So, dear, whether doorbell or three taps, the door swung open to meet a familiar stranger. It wasn’t her. It was her beautiful life-partner, Fern, who welcomed us both into her home with generous hugs, ushering us toward the living room. I stole a glimpse at the beckoning, homey interior. It smelled of tea, biscuits, and goodness. All the scene needed was fluffy balls of snow on the windowpane outside, a fireplace made of red brick, and a dining set with a red-and-white checkered tablecloth, and it would have taken me back to those televised visions of a “proper home” I was fascinated with as a child.
To the right of the room, as I had expected, there was a whole shelf of important-looking books in the hall. Something shifted: now, you see, I was clad in a blue and white Yoruba “indigenous-looking” outfit—just like the others I had at home, which I wore when I traveled to America or Europe to speak about my decolonial adventures. The clothes made me feel like I belonged to something important, and—perhaps more importantly—they made me feel comfortable to be black in the face of white scrutiny. But there was always a silent hypocrisy demon that taunted me when I attired myself in those Yoruba colors. They often felt like “performance clothes”—like a costume I got into to give the impression I was more “indigenous” than I really was, or that I had my feet on firm ground … when I was really stranded in midair—lost and yearning for new settlements that touch the soul—like those who heard me speak. For one who was part of a lost generation, stolen from the soil by the highway, orphaned by the inhuman face of empire, speaking only the one-tongue of our white masters to our lands that were now mute, and without father, I was the Frankensteinian product of lord and slave, the silt between angry ocean and sullen mudstone—at home neither in womb nor away from womb. I was usually uncomfortable in my own skin … keenly aware of the scandal in the court that had birthed me, but without a way to respond to my monstrousness. Walking into her home, Doug and Fern exchanging greetings behind me, I felt those pangs of vulnerable inadequacy—like I was being tested or examined again, as I had been throughout my conscious life.
And then, as if puncturing the suffocating bubble of intense self-awareness around me, the elder rolled up to meet us, her face beaming a welcoming, interested smile. She was in a wheelchair, her ankle broken in three places, as I would later learn. She wore a studious pair of dark-rimmed glasses and a cavalier green shirt beneath a black suede waistcoat. Her hair was short and whimsical. In her writings, she had taken pains to describe the way the void—the classical theoretical space some physicists insisted was empty—was filled with virtual particles conducting experiments with space-time. Her hair, flaying about in subversive curls, looked like an embodiment of that assertion. A carnival of silvery wispy tufts of wisdom.
“Hello, Bayo!” she said. I smiled, walked forward to meet her, and bent into her chair to embrace her properly, as she made to lift herself out of her chair to meet me halfway. I looked at her. I felt we had an understanding—a shared quest for the poetry behind the iron curtain, the sacred laughter stitched into the fabric of the ordinary. A keen suspicion that there was a more stunning home outside of the fences where we both found ourselves. Like I had those years ago, she had only just lost her dear father—another thread of kinship that connected both of us as hauntees of abiding ghosts and present absences. As subjects of the workings of time out of joint. It was no wonder then that when we embraced, grieving child to grieving child, dad to dad (she refused the gender binary identification as a “woman”; her daughter called her ‘dad’) many worlds came in touch. She had called, and I was there. It was almost impossible to imagine: it was my thirty-third birthday, and I was in the home of Karen Barad—feminist icon, physicist, science studies scholar, and fellow monster.
I rolled the petrified thing around and around, all my five fingers considering its strange textures and hard ridges. It had probably died a long time ago, curled up into an ammonite spiral, and assumed its prehistoric posture—frozen in its black silence for all time.
It was a hush.
The third hush out of ten.
I wasn’t sure what to do with it, or what Bàbá would have wanted me to do at that point. But it really felt like the third one in the series I was looking for. It had, after all, found me under unique circumstances. In my mind, I was thus closer to answering the question of home, somehow. Karen would herself perform what seemed to be the accompanying ritual.
