When Yoruba people respond with “asé” to the proclamations of a king, in greeting, in praise of another, or in libatory moments, they perform this call-response betweenness. Asé, usually paraphrased as the Christian “Amen” or “So be it” of Hebraic etymology, means more than a granting of affirmation. In Ifá tradition, it is a philosophy that imbues everything, that makes change happen, that motivates the earth to breathe and the skies to regurgitate rain from their bellies. While some scholars define asé as “a coming to pass; law; command; authority; commandment; enjoinment; imposition; power; precept; discipline; instruction; cannon; biding; document; virtue; effect; consequence; imprecation,”23 Imhotep writes that asé is extraordinarily complex, a polysemic word that “does not signify anything particular, yet it invests all things, exists everywhere and as the warrant for all creative activity,”24 and suggests that its underlying theme is “power.”
In other words, asé is the sound of the euphoric “participatoriness” of all things. The tonality of the gathering. The premise of change and the signature of hope. It is the cosmology of middles, one that hints that power is not contained in this or that, hidden away in a trope, or found at the distance. The divine is sprinkled in everything. Asé might very well be aligned with the performativity of dust.
Worthy of mention is that asé is seen as a vital force kept by Èsù, the trickster-deity of the Yoruba pantheon—who in the abracadabra of colonial inflections became Satan, the devil required to satisfy the Christian thirst for duality. But Èsù is something more than devil and is not to be replaced by the ghost that haunts Christian notions of embodied evil, as Funso Aiyejina intones:
The definition of Èsù which has, however, persisted in the popular imagination is the Euro-Christian one which maligns him as the devil/Satan. This definition was midwifed by Bishop Samuel Ajaiyi Crowther (1806–1891) who, in his pioneering translation of the Bible into Yoruba, had chosen Èsù as the Yoruba equivalent of the Christian Satan. In A Dictionary of the Yoruba Language, published in 1913 by the Church Missionary Society Bookshop, Lagos, Nigeria, Èsù is defined as the devil, a definition that would be repeated, albeit alongside other more traditional Yoruba definitions, in the 1958 University of London’s Dictionary of Modern Yoruba.25
Aiyejina goes further to read out Èsù’s incredible roster of accomplishments, his cosmic résumé:
In Yoruba philosophy, Èsù emerges as a divine trickster, a disguise-artist, a mischief-maker, a rebel, a challenger of orthodoxy, a shape-shifter, and an enforcer deity. Èsù is the keeper of the divine asé with which Olodumare created the universe; a neutral force who controls both the benevolent and the malevolent supernatural powers; he is the guardian of Orunmila’s oracular utterances. Without Èsù to open the portals to the past and the future, Orunmila, the divination deity would be blind. As a neutral force, he straddles all realms and acts as an essential factor in any attempt to resolve the conflicts between contrasting but coterminous forces in the world. Although he is sometimes portrayed as whimsical, Èsù is actually devoid of all emotions. He supports only those who perform prescribed sacrifices and act in conformity with the moral laws of the universe as laid down by Olodumare. As the deity of the “orita”—often defined as the crossroads but really a complex term that also refers to the front yard of a house, or the gateway to the various bodily orifices—it is Èsù’s duty to take sacrifices to target-deities. Without his intervention, the Yoruba people believe, no sacrifice, no matter how sumptuous, will be efficacious. Philosophically speaking, Èsù is the deity of choice and free will. So, while Ogun may be the deity of war and creativity and Orunmila the deity of wisdom, Èsù is the deity of prescience, imagination, and criticism—literary or otherwise.26
Èsù, as the trickster fiddling with the cradling strings from which everything emerges, is the personification of asé:
Èsù is the Divine Messenger between God and Man. Èsù sits at the Crossroad. Èsù is the Orisa that offers choices and possibility. Èsù is the gatekeeper, the guardian of the door. Èsù safeguards the principle of freewill. Èsù is the keeper of asé.27
I am especially delighted to know that Èsù sits at the crossroad—and where else would he sit, actually? If asé is borne in response, in the riddling middle of reality, in the betweenness of things, then the one who keeps it has to be a phenomenon of the crossroads. And the fact that Èsù sits there finds a conceptual playmate in the notion of diffraction—the optic phenomenon that “troubles the very notion of dicho-tomy—cutting into two—as a singular act of absolute differentiation, fracturing this from that, now from then”28—as put forward by Karen Barad. This concept of diffraction figures in a decolonial notion of self and identity that Barad echoes when she quotes Trinh Minh-ha:
