These Wilds Beyond Our Fences

by Bayo Akomolafe

  The world is mutually infectious, an orgy of touching. Like turning on the light to see the darkness better, or changing the nature of a photon merely by peeping at how it interacts with obstructions, you cannot approach any one part of “the world” and walk away intact. You cannot witness it without being stained by it. There is no privileged perspective, no lofty body afloat over the mangled reaches of her carnality. But there is more: it is not that we can avoid being in touch; we can’t—for we ourselves are produced in this ungodly ontology of irreducible compromise. This is the red-toothed, Pan-horned, cloven-hoofed, lava-forked fear that haunts our present practices within nature or our institutions of escape: that we are the seething mass of pungency we have quarantined away from view. And that even perched atop our whitewashed steeds of superiority and moral nobility, we never really left the ground.

  Like unruly children in a classroom, no “thing” stays still and as disciplined as we would like it to be. Hard at work creating the world, God inscribes an irrefutable equation for multiplicity on the bodies of all living beings by causing everything to appear in twos: a creature and its less prestigious helper companion. The binary is thought to be locked into the scheme of things; you are either male or female. It’s an Aristotelian law: a thing cannot be itself and not-itself at the same time. One stands at an irreparable distance from the other. And like east and west, never the twain shall meet.

  Once in a while, however, it seems the twain do meet in the middle, with perverse combinatory effects that bewilder the careful taxonomies of the modern tinkerer. A woman sprouts a six-inch-long beard; a young man becomes pregnant by artificial insemination; a five-thousand-year-old male yew tree, old enough to be quite set in its ways, undergoes a sex change and begins sprouting berries; bdelloid rotifers, microscopic leech-like organisms (too small for human eyes to define) and Timema stick insects defy the sex modes altogether—remaining both sexless and prolific—or swinging into whatever sex mode they want. In other cases, things do stuff they “shouldn’t”—stopping us in our tracks with the ponderous eminence of a gasp: monkeys mating with dogs; sea slugs producing chlorophyll (as only plants should do); brittle stars intelligently responding to environmental threats without the use of brains; orcas conducting experiments on human scientists; the future affecting the past; or, in the study of very small things like electrons, particles speculating about what it means to be at home. I suppose it suffices to say that the world seems to be replete with things that stray away from fixed categories, things that appear to go contra naturam, defying the supposedly immutable laws of reality.

  When things melt past their assigned boundaries, when they touch each other across the wide ontological canyons that divide them, we name those resulting things “monsters.” Monsters are the stuff of nightmares. Monsters are a queering of categories, a disturbance of purity. There is not a greater scandal to the modern thinker, who is still faithful to the Renaissance’s quest for pure universal categories, than when a thing—supposedly tranquil in eternal light and beyond reproach—moves. Our many social, political, and literary histories are replete with things moving into things, things doing perverse things, becoming the occasion for yelps of horror and hysterical recapitulations of doctrines of holiness. A once-man reconstructs his body with estrogens and antiandrogens, and transforms into a woman. Splayed flesh meets bone fragments and metal and coursing electricity and wild ambition and thus becomes Frankenstein’s monster—angry and seeking; the Yoruba playwright Ola Rotimi absolves the gods in his play The Gods Are Not to Blame when Odewale, the tragic protagonist, commits the ultimate abomination and, unbeknownst to him and everyone else (save an old messenger), kills his father, marries his mother, and becomes a father to four of his own siblings.

  In response to accounts like these, we recoil in horror and repulsion—spitting out the aftertaste of the revolting stuff on our tongues. We fortify our foundations and raise the walls a few more inches, installing soldiers and searchlights at the tops. The alarms echo through the neighborhoods, the gong sings in the village square as we ship the decadent ones to faraway killing fields to be ended. Within our fences, we start to sigh: we have driven out the heathen from the Holy of Holies. Now we can relax in our consanguineous spotlessness.

