The Tension of Emergence: Thriving in a world that remakes, not breaks

Breaking the Trance of Pragmatism with Bayo Akomolafe

• Jennifer England • Season 4 • Episode 13

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How do we respond to harm and injustice without reinforcing the very systems we want to tear down? What if our most pragmatic responses—fixing, solving, demanding—are part of a trance that keeps us under the thumb of power?

In this episode, Jennifer speaks with philosopher, writer, and teacher Bayo Akomolafe, whose work invites a sideways glance at activism, politics, and the idea that we can simply repair the world if we try hard enough. 

Together, they explore:

  • How activism can sometimes reinforce the “myth of repair” and the logic of pragmatic solutions
  • Why saying “no” is not always refusal, and how resistance can still participate in the systems it opposes
  • Bayo’s concept of parapolitics—an ethically experimental space beyond conventional political choreography
  • Fugitivity as a form of transformation rather than escape
  • How the “obvious” response to crisis can hide deeper entanglements and possibilities
  • The seasonal tension between saving and savoring, urgency and presence.

Come listen as Jennifer and Bayo explore what it might mean to break the trance of pragmatism—and discover new possibilities for aliveness, creativity, and ethical response in uncertain times.

Links & resources—


Gratitude for this show’s theme song Inside the House, composed by the talented Yukon musician, multi-instrumentalist and sound artist Jordy Walker. Artwork by the imaginative writer, filmmaker and artist Jon Marro. 

S4. Ep. 13 Breaking the Trance of Pragmatism with Bayo Akomolafe
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Jennifer: [00:00:00] A few months ago, in the heart of my city, there were two violent attacks against women on a popular walking trail. One that I've run and walked on for decades, and these attacks. Really kicked up a response of heartbreak and rage in my community and feeling those responses.

I just felt that we needed to gather and I felt it in my bones. So I put out an invitation on Facebook, which is what my community uses to share news. And while I didn't anticipate that many people to come, the event attracted hundreds of people and it felt so good to be together across gender, politics, culture, beliefs. And like so many of these events while.

There is such an aliveness to them. There was also the weight of expectation, for more [00:01:00] action, accountability, meaningful policy, behavioral and policy change. And I could feel the weight of a hope that somehow, that this would solve everything, at least for a while.

And while I could completely relate to this sentiment and wanted all those things too, I noticed that I was relating to the experience of organizing differently. And I had the distinct sense that somehow safety actually wasn't the final goal or the arrival point.

Somehow I trusted that the ripple of being together would instigate changes that I couldn't predict. That we couldn't predict.

You will hear more about that strange and marvelous gathering in this episode.

But I begin here because it reveals a significant shift I've made in my own thinking as I wrestle with this [00:02:00] season's core tension and perhaps my whole life. This tension between saving and savoring urgency and presence, stillness and transformation will and surrender. And I don't think I would've really appreciated my shift in thinking had I not gathered this past fall with my community.

To help us crack open the possibilities that come when we let go of certainty and the expectation of arrival points. I'm. So happy to be joined today by Bayo Akomolafe, who is a philosopher, a writer, a teacher, and one of the most destabilizing and generous thinkers I've encountered. He is the author of these Wilds Beyond our Fences and an editor of We Will Tell Our Own Story, the Lions of Africa Speak and is about to [00:03:00] welcome his new book.

Selah: A Bayo Akomolafe Reader later this month and I was lucky to receive an advanced copy of Selah, which gathers years of poetic and provocative strands and reflections into one place. And what I so appreciate about Bayo is that he encourages us to take a sideways glance at ideas and practices that we take for granted.

Through his work, he reveals the ways activism and political resistance in particular can actually reinforce the very systems we're trying to dismantle.

So I can't think of a better time to celebrate his forthcoming book this month, and also to help you and I wrestle with this kind of irresolvable tension between our urgency to act and the courage to stay with the trouble. So thank you for being here as we break our trance with the [00:04:00] pragmatic, not to avoid the real emergencies that we need to attend to, but to find new ways to create cracks and liberatory potential in these strange times.

Bayo way it's such a pleasure to be able to talk to you today in honor of your new book that's coming out, Selah, and I know we're on opposite ends of this turtle island. Me in the far north at minus 36 Celsius right now. 

Bayo: Oh my goodness. 

Jennifer: Intense winds. And you and the storm of all the things.

Yes. Us on the east coast there. 

Bayo: Yes. Yes. 

Jennifer: In honor of your book, which is a reader, Selah: A Bayo Akomolafe reader. I thought that I would approach it kind of like a braided river and that we'd pick up tributaries and Right. I wanted to pause and linger at the parts of the river That made me come alive as a way of, introducing new [00:05:00] listeners to your work, but also I hope, going deeper into the threads of what's.

Really enlivening you at this time? Yes, 

Bayo: yes. Let's do it. I'm so glad to be here, sister. Yeah. I'm looking forward to having a conversation with you about it. So let's do it. 

