? How would art be an invitation to be disturbed and unsettled, and how is being disturbed part of potentially emancipating decolonial politics?
Our solutions can only go so far – restoration, restitution, justice – it’s all nice – we need these as well – he isn’t dismissing them, but he sees a need for them to be supplemented by something else because all the green technologies and Paris conferences etc in the world will not address the ontological weight of loss and trauma that is swimming around us and in which we have our being.
Something else is desired beyond solutions; something else wants to happen beyond proliferating new identities within the city that is the very bedrock of violence, which the Anthropocene is unable to know or provide.
We need something more than liberal humanist traditional subjectivity to address the ills of today.
We need to become animists – we need to become Black.
It’s not about taking on black skin or Black identity – it’s about noticing that we ourselves are not as well-put-together as we think, that our identities are fugitive.
Whiteness is the denial of fugitivity, turning away from the idea that we are becoming animal, along with ecology, ancestrality, archetypes, etc.
Whiteness wants to tame everything, so that he can mount an architecture of presence.
We (white, black, white and green bodies) are all caught up in whiteness together, but it’s not working for us anymore as it is a dysfunctional project.
The solutions – repair, seek justice, become good white allies – are not quite good enough; we need to fall apart and follow the threads of our becoming.
It’s about listening differently to the world around us, co-creating different artistic political imaginaries, with exquisite awareness of Nature.
Real Rest is the Best 