  Except that alterity (or radical otherness) has never been successfully excluded or mastered. Sooner or later, we will notice yet another demoniac infiltration, another monster sprouting from the cleanliness within: our searchlights will burn with greater ferocity, its sweeping gaze scanning the grounds for a speck that shouldn’t be there. This time, the light will settle on the least expected place: us. But even more scandalous than the fact that we are vectors for the monstrous is the observation that monsters are not occasional anomalies that appear when the moon is blood-red, or when a crazy scientist retreats into his fusty enclave to debauch the holy order of nature. Something deep and troubling is happening at the very “heart” of the world. Something that is not merely occasional or frequent. Monsters keep the world fresh; to the one who supposes that things are settled, that forms are given, that the road is clear, monsters spring a surprise—opening the new in the belly of the old.

  Indeed, Lovecraft’s Azathoth is the all-powerful monster whose sleep dreams up reality itself. In turning to the edges, to madmen, and to “the invisible,” I supposed I might learn how to meet the universe halfway, and how to answer the call of Leviathan—the ecology of monsters beyond atom and story. I suppose the same might be true for you. Home lies in the direction that strays away from the logic of fixed answers. You will have to learn how to walk off the beaten path that snakes into the dark forest—the one that safely leads out. Meeting the “something that calls” cannot be on your own terms. You might walk a whole day, or spend a lifetime entangled with thick bushes and tree branches without anything to show for it. If you wait there, if you are “still,” she might approach you. This “other woman.” I speak of the mother of monsters, the one who calls, or Leviathan—who, according to some, also goes by another name: Lilith. The other woman whose ghost leaves traces across the length and breadth of this letter—nodding gently to the expositions on entanglement. The mysterious lady of the house—lately gowned—slowly comes down a flight of stairs to greet her slack-jawed guests.

  Take a bow, Lilith. Or don’t. In any case, meet my daughter.

  Perhaps no other mythological character has exerted such an influence on popular culture in my time as the purported first wife of Adam, Lilith. She is a product of many cultures, harking back to early Sumerian and Babylonian tales about demon-lovers, wind spirits and evil temptresses, whose breasts are filled with poison, not milk. She wanders across arid plains, also not yet at home. In the matrices of rabbinical imagination, her feet are not at rest. Talmudic references to her are few and sketchy, echoing earlier Babylonian images of her as an embodiment of unwholesome sexual practices. But an abiding interest in her story bemoans the inadequacy of text and the poverty of orthodoxy. She appears in fleeting traces, showing up by name only once in the canon—yet exerting enough of a force to disturb its storied eminence and confound the neat storyline of redemption. She is sprinkled in anonymous satirical writings (like the Alphabet of Ben Sira, circa 800 CE), and she takes on a legendary status in the Zohar, the foundational book of Jewish mystical thought—Kabbalah (the concealed part of the Oral Torah).

  Stories about Lilith predate the Judaic accounts, harking back to Sumerian and Mesopotamian figures of a venerated goddess of fertility, who was worshipped, prayed to, and celebrated when there was a rich harvest. Jewish rabbis writing in the Zohar and the Ben Sira books, however, tell a strangely negative tale about Adam’s first wife. They first begin by implying that Eve wasn’t the first woman at all. That honor belongs to Lilith. Fashioned from dust (or more specifically, grime and muck—a notable distinction that is, in some quarters, influential in the telling of the legend), much like Adam, Lilith is described as abusive and needlessly contentious in matters that sho
uld be without controversy. She and Adam get into numerous fights—like who should lead or who should be on top during sex—and Adam has a hard time bottling up the volcanic rage of his wife. One day, her rebellion erupts and she leaves Adam—sprouting wings by some unnamed power and sailing away from the Garden of Eden like a winged serpent, just after uttering the hidden name of God. Adam, broken and dejected, cries to his maker to help him revitalize his dead marriage. God gives in to Adam’s irritating pleas, and sends three angels to retrieve the erring runaway bride at the eponymous Dead Sea. Lilith, refusing to come peacefully, chooses to become the mother of demons, the primal womb of the inappropriate. She is cursed by the angels—who vow that one hundred of the demonic children she will give birth to will die every day. Lilith strikes back by swearing she will hurt the seed of Adam, killing his children (except those protected by an amulet engraved with the names of the three angels) to avenge the death of hers, and beguiling men.

