These Wilds Beyond Our Fences

by Bayo Akomolafe

  The next letters will dwell more fondly with these inquiries. For now, I hope it suffices to say that we are a companion species. The presumption that we can act or do act unilaterally, in any instance, can no longer be sustained given our troubling lack of independence.

  It’s simple, really. If I were to ask you what part of your body “sees,” you might point to your eyes. And that would be true—but it wouldn’t be completely true. There’s more. There are preposterous connections to be made from there: for instance, your eyes cannot “see” if there is no occipital lobe at the back of your brain to process the trans-electrochemical signals relayed by your retinal cells. And the ensuing cerebral activities, shrouded in the dark, wouldn’t be possible without the support your skeletal system gives to your brain. Neither would seeing or brain activity be possible were it not for the vertebral and internal carotid arteries that supply blood to nourish your brain. Furthermore, the blood transported through arteries is co-constituted by the foods we ingest, which are in turn delicately predicated on the health of the environment—which is always subject to and a shaper of politico-scientific matterings. Seeing is not a property of your eyes, any more than mud prints are a property of mud. “It,” for the time being, is a product of material practices (and meaning-making practices) that extend beyond the conventional boundaries of our bodies or minds. A larger web of intricate relationships make seeing possible, and define what it means. And it doesn’t stop there—but you hopefully get the gist of the matter, which is that the world is queer, a mangled, cat-cradling field of ongoing entanglements. There are no easy “causes” or definitive “effects”; the line does not proceed unambiguously from point A to point B. Strayings, hidden plots, and spooky actions from a distance (in the words of Einstein) are part and parcel of this world. Not that there are normal things and queer things, but that all “things” are already queer, so that I wouldn’t be incorrect to insist that the world is made of surprise.

  The anthropocentrism that looks out on the world and says “we did this!”—including the more tolerable kind that looks out on the so-called Anthropocene (where human-led activity is so grossly consequential and disruptive for the planet’s health that it rivals other geohistorical periods on the registers) and sadly mutters “we did this”—denies the significance of the other-than-human in the world’s emergence. The closer we look, the more we find that we never act alone: every small gesture is a generation of the collective. Every small gesture is already cooked in a cauldron of many spoons, stirred by things whose names we can pronounce, and other things that are not quite nameable. Every small gesture is already a compost heap of a million critters. Little wonder some advocate that the humanities be renamed as the “humusities”—from “humus” (meaning “earth” or “ground”).28 The “human” is a carnival of nonhuman doings; it is, to use Karen Barad’s term, a posthumanist performativity that shapes the world, allocates agency, and troubles boundaries. Like dust.

  We are fundamentally porous and promiscuous. This is the world we live in—a carnival of the unexpected, of the irregular, the grotesque, or monstrous bodies—where the hard and cold lines that distinguish you from me, us from trees, trees from economics, and economics from whale shit are blurry, leaky, and wet. Our own bodies are populated by trillions of other bacterial cells in their own becomings, but these cells do not live “on” you, or with you, or through you. They are you: they are necessary to your body’s ongoing survival. You couldn’t be human without these alien nonhumans performing your body, or without so many other intra-acting entanglements that breach the fences between you and your environment. These overlapping bodies, pressed together in this strange material world characterized by a “horrifying kind of intimacy,” make it impossible to make a once-and-for-all cut between where I stop and where you begin, or where life stops and death triumphs, or where matter gallops forward and mind allegedly tugs on the reins. It is in this sense we are monsters. We are one and many. You are only yourself through all others.

  Brian Onishi concedes that “reason and science have done as much to conceal our relation to nature as provide insight into the working of nature.” Monstrosity—our entanglement with everything—“is a story of borders and bodies that are open and fluid, a maddening insistence that we are always effected by the terroir of place. It discloses the mutual constitution of the material world by articulating nature as simultaneously an alien organism and intimate companion.”29 A dangerously beautiful movement of never-still edges.

  As such, while we might say that the Wright brothers invented manned flight, a thicker account would want to draw our attention to the history of experimentation in aerodynamics, the flow of particular learnings and situated practices necessary to successful flight, the crucial contributions of materials for the plane, the impediments posed by geoclimatic effects, and the specific social milieu that made the possibility of flight an intelligible goal. In short, “agency is cut loose from its traditional humanist orbit. Agency is not aligned with human intentionality or subjectivity … [but is] larger than what liberal humanism proposes.”30

  Agency is acting. Agency is effects. The baker kneads the dough, but the dough organizes the baker’s posture, disciplines his approach, conditions his body, and resists his advances. Where do we allocate agency, then? Who acts and who is acted upon? In the coordinates of humanism, agency is intrinsically a property of the human—the rest of the world is just mechanics. We attribute agency to human beings because we suppose we have curious things called “intentions” which precede action. However, this easy causality equation that traces out a firm trajectory from human intentions to concrete realities does not account for human porosity and immersion in a nonhuman world of multiple vitalities that also have effects. In the case of the baker and his dough, both act upon each other—in the same way today’s smartphones are not just tools, but users. Neither needs intentionality to explain its effects. Our own bodies do astonishing things that do not fall within the domain of our control: we blink, break wind, burp, get tired, and feel a spectrum of affective states very often without intending them. It seems our bodies have minds of their own, and “we” are only along for the ride.