Jennifer: Where I'd love to start is, you know, in modernity and in academia in life, we are trained to look directly at a problem and to solve it.

But you speak about in so much of your work, looking away. And about peripheral vision and about an animism of the margins. 

Bayo: Yes. 

Jennifer: So I'm wondering when did you begin to sense that direct confrontation wasn't helpful and that.

Looking away actually could reveal more aliveness that would point us somewhere new. 

Bayo: Oh, that's that really strikes at the heart of my geopoetics [00:06:00] or cosmo poetics. It's, it's a simpler observation. It's noticing how systemic practices anticipate the individual. And precede, but are not distant from it is not a preceding that is distant from, it's a preceding that is entangled with, it's not a, it's not a sequentiality here that we're drawing out.

It's an a sequential preceding. There's something about how systems precede the individual and anticipate the individual that collapses and composts the idea that we're in charge. Right. Oh, oh, let's protest. When tomorrow at what time? 6:00 PM in the little box that the nation state has drawn out for us to do our protests in.

Right. There's a way that our most radical actions seem to already have been [00:07:00] articulated by the things that were supposedly up against. This is an example that might. Respond directly to this. A brother sent me a video recently. It was of a black scholar speaking about black refusal and. This scholar, at least in the snippet, in the video, in the part that I watched, was speaking about saying no to particular kinds of futures that are being imposed on us today.

No. To the capitalist utopias no to even the brands of Afrofuturist futures that are. You know, articulated by Disney. It was a no. We are not having that. Just say no is what this black scholar said. Just say no. And on the surface of things that feels like an applaudable move, just say no. But I wrote back to this brother and I said that brother, I don't think saying no [00:08:00] is refusal .

Saying no could actually be a form of participation. Right. It's like switching on and switching off. You're still participating? There, there has to be something that goes beyond just saying no, because I could be eloquent. I could speak truth to power. This is why Fred Moten said that we do not speak truth to power, and I suppose he says that.

We did not speak truth to power because speaking truth to power, and it can often be a way of legitimizing and participating within the stream of events and paradigms that are sustained. It's like my participation reinforces and ies the logic that incarcerates me. And I'm not saying the thing to do is to redraw participation.

I'm saying that there has to be something about refusal that does not turn on No or yes, and this is what I think about as non legibility, but I [00:09:00] digress. 

Jennifer: Mm-hmm. 

Bayo: Your question is, you know, it invites us to notice the ways that we are in larger. Paradigmatic, atmospheric spaces that we think we are acting.

We think we're making choices that I chose this dress today. It could have been, you know, a committee a decade ago that decided that, and I'm not saying agency can be reduced to one being or a single collective. I'm just saying it's pheromonic in its quality and that's most scandalizing to modernity. It likes to think that we are in charge, but what we are noticing today is that we are in larger streams of doing, and because we're in larger entangling mangling schools, I mean streams of doing, we have to.

Cultivate the sensibility of looking to the sides because clarity could be obfuscating actually. 

Jennifer: So in that response to your [00:10:00] brother looking away, the idea that refusal needs to become stranger, then yes. Unarticulated no. 

Bayo: Yes. 

Jennifer: Just to ground it for our listeners, like what might you point to?

Because you talk about becoming water and this is where in the conversation I need to just release even in this moment, any need to grip what you're saying and kind of listen to you with my whole being to listen for and with you about how to stretch to the periphery.

So what in a refusal, if we're both sensing the flows of how we are enlisted in Modernity's Logic? Yes. 

Bayo: Yes. 

Jennifer: What do we look for or see in this stranger refusal? 

Bayo: Mm. It might come down to, well, let me, slowly introduce what I call the attentional. And the attentional [00:11:00] is a field instead of the ways we often.

Speak about attention might give one the impression that we give attention to the world. That it starts from the sovereign subject. Who decides to pay attention to the world. And we use language like paying attention. Of course, the old, older English forms Had different significant meanings for paying attention, but it always presumes.

Individual. It starts from the individual that looks out upon the world. But what we're learning today in post humanist scandalous ways is that how we pay attention is more dis is more aptly described like gravity. Right? It's, it doesn't start with choice for instance. That's a very deep.

Habituated way of thinking about the human, like we have choice and it removes us from ecology and from ancestrally, from density, [00:12:00] from intensity, from furniture, from microbial activisms. It removes us from the world that shapes and modifies us, right? So it's not that we pay attention, it's that the attentional is like a gravitational field.

I was speaking with a sister. From Brazil and she was speaking about entering a room and she's white Brazilian. She was speaking about entering a room and saying a thing to the audience. She's with a, a co speaker who's a white who, Brazilian man. Right? She says something and the audience nods their head, but when the white Brazilian man says the same thing.