  These mystical traditions therefore portray Lilith as the one who steals the semen of men when they sleep at night, coming to them in their dreams as a succubus. She is a child-killer, possessed by the devil (whose evil light made its way through the mud and infected her during her creation), and a monster of the first order whose perverse rebellion against the established order is directly responsible for the subsequent Fall event. The kabbalistic text of the Zohar identifies the seditious serpent that comes to Eve—God’s second take on womanhood—as a woman scorned. Lilith herself. She is the temptress that throws the spanner in the works, the sex addict who asserts her place as her husband’s equal—an act that probably inspires God to make a bolder statement about the inferiority of women by making Eve from Adam’s rib, not dry dust.

  She is the mother of the monstrous. The matron of the occluded.

  Even after seeing a bit of her backstory, it still doesn’t fully explain why Lilith becomes so hideous. A monster of monsters. At the level of the text alone, the stories about those who become monsters seem to suggest their transformation is an effect of the carnal … or ontological failure of the deepest kind. A fall from grace. An opening up to the wilds. A glitch that ruins the program. Lilith rejects the biological determinism of the master creator by destabilizing the establishment and its naturalizing effects. She will not be under. She contests that. Her grievance seems framed in oppositional subjectivity, a contentious feminism that hates men for being men. But then she suddenly sprouts wings … and takes off. We are not told how this happens. And this is the thing with monsters: an explanation is not necessary or helpful. The logic of the previous or a full disclosure of their backstory is not enough clarification about the surprising emergence of the monstrous. The monster demands sensuous causalities and reprimands the linearity of answers or the confidence we repose in the intelligible. It resituates oppositional subjectivity without dismissing it. When we come to the monster in the story we come to the preposterous; we come to a generous place (the menu becomes larger) where the logic of the story is not superseded or dismissed but queered.

  Monsters are reminders of particularities—children of a world too complex to be spoken of in terms of the universal. They can be mediums of democratic expansion and forbears of new cultural modes of relationality. They can be creatures of reenchantment (I consider the effects of transgender politics on our sterilized and binary notions of gender). But I am hesitant to attach instrumentality to the monster. I feel it defeats monstrosity, making it less alien so we can accommodate it. While there is no general monster, the particularities of each will not be reduced to discursive analysis. The world is keener than neat form, correct answers, linear causality, social agency, or right responses. Something the body is doing needs to be met, and something about the co-emergence of the material and discursive seems to suggest that we must allow for a world where everything is not possible. Where things happen and their causal path is not open to scrutiny.

  In the monster, we do not come to the end of critical analysis; we meet its queering. We come to touch the silences and gaps that our discursive grasps cannot comprehend.

  Our usual response to monsters is to curse them even further. They are unpredictable. Our survival is at stake if we allow them to multiply their perverted bodies. So we contain, medicate, bracket, paraphrase, and lock them away. But considering that the gift of the monster is a glimpse of our mutual porosity, other responses are possible and perhaps summoning both of us at this time.

  If you’ve been following the soft themes flowing between the lines in this letter and previous ones, you might already know what I might say next: yes … you got that right. We need Lilith; we must seek her out. Some say she still roams in desolate places. This much was told to me by one of the Yoruba priests I met with—not Bàbá, but another: “You have chased away the spirits with your roads and development and projects. They hide in the thick forests, and it is there we must go to in order to understand what is happening.” Toward the wilds beyond our fences, where Lilith dwells. A winged serpent cursed to fear the footfalls of Eve’s offspring, she slithers into dreams, makes her bed in blind spots, and tends to the eggs in her belly. If you stray from fixed paths, my daughter, you might meet or you might be met by a ring of dancing tricksters. Vampires. Werewolves. Succubi. Demons and fallen angels. Wild uncivilized people. These are all Lilith’s children. And every night, she mourns as a hundred of them are slain by righteous angels. Her crying echoing in the dark forest, causing everything that moves to huddle closer to each other in trembling embrace. But Lilith’s tears do not linger too long on a soft, broken face. Like Kali of Hindu mythology, whose urge to destroy overcomes her again and again, she is refilled with an abominable rage, and she seeks cocksure men and their children to assert her place in the world.