Identity as understood in the context of a certain ideology of dominance has long been a notion that relies on the concept of an essential, authentic core that remains hidden to one’s consciousness and that requires the elimination of all that is considered foreign or not true to the self, that is to say, non-I, other. In such a concept the other is almost unavoidably either opposed to the self or submitted to the self’s dominance. It is always condemned to remain its shadow while attempting at being its equal. Identity, thus understood, supposes that a clear dividing line can be made between I and not-I, he and she; between depth and surface, or vertical and horizontal identity; between us here and them over there.29
The concept of self and identity, redescribed in the queer materialism and diffractivity of asé, cannot conceive of the “other” as “negativity, lack, [or] foreignness”; it repudiates the idea of identity as “an impenetrable barrier between self and other [that is set up] in an attempt to establish and maintain its hegemony.”30 In other words, just as you find bands of darkness in light, and a heart of light in the blackest shadow, the self and the not-self are not separate, and difference—though real—is not fixed, but dynamic and co-emergent.
Èsù sits at the crossroads. The crossroads is not the place that lies ahead, a one-time occurrence. All roads are crossroads; every highway a junction of intra-sections. Matter-mind … reality … every “thing” is already a quilt whose sewers, human and nonhuman, are scattered across space-time—every object a node in the cosmopolitical, material-discursive traffic of things crisscrossing, cross-hatching, crossing-out, bleeding-in each other.
Asé disturbs the idea that whiteness is an “other” to blackness, but sees “both” as arising from the same matrix. It does not deny difference; it queers separation. It dispels the myth of unilineal oppression or independent victimhood, tying both the powered and the disempowered in a call-response ambivalence. Power does not flow from them to us. Dominance cuts both ways, injuring the colonized and reinforcing the strictures of the colonizer, but even that dynamic is not locked in place. The past we often mourn in our intellectual projects that seek a “returning to Eden,” to reclaim a sense of indigeneity, were never coherently indigenous, harmonious, or without shadows. Modernity is not essential evil come destroy our havens of communal living and well-being.
Èsù, like Shiva, fritters away the tough edges between us, calling us to inspect our claims to victimhood, to lean into nontarget populations. To learn to pour libations at the crossroads. One cannot easily condense Èsù’s nebulous character into well-polished morals-of-the-story or principles or even underlying themes, a situation that ironically informs a different ethos of racial justice: that in the game of sides, the greatest loss suffered is the other side.
I make the case, my dear—as a black or rather a “black-black” man looking through the lenses of agential realism and my own indigenous cosmologies—that blackness is a phenomenon of white normativity or of a modern spatialization project that occludes the material vibrancy of the more-than-human world, snuffing out other places of power and hiding away the language of the trees, if you will. Blackness is a product of white power—a response made possible and meaningful within preset frames. In asserting the purit
y of our identity, in essentializing the other and fixing power in this modern logic of hierarchy and ascendancy, we are blinded to ways of being “otherwise” with planet, with people, with generations to come, and with power. Only within the binary sterilization of modernity, only within a settler epistemology of fixed Newtonian bubble identities, only within a world shorn of its vibrancy and agency, does blackness become naturalized as inferiority and become associated with backwardness. “Outside” of the quests for equality or reconciliation, there is a sensuous, richly generative, luxurious intra-activity of bodies … a stream of becoming and movement that disrupts the hard edges of our claims to blackness or whiteness, and engages white normativity and privilege from a place that is simultaneously compassionate and generative—without turning a blind eye to the oppression suffered.
