BAYO AKOMOLAFE SEEKS BEWILDERMENT
SUBJECT
Bayo Akomolafe
OCCUPATION
Poet, philosopher, psychologist
LOCATION
Chennai, India
DATE
July, 2020
In the space of a few weeks, four unrelated people sent me interviews and writings by Bayo Akomolafe, all with a subject line that went something like: “essential reading for this time.” I’d never heard of the Nigerian philosopher and poet before, but as I launched into his work, it quickly became apparent why so many people were shining a light his way. His website bursts with provocations and offerings like: “These times are urgent. Let us slow down”, “The way we respond to the crisis is part of the crisis,” and, perhaps most stirring of all, “We are coming down to Earth. We will not arrive intact.”
Born in a Christian home to Yoruba parents, much of Bayo’s upbringing was lived believing, “If it was white it was right.” He lost his father suddenly as a teenager, sending him on an inward journey that led him to train as a clinical psychologist – only to find that something else was tugging at his sleeves, something beyond articulation. Through writing and teaching, he has been able to create a home for the unsolvable and preposterous, one that accommodates our yearning for a world beyond binaries of right and wrong and “more at peace than the stories of infinite growth allow.” In 2016, he co-founded the Emergence Network, an organisation of trickster-activist-artists inspired to rethink our patterns of responding to crises.
Today, Bayo considers his most sacred work learning how to be with his children, Alethea and Kyah and his wife and “life-nectar,” Ijeoma. Together, they are on a journey of unlearning, living in Chennai, India. A wise and widely-regarded voice in the climate conversation, Bayo offers perspectives that challenge human centrality and the hope of us fixing the crises we’ve created. Instead, his work calls for meeting the incomprehensibility of the moment, for becoming “fugitives” from the established order who come together around outlawed desires – thereby, perhaps, orienting somewhere deeper than solutions, somewhere “too sacred for words to embrace.”
NATHAN SCOLARO: I’d like to begin with a bit of a check in, to note how we’re arriving to the conversation. We’ve been doing a lot of it over this period in meetings et cetera and I’ve found it enormously helpful.
BAYO AKOMOLAFE: Well I just want to say I came off a call with an international organisation and consortium of museums that I do some work with. I am often invited to act as a provocateur – to shake them from their preservationist notion, archiving the past and stuff. And we started with everyone just jumping into business. I was invited to speak and I said, “I don’t feel like I’m here. Can we check in? Just say how we’re doing?” And it was like a breath of fresh air. So, I’m glad you’re starting that way.
It shifts it entirely doesn’t it? And for some of us it’s the only time we get to pause and think about how we’re actually going. So I really value it in our work.
Yes. Beautiful. So I’m good. I’ve heard talk that people are having mental breakdowns from being at home so much. I’m having a mental lift up! [Laughs]. Because I’ve been travelling for years now non-stop every month, airports, planes, so much that people know me on aeroplanes! So I feel healthy just being at home with my family
