These Wilds Beyond Our Fences

by Bayo Akomolafe

  Perhaps an asé of racial becomings can gain ground in a politics of possibilities thrown open by this commitment to entanglements. Perhaps this is what whiteness can do: to ally with colored bodies and learn to develop “affective muscles”37 with which they can serve as generous conduits of rage—letting screams of “I hate white people!”38 be held not as evil or as something to be repressed but as the trans-affective flow that is dispersed in the world at large. To open up places and sites of inquiry where “I don’t know, and I’m not sure we have this figured out” is the theme of the gathering. To direct money toward projects of the commons that do not necessarily yield returns on investment.

  And because blackness cannot stay in antagonistic wait for answers, that identity is also being challenged by a world too corrosive for steady boundaries. A different ethos of “transraciality” queers the oppressor-victim dichotomy. I employ transraciality as distinct from transracialism—or when someone of one race decides to represent himself or herself as a member of another. Transraciality would be a postcolonial, diffractive understanding of race as a partial emergence of bodies that already includes radical others in its genealogy of becoming, as well as a posthumanist notion of race as a queer material-discursive intra-activity of bodies beyond linear ancestry. Transraciality could inspire black collectives to seek to understand the positions of nontarget dominant groups, or even extend invitations and receive contributions from others groups made to their traditions that are still extant. Spaces of shared grieving can be co-enacted. And because words don’t possess meanings or come preset with meanings of their own, I even imagine days of jubilee in which white allies are allowed to open that hydraulically sealed capsule, survey its vexed and contemptuous content—the slur “nigger” or its rehabilitated variation “nigga”—and compost it by saying it in a multiracial ritual that allows intergenerational trauma and ghosts to roam free, if only to redeem the word and reclaim it for less divisive connotations.

  None of these are of course prescriptions for rekindling racial relations or without risk. None of these are solutions. Also none of these ideas are necessarily teleological or directed at an ultimate portrait of racial justice. They are provocations to “think otherwise, to become otherwise.”39 Different contexts contain their own enabling and disabling features, a point that reinforces the idea that responsivity is never unilateral or entirely human, but is the shared agency between. There is no correct response for all situations, or fixed racial singularity in the far distance to which we all must tether our aspirations and multiple yearnings. What asé as a new materialist, posthuman redescription of racial matterings and a different ethos of responsivity provokes are opportunities to be otherwise—opportunities to come in touch with times other than the one Future of neoliberal progress that has hijacked racial justice imaginaries. Opportunities to re-member.

  Do I dare consider transracialities that invite us to live intersectionally? Do I dare dream of a decolonial politics that allows us to confront these troubling ties we have with the supposed Others? One that frames engagement not merely in terms of reconciliation or equality among races—since equal opportunity within a structure reinforces the structure—but in terms of seeking out crossroads, and pouring libations in the places our bodies intersect with the many others that are already and already yet to be part of us? Do I dare confront the present, and explore its depths for the many within?

  The day you were born was a Wednesday. You know that, dear. You’ve seen me make reference to that day over and over again, through these letters. You have perhaps also noticed that everything I have shared with you seems to happen on a Wednesday. That’s because when you were born, the world stopped turning, and every day before that and every day that will come was/will be a Wednesday, so long as I breathe.

  Now let me end this letter by telling you about the hushes that occasioned these musings on race. And the “forbidden child” that brought them to me. I remember the moment she walked in—this forbidden child. I started to sweat. I hadn’t expected her to be so beautiful, so enrapturing. I began shuffling my feet restlessly beneath the table. I stood as she came closer. I had on an “unnecessary suit” and a pair of shoes with soles that stuck out like a tongue from a diseased mouth. I shook her hand formally, came behind her chair, pulled it out, and allowed her to sit. Then I circled back to my chair.

  I had noticed her before. From a shy distance. But the day before, I was overcome by a need to meet her. Something about her called to me. Now, here she was. Sitting before me, a sight for sore eyes: her face was a perfect geometry of form and delicacy, a study in psychedelic depth. I controlled myself from looking directly at her, but noticed my eyes drifting from eyeing her face to her slender fingers, which she rested gracefully on the table.

  At that point in my life, I was caught up in my quest for bigness. Still many miles away from Bàbá. Still buried in my books. Still searching for my place in a scheme guaranteed to benefit the faithful. Still committed to modernity and its fixations with categories. When she came, she was like nothing I had ever seen—a shocking monstrosity of pagan virtue. For someone who had worked so hard to obey the rules, to stick to the map, I knew she was not a product of rules. Somewhere, some persons had transgressed the protocols inscribed into the heart of things. The totem smashed, the forbidden child—your mother-to-come—sat with me.

  And we sat there together, in that Nigerian university canteen, with an unopened Coke between us, speaking of our lives, the names we had given to our cars, the fact that we even had names for our laptops, and the loss of our fathers when we were both young. She was an expatriate lecturer in the department of biology and natural sciences, and I, a lecturer in psychology. Between us, a fervid chemistry bubbled … a warping of timelines, a queer temporality, an involution of plot and linearity.