  Why must we seek her out, you ask? Why would anyone seek out an ancient monster, talk less of the mother of monsters? It is perhaps no coincidence that Lilith is at once a goddess of fertility as well as a monstrous entity. Maybe we can infer that the monstrous is prolific, or that fertility is a matter of embracing monsters. That nature itself—the appropriate order of things that God and his righteous angels seek to preserve—is not a stable location, neat, neutral, or without controversy. That the generativity of the world is premised on its deep-seated monstrosity. That the closer we lean into the world, the more we are inspired to sympathize with Lilith and her abandonment of things-as-they-should-be. That in the grotesque, in the anomalous, in the scandalous, we glimpse not a fall from grace but a deepening of its work.

  I imagine that when Lilith visits Eve’s children at night, her eyes still stinging with rage, there is a deep compassion that speaks as well. I imagine she curls up to our ears, tucking her mangled colubrine body that has been cursed and maligned and stepped upon by patriarchal righteousness into the folds of our pinnae, and then says:

  Hearken unto me, fellow creatures. I who have dwelt in a form unmatched with my desire, I whose flesh has become an assemblage of incongruous anatomical parts, I who achieve the similitude of a natural body only through an unnatural process, I offer you this warning: the Nature you bedevil me with is a lie. Do not trust it to protect you from what I represent, for it is a fabrication that cloaks the groundlessness of the privilege you seek to maintain for yourself at my expense. You are as constructed as me; the same anarchic womb has birthed us both. I call upon you to investigate your nature as I have been compelled to confront mine. I challenge you to risk abjection and flourish as well as have I. Heed my words, and you may well discover the seams and sutures in yourself.31

  So why do we seek Lilith? Why must we heed her call? And how does this have anything to do with homecoming or finding our place in the world? We must seek Lilith because we come from her—because we also are born of the rage of a world astray. Because she is the mother of monsters; because she is our mother. We must seek her because she seeks us too. I must seek her because she stands in my way, and she is trouble. Perhaps to stay with this trouble, to pray to her, to
hug this monster, is to learn—very faintly—that what stands in our way is also part of the way home.

  I sing you to sleep … my belly swollen with the life of your little brother who now comes to join us. Your long legs sprawled across my lap, your spotted head resting in my arms and then moving to my chest. I sing you to sleep. I can hear your soft troubled breathing—the way you rub your head hard on my breasts, anything to relieve the itching. I can feel your pain, but I can’t allow you to scratch. Let them do their work.

  Put your arm around me. I will lock it under my armpit. Let the devilish things blister and pop and swear. No matter. Let them burn. If you scratch them, they will leave splotches on your skin; they will mark you as one who did not listen to your mama.

  Close your eyes. I will hold you with one arm, and use the other to comfort the one who rolls and kicks under this pimpled hill … the one who has made my navel his footstool. With my other hand I will pat my belly, and take deep breaths.

  Don’t mind that the floor is hard. It is what our bodies need now—hard places, not soft warm places where these things can hide and taunt us later. This is what our aching bodies desire.

  Your father stands limp. His eyebrows are turned outward where they meet. His face is sad. If he could take away these spirits from your body, he would. He doesn’t know what to do. There is nothing to be done. Sometimes things have to be done to us. Your father has been visited too—long ago when it came and made his body a large kitchen of many boiling pots. He says he scratched every one of them until he became fire.