  Is this a way of easing oneself out of responsibility for, say, the impact of industrial activity on climate and environmental well-being? No, it is a way of deepening it—because to so summarily assign blame and pin an entire upholstery of multiple events to a single factor, or an essential substrate working behind the scenes, is to further distance ourselves from the world’s happenings and—intentions notwithstanding—reduce the world to separable parts where our technological mastery is its main driver. It is to strip matter of its own desire, will, intention, and movement so that it doesn’t present an impediment to our concerns.

  It is with this sense that we come to some understanding that to say “We placed a man on the moon” or “We have built a city” or “Humans are the major cause of climate change” is to centralize the human, and to deny the material-discursive contributions and conditions that make such statements even comprehensible.

  Barad’s contributions to feminist theory—especially as they emerged from her engagements with Bohrian physics-philosophies—show how very little things, quantum things, speak valiantly of a carnival world. A world of hard facts, yes, but a world that dances. Waltzes would be better to say. This is not the arbitrary world of postmodern lore, or the mechanical world of modern fantasy, but an emergent world that presents real constraints and real limitations—and yet is never closed to emergence. This material world isn’t the one of Democritean wet dreams. We live in, and are produced by, a celebratory, orgiastic, festive, teenage, promiscuous, and downright perverse world that offers no safe grounds for those that propose an essentialized nature as their ultimate reason for lording it over others.

  When Barad wrote about Thomas Young’s nineteenth double-slit interferometer test to determine the nature of light, I imagine she must have gasped … for what she
saw wasn’t a clunky assemblage of things following previously decreed laws in a blind zombie-like fashion. Something else is going on: something that calls into question everything we think we know about how the world works. And indeed something is going on. Other feminist materialist scholars like Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Susan Hekman, Vicki Kirby, Elizabeth Grosz, Myra Hird, and Stacy Alaimo contribute various ways to rehabilitate our notions of matter—effectively decentering humanist notions. But what does any of what they say mean for my mother, mean for your mother? Mean for you? How does this address the initiating question of home and place? I think the grander message is that the world is now open for play, and yet closed off seductively … and that in this playground there are mysteries and beings and other presences (and absences) that totally recalibrate the logic of our quests so that the questions to ask about the future, about our lives, about living well, might not even be here yet for the asking. There are hints of an invitation here in this ecstatic redescription of feminism: to stand still in the face of a monster, warts and all, and recognize ourselves.

  Taking the plunge off this cliff, from the classical vision of a Crusoean pilgrim marooned on a brute pile of oblivion to a vision of shared vitality where the pilgrim realizes he isn’t alone and has never been alone, is not only difficult but fraught with troubling implications for our quest for home. Things aren’t suddenly okay because we are coming to see—with help from feminist new materialisms—that the room is crowded with others. Others who can resist, object to, and disrupt our plans to seek out new worlds. Others who can stand in the way of new homes and new ways of thinking about the rising sun, the yielding ears of corn, and the sleepy-eyed gaze of the moon. Entanglement is the milieu of monsters.

  In the course of the years since I visited Bàbá, I have learned many things—some of which did not want to be learned. I still remember the mischievous grin on his face as I left his shack—the mask of a trickster, whose frozen grin could have been a blessing or a wordless curse. However, underneath the mask I sensed an elder—in the same way I came to know Karen Barad as an elder—who truly found it fascinating that an old Christian boy had come to him to consult with the shadows of his ancestors, and who wanted me to succeed on my quest for new ways of thinking.

  But there were many moments when, I confess, I felt the urge to give up on this quest. It hasn’t been neat, swift, and tidy, as I had hoped it would be—something that might have been over and done with in the time of a week or a month. It hasn’t played out that way. I am not finding answers as such—just new questions. Traces of questions. I still do not know what it means to be at home—or even how to ask the question in a way that makes my heart beat faster.

  To be sure, I still continue to see hushes occasionally—terrible new species of the repulsive critters. Flightless ones, horned ones, smelly ones, and some that look like the stain made by a nylon bag filled with ink and dropped twenty feet to the ground. No one talks about them still, even here in India. However, coming across a trail of hushes isn’t the same thing as encountering the ten that Bàbá asked me to assemble for the ritual. Once, I tried to pick up four in a row: these ones looked like pink fairy armadillos. They followed each other snout to rear-end along the side of a rough and uneven sidewalk outside the only barbershop I patronized in Chennai. They were black and featureless, with some fur running along their sides. They were too small to be rats and too big to be roaches, but a thousand times more repugnant for reasons I haven’t learned to examine yet. It had been a while since I saw a hush, so I rushed at them. They didn’t even increase their pace or scatter across the street as ants in a food line would do when they sense an interruption. I got two, as many as my trembling hands could carry, twice as many as my sudden embarrassment could accommodate. One wriggled in my palm, the other was just eerily still. I might have stuffed them in my jeans pockets if they were large enough. They weren’t. And my repulsion was steadily rising past my bodily threshold of disgust. It was no use. I placed them on the ground, wiped my hands on my jeans, and walked away—swearing to my misfortune.