  Many days later, she gave me a gift. Two gifts, actually: your mum loved collecting things she found on the way. She would collect snail shells and bugs, or identify a plant or tree with its Latin name—telling me why it bloomed the way it did or what medicinal properties they had if they were used or approached in a particular way. She had a gentle regard and respect for all life, a talent for noticing misfits, and an eye for the invisible—often arguing during her classes that, contrary to the doctrinal proposals about the human’s centrality in the world that were pervasive in our Christian university setting, plants were in fact superior life forms: they didn’t have to move in order to be nourished, and they hadn’t built an outrageous world-canceling civilization. By that time, we already had one dachshund and two Lhasa apso puppies between us. We called them our children, all three of them—Hiccup, Sasha, and Mila. Hiccup lived with us in our apartment, even though pets were not allowed on campus, while Sasha and Mila were in India, in her mum’s house, yet to join us in Nigeria.

  We once found the dried but wonderfully preserved body of a scarily huge dragonfly in her backyard. She kept that thing for weeks, while my first impulse was to jump anytime I noticed it. So she knew I had a thing for creepy-crawly things—even though deep down I had a fond but wary brotherly regard for her creatures, for we all together had been rescued from the treacherous highway by the good missus.

  Well, one day we went out, and she noticed something in the shrubbery while we waited outside to see someone important to us. She bent down and picked up two snail-like things. The tiny critters looked like pitch black nudibranchs with irregular hairy protrusions from the rear end of what looked like long flagella. “Hushes,” she said with a smile. I was already five feet away, urging her to put them away.

  “They won’t bite! Just come here and feel them,” she ordered. So I adjusted my collar, straightened my shoulder, and walked up to them.

  “Are you sure these things are safe, dear? Don’t they stink or something?” I stuttered, as I held out my index finger to touch the hushes, suspending that move as I observed the squirming bodies.

  “The world isn’t safe or meant to be,” she repli
ed. “And yes, they stink—but it is okay.”

  They are just different, that’s all. And what’s a world without differences?

  As the hushes slithered across her palm, the one holding the other, she asked me to touch them.

  The fear is in the moment just before you come in touch, she said.

  So I did, at first closing my eyes, silently reminding myself that these hushes were considerably small.

  She looked at me, holding back her need to blurt out laughing.

  “You are so horrible at this, Bayo!” she said. I started to mumble something about being indifferent to them and all that and blah-blah, when she announced that we were taking them home, and that they were to be our fourth and fifth children. The fourth and fifth in a series that was yet to come.

  We didn’t take them home, and I quickly forgot about the hushes, but a plot thicker than linear time was afoot.

  At night, we pray together. Your father usually does it reluctantly, rolling his eyes when we mention Jesus, or when you punctuate every sentence with “oh, Lord”—imitating the way I pray. When you ask him to pray, he usually does so begrudgingly, and then holds an annoying frown on his face.

  This morning, after we share a prayerful moment together, he turns around, his face dejected and sunken. He has never been good at hiding his feelings. I ask him why he is this way, and he stutters to explain himself, saying that he has deep reservations about you growing up to be Christian, to be like he was—casting the world in terms of good and evil, getting worked up about sin.

  I remind him that you are only three, and that he must trust you to find your own way. He counters by saying he does trust you, and that he wonders if he can count on me not to fix you in my faith.

  I am now angry with him. And I let him know that I have questions too and that I am also exploring what my faith means. I tell him I do not want to “fix” you into it—that you are an analytic thinker with highly attuned ears. I also remind him that he is often locked away in his writing, and then shows up like a manager from behind his closed door to complain about the noise in the workers’ room. I tell him he cannot expect to swoop in to save the day once in a while. I need him in the muck with me, not lingering above it.

  I say to your father: “One can become fanatic about religion, and one can become fanatic about keeping away from it. Are you willing that we hold space for her even if she grows into something you disagree with?”

  He lowers his head. He does that when he comes to see himself. He had once told me that “Just like plants need fertilizer to grow, we need to hold close our bullshit—and practice the slippery yet sacred art of self-deprecation.” I remind him of this, and he nods his head gently.

  From where I lie on the bed, I turn my attention to the hall, where you are playing with some Lego bricks. You are so blessed. How do I know? These struggles, these meetings with ourselves and negotiations of what it means to be there for you—often difficult and hypocritical and revelatory—are how I know. We are not perfect. We don’t have this figured out. And that’s okay.

  No; that’s perfect.

  Letter 5

  Tears Do Not Fall in Space

  If happiness knocks on your door, open your house, but prepare room and board for two. For happiness never travels without her lover, grief.

  Dear Alethea,

  These saccharine waves relentlessly crash upon the shore—each mad arrival no less quizzical than the previous. The sun rises, then sets; the moon bleaches the undulating surfaces of an oblivious sea; a newborn roe fawn, graceful and ethereal, is eaten by lion. All this time, we ask, “What is this for?” What is its deeper meaning? Perhaps we are blinded by our addiction to reasons; we are done in by presupposing that things must have reasons behind them—guided by a sure hand, a resolute truth, a stern law, a cosmic debt, an abiding promise. Everything must be used up, taken in—nothing left to waste.

