These Wilds Beyond Our Fences

by Bayo Akomolafe

  I really don’t want to bore you with commentary on your lineage, so I hope your mum’s handwriting is clear enough to confuse you about your “true” identity or your innocent appropriations of brownness. There is no essence here, just movement—connecting colonizer and colonized in erotic mixtures. Somewhere down the line you have an English great great grandmother and Iranian parentage, an African grandfather, and Indians all the way down. But even this does not capture the complexity of your heritage: not only is each person here not a stable Newtonian mix of already static identities, their identities—even though most here are dead—are still being rewritten.

  Family trees are fundamentally structured to represent identity as a stream of past events congealing into the moving present. In that time conception, the past is done with: if we could capture all the elements of your ancestry together, or find a way to trace your heritage “back” in the record of races that have contributed themselves to you, we can theoretically form an aggregate of these individual identities and squeeze out what you really are—as we would squeeze out juice from an orange. That proposal falls in the face of a different notion of time, one that modernity chases away to make room for its homogenous universal clock, and one that is at the heart of racism, anthropocentrism, sexism, and speciesism.

  In many indigenous non-Western cultures, time is circular—not flowing forward from past to present then future, but entangled together in a thick now, so that the past is still accessible and the future can be remembered. Or as Karen Barad puts it, “the past is yet to come.”33

  Do you remember the double-slit experiment I described to you in the last letter? The one with the sticky wall and one of your confused grandmas? Where the very nature of reality is called into question, and where we find that only a relational ontology could possibly help us make sense of the queerness at the heart of things? Well, it gets stranger. A modified version of that experiment challenges our conceptions of time. It’s called the delayed choice quantum eraser experiment. You could just call it the “Grandma waits to look at the balls” experiment.

  In the original double-slit experiment, if you bring a source of light near a barrier with two slits in it, on the far side of the slits you’ll register fringe patterns, or undulating ridges of shadow and light, on a screen. If you were to use particles, sending them flying toward the barrier with slits, you still register a fringe pattern—even when you send each particle one by one. When you try to find out which slit the particle went through, the pattern on the screen changes back to what you would expect for particle behavior. As soon as you stop observing which way (which slit) the particles went, the interference pattern returns. Right.

  Where we left your grandma the last time was near both windows, recording which particular window each of our hurled balls went through. Because we aren’t so sure that grandma isn’t meddling with the thrown balls before they pass through the openings—even though she swears on her life that she has nothing to do with the queer results we are obtaining—we decide to move the poor woman outside the house, in between the windows and the freshly painted wall (I know this is stretching the metaphor but stick with me). Her job is like before—only this time—she is to carefully observe which windows the balls are coming through, after they’ve already come through it. Her eyes are wide open as the balls sail through either of two windows. As they land on the wall, the two ridges of stain marks (not the diffraction pattern) emerges. She shouts this out to us—telling us there is no diffraction pattern.

  But alas, the thing we most feared happens: one of the balls hits grandma in her head, and she staggers away, calling it quits with our nonsensical game. We were blindfolded, so we couldn’t tell where the balls were going through—and now, the only person that can tell is out of whack. We remove our blindfolds. Instead of two ridges—we see endless rows on the wall. Remember we had established an order to this madness before: when we don’t know which window the balls go through, we get the endless ridges of ball stains. When we know, we get only two. Now we effectively “switched off” our ability to know after the balls had already struck the wall, and even though two ridges formed, they disappeared after grandma walked away—it is as if they were never even there before. As if the moment grandma walked away, the balls went back in time and altered their behavior, exhibiting the diffraction pattern.

  In nongrandma terms, what these experiments show is that even after the particles have hit the final screen—showing a pattern that tells us they are “particles” because we have information about which slits they are going through, the results can be “reversed” when we remove our ability to gain that information. We see a diffraction pattern when detection is turned off, consistent with the fact that we are dealing with waves. What is downright queer is that the particles behave as if they were always waves—as if they went back in time, altered their history and rejoined us as waves. A case of a future event causing the past? An instance of time travel? Or a queerer story?

  Karen Barad offers some thoughts:

  So the point here is: how do physicists interpret this? The way physicists interpret this is by saying that we have the ability to change the past. Because I am changing how it went through the slit after it has already gone through the slits. So there is a talk about erasing what already was, restoring the diffraction pattern, and basically moving the clock backwards or changing how the particle went through after it has already gone through: the ability to change the past. Now I want to suggest, though, that that is a very convenient kind of nostalgic fantasy. I cannot blame physicists for engaging in this. I think this is a very seductive fantasy. Perhaps at one time or another all of us wish that we could change the past and the marks left on bodies, and change the ways in which we materialized the world, especially when we are not being careful, that we would like to undo what has been done, that we would like to go back and do it differently. But is this really what this experiment is telling us about what is possible?34

  She then offers insights diffractively gained from feminist theory and cultural studies that what is happening here is not a simple return of a previous diffraction pattern, but a new one. The deeper implications here are that time is just as indeterminate, and not the parameter that matches forward from past to present to future. It is constantly reiterated in the now.

