21/08/2021
I haven’t posted for many months. I am now deeply moved to share this from Bayo Akomolafe about a course entitled We will Dance with Mountains. Bayo’s voice together with others who he works with engages with learning in the cracks, at the crossroads, with failure, in our lostness and disconnection, creating finding other ways of re/sponding and being in these times of crises. I cannot say what I want in a few words apart from how important these voices are at this time. Go to Bayo’s web page or follow him on Facebook to get a sense of this program. This is a course for fugitives.
W H A T I S T H I S C O U R S E A B O U T ?
For a year and many months, the coronavirus pandemic has swept across the globe like a relentless fever, rolling into cities from Auckland to Zacatecas, touching down in remote villages, haunting the once unbothered intimacy of touch, slinking across interlocked limbs, swimming in mid-air, inscribing African bodies with its biological imperatives, upsetting the confidence of foresight, blowing through heated Euro-parliamentary arguments about the best ways to conduct war, scratching the sky open, building diplomatic consulates in evasively novel variants whereupon its compelling terms of endearment could be enunciated to the human-folk.
In the months since the first vaccines were announced to an exhausted global order, a slightly inflected normal has begun to return against the soundtrack of a persistent viral irruption. The engines are humming; the administrators have rushed to unbox the old tools, to polish the flagpoles, to tighten the old bolts, and reassure every citizen of the viability of the previous. But there’s something different: something molecularly off-track. Not everything has returned the way we once recognized them – not even ourselves. There is a jarring chord of failure – perhaps now amplified – that innervates our once cheery song of things. Perhaps now more than before, our optimisms seem cruel, our postcolonial hopes dashed, our efforts for justice tinged with cynicism. It seems like things want to fall apart. It seems like we’ve been stolen from home. Where do you go when things fall apart, when home has been taken away from you, when the cracks appear?
There are rumours that the cracks are not so foreboding. And that there might yet be a strange abundance in those ruptured places. Legend has it that a stolen people arriving on Brazilian shores centuries ago found a way to weave a posthumanist politics of care, a new theology of smelling and eating and tasting and sensing, a treasonable altar of gods and goddesses in their fugitive terreiros. They shut their eyes and danced with hyphenated deities; they choreographed strange sanctuaries. They stayed with new sites of power.
Perhaps that unsettling counter-imperial strain of failure that reframes the normal, calling for new response-abilities, new dis-abilities, and the making of sanctuaries, stirs in our epidemiologically inflected landscapes, in this age of the “hyposubject”* and the fugitive. Perhaps there is nowhere else to go but into the cracks. Perhaps our deepest activism is this dancing that might yet be.
*hyposubject: A term by Timothy Morton. “Hyposubjects are squatters and bricoleuses. They inhabit the cracks and hollows. They turn things inside out