In fact, borrowed from her language earlier on, the room is brought to life, right? Like they're paying attention. Now, if you ask each of those people, why did you react in that way? She said the same thing. She even said it better than this [00:13:00] dude. Why did you react? It's not the progressive left's response is to tell each of those individuals do better.

Or do your work better, but it doesn't come down to the individual We're speaking about logics, managerial logistics, gravitational fields, principalities and powers that exceeds the individual. So when we're talking about these matters of turning to the side or refusal as non legibility sister, it does not begin with us.

You know, it does. Refusal never turns on the individual or around the individual. The individual is not the anchorage of refusal. It is the world in its becoming. It is the world in its becoming that creates the density of refusal. This is what I call crack. A crack is the obliquity. The angular obliquity of modernity.

It's how modernity has never been straightforward. It has never been flattened. [00:14:00] It has always been infested with tensions, with things that are invisible, with lurking ghosts. Those are the ingredients that draw attention in different ways. Those are the alchemy of how refusal turns, right? So I am decentering humans from the language or the vocation of refusal and saying it's the world. It's not left to us to do that. But I think that there is a politics that knows how to sniff out those moments of refusal and cultivate participation in those spaces. This is what I call para politics. 

Jennifer: Yeah.

Beautiful. I have so many questions, but I'd love to share a story to ping off you. Please, 

Bayo: please,

Jennifer: So my background is gender activism. I did that for about 25 years, gender-based violence, women's reproductive health, you, L-G-B-T-Q policies and so forth. And I did it at the activist level in downtown Vancouver [00:15:00] to government work as a diplomat for many years.

I'm now five or six years out of that work and, doing podcasting and writing and, coaching with leaders and change makers and so much of my thinking has changed. And we had a situation in our town, this is the story last fall, where two women on this very popular running route were assaulted by two different men, two different women, two different men, and the last one happened on a Sunday morning, and for whatever reason, I just had this impulse to spontaneously invite a gathering, a walk. And I don't know, it just came out of nowhere. I just said, I, I wanna gather and for no real other reason other than to just be with other beings and bodies .

'cause I had heard so many women talk about feeling unsafe. And so I did that and I thought maybe 15, 20 people might come. It was minus 10. The river was leaking through its [00:16:00] ice and Misty, very cold, dark in the morning here in the north. Maybe 650 people came. I saw all these cars, I saw all these headlights coming, and I just had this sense of being, this convergence happening.

And it was both surprising in the number, but also what was so interesting was that I got asked by the media, by former colleagues, so. You know, is this gonna be like a take back the night vibe? What do you want from this? What are you gonna do with this? There was this assumption that there must be something to this.

Bayo: Yes. 

Jennifer: And I think that's where I really pick up on this idea of yours that you talk about throughout your work, that we don't need to save the world because it reinforces the myth of complete repair. Yes. And what I realized in walking. I just got like chills just in this moment as I share this with you.

Mm-hmm. Is that [00:17:00] I, I wasn't there to walk to create safety, a new policy, a new justice model, even, 15 new lights on the trail, whatever it was, it was really a sense of if we can just be together. I don't know what's gonna come up from this. I don't know. And that was the, the destabilizing energy that felt that it had the most potential was in the, I don't know.

Hmm. So I'm, I'm curious how that lands for you and how that maybe gestures towards this looking away and also be this para of politics that you speak of.

Bayo: That is such a powerful example. Even though I am usually very shy of. Delineating or itemizing examples of what I call parapolitics.

It seems too sacred to people, an archive of language things, right? Sure. But, but, but, but this [00:18:00] feels so powerful to hear, and I love to hear this story again and again and again. You've given me two irretrievable gifts. Today. One is the word conchoidal, and then this is the other story. I love this. I often demarcate between politics, which is the realm of the spotlight, right?

And then Infrapolitics coinage of I think James Scott or something like that. Which is a realm of the Searchlight and then parapolitics. The politics requires us to be legible. It requires us to state our objectives, to be individuals, to be coherent, to be proper bodies. There's something ontologically violent about politics.

It says, this is the pragmatic way to do stuff. Don't scream and shout that doesn't do anything. Call your senator, right? Mm-hmm. You know, call a legislator, write a form or write a letter. Do things [00:19:00] properly, right? Mm-hmm. So politics. Congeals and settles. And it settles it. The violence is the settlement.

It obscures by settling. Right. It reduces the field to a morally policed, pragmatic choreography. Right. That says this is how to dance here. Right. But that always leaves things out. It leaves things out. It leaves black bodies, female bodies, it leaves all kinds of bodies out, right? So there's this other trickling field.

I call it the distant cousin of politics, infrapolitics, right? It's the response to Gayatri Spivak's question. So minor question, can the sub altern speak? Can those who are marginalized and excluded and oppressed and trampled upon, can they speak? Do they have a voice as well? So, infrapolitics attempts, it seems like the.

