How We Live Now: Báyò Akómoláfé on fugitive ideas

Hello,

I’ve always had a potent urge to escape. I realise that sounds like a prison break, but it’s not as if I’m trying to resist anything particularly oppressive. I just hate being constrained, even to good things. Show me a routine, an appointment, a commitment, or a social engagement, and I’ll show you my plan to evade it. I can’t help myself: I’m an innate fugitive. I leak out like smoke. I overflow like water. I find the fractures and the fissures. I run along the gulleys. 

It’s not just about turning up. I’m forever trying to escape language too. I hate the fixity of words, how one person reaches for a way to describe experience, and it catches on, being repeated and repeated until it’s just an empty chant. It seems to me that language decomposes through use. Our work is not to endlessly repeat, but hear the last person’s words, and to morph them into something new. 

In Báyò Akómoláfé, I see a fellow fugitive - far more fleet of foot than I, and far more adept at evading the hooks of stable language. When I thought about talking to him, I tended to imagine exploring a landscape rather than holding a conversation; and the landscape was, in itself, sentient. 

Born in Nigeria, Báyò is a writer, speaker, teacher and founder of The Emergence Network who finds his most sacred work in fatherhood. His book, These Wilds Beyond Our Fences, is an extraordinary meandering through the cutting edge of contemporary philosophy framed in letters to his daughter, Alethea. He is also the editor of We Will Tell Our Own Story, an anthology exploring Black African scholarship and knowledge. He now divides his time between Germany, India and the USA. However, he is a person of such shifting energy that my biography doesn’t nearly capture all that he does - you can read more here. 

In this week’s episode of How We Live Now, we consider how we can step out of the belief that humanity is in control of a passive planet, and instead wonder how we can learn to read the intelligence of the systems and landscapes that we inhabit. We meander our way to autism, and begin to think about how we can create a new language of neurodivergent experience that resists the labels applied from disinterested - or disgusted - outside viewers. And we take a look at ‘hushes’, the shadowy, scuttling figures that disrupt Báyò’s narratives.

This was a hugely playful space for me, full of deep enquiry and difficult thoughts. The conversation has been resonating through me ever since. I hope you enjoy it too. 

Take care,

Katherine

Links from the episode:

• Bayo’s website

• Bayo's book, These Wilds Beyond Our Fences

  
  How We Live Now is recorded using RiversideFM and hosted by Acast.

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From the transcript

Katherine May:

How did you come to the point of writing? Did that emerge from a kind of academic impetus, or was it more about telling your life story? Because you're a beautiful memoirist.

Báyò Akómoláfé:

Thank you so much. I'm blushing. You can see it, but I'm blushing. I started to write at a very young age, I had elaborate plans to write encyclopedia.

Katherine May:

I love that.

Báyò Akómoláfé:

Which didn't make any sense whatsoever to my parents, but I just wanted to write. I remember as a freshman... No, I think I was a sophomore in the university, and I wanted to give a public lecture just because professors were doing it, so why not a student? And so they asked me to actually, yeah, let's have a student try to give a public lecture. So I wrote my lecture. It was very Christocentric, which described my religious persuasion at the time. And so I wrote a public letter called Moses or Darwin, how... I forget the tagline. It was something about creationism.

Katherine May:

Oh, wow.

Báyò Akómoláfé:

Yes. And it became 200 pages. I wrote 200 pages.

Katherine May:

That doesn't surprise me at all.

Báyò Akómoláfé:

And to the university council that then and persuaded me to make it a book. Yeah, because I-

Katherine May:

That's amazing.

Báyò Akómoláfé:

... I just felt so from a very early age, I've always felt this what I might call an ecological ventriloquism, like something possesses and wants to write so that in a sense, I'm not the author.

Katherine May:

Yeah. So that something else is speaking through you.

Báyò Akómoláfé:

Yes. And I know that sounds corny sometimes, but it really feels like a very pressing and compelling felt experience that I'm not the one moving the pen. And I ritualize this in some ways by listening to music to write. And without that agency writing becomes impossible for me.

Katherine May:

That's so interesting. And it's definitely my experience too, that I can't access the part of me that writes. I don't know where that comes from. And I certainly have no control over it. I only wish I did. And it always feels like when I have written that I can look back over it and just wonder where those thoughts connected together. When did those connections happen and how-

Báyò Akómoláfé:

Exactly.

Katherine May:

... it's mysterious.

Báyò Akómoláfé:

Exactly. I have the same feeling. This is nice. I'm viewing it as if for the first time it is reassuring.

Katherine May:

Well, every now and then I get asked to write something that the spirit isn't moving me for. And that's so hard. And I wonder if that's how other people find writing all these people that hated writing at school. I think that's how it must have been for them. No wonder they hated it. It's awful. It's dreadful.

Báyò Akómoláfé:

Yes.

Katherine May:

So we are talking in this season about enchantment, which I've just written about, and my perspective on it was really that of a beginner and a learner to be more enchanted and to let that fluidity between the observable and the provable and the stateable to other people flow with those edges of my perception that I can't give voice to voice. And that are maybe not the same as other people's perception either. And I think for me, your work often speaks at the edges of that too. That you are thinking about that huge mixture of what it is to be human. Does that make sense to you?

Báyò Akómoláfé:

Yes. I mean edges, we are constantly performing edges to give ourselves definitions. Our stories are replete with edge-ritualizing work. This is where the city stops, and this is where the wilds begin. This is what it means to be human. And the other side of that is the monster. So we're constantly making edges. This is the reason why I named my book, These Wilds Beyond Our Fences. It's like at some point we will need to lean on the fence long enough to break into the so-called disreputable wilds to meet the monsters that we've cordoned off or quarantined or pushed away. Because the ontology of where we are is hollowing out and it's pushing us and to the edges, so edges.

Katherine May:

And I feel, I was writing about this morning actually, I've always identified as an edge dweller. That's where I'm comfortable on the borders between. And I think that's maybe where writers live in lots of ways. We're interpreters between those two places. We speak both languages.

Báyò Akómoláfé:

Yes.

Katherine May:

But I feel like this age is the age of the edge dweller. We are beginning to feel at home when everyone else is getting intensely uncomfortable.

Báyò Akómoláfé:

Yeah. I put it this way that, I mean, I've often written it this way that I think it was Karen Barad that said that we are in a time when the world is kicking back. I like the idea of the world kicking back. Suddenly, the world isn't this mute, instrumental backdrop to human sociality. The world is also an actor on the stage, or the stage is an actor as well. And the stage is mounting an insurgency against a plot, if you will, whether it's the hero's journey or whatever is playing out on the stage. The stage is like, I will have my say. And I think that's the very definition of enchantment for me. When things spill, when things refuse categorization or instrumentality.

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