The way the British colonists took over Igbo settlements and gained adherents for Christianity was to reverse the roles the Osus played. The Osus’ untouchability, once a mark of sacredness, became repulsive distance. They had hitherto operated within a posthuman cosmology, which allowed them to think of themselves within a community of other beings. A web of life that connected them in vital links with their environment. A fish is not wet inside water.
They offered sacrifices and paid homage to the gods, who were in turn embodied performances of their environments, peeping through the stories the people shared, stirring in renegade gusts of wind, dreaming with the soft breathings of every dust-infiltrated surface. The lifeblood of the community they served hinged on the balance between the mundane and the sacred. As such, to be human was to be in debt to other actors, seen and unseen. To be human was to be immersed in a sensuous world that did things to you.
By displacing this posthuman sensitivity, the colonialists downplayed the agencies of the nonhuman and more-than-human world around them—and not just for the Osus … this is how colonialism took place and still does: a shrinkage of the wide, wild, nonessential, nonteleological vitality and abundance of the world into a grim binary, a bitter modernity that reifies the human being as orphaned agent and the world outside of him as tool. Draining all the agency away from the material world, wrapping it into an essentialist bundle, and stuffing it into the human being as a natural category meant that the world was reduced to a machine.
Education was now to be gained in isolated, suspiciously standardized places called schools, and not in the immediacy of a moment or by learning from the environment. The free-flowing gift cultures that coincided with the values of Ubuntu—the idea that I am, not because I think, but because you are—were undermined by a new economic milieu defined by artificial scarcity, greed and pyramidal quests for ascension. A new universal metric for evaluating wealth displaced the abundance these cultures had known. All that was left for the lords to do was to rapidly convert indigenous artefacts, lands and these cultures into commodities.
In order to help this world-eating machine of capital globalization grow more tentacles, a universal time and singular future was pressed upon everyone. A linear notion of time—one that flows from past to present and to the future—helped foreground the discourses of development and progress as the engine of a Future-yet-to-come. That same clock, floating disembodied and static over everything, has shut down the way time was negotiated between plant and ear, between moon and tide, between the bulging saccharine sweetness of a ripe fruit and a farming family. The rituals of attending to what the world is doing are displaced by new modern rituals of trying to escape it.
Blackness—at least to some of us black-black people—is a “passenger concept.” The class divisions on an airplane—first class, business class, and coach—only make sense within the airplane. The plane’s architecture organizes its transient airborne society according to those categories. Could it be said that our black identities speak more to the particular social architecture we inhabit, haunted by worlds elided and practices forgotten, than to some essential identity within?
Modernity, the mapping project of locating bodies (whether female, environmental, object, animal bodies) within absolute categories like “space” and “time,”31 shaped blackness within an enlightenment settler humanist ontology. As such, white normativity is the heartland of blackness, for it was fashioned not only as a class tool for creating wage-free slave populations, but by the new “blacks” themselves as a rejection of the material essentialism of their bodies by which they were stabilized into servitude. Blackness became their existential struggle to transcend the new spatialized territories, or a rejection of the fixedness of the “nature” exploited by capitalism. Where being black might have been an issue of complexion, modernity’s cubicle ontology predesignated it as “lack.”
If a word is only understood within context—deriving its intelligibility within a stream of other words—then modernity is the gridlock that separates words away from the umbilical cord of sentences. Within this framework, the goal of synthesis—or two separate things coming together—plays out. Justice becomes about black people having just as much economic and political access as white people. However, if blacks finally transcend their unfair placement in white settlements, I would argue that this would be the greatest triumph for white normativity—because even though winners would have changed, the game still abides. When black people fetishize blackness, white settlements are reinforced.