Coherent attempt to push back against the political [00:20:00] field. This is where we get invitations to speak truth to power, right? Mm-hmm. To hold them to account, to insist on having a seat at the table. 

That's all well and good. The danger and the risk of that is that in pushing to be seen by the emperor.

We are cursed by the empire.

Jennifer: Yeah. 

Bayo: In, in, in pushing for legibility. In pushing for a, like, I wanna see at the table, we reduce power to the terms that has been established by the political field. 

Jennifer: Mm-hmm. 

Bayo: Right. And it's, it's like, it's like I've seen, for instance, people say that white folks have privilege.

Of course white folks have privilege. I would of course turn that on his head and say, privilege has white folks. There's something carceral about it. But in pushing back and saying apologize for your privilege. There's something about that that ensnares [00:21:00] the protestor within the logic of what privilege is like.

If you need to protest against it, then you need to agree that this is what power looks like. Mm-hmm. Like this is what power is and ought to be. I want to pay my bills too, and we do wanna pay our bills. But the thing about that is that once we argue for space in settlement, we become part of the epistemological process and, and ensnarement of settlement.

So my problem was isn't there something other that, that is possible that is not the searchlight or the spotlight because they. Tend to confirm and reify each other. Isn't there something else to do or to notice here, and this is why I coined para politics. parapolitics isn't seeking to make demands known, and that's why you're like, it's not about a demand.

There's no demand here. There's just this tension that [00:22:00] invites. This call. And some might say, oh, this is spiritual bypass. Yeah, no, it's not about bypassing anything. It's actually about staying with the tension that is already right in the field. Now, many people might say, well, this doesn't do anything.

You're right. It may not do stuff in the logistical choreography of politics, but that is the point. Like the pragmatic is the morally sensible. What Paralytics is looking for is the ethically experimental. It's looking for something that isn't available yet that we have no language for. So we gather in a picnic or we call 20 people and a thousand people show up.

It's this. Is this urging this sensibility that there's something more and let's stay with it. Because if we don't crack open the field of sensibility, we will keep going around in circles. Mm-hmm. Thinking that our agitation or our anger is actually amounting to much [00:23:00] other than the reinforcement of the familiar.

Jennifer: And what it is so interesting, just to use that example, 'cause I think it's so helpful, even though I, I take your invitation to be careful about pinning even this story down in any particular way, but just the insistence that I, as an individual, if I called or gathered, then I must have a goal.

I must have a point and I must. Create impact. Yes. And if I don't, I as an individual in this frame of activism has failed not only myself, but women. Yes. Or the future women who yes, have fallen because of my lack in the moment. It was so interesting to sit with this tension 'cause that's exactly what I've been sitting with for months.

Yes. And strange things have happened since then that I've been paying attention from this event, from putting things out [00:24:00] strange. Connections from halfway around the world who have connections to this particular situation have come into my orbit. And I thought, ah, there's these, what I think you call leakages or cracks or excesses that are so strange, but are a signal that something different is in motion, even though I cannot define it or pin it down.

So, 

Bayo: yes. It's what some of my favorite continental philosophers and visionaries, Fernan, Deni, the Deluze, Guattari, would have named as a line of flight. It's like in the accommodation, I have this concept that I call accommodation and accommodation is how bodies are rendered legible.

Or coherent. It's the urge to coherence, right? Mm-hmm. I, I have a PhD. What does that mean? Within this accommodation, it means that I get to be seen as intelligent. Whether or not I am seen as intelligent, [00:25:00] it means that, oh, this person has a PhD. This person must be intelligent. The accommodation allows that kind of meaning making practice, right?

Accommodations are assemblages. Our bodies, tensions, meanings, concepts, you know, visible and invisible are brought together to make worlds. Tangible, right? Mm-hmm. But accommodations leak all the time. And how they leak is this dynamic process that I call the cracks, right? It's how they're constantly incoherent, but trying desperately to hide their incoherence.

Yeah. What what you are noticing. What you're noticing is that sometimes the way we see whether it's the forward facing mobility, upward mobility of politics or clarity seeking in scientific research or activism can actually reinforce an accommodation. But what we want to do is to be alive to all the ghosts in it.

Jennifer: Yeah. Beautiful. [00:26:00] And I think that's what's so hard about this particular cultural moment is because we are so, at least I'll speak from I, it's so easy for me to reproduce this left right distinction, these polarities, these binaries. Well, if we only get rid of the bad guy, if we only got rid of Trump, if we only.

You know, don't elect this individual or that individual. If we could only reinvigorate this policy, then everything would be better. Everything would be optimal. Exactly. And, and I think that's what you're. I mean, literally your work is like a, an earthquake and an underground stream in that I think you're inviting us into this discomfort of this moment.

That we, we are being dismembered in all ways that our con codal will bring that term in. This idea that split along planes that are. Unfamiliar or unanticipated and to pay attention to that. And that's where the aliveness is. And I think that's, for me, where I've been so [00:27:00] drawn to is, is kind of shedding old skin, not for a new story or new skin, yes.