  What we are seeing here is that time is not given, it is not universally given, but rather that time is articulated and re-synchronized through various material practices. In other words, just like position, momentum, wave, and particle, time itself only makes sense in the context of particular phenomena.… The “past” was never simply there to begin with, and the “future” is not what will unfold, but “past” and “future” are iteratively reconfigured and enfolded through the world’s ongoing intra-activity. There is no inherently determinate relationship between past, present, and future.35

  Temporality is co-constituted and reassigned in the particularity of each moment. Bodies don’t move ‘in’ time or through time; bodies and time are configured together. Asé means that even time must come to the crossroads, not linger above it. Memory and remembering, for instance, are not about latching on to an already-done-with past, but are about recreating the past each time memory is evoked. But does this mean we can singularly change the past? Does this mean we can erase the traces of different iterations of the past and impose the ones we prefer? Remember the diffraction pattern does not return when the detector is “off”; a new one is created that is haunted by the memories of the “previous.”

  The past, like the future, though, is not closed. But “erasure” is not what is at issue. In an important sense, the “past” is open to change. It can be redeemed, productively reconfigured in an iterative unfolding of space-time-matter. But its sedimenting effects, its trace, cannot be erased. The memory of its materializing effects is written into the world. So changing the past is never without costs, or responsibility.36

  Indigenous worlds resist the idea of uni
versal homogeneous world history. The identities of our forebears, seemingly locked in the past, are still being remade. Time bends and dances and jumps from here to there—or, following Barad, makes “here” and “there” by jumping. The idea that “the past is yet to come,” that the Future imposed by the developmental models we subscribe to, and that causality is a lot more than mechanical bodies bouncing off each other, undermines the totalizing regimes of homogeneous time, which—it is possible to argue—was one of the foremost tools employed by colonial forces to estrange communities from their own wealth, from their own intimate partnerships with nature, from their own anticipatory disciplines, and from other places of power.

  This moment here now is alive with the dense seeds of other times and spaces—pasts/futures in constant reconfiguration. That the past is alive (not rooted in a singular universal Futurism) challenges the emptiness of enlightenment time. It is not about erasing the tears of oppression that once landed on anonymous barren earth—the sorrows of our mothers and fathers. It is about the constant generativity of what is supposedly done but not forgotten. It is about what the past can yet become, what the tears falling to the ground might yet fertilize. It is the queer idea that we cannot allocate these lively marks on our bodies to the category of “history” (leave it there or bury it, for even the dead are active).

  To truly honor the past is to admit it moves—and to admit it still speaks and haunts diffractively through our current specific contexts and circumstances is to do the difficult work of revisiting our standpoints and finding new questions to ask by lingering in the silences of what we don’t know.

  The point I stress is that we are haunted by what we’ve repressed. Given insights generated by indigenous traditions, quantum physics, and feminist materialisms about the queerness of temporality, the collective intelligence of the world around us, the intra-connectedness of all things, the agency of materiality and its entanglement with discursivity, we have to rethink racial justice vis-à-vis the rhizomic emergence of identities. If becoming is an “open, nonpurposeful, contingent process,” characterized by a "becoming-with” (or sympoiesis), then racial justice is not necessarily a race for races but might (yet) be a slowing down—to a complete stop if necessary—to consider the tracks that urge us on.

  It’s not that there is something conceptually inadequate about our descriptions/actions for racial justice; it is that our engagements are themselves fashioned within an apparatus—namely, modernity—that thrives on those charged distinctions between black and white and absolute notions of separateness to work, while leaving out the contributions the world is already making to our realities.

  We are situated in an architecture of racism. Racism or prejudice is not a human attribute any more than humans are themselves independent, self-contained, and separate from the unspeakable material-spiritual goings-on. This architecture is not entirely conversational or discursive. It is biological, material, visceral—implicating not just our communicative transactions or knowledge-creation practices.

  Perhaps, then, if the holding milieu were any different, Diallo’s claim to blackness might have been investigated with different lenses. With the sensitivity of an “Osu,” who knows that fathers often “come back” in form of their children, who understands that the whisperings of one’s ancestors are often mistaken for madness, and who knows how to consult with other agencies. But under modern circumstances, each “side” is locked in. An Osu’s blackness generously opens up a world of crazy dreams, ancestral connections, queer pasts, posthumanist performativity, and the connections our bodies are making that we moderns do not see because we are trapped in our castles of identity politics. No one is essentially black or white; we all are a becoming-black/white. Race is not biological determinism, or linguistic absolutism—not fixed or arbitrary; it is emergent. It is not even a thing of human ancestry alone, since the human is a matter of the nonhuman becoming.

  Race is a gerund.

