These Wilds Beyond Our Fences

by Bayo Akomolafe

  In this loose assembly of bodies, manifested in the media, in the ways we govern ourselves, in the ways we name things and educate our children, we are desperately trying to investigate our circumstances, to ask what it takes to live well, to struggle with aging and dying, to know when to be wary of the other and when to be hospitable. To know what home means. We may not frame our everyday this way but we are constantly performing these investigations, driven by questions and stories our modern circumstances make possible: with films that explore extraterrestrial civilizations, we wonder about alien others and come to terms with the strangeness of our own forms and material circumstances. With fiat currencies, we are inquiring into our well-being and survivability on the earth; and with schooling, the questions about what it means to responsibly account for ourselves in a changing world come to bear.

  Western science is often thought to be the oracle that grants us access to the deeper secrets of the world—the singular series of practices that offer us our best chances at resolving our most pressing dilemmas, a strategic stance to assume as the dust settles. To the question about our place in the universe, science16 says we are unique, unrivaled for our evolutionary achievements. To the question, “Why do I feel so alone and feel like crying all the time?” or “Why do I feel tired even after I have had a good night’s sleep?” science presents a conceptual framework that offers a way to think of your experience as the fallout of unhealthy life choices—with the potential for betterment. And to the question, “Where do we go when we die?” science thrusts out a chastising finger-wag, banishing such thoughts as nonsensical.

  In short, Western science—and I say “Western” to acknowledge at least one layer of its particularity—teaches the modern world how to see, how to make meaning. Seeing clearly, getting it right, offering an answer, striving till we get there, reaching for the stars, finding the truth, never stopping, arriving intact, making it happen, being the first … these impulses substantiate our modern lives.

  Seeing clearly, especially, discloses a particular relationship with the world. The expectation is that the world around us is explainable, that we can arrive at answers to our most fascinating riddles. Never mind the dust! Just stand this way, push out your head that way, and squint a bit—and you should see the real masquerading behind the indiscipline of finitude. Modernity presupposes that the truth about ourselves can only be accessed indirectly, via representations of things themselves. The truth can be revealed if we harness ourselves and deploy our gifts to hold open the breach in the veil, where the real or “pure knowledge” spills into the ordinary.

  The scientific method (about which I am very certain I will write in subsequent letters) is thus ennobled with the burden of sorting out what is true and what is false. And today, not just our technologies … not just our smartphones and television screens and internet-y activities owe their being to this metaphysics of seeing, but the ways we navigate the world, the things we avoid, how we make love, how we think, and how we think about thinking are all partially produced by these particular ways of seeing that lie at the heart of the modern world.

  The thing with seeing is that it comes with its own set of paradoxes—one of which is that greater clarity or higher definition is always a trade-off for panoramic depth. There’s an Eastern saying for this dialectic: name the color, blind the eye. It means that “seeing clearly” is a practice of occlusion. It means that the premise of modernity—to arrive at the heart of things—is not an arriving at all. For every “resolution” offered to our pressing questions by our present circumstances, there is a possibility discredited or rendered invisible. The dust never settles.

  No definition of modernity captures its essence, and that is because there is no essence, no ideal explanation to arrive at. We can only speak with a lisp about these matters, with a humbling stutter. Even the idea of modernity is a product of a Eurocentric analysis that looks “back” on “history” and arranges it in convenient thematic clusters amenable to contemporary discourse.

  I think it is important to keep this in mind, and I have often had to remind myself—as a citizen gestating in this “age,” sharing troubling questions with others—that modernity is not evil. Modernity is not a thing in itself, with its own walls and furniture, independent of other periods, sprouting unmediated. Neither does the term modernity aptly describe all the power relations, opinions, subjectivities, appetites, longings, or possibilities it supposedly “contains.” Things aren’t just that neat. Modernity might be an assemblage of practices of unease with the world, but its roots are the branches of the ongoing previous. As such, it is also part of the wafture of dust—no more cut off from the premodern (which we often tend to romanticize and talk about as if it were a time when things were all right) than the ocean is from the shore.

