#260 | Monstrosity: The Trickster, An Invader, & Fractures Of Messianic Becomings w/ Bayo Akomolafe

Intro: 8:44

In this episode, I speak with Bayo Akomolafe, author of 'These Wilds Beyond Our Fences', Executive Director and Chief Curator for The Emergence Network (A Post-Activist Project), and host of the online writing course, ‘We Will Dance With Mountains: Writing as a Tool for Emergence’. 

We begin by discussing Bayo's recent essay ‘I, Coronavirus. Mother. Monster. Activist.’:

One of the central questions I ask with this essay is: If this is indeed a war, do we really want to win it? What if winning is the worst possible outcome we could imagine? Do we want to come out on top, stamp out this viral enemy, and restore agency to the cold ossified tentacles of the familiar? Are we sure this disruption is not what we want, what we’ve cried for in unvoiced ways? Should we not treat this opening as our grand marronage, our fugitive departure from exhausted cottonfields?

Nothing about this moment is romantic. And we should be careful about smoothening the hard and recalcitrant edges of this phenomenon to fit our ready-made narratives about the so-called deeper meanings of the pandemic. I speak of popularized stories about, say, the Earth’s comeuppance, about the virus being on ‘our’ side against the one-percenters and the boomer generation, about the fall of capitalism or Gaia’s revenge, about the way love always prevails. This isn’t the rise of Nature to correct everything that has been wrong; this isn’t Eywa battling it out with the extractivist corporations. Not exclusively. This virus is not a resource for the factories that produce human intelligibility; it need not surrender to our appeals for everything to make sense. As such, I am very reluctant to offer an overview about what is happening, or to perpetuate those convenient stories because they tend to re-centralize humans as heroes-in-wait (if only we could get our act together, you know). (https://bit.ly/30xaTP3)

Bayo Akomolafe is a husband and father, as well as an international speaker, poet and activist for a radical paradigm shift in consciousness and current ways of living. Bayo is globally recognized for his unconventional, counterintuitive, and indigenous take on global crisis, civic action and social change. He is the Executive Director and Coordinating Curator for The Emergence Network. Through his work with The Emergence Network, “Bayo hopes to inspire a diffractive network of sharing –- a slowing down, an ethics of entanglement, an activism of inquiry, a ‘politics of surprise’… one that does not treat the crises of our times as exterior to ‘us’ or the ‘solutions’ that conventional activism offers as discrete or separate from the problems that we seek to nullify.”

Episode Notes:

- Read Bayo’s essay ‘I, Coronavirus. Mother. Monster. Activist.’: https://bit.ly/30xaTP3

- Learn more about Bayo and his work at his website: http://bayoakomolafe.net

- Learn more about his course ‘We Will Dance With Mountains: Writing as a Tool for Emergence’: http://course.bayoakomolafe.net

- Learn more about The Emergence Network: http://www.emergencenetwork.org

- Purchase his book ‘These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home’: http://bit.ly/2EUNVYL

- The song featured in this episode is “Baiji Dolphin” by Felix Rösch: https://youtu.be/XBsGPFzbW8M