  This is not to say that we should just hold hands (whatever that means!) and walk into some future, forgetting the whispering of our ancestors and the tender wounds inflicted upon us even now. Entanglement is not submission to a hive mind or an effacement of differences; it is instead, as Trinh Minh-ha reminds us again, noticing that we are inescapably interconnected—and this is tragedy and hope.

  Who knows? With an Osu cosmology, Diallo’s infiltration might have been an opportunity to meet our notions of identity as if for the first time, to ask weird questions, and to examine the historical, technological, material, geographical and colonial conditions that situate blackness(es) and whiteness(es). I tell this story of the Osus because we are living in times of deep forgetfulness, but the point is not to see that pasts are never remembered—pasts are re-membered. Reconfigured over and over again. Not erased. But manufactured from the threads of this very moment.

  In so far as our colors abide on this single track, on this trajectory of progress and anthropocentrism, within this space-time cartography of whiteness—the same framework that once colonized and still colonizes white people too—we might never know other places of power.

  Blackness is the figure of being late and the pressure to be punctual to a time that is not ours; it is this Sisyphean striving to arrive early to a party that started long before we were told about it. And for so long, we have stood at the gates, and we have stammered out excuses for not being punctual enough, and we have fought for seats around the table where the juiciest plates are being arranged. We have demanded to be seen, to be heard, to be invited, and to be served. But therein lies the thick Faustian plot: in these moments of angst, for which our loud protests are christened a form of justice-seeking, and which are inscribed with a dense forgetfulness, we do not see that there are other clocks, and that there is no single universal homogenous world history to adhere to. The world does not careen toward progress, and human improvement and well-being are not matters owned by the practices of economic development and growth. There are songs that trees know that we haven’t heard; there are alliances that termites and the pheromones they secrete forge that we can learn from; there are wild things that do not know the moral discipline of purpose or the colonizing influence of instrumentality; and then there are murmurations—the waltz of wind, sky, starling, and ground—which are not meant to be spoken about but merely to be seen and appreciated. In short, there are other powers, other agencies, and other clocks. And, perhaps, we release ourselves not only to the performance of our many colors, but we free those in the posh parties that have somehow denied us entry from their secret fears of losing their own seats at the table, when we say “there are other clocks, and we will not be on time.”

  We are in the marked time of a global socio-economic order that hinders us from noticing our sensuous connections to each other. We are in a convoy of exhausted traffic blind to the expanse of wealth on the sides of the highway leading to an enlightenment Future—the future premised on the assumption that humans are alone, that nature is dead, that you and I are separate from each other. I refuse this premise. This repulsion at the heart of colonial truth. I am not separate from you. My father is not separate from me. We are not alone.

  But how do we find our time? One might say that a different feminist ethos of racial sensuousness, an asé of racial justice-making, or what I call “transraciality,” brings us initially to a notion of self and identity that are posthuman, diffractive, and intra-active. It invites us to see that racism does not sprout from racist human bodies containing ignorance and hatred but intra-active relationships that are always yet-to-come.

  It slows us down to see that power is not only never complete, not only partially realized, but shared—so that victimhood can become an ironic vocation of maintaining problematic orders of things. In the same vein, it tells us that there is no perfect victim, no innocent past or coherent indigeneity that was lost and which we have to regain. It disciplines our edges and teaches us that every moment is a reconfiguration of identity—an
d that we do not ease gently from one second to another intact. That we will not solve racial injustice, and that our inability to do so is not a function of our inadequacy or a want of ideas, or because racial injustice is sewn into the very nature of matter, but because we—the once coherent selves of humanist imaginations—are not at all central to the equation of the world. Asé forbids this. We are not complete. We are not in charge. Our best exertions will never totally embrace everything there is to consider, but will ripple out into the crossroads, touching here, excluding there. Far from being an invitation to despair, or to abandon efforts in service of racial justice, we are “called” (so it seems) to resituate ourselves within the mangle of other forces and to think of ourselves as co-participants with a world that never was inferior to us; a world that is also embroiled in material explorations and experimentations in the questions of justice. This “transraciality” is the very fabric by which all things matter, and by which things show up only partially. It does not dismiss the imaginary of equality, but it tells us how this is framed in an anorexic, neoliberal apparatus that obfuscates our multiple connections and potentials of partnership “with” nature.

  If we frame racial justice within this apparatus—and there are specific contexts that demand this framing—then our victories will be dependent on the enactment of laws and operationalization of policies that address economic, political, and scientific exclusions of people of color. However, other justices are possible. Other ways of meeting each other. In a wide open space, in a world dislodged from its neoliberal coordinates, what racial matterings might look like are yet to be seen—and we may not be prepared for what wants to come next. Since there are no resolutions, no points of firm arrivals that are not already takeoff points for other kinds of emergence, each of our ideas and practices are what the “whole,” or a movement of bodies that precedes us, is doing. Each of our projects are yearnings performing a provisionality. Each of us pours a libation at crossroads.