Karen had given me the lithified remains of the hush and a little light-green book she had written called What Is the Measure of Nothingness? Infinity, Virtuality, Justice. Both gifts sat in each hand as Doug drove through the fog on the way back to the Bay Area from Karen’s home. Book and hush. Words and a thing. Language and matter. The postmodern retreat into stories that left the material world behind and the modern/colonial stabilization of nature that occasioned the retreat. Somewhere between, somewhere in the middle, the memory of Karen’s voice and presence lingered.
Back in her home, as we sat together—a quartet of solemn inquiry—I mentioned that it was my birthday after both she and Fern had hosted us in conversation, told us about their backyard garden and children, and regaled us with the tale of how Karen had broken her ankle in Peru when she visited a mutual friend of ours, the good professor Frédérique Apffel-Marglin. There was no small talk. Just sunlight, a dog, the quiet purr of occupied sofas, and shared memory. We talked about children. I spoke about you—and my quest to “redeem” my fatherhood in an intentional pursuit of what it meant or what it could mean in a time like this. I talked about Bàbá’s ritual of gathering the prayer items. I did not tell her those items were hushes. Doug talked about his career in publishing, and Fern, a rabbi, who gave me the impression that she was from an enchanted time of deserts, camels, traded beans, and shofars, spoke about her work and their children.
An angel passes by.
Karen turns to me and says, “You know, there is no time. We have no time—we are only here for a short while. So I wonder if you have anything to ask while we are here together.”
At first, to my ears, it sounds as if she wants me to leave. There is no time. In Nigeria, that’s the kind of thing you say to a guest that has outlived his welcome. But I can tell this is not what she means. This is the zeal of an elder, whose invitation has been honored, who sits on her short stool, who knows that the sun loiters in the heavens only as long as day is day, who wants to tug at one of her ears, call my name three times and ask me how many times she called it—just before blessing me. This is a sacred moment. This is meeting my father. He is here. Haunting this instant, begging me to toss a cowrie or my two hushes to ask a question before the portal closes. There is no time.
I have no prepared question. I feel a bit nervous when I consider raising a question about her thought project—agential realism—so I abandon the idea, and ask instead: “What is the most beautiful thing in the world for you, right now?” I think I notice her swallow with some difficulty—as if she is slain by the riddle. She bows her head, starts to say something but segues in another direction.
“This moment. This thick now … this particular moment,” she continues. “Because it is connected to all other moments.”
Following Karen, Fern speaks about the divine play and sacred laughter that is the kernel of every object, every tick of restless clock hands. As both comment on each other’s responses, I am afforded a private moment to imagine reality as a cosmic cackle, lingering and persistent, without some lofty purpose at the end of it—for there is no “end of it,” no break in the giggling. Just laughter spilling into laughter long after the joke is spent.
When we knew it was time to leave, Doug and I started to say our pre-good-byes. Having learned during the visit that it was my birthday, Karen beckoned me, wheeling herself toward her shelf of books, leaving Fern and Doug again in a haze of polite chatter. I noticed a pristine version of her complicated magnum opus that had introduced her to me—Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Ma
tter and Meaning—and watched with muted anguish as her hand drifted past it to pull out the small pamphlet-like book on nothingness. I had already read the pamphlet on the internet, but was too polite to tell her so. Then she said she had something else to give me. What could it be? She took it from a corner of her shelf—the small, irregular, and round body of a hush. When I sighted it, I might have choked on my own spit a little. Even as I write this to you, my dear Alethea-not-yet-known, I feel the hair at the back of my head standing on end: what were the odds that Karen would give me the very thing I needed to complete my ritual of prayer, my quest to understand what it means to build a home for you?
“You don’t know how much this means to me, Karen,” I said, with remarkable smoothness, “but where I come from, a child receives the blessings of an elder on bended knees—not standing up tall.”
I fell to my knees, near the shiny bars of her wheelchair, and close enough to hear her whisper into my ear as her free hand rested on my head, anointing it with a queer oil of words.