But for pain listening with. Sideways. But with all of me, that is not just me listening with river, with raven, with mist, with ice, with bodies to re, it's like, oh, actually safety isn't a final arrival point that we can walk into and guarantee, nor is justice. Justice 

Bayo: indeed. 

Jennifer: And so there's this sense of.

Well, we must just walk again. I don't know when. Yes. Maybe we'll walk again. Maybe in a different formation, maybe with different people. Yes. But there's this invitation of this spontaneity that I think you're inviting and this curiosity and this paying attention to. Yes, this is the optimal way in which we're being socialized into, and yet there's so many other ghosts and myths to pay attention to 

Bayo: and see, it's so brilliantly [00:28:00] put, so brilliantly put.

That's exactly the invitation of the para political or the para pragmatic, right. It's, it's that you, you walk straight not because of your hard work or your. Or your, or your excellence. You walk straight because you're accommodated. You are subsidized by multi-species, you know multiple species.

You are a multi-species project. Your identity, it's not even essential to you. Your identity is a practice. It's a practice of, of, of technology. It's a practice of fields. It's a practice of memory. It's a practice of technological grids and social algorithms. Take one of these away and the phenomenon that you claim to be yours, your identity might switch a bit or how you think about it.

So it's learning to think as a forest that seems particularly difficult for modern citizens. gestating [00:29:00] stating in the. Haloed, you know, choreography of the individual, the glorious individuated atomic agent that solves the problem. And that's what is difficult to come to stay with. 

Jennifer: It is, it is so difficult.

But maybe this is a good time to bring in your concept of fugitivity, because this is right. Essential to your work. Yes. And you describe it as a site of hopelessness, of defeat, and even of hiding. Yes. And so, for folks listening who are less familiar with this concept, other than, you know, the escape artist fugitive yeah.

Could you talk a little bit about why that's so important? And I'd love to ping off, I have a couple stories that might enliven this too, but why is this so important to you and, and what does fugitivity make possible in our politics? Yes, 

Bayo: yes. Well fugitive first of all is not [00:30:00] escape. Right, because Escape is doing some other kind of work while The Fugitive is doing some other kind of work.

I'll see if I can explain. There's this wonderful story of Ellen and William Kraft two slaves in making make Macon Georgia, Macon State, Georgia. They were in they decided, I, I think. I think this was in the 19th century. They decided to escape to run away from the plantation. Ellen Craft and William Craft, they were not married, but they were in love with each other.

And Ellen was white presenting. Her father was a white man Of course. And so you understand the dynamics of that. She could pass as a white person. And so Ellen and William crafted Ellen and William Craft crafted a sublime escape plan, so to speak. I'm using escape in the popular ways.

It's understood. [00:31:00] And their plan was Ellen would wear, would dress up as a white man. 

Jennifer: Mm-hmm. 

Bayo: Right. Do you know this story? 

Jennifer: No, but tell me, I'm, I'm just like, oh yeah, she did. Of course she did. 

Bayo: She dressed up as a white man and they were going to travel up to Canada where you are, right? Past Virginia and all of that.

And. William was to dress up as her slave, or now his slave. And the story is amazing. I wondered why this is not a major Hollywood picture because they wrote about it and they settled in Canada for a while and they were a celebrity couple there. They traveled and they were stopped at many points.

It's almost like a, it, it fits all the trope of a movie where a spy walks into a building and drops something and it narrowly escapes the guard and the guard in that. Also, exhaustingly obvious way says Sir. Meant, meant to, meant to [00:32:00] heighten the anxiety of the audience. And the spy turns back and says, you dropped this.

You know? Yeah. And, but that really happened to them. That really happened to them. Many times they would be stopped and they would sir, and then Ellen would turn back and say, oh, you dropped your pen, or something like that. And they traveled, they made their way out of the plantation, or did they? Now, the, the question for me is.

Not about escape it, it, when we think about fugitivity normally we would say that the Fugitive Act is about escaping the plantation is about removing oneself is an act of marinage, right? Removing oneself from the vocation of slavery from the plantation. But there is. Another sense that is even deeper here and why some black scholars are really attracted and magnetized to Fugitivity is because it's not so much an act of removing oneself as it's an act of [00:33:00] transmutation.

And this story I've just told kind of stays with that. They were not themselves walking out. No one walks out of the plantation with their heads held high. It's not a matter of. Moving atomically from one place to another. Mm-hmm. It's that to cross the threshold, you have to become different. You have to be something different.

There's another dude, I forget his name, but he mailed himself out of a box. Through a box to a, a different location. And his nickname was, I don't know, Fred, the box, whatever his right, because he became a box to get out. You, you don't, you don't walk out, you crawl out. There's something about the threshold that demands transmutation.