  And yet there are some things that feel true and pressing about our world of clock time, long weeks, headline news, and occasional skirmishes with nature—things some metaphors might highlight: one might say that to be modern is to be in a constant state of ornamenting our exile, constantly changing the wallpaper to screen out the jarring effects of the world, a mass forgetting. Burrowing deeper to arrive at the ideal. Trusting that the dust will settle so we can see clearly.

  There are many that trace modernity to those moments during the European industrial revolution of the late eighteenth century, when small-scale, agrarian, home-based production methods transitioned to mass production in large factories. These major changes in European culture came in on the back of the Renaissance, which declared man to be the practical measure of all things, and therefore instigated a return to Greek and Roman literature after the “Dark Ages.”

  The rapid industrialization of the landscape continued to reinforce the premise that man sits at the heart of the universe. The world was shaved of its sacredness, and the narrative of innovation became the central imperative of the new expansionist project. Today we are subjects of a neoliberal hypercapitalist system that seeks the rapid, largely unregulated, laissez-faire conversion of “nature” into resources and profit. It has changed the way we live, the way we educate ourselves, the way we understand knowledge and produce it, the way we eat and encounter food, the way we relate with the world outside and with the world inside.

  But every world comes with its own shadows. The very logic of modernity and its quest for the universal, for expansion, for “naming the thing itself once and for all,” inspired events that undercut its own foundations. Made possible by the technologies of travel that colonial impulses necessitated, many nonwestern cultures and worldviews became accessible. Meeting the strange “other” in colonial moments preceded institutionalized slavery and racism, but it also opened up channels of cross-cultural interactions that challenged the imperialist power of modernity. Soon, some began to react against modernity. There’s no one name for this critical engagement, but we’ll focus on “linguistic constructionism” as one aspect of these cultural conversations.

  While the claim persisted that “pure knowledge” was possible, and that nature was perfectly disclosable to society, open to language, and separate from it, the linguistic constructionist’s seditious dissatisfaction with, and opposition to, tenets of modernity began to air. Some would date this to the 1960s, when antiestablishment, antistructuralist views started to gain credence.

  Considerable attention turned to the politics of representation—the social interactions, political contexts, situational dynamics, environmental variables, and gender biases that came into play when “pure” knowledge was produced. Postmodernists scoffed at the idea of the pure. Pure universal knowledge indeed! No such thing, they proclaimed. Representation (I’ll write more about representation in the next letter) wasn’t an act of mirroring the truth; it was the practice of creating one’s own truth to the painful exclusion of other truths. There is no outside, no God’s seeing eye; just the stories we tell. In a milieu that was largely predicated on the idea that truth was universal, the idea of difference an
d diversity mounted an insurgency.

  The dust murmured in the air, and the most austere and most eloquent speakers coughed and choked on their claims to building a universal home. Being one given to the arts, to drawing and painting, one of my favorite ways of thinking about these monumental tensions within modernity—and postmodern critiques of modernity’s regimes of visuality—was in learning how Picasso’s cubism emerged from his interactions with African art.

  Cubism emerged as a result of a growing weariness with the limitations of perspective drawing, a form of Renaissance response to the challenge of producing the illusion of depth on a two-dimensional surface. In most Renaissance art, the disseminating source of geometric lines could be discerned in the way the objects depicted adhered to it. Their contours and bodies aligned with a static unseen point in the distance. A type of disciplining, all-seeing God-eye. Space itself was empty of perspective, abstract, and unproblematic—serving only as a palette for the mathematical (and therefore immaterial and invisible) reproduction of reality. In African art, to-be cubists met a refreshing form of expressionism, free from the anxieties of exacting representations. These sculptures and paintings did not pretend to be photographic imitations of a world that was outside; they acknowledged subjectivity and played with emotions, and—in the case of paintings—honored the two-dimensionality of surface, instead of seeking to deny its characteristics. As such, the collage-like multimodality and polyvocality of cubist works radically reimagined space in Western art as populated, thick, and animated—instead of being empty and uninteresting.