If white normativity is agential, then its purpose is to continue to find intelligent and resilient ways to organize society in a hierarchical way. Its effects are to valorize difference as separation and enforce closures, to lock the “I” away from the “not-I.” By maintaining a harsh cut between black and white, male and female, dead and living, animate and inanimate, modern ontologies obstruct an appreciation for the unending traffic between mutual borders—the intra-activity that insists, quite rudely, that black and white are co-constitutive. Even more critically, and this point needs to be emphasized in the context of the conversation about “other places of power,” the dissociation of the “human” figure from the environment creates relationships of power that emphasize exploitation over nature, not partnership or co-becoming with nature.
This colonial logic of identity—whether black identity, white identity, female identity, or male identity—rigorously denies that spillages are possible, that our bodies are actually doing something that undercuts the rigidity and confidence of our passionate discussions. It nails down identity by settling for an anorexic pixel in the stead of a screen, and for a morsel of the canvas—still life—where the portrait is still being painted by a sympoiesis of bodies. An asé of bodies.
This is all to say that we became black when we were surgically removed from a stream of many colorful becomings, and positioned in a rigid table of categories … when we were stabilized and naturalized as citizens of a globalizing status quo. That status quo is characterized by an emphatic focus on the sole agency and supremacy of human beings above communities of nonhumans, the erosion of multiple pasts, the occlusion of the abundance and gifts of the world, a mechanistic ontology and the fostering of a single Future. To address racism and oppression, one must notice the materiality of the social conditions that hold us in place, in suspense, while occluding other ways of being in the world. In preserving itself, what this complex of oppression invites us to advocate for is equality. The ideal of a world where blacks are finally equal to whites (or even the prospects of black domination) is as unsatisfactory an ethical response to patriarchal domination as is taking a child’s playthings away—and then rewarding the child with the promise not to beat her too much if she stops crying so loudly.
Why be equal? Why abide a metric of equality that pays no mind to the ways we diffractively enable and disable and permit each other? Why do we gather and mourn at the race track, in a stadium filled with other games to play? It is an underwhelming compensation—one that pretends that blacks—and whites—are really bound by a phallic system of value, and that the only way to be relevant, to be useful, to be real, is to ascen
d a pyramidal structure, the estranged pinnacle of which is the source of power.
Is there a universal black experience, a policed line that should not be crossed? Is my blackness still subject to the elements, or do I betray it by furnishing you, Alethea, with a “white argument” that betrays the experiences and sufferings of people who look like me? Am I a sell-out? Or is there something in noticing that even this blackness will go the way of other colors: in the compost heap that disciplines everything?
Even right now, like spent charcoal in a dead bonfire exposed to the air, I flitter away in soot and pieces. The closer I come to my identity, the more I see that it is diffracted, dispersed, and unevenly distributed across time and space, so that to say I am “black” is to cut a chunk away from my inexhaustibleness.
You, for instance, are a shocking palimpsest of colors and bodies.
Your mum lies now on the bare floor a few meters from where I sit. Her beautiful body is riddled with chicken-pox rashes and scars, as she is halfway in her recovery. It has been a tough seven days taking care of her. To blame the varicella zoster virus as the culprit here would be to forget its entanglement with other agencies. This is to say that your mother’s chicken pox is itself a movement of other bodies, environmental configurations, biological events, and situated cultural practices of taking care. The diffractive becomings of chicken pox are a good figure for identity. Like the wind on its way, identity is never still—a point Maxine Sheets-Johnstone makes in her book The Primacy of Movement when she affirms that movement forms the “I that moves” before the “I that moves” forms movement.32
In the absence of a DNA test and a family history from my side of the family, your mum wanted to impress you with just how convoluted your identity is—and just how much she is proud of your heritage. So, weak and exhausted, her face yellowed with turmeric and her body spotted with a neem leaf emulsion, she traced out your maternal web of others. I reproduce it here for you to see:
These Wilds Beyond Our Fences Page 23