And so why this is important to to my work is I feel that. All our demands for freedom for Justice still seems anticipated by the [00:34:00] plantation. It still feels like a vocation of the plantation, and we're circling from one corner of the plantation to another. It's from the field to the house, or we want to be in the house more, or we don't want to be in the field.

It feels like we're circling around until we listen to the sides, to the feral wilds. Until we let go of those. Political anchorage the, the, the anchor points, the guardrails by which we have steadied ourselves mm-hmm. We will keep on maintaining the plantation because the plantation often extends itself with escape.

And this is why I say that escape is not fugitivity. Mm-hmm. Because you can escape and in your escaping, you're carrying on the vocation. There were some slaves that enslaved other slaves.

From the plantation. Mm-hmm. Right. So there's no act of purity. Escape is the presumption of purity that you're intact and you leave.

But Fugitivity says, no, [00:35:00] refusal is a multi-species project. You cannot just move from one place to another. You have to become different. You have to become water, or in Deluzian terms, you have to become monster. 

Jennifer: Yeah. I'm just pinging off of you. I watched this beautiful Iranian film by Jahar Pani called It Was Just an Accident.

It won the big Cannes Film Festival, Palm D'or, in the fall. The film is about this guy who is a mechanic and a stranger shows up at night and the stranger happens to be his old prison interrogator, and they're both free of those identities, but he ends up.

Following him and kidnapping him and then trying to figure out was this really the torturer from prison ? And he gathers his friends up wondering, you know, is, is it really him?

And they eventually find out, but it haunts them in all [00:36:00] these, particular ways where they may be free from the prison, but they're still in, they're still being watched by one another. Even the imprisoned is watching the, interrogator and the interrogator is watching the now free imp prisoner.

And then what's so remarkable is that the director and I, I watched a, a short film. interview by the director and he had to become a taxi man in order to film in Iran because he had been outlawed for making any films. And so he had these tiny cameras in the taxi in which cultivated his skills to be able to actually make this film primarily in moving cars in order to evade detection.

So in that way, I think about, oh, is that what you mean about becoming, you know, in a way. You're still enslaved. We are still enslaved. Whatever the system it might be. And you also, in order to [00:37:00] become fugitive, you need to become taxi driver. You need to become water. Right. In the case of the river where I was walking.

Bayo: Right. It's, it, it, one may say that the universe is hostile to straight lines. It's like we and our politics, we love straight lines. We love like a semial moment. What, what was George Bush. Junior's phrase was, I dunno why I escaped my, that thing hung on the banner, like the end of a war.

We won victory or something like that, right? It, it never is clean and tidy. How we draw lines in the sand, the tide comes in and it erases those measures and those thresholds. So yes, I feel that we are, I don't wanna say we're up against. But from the perspective of modern citizenry. And our isolated, seemingly isolated subjectivities, one may poetically say [00:38:00] that we're up against a world that has never left us alone.

Mm-hmm. Right? Mm-hmm. And so we have to think, conchoidally, we have to think like cracks. R Rhyzomatically, my mycellially. We cannot think like highways anymore or parking lots. And that's how most of our solutionistic stick enterprises are framed. Like, okay, we're gonna build stuff here. We're going to design our way out.

But the world is, the world is in excess of design, right? Mm-hmm. And, and that's what makes it interesting and actually livable. 

Jennifer: Yeah. Beautiful. Well, I wanna bring in I guess two things. One, a piece around responsibility and agency in this realm where there's ongoing oppression and violence and harm, but this idea where, you know, many of us can feel both the necessity and the limits of identity politics.

Bayo: Yes. 

Jennifer: But how do we take responsibility? With the real harms underway, whether it's [00:39:00] Ice, whether it's provocations, to continue to colonize indigenous peoples in, Greenland or taking, leaders out of countries, out of Venezuela, stealing oil, whatever it might be. And I realize this is, this is in excess of what's already ongoing in colonization, active colonization that's still here everywhere. But yes. 'Cause some might say, okay, well that's nice Jen and Bayo, like, that sounds very poetic and you know, rhizomatic and, and so forth. But I just putting myself in the listeners' shoes. Okay. Then what? Like when rubber hits the road, how do we both address harm but also not become stuck in this certainty of identity?

Bayo: Yes. 

The answer to that is already I implicated or entangled with the question. The logic of the question is right there. How do we do this? Or how do we do that? Well, when you pose that question people can already feel the tension of immediacy and [00:40:00] urgency, right? Mm-hmm.

If my daughter were to fall into a, well, I'm not gonna tell people that the times are urgent. Let us slow down. 

Jennifer: Yeah, 

Bayo: it's obvious things that get so obvious, you can write in there and you, you get your daughter out. Yeah. But if I may, being the amateur process theologian that I am, let's stretch obviousness, just a little wider than it usually is because obviousness is usually seen as this very thin space of immediacy, right?