  Each day, however, in my struggles for authenticity, I am reminded that the world is larger than my capacity to be purposeful or useful; I am reminded that “nature” is extravagant, awkward, irreverent—spawning species, only to ingest them again—and not in service of some larger plot, but in its own radical in/hospitality, sacred hypocrisy, and wanton spontaneity. “Why” becomes a chain that tethers me to the familiar, instead of a first unsure step into the thick.

  Don’t misunderstand me: I want to hold my reasons close; I want to hug them and nestle my face in theirs. But sometimes I want to lose them in the distance—and be part of a song that knows no lyric, no crescendo, no paradigm, no dramatic selah, no panting stop. I want to be lost in a bokeh of playful lights, with no sharp boundaries or specificity. I want to be unhinged from my slow circuitry around the gravitational pull of purpose. I want to dance to an incongruous stirring of noise and sunset, and know—if only for a moment—that what happened has no explanation. Or need not have one.

  Love has a way of unraveling you, making you float above the imperatives of reason and logic, unchaining you from the gravity of teleology. Love doesn’t make sense. Not everything has to.

  When I met your mother, it felt like a homecoming. For a while, I didn’t know my father’s hauntings. Just the faint whisper of his blessings. Before your mum, I consoled myself with my books, doubled down on my repulsion with human company, and sought to figure everything out. Literally everything. I had a journal where I documented this romantic quest for final answers. I called it “Dear Josephus”—imagining Josephus to be a Palestinian Muslim cleric, who had more questions than any sacred text could provide answers to.

  My correspondence with Josephus included reflections on creation, why I often felt so lonely or less than my peers, and what was the purpose of the incessant motion of things. “To what end do these things move, elder?” I would ask, sometimes in the dead of night. “Where is home?”

  Sometimes he replied. Sometimes he spoke to me about love, about the nature of truth, about the deep pain that each ordinary passing second is pregnant with. The mere pain of being alive. The ache of breathing and the tension of other bodies.

  Josephus often told me to be still, to be as perfectly still as I could manage, and when I thought I had achieved that, to notice that I was in fact moving … that my heart’s rhythmic arguments sent a dialectic coursing through my body so eloquently that even my practiced stillness concurred with it—and thus moved.

  We kept writing to each other—his reassuring voice comforting a young African man learning to find his way in the world. Now that I think of it, I suppose I was still reaching for my father when I wrote Josephus—naming him after Flavius Josephus, the Roman-Jewish scholar and historian who reportedly knew of Jesus, whose mysterious claims about heaven I so wanted to be true—because it meant I would never really lose anyone again. Including those I had already lost.

  Maybe these letters to you, to this Alethea who now kneels by the seashore, by our side, is my way of wanting to learn from you too as much as it is a haunting of my father. My way of breaching the seemingly impassable gulf that lies between now and then—or the many nows that are produced by our (human and nonhuman) movements.

  Anyway, Josephus and I eventually stopped speaking with one another. It happened when your mother became my every waking moment. When she said yes to me. To me.

  I remember being curled up in bed next to her on most mornings. I would look at your mother’s face, pinching myself to wake my pathetic head from the cruel dream imposed on me by a demon. How could it be that such a woman would lie next to me? It didn’t seem possible. And yet there she was. She was real—her small head a treatise on proportion and subtlety, her hair a reverse waterfall—with the plunge pool of eddies of jet-black hair enveloping her head, and the river proceeding from the turbulence of currents, tapering off into a sigh at the nape of her neck.

  One particular Wednesday, we should have been in our classes—me teaching about cross-cultural psychology and her taking something in microbiology. But as I watched the gentle b
lue outside yawn into the factory white of yet another busy morning, I knew I didn’t want to be anywhere else but by her side. Curled into her without the interrupting bigness of things disturbing our serenity. That morning, we had a conversation that somehow led to Josephus—why didn’t I write to him anymore, she asked. Because I don’t need to, I answered.

  In your mum—and I trust you know this already—I found a home. A beautiful stillness. She became my goddess just as the narrative of origins and bold destinies slowly lost their power over me. Truth wasn’t out there, registered on invisible Books of Life and Death. It was right here, in this forbidden moment when I stared too much at her face as an eternal morning unfurled. In our temporal forever. It was here when I kissed her feet as my prayer—an act she didn’t particularly subscribe to because of her own still-intact Christian beliefs, but which I sense she loved deep down, past the sedimented layers of her upbringing as a Christian child in an Anglo-Indian home.

  Together we dreamed of you—how you’d look and whether you’d be stubborn and boring like we were. I used to tell her that you’d be a starry-eyed nerd like me, a prophecy she rejected by waving her right hand in a circle round her head and snapping her fingers—saying “God forbid!” as she did, and as most Nigerians do. Upon these many dreams, this excitement about the home we could build for you and the world we hoped you’d live in, we built our life.

  Our eternal afternoons were often broken by a knock on the door, by someone inquiring about our whereabouts. There was this and that program to attend—this here and there to be at. Destiny awaited in classrooms or university assemblies: the greatness only the faithful knew.