  Remember those crazy portraits you used to draw on your “Buddha Board”? The wet strokes of your tender brush that appeared as dark paint on the bright screen? Your mum and I, looking at the irregular lines, would ask you, “What is that? Is that a fish?” and you would say, “No, sillies! That’s a dragon dancing on a tree.” No matter how hard we squinted, we couldn’t see what you saw—but we smiled all the same. It didn’t have to look like a drunk dragon to be true to you that way.

  When observing a cubist painting, one is usually struck with its queer deviations from “proper” form. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon comes to mind with its depiction of five nude women (a truly scandalous piece for its time) with splintered faces and restless, anarchic lines. With a turn to language, to cultural diversity, postmodernity (or, specifically, linguistic constructionism) rejected the Euclidean imperatives of modernity and its quest for universal truth. Some critical of modernity came to doubt the given-ness of the idea that culture, language, words, concepts, and stories were separate from nature. In their opinion, the goal of “pure knowledge”—to describe (and ultimately control) nature in a painstakingly reductionistic manner—didn’t stand up to rigorous scrutiny. Language and nature were, for those who proposed a paradigm of many truths and no grounds, related. Different cultures had different realities. Truth was annulled, and story was enthroned in its place.

  And yet these reactions to modernity only added more inches to the walls we had already built. Dust swirled in the crazy distance—at least in the distance of our imaginations—like a madman peeping through the gaps in the fence, shouting loud obscenities at the passersby within the village.

  The idea that the world is story was very fond to me. For a while. I learned to say with many others that there are no facts—that all the world is “energy” or consciousness or the reverberations of our own voices. I learned to think of everything in terms of stories told, stories that embraced, and stories that pushed away. A fair and just world was a mere syllable away, squarely in the orbit of our control.

  But then, if reality were a story, then everything … every susurrous crevice, every untoward follicle, every amphibian burp, every unanticipated moment … would have to make sense. That may not count as a credible counterargument against linguistic constructionism, but it was my first baby-step into an aesthetic reconsideration of the story-is-all rejection of modernity. A world where everything is moored to logic, to power, to syntax and plot and scheme and expectation and meaning, leaves no place for magic, for the inextricability and beauty of a glimpsed sunset.

  Something was missing in the linguistic constructionist’s account of the world. The linguistic account was a shore without oceans—a neat and tidy island that refused to consider the grating bodies that rubbed against its squeaky-clean universe of words and names. In positing that language was critical in our account of the world, constructionists presented powerful insights that are very important to keep close in our search for new settlements. They rejected heaven, because it wouldn’t have been able to contain everyone; too many people and possibilities were cut out. They won the battle over denaturalizing nature. But it was a pyrrhic victory: the new practices of focusing exclusively on language to understand what was happening in the world failed to bring in the contributions of the world in its own emergence. Just like paper currencies were once promissory notes backed up by stores of gold and other valuable artifacts, but were gradually exchanged as money itself, discourse came to be considered as the only thing that constitutes reality. Facts became arbitrary (as opposed to being pre-given), and it became fashionable to speak about your truths versus my truths in a new socio-political milieu that denied the existence of anything outside experience. The significance of the nonhuman world was overlooked, and the architecture of anthropocentrism, polished in modernity, was updated to cement our desired distance from the discipline of dust. In short, postmodernity failed to satisfactorily address the dichotomy of language versus nature upon which modernity, the other half of this moiety, based its problematic quest for home.

  In “trying to evade [dust], we become dust all the more.”17 The banishment of matter from our descriptions of home has, in both instances of modernity and postmodernity, coincided with the globalizing threat of a neoliberal monoculture of war, blood, and suffering. We have lost, and are losing, species as our ecosystems undergo drastic changes. The loss of biodiversity, ocean acidification, desertification, and climate change are just a few of the challenges postponing our longed-for flight away from dust—a situation reminding us that we are of the soil—“dust thou art.”

  What is considered economic activity or productivity is limited to a set of practices that men engage in—that of repainting the world with the colors of their patriarchal angst for flight; what many female-identified bodies do when they are hunched over, breastfeeding their young, and mothering the soil, tends to