These Wilds Beyond Our Fences

by Bayo Akomolafe

  8In pivoting my explorations around agential realism, the new materialist theory that rethinks truth, boundaries, and bodies (whether conceptual or material or political bodies) as ongoing reiterative intra-actions, I am in fact saying that—in some queer sense—agential realism cannot overly exert itself as some kind of newfound truth, for the moment it does, it undermines its own premises as a way of seeing how entangled performances produce the world..

  9John Shotter, “Agential Realism, Social Constructionism, and Our Living Relations to Our Surroundings: Sensing Similarities Rather than Seeing Patterns,” Theory & Psychology 2:3 (2014), 306. doi:10.1177/0959-3543-1351-4144..

  10Astrida Neimanis and Rachel Loewen Walker, “Weathering: Climate Change and the ‘Thick Time’ of Transcorporeality,” Hypatia, submission to Climate Change Special Issue (2013), doi:10.1111/hypa.12064..

  11Andrea Thompson, “Earth’s Clouds Alive with Bacteria,” Live Science, February 27, 2008, http://tinyurl.com/mna8kbu..

  12Ibid..

  13A different way means a different crisis, not the same one. If the apparatus changes, then the meaning changes as well.

  14Narrowness here is not a way of saying it is “wrong” or inadequate, except I am speaking from the vantage point of a different framework..

  15Ibid..

  16Grosz, “Future of Feminist Theory,” 52..

  17There is a story about a man who faithfully hammered a nail. Every day, without fail. Tap, tap, tap. It was his sacred duty, and he did it without question. One day, the hammer’s head fell off from overuse. There were no blacksmiths in his town, and no one knew what to do about his broken hammer. Distraught, he heard that there was a powerful medicine man who could help fix his problem—a man with answers. So he went to him and complained about his hammer and how much time had already been lost in not hitting the nail. The healer’s eyes beamed, and he jumped up, declaring “I might have just the thing you’re looking for!” He rushed into his hut, and came back with a feather. “That’s a feather,” the seeker murmured. “Yes, I see that,” the healer noted. “But how can I achieve my nail-hitting practice with this feather?” he continued, exasperated. “Who said anything about achieving that? Who said anything about solving your problem?” the healer asked. “Well, isn’t that what you are supposed to do—solve problems? Provide answers?” “Oh, no!” the healer cried. “I don’t give answers. I help you ask different questions.” “Other places of power” is not shorthand for “indigenous augmentation of modern objectives.”.

  18Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 10..

  19Chris Mowles, Managing in Uncertainty: Complexity and the Paradoxes of Everyday Organizational Life (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2015)..

  20Barad, “Quantum Entanglements,” 251..

  Letter 7

  1David Whyte, The Sea in You: Twenty Poems of Rojuited and Unrequited Love (Langley, WA: Many Rivers Press, 2015), http://tinyurl.com/y9dmnrlc..

  2Julia Zorthian, “Stephen Hawking Says Humans Have 100 Years to Move to Another Planet,” Time, May 4, 2017, http://tinyurl.com/k4sv5w7.

  3There was a time prior to your arrival that I was so enamored by accounts of extraterrestrial civilizations and stories about little “grays,” beings from other dimensions that visited earth and crash-landed in the legendary Area 51—only to be retrieved by the American military. In one story I read—which I cannot verify to be authentic—a scientist that interviewed a surviving EBE (extraterrestrial biological entity) disclosed that the entity told him that he was a future iteration of humans, and that he had indeed traveled back in time—to our time—to help prevent the future event that leads to the “rapture-like” event. Having relocated to a distant planet at a yet-to-be-determined future date, we would go on to become the large-eyed, hugged-headed, three-fingered, flying-saucer-piloting, miniscule beings that have animated popular imagination. I am not one to dismiss stories about other worlds—even though this reads as a fantastical plot for a woo-woo sci-fi novel. Having let go of my need to believe in a geocentric, anthropocentric universe, I find it highly likely that life isn’t as “special” or as isolated as mainstream thinking presumes it to be, or—at least—is loath to allow alternative ideas about. What is of note here is that moving from “here” to “there” contains greater logistical implications than the modalities of the journey takes into account. Because we are porous beings, intersectional becomings, moving from here to there is never simple. There is no preset “there” frozen in wait. We collectively make “here” and “there.” Earth makes its humans..

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  About the Author

  Bayo Akomolafe left a teaching position as a professor and clinical psychologist in a Nigerian university to pursue “a small and intense life”— a life outside the highways of the familiar, outside of fences. In a sense, his decolonizing journey in the wilds, in the borderlands of globalizing culture, began when he met Ijeoma, his wife of Indian and African descent, and when a healer suggested to him “that I could find my way if I were willing to become generously lost.” His quest is to tell the stories of the occluded, to make room for other spaces of power and invite the proliferation of multiple natures. This, his first book is a foray into the ordinary “which the extraordinary is always trying to become.” Akomolafe lectures and gives talks internationally, mostly keynote speeches, and is chief curator for an earth-wide commonwealth of curators working from a different ethos of responsivity called The Emergence Network. He currently lives in India with his “life-force,” Ijeoma (or Ej), and their two children: Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden.

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