  So far, I have five out of ten (how I caught the fourth and fifth hushes—in the space of writing this letter—is the subject of the next note). The ritual is its own force, and will not be hurried or rushed or bullied into the plot points of my tender convenience. There is no other way to explain it except to say that I feel different … called … when the right hush slithers my way—or is handed to me, as was the case with Barad. And then, a question becomes lucid—and sort of pierces the tranquil surface of the familiar, presenting itself to me as a mermaid would do to a sailor lost at sea. Still, I do not fully understand why the ritual requires hushes: my theory is that they are bringers of questions related to my petition at the shrine. Maybe the last hush, the tenth, will bring the answers to questions I do not even know how to ask yet—or, at the very least, coincide with a deep discovery that will help put this journey into context. For the time being, these letters to you—taken up soon after I licked the first two hushes at Kutti’s slum—are the one way I can make sense of this strange journey and reach you across perplexing space-time.

  Do you remember the Bath Monster, dear? The gruff-voiced towel-clad figure that waddled around the bed like a penguin, and took you to the bathroom on many mornings—and sometimes just before bedtime? Every time you scowled at the invitation to have a bath, I’d summon the Bath Monster, who would conveniently appear when I was “missing.” All I needed for a complete transformation was a towel, a limp, and a lisp. When I puttered into the room, your eyes … they would chuckle, in that way that told me you knew it was me underneath the towel but wanted to play along. I knew this because I peeped out the side of the folds to see how you were reacting. I would pick you up, giggling and squealing, and then balance you on my shoulder. You’d be quiet, your face frozen into a heartbreakingly beautiful smile, as I gently put you back on your feet at the bathroom’s entrance. I’d ask you to close your eyes, count to ten, and wish the monster away. As you did, I’d hastily toss away the towel, then turn to meet the merest of joys in your face. You loved the monsters I created, but you liked that I came back when they outlived their welcome. In the years to come, I would teach you how the monsters never did go away, and that when one got to the heart of the matter, we all are monsters too. The dragons that breathe fire in the distance are no less monstrous than we already are. To put it differently, a monster is not the exception to the rule; a monster is the rule without exception.

  You didn’t go to school like your cousins and your friends, but your mother and I took your education seriously—especially your education in monsters or in alterity (the state of being different). I remember being so proud of you when you—just three years old—went up to an old lady who lived on the Chennai street outside the barbershop where I got my hair cut, and talked with her, eventually bowing your head a little so she could touch you and bless you.

  For us, it was important that you learn to respect the outcast, the broken, and those rendered inappropriate by particular regimes of power; we hoped you’d learn to notice the “other” within, and that everything touches the other—in unholy matrimony. In striving to make you a home, we sought to introduce you again and again to a sensuous world, a mischievous world that is full of surprise, a troubling world nonetheless—a realm where the monstrous was a signal that there was something else at work … something calling for attention. Even now, with you here at this sandy threshold, I encourage you to pick up a pebble, a rock or the remnants of kelp littered about. Anything will do.

  Look how things sprout from other things. How nothing is itself all by itself—or without the contributions of other things. When you happen upon a flower, especially one whose otherworldly beauty and feminine fragility contrast sharply with its less endearing environment, you might immediately treat it as this localized “thing,” as an object—one deserving of admiration—but an “object” nonetheless: removed, unique, separate, and even audacious. W
hat our linguistic conveniences blind us to is how that very flower is no more distinguishable from the dirt, the erratic weather, the traffic of pollen bearers that come from far off, the blazing sun, and even the occasional imprint of a boot worn by an uncharitable tourist, than a wave is distinguishable from the sea.

  In this sense, we couldn’t even say that the flower is “part” of the environment—that is admissible, but it seems clunky and mechanical, and more importantly, it lacks aesthetic appeal. We need a different metaphor. Perhaps we could say that the flower is the environment itself in rapturous dance; that the flower is a symptom of its ecosystem, or that the environment “flowers” (treating the noun as a verb—as surely Mr. Watts would have delightedly approved of). And all we would be hinting at is a “new” paradigm of thought—one that inaudibly recognizes how everything is connected; how nouns are “verbs in masquerade”; how the “other,” the “strange,” and the “alien” are a sibling emanation of the “same” process constantly exfoliating from the ineffable; how truth is impossible, and sincerity, insincere; and how what we “really” are defies notions of size, hues, grades of quality, origin, and destiny.