Mm-hmm. It's obvious what to do. We need to kick back, we need to fight back, and yes. Those things are obviously obvious, right? But, but the obvious obviates, right? Yes, yes. The, the, it obviates a lot. It obscures, it hides a lot like the gradient, fields and worlds, you know, hiding behind the obvious. When I hit my laptop and I go to chat, GBT.

Right, or Claude [00:41:00] or the internet. It's obvious when I types a prompt that it oughts to respond to me. I demand an answer, right? But what's not so obvious hiding in that thin liminal space of obviousness? What's not so visible are the data farms in Kenya. Hmm. Or the technological infrastructure that is being planned to be part of the Atlantic Ocean, or the poison of cobalt killing Congolese bodies on the African continent.

All of that is part of the switch. All of that is part of the obvious. It's just that we're habituated into seeing the obvious as immediate. So when people say, what do we do? And they already know the answer, I don't try to discourage them from the answer. I say, that's what's available for you. But I think that that's also a way of acknowledging that the answer may not be available for us.

Mm-hmm. The para political is not something we can snap our fingers and demand [00:42:00] immediately. Someone ask me a question, how do we operationalize cracks? And like you, you can't, it's not you. You can. Operationalize it. Yeah. You can't make it. 

Jennifer: Yeah. 

Bayo: Something you do it. We live in a world where things are done to us and things happen on their own, you know?

And, and that is, that is what is humbling about speaking about entanglement and all of that. So directly to Ice, I would want to hit the streets and, and do stuff I would want to protest as well. I've spoken about Renee Good and Alex Preti already many times I've been teaching about Renee.

Good. From a theological perspective already, I, I want to do as much as possible. You want to raise money for immigrant families. You wanna call your senator. Those feel, feel like obvious things to do. The danger here is that the obvious obviates and sometimes when we're pushing back we become the very thing we're pushing back again against.

Mm-hmm. Gavin Newsom is a some minor example. [00:43:00] You know, he might just be the Democratic candidate 2028 for president. But he's speaking the language of Trump and he feels it's necessary and some others rational minds feel. Yeah, that's a necessary thing to do. Sound like Trump fight fire with fire, but that's also a slippery slope, you see?

Yeah. What's obvious may actually reinforce the logic that you are up against. And that's the thing of that I'm telling, trying to seed in culture or to. Allow to bloom. It's not what's obvious here. It's all the ways that the obvious stutterers that I really am in, in tune with that.

I want to notice all the ways, what's obvious, shakes a little bit. Or stutters or moves or migrates. I wanna follow that and see where it leads. That may not be a pragmatic solution, but I think it might break the, spell the trance of the pragmatic that has held us spell bound in [00:44:00] repeating realities we don't want.

Jennifer: Your work has helped me unsettle the idea of a tightly bounded self. It is encouraged a real attention to aliveness and spontaneity. It is encouraged me to follow the creativity that comes from strange places and all of that to watch for this entanglement.

And to celebrate where and how We are either enlisted or we're, we're free Both. And at any given time. Yes. And so there's, ah, what do I wanna say? There's an essential undoing that you're inviting us into that I have practically brought into my vocational work, into my poetry, into my writing, into my work with leaders in a way that [00:45:00] I hope furthers this.

Opportunity for decoloniality for something other than modernity, for something other than the dominant paradigm that is far more interesting. Free, free. Not in the sense of, okay, we're free to do our will, but in a way that draws our attention to where there's always reciprocity between what we think is the boundaries of us and the world itself.

And back in. Yes. 

Bayo: Yes, yes. I love that. It might be helpful to add here just to think theoretically about these things that what's, as I was saying about obviousness, like what's obvious is a sensorial field, and I'm gonna echo the words of my dear sister, Nora Bateson, that our, the work of this time seems to be to cultivate new kinds of sensibilities. Right. It's that perception has never been internal [00:46:00] perception is ecological. We participate in perception and it sustains the obvious, right? It subsidizes what we name as the obvious that is changing. Mm-hmm. And we are already feeling the mass disabling effects of the tremors in the field of the obvious.

Right now we just cry. It feels like a more obvious thing to do is to cry. Why does that feel obvious now? Right. Why does it feel more obvious now to, for people to say, I don't know what to do about politics. I don't know what to do. I'm just gonna stay at home. People might blame them and pathologize them and say, well, you are part of the problem.

But the obvious, the field of the obvious is changing, and I feel that there are morsels cells of emancipation in examining and staying with those places where sensibility might shift a little bit. 

Jennifer: Well, one of my last questions for you before we wrap up is, 

Bayo: yeah.