She said, “May you find success in all you do.” She continued to speak other words, her soft prayerful blessings reminding me of the gushing stream from the wound in the mountainside that Moses’s staff had wrought: a crack in the presumptuous binariness of things.
I thought of all the things I wanted to succeed at: I wanted to love and be loved by your mother … to know her tearful smile as both of us shut our eyes for the last time, holding each other’s hands—fingers interlocked—in the way we do; I wanted to meet my father somewhere in the fog, where he sighs in wait, his hair not a day older than when I saw it last on that fateful Wednesday; I wanted to know the intimate joys of living small, to relinquish my claim of ownership over myself and learn to play; I wanted you to grow up and remember me as one of your heroes, a good father, one whose trembling hands held you aloft every night, whose nostrils gladly accommodated your little farts, and whose shoulders gave you room to stand on to take in the majestic view of a wonderful world; I wanted to complete Bàbá’s quest—my quest—to prepare a home for you, to know how to pray for your journeys.
When I rose to my feet, I caught Karen’s eyes reflecting. She was verklempt. Her eyes were perhaps reddened by a memory, a feeling or some other emotion I might never understand. Had she found a way to eavesdrop on thoughts, and thus heard my faint yearnings? Had she caught a glimpse of her own father, skirting the relaxed boundaries between the now, then, and the yet-to-come?
“Thank you, Karen,” I said. She nodded, her face speaking of an ongoing struggle with depths too deep for words.
As Doug’s car ate up highway after highway, I thought about her teary eyes as I stroked the hush’s frozen body. The mystery of it haunted me. Why did she cry? Did I remind her of someone, or did my kneeling down for her blessing trigger an unspoken sense of loss or grief about the harsh anonymity of the modern world she was immersed in? Was it the simple joy of a shared moment of intimate friendship? Or the curious peregrinations of a mind that had given itself too passionately to the rehabilitation of the body of the material world, and the articulation of a striking feminist ethic that repudiates racism, sexism, and colonialism. Perhaps she saw in me what she knew in herself to be true: a desire to inhabit a home that worked for all of us, not just a few above the many. Perhaps it was all of these and more—and not just one thing. Karen herself had written her book about the futility of seeking out a world populated by already made-up things, secret essences, or separate ingredients. The world doesn’t work that way.
Whatever the reasons were for her tears, I had just been blessed by Karen Barad. My body tingled all over. It was like I was just from a revival meeting at a big tent gathering, and the whiff of the Holy Ghost still lingered like a stubborn scent. I tried to trace out the series of insignificant events that had brought me to the text of her work and, eventually, to her doorstep. Long before she pressed her fingers on my head, we had kept up a correspondence between us—emailing each other once in a while. I had initiated this traffic of mutual exploration when I expressed my fascination with her “agential realism,” and she graciously responded, even when she was going through a difficult period hospicing her dear father. Out of the pixelated blue, her latest message arrived; it had the gravity of mysterious urgency—as if there was fire on a mountain and my meeting her was going to help put it out. She wrote: “Bayo, I just noticed a post of yours saying you are in my neck of the woods, in Berkeley! Do you have plans to stay in the area for a bit? Any chance of you heading down this way? It would be great to meet finally. Peace, Karen.”
Okay, I admit that doesn’t sound grave. Or urgent.
I’m allowed a few embellishments, aren’t I, dear?
Nevertheless, there was nothing cavalier or playful about her summoning me. I probably would have responded with no less a sense of urgency than if she had told me the sky was collapsing on her head, and only I could save the day. In my mind, an elder had just called me to her side. Nothing was going to keep me from getting to her.
There’s no surprise here. For a young African father, whose own father had left in him an asphyxiating quest for reconciliation, whose own lands were buried underneath the asphalt of a dead-eyed consortium of colonial propositions, and whose promise to his daughter textured his breathing moments, Karen’s work was the structural equivalent of a gap in a steel wall. Or a crack in the perimeter fence, showing the wilds beyond it. There was something refreshingly generative and alluring about the ways she saw the world—a gritty vision of the real rooted in a rigorous and sustained engagement with the mysterious workings of the material world, and informed by questions committed to matters of justice. Her poetically textured writings honored the earth-affirming wisdoms of my people, sympathized with the life-denying elisions we suffered, addressed the ontological premises that occasioned those colonial encounters, and cleaved open new spaces of power and reenchantment. Hers was in fact a redescription of home that both challenged lazy notions of distant arrivals and finish lines, and recast the traveler in a posthuman saga of never-ending co-emergence.
I am hesitant to do so, but if I were to speak of the implications of her reconstructive work in the duration of a grateful sigh, I might say that Karen paints the portrait of a collective “coming down to earth.” That redolent picture of coming to earth elicits imaginations of crumbling ziggurats and divine disruptions, as featured in the biblical tale of the Tower of Babel: in a bid to escape the diluvial fury of the gods, the children of Adam propose to build a tower so high that it would not only protect them against other possible flood events but reach the heavens where the gods reside. Anxious, the gods realize this undertaking of men might breach the established order of things, so they confuse the ears and tongues of the builders, so that even though they all speak one language, no one can understand each other anymore. This premodern fantasy project of human mastery and transcendent disembodiment is thus thwarted, and confusion—a meeting in the mangled knot of co-becoming—is the agential force that effects the humiliation of this postdiluvian civilization.
A coming down to earth. Leaving the certitude of oracles behind. Making do with this world of partial recovery. Reacquainting ourselves with dust. Meeting Karen in text and in person was an about-turn from my previous trail to heaven. If the taped sermons of Finis Dake were dispatches from a golden city of angels and gods above—coordinates to heaven, one might say—then Karen’s was part of an earthly choir of agencies singing me down to land, urging me to notice the troubling yet surprising sympathy between all things … all creatures … a sympathy that weaved together mind and soil, sky and shadow, man and woman, god and dust. Father and son. A weaving so intimate that the connective stitches become indistinguishable from the fabric.
Her descriptions of the real weren’t just intellectual exercises disconnected from the goings-on around the world. In fact, they were theoretically inseparable from her ongoing commitments to feminism. A different feminism, if I could put it that way. Not the one
the chattering class in Lagos, huddled at a newspaper vendor’s roadside kiosk showing various headlines about women contesting gubernatorial elections, learned to hiss at—wondering what was becoming of a world where women no longer knew their place.
Up till the time I started to encounter writings like Karen Barad’s, the word feminism had meant little to me: it was yet another floating concern in the world out there … mired in the background ruckus of the everyday, sometimes surfacing to cause furrowed eyebrows, only to sink back into the half-words, bleeps and crackles of the unseen long before those frowns became permanent.
I grew up with three sisters, your aunts Tito, Bimbo, and Wendy, and never considered myself at the short end of the stick for it—and though my teenage years were characterized by a desire to live up to Christian doctrine, the idea that men were one rung higher than women on the onto-divine ladder wasn’t very attractive to me. No doubt I unconsciously imbibed the idea that the man was the head of the house. Why else would God create Eve from Adam’s side? Was it not to say that women were to be submissive to men?
In our parents’ house, there was a little sign that was hung on the wall that said: “A successful man is one who makes more money than his wife can spend. A successful woman is one who can find such a man.” It felt biblical, like something that was written with the same ink, in the same fonts, and on the same page as “Honesty is the best policy.” Not that my mother didn’t make any money outside of what my father earned as a diplomat; she did—but there was an unwritten rule that dads came first in our consideration, that being a mum or a wife meant cooking in the kitchen and doing “mummy” things. All the pictures of the clergymen I revered growing up—the very popular ones and the upcoming ones—had their wives standing up by their side, leaning into the picture and resting on the shoulder of the “man of God,” who was seated, suited, and fundamental.
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