Jennifer: You know, your new [00:47:00] book Seila gathers your thinking over the years, and I, I appreciate it. It's in these spurts of poetic prose and giving us little crumbs of, of how your thinking has changed and shifted and metabolized and, and I'm, I'm really curious where did it defeat you? What did it invite you to relinquish in the creation of this, cultural artifact called a book

Bayo: I think born in the Christian, south of Nigeria. I carried. Inheritances that I didn't quite name fully, or maybe it wasn't possible to name it fully. I, I carried legacies that postured me as a member of a pure class. And, and let me say a little bit more about that. I did not know that I was carrying the burden of purity for a long time in my posture, in [00:48:00] my attitudinal.

In my public facing persona, something about this collection, it's like a friend told me, he said, you've been writing about Wilds all this time. You are yet to be introduced to it, right? It's something about, there's something in the course of the development of this book rendered me porous to the wilds and have.

You know, it has brought me back to a deep ancestral reckoning with the trauma of my birth, 

the 

Bayo: circumstances of death. That was the condition of my emergence into the world. Stories that were told in my family that I had to listen to again, dynamics in my family life. There's something.

co-terminous about these eruptions and the book's [00:49:00] emergence in the world. So even though I was always theoretically against purity, there's something about getting my hands dirty that this book bookmarks and, and celebrates and Christians and, and so yeah, I'm, I know I'm speaking in Proverbs, but.

It's almost all it, it feels violent to render everything into words, but that feels right.

Jennifer: Yeah. Well, beautiful. Thank you for just your, your courageous cracking open and what I love about geo poetics, and as I mentioned, I'm, I'm raised by a geomorphologist. 

Bayo: Yeah. 

Jennifer: Rock. A rock man, if you will.

And then a plant mother, a bryologist, la mosses, the tiniest of, of nonvascular plants. And I think what, what I resonate with you so much on so many different in levels is this. Th this merging of, of the [00:50:00] crack as something hard that's breaking open. And what I find in your work ultimately is tenderness and just a, a love and a generosity.

And it's words that I come back to and have written in, in my book in progress is that it's a beauty that hurts. That living is a beauty that hurts. And. The ghosts and the lineages and the ancestors, and the trouble is the reckoning that will never not be there. And the way you invite us into that con coital plane, 

Bayo: that's a good word.

Such a 

Jennifer: powerful 

Bayo: word that is, 

Jennifer: is, is a real gift. And with that, your humor and your love for your family, and for this planetary, crazy group of us who are, energized by the rivers of your work. [00:51:00] So thank you so much. 

Bayo: Thank you, Jennifer. That was beautiful.

Thank you very much. 

Speaker 2: so here's the essence of what I'm taking from this conchoidal coital chat with Bayo. First, he helped me understand my instinct that when I wanna resist power and domination, sometimes how I do it gets me caught in a trap.

And I think about the pressure or the expectation on the gathering I organized to change policy or ensure accountability to shift gender relations. Or even to secure safety. And when I reflect back on it, it feels like the logics of pragmatism. Do something, change something. And instead he helps me pay attention to the spontaneous, the illegible, the uncertain happenings that are bubbling up. If we can look [00:52:00] sideways, to liberate the aliveness that we're so looking for.

Secondly, I loved his concept of Fugitivity, as a disruption of a fantasy of a clean escape that FGI doesn't keep the self intact, but is. A strange transmutation that leaves none of us untouched. And so he says we have to become different: water, monster, other. In other words, become with in new and surprising ways, like the couple who escaped the plantation from the United States and made their way to Canada.

Third Bayo, and I grappled with that question that so many of us are asking right now, but what do we do? How do we respond? And this delivers us into the heart of our seasonal tension between saving and savoring [00:53:00] immediacy, urgency, the impulse to act.

And yet as he shares with us so much of what appears to be obvious, the obvious thing to do, hides. Broader flows and entanglements.

And so I wanna say, wrapping up this episode, if you feel slightly destabilized right now, welcome. You're not alone. 

Allow this conversation to move over you like a stream of water. Let it disturb the ground gently and nudge you into asking new questions and new ways of perceiving and to trust that whatever is moving stuttering or migrating in the field or inside you may you trust that this energy will break the trance of the pragmatic, the obvious, and open up new possibilities. My hunch is that [00:54:00] even for me, like failing to save what I love is not the final evaluation on whether my devotion to this wild planet made a difference.

In the very failing it shows my willingness to be entangled with a beauty that hurts.

You can find resources and links from this episode in the show notes to learn more about Bayo's new book that is available for pre-order in addition to his ongoing festivals, classes, and retreats.

To stay in touch with me, you can join me on Substack, where I rethink activism, leadership, politics, and weaving in spirituality and new ways of understanding the self and community that may encourage your creative emergence as we wrestle with the messy realities of being human.

And finally, be sure to click follow the show so you can [00:55:00] catch a bonus micro episode. I will be offering a seven minute practice to help you deepen the learning of this episode into the field of your own life in a way that is ironically pragmatic. 

So that's all for now. . I am Jennifer England. Thank you so much for being with me here on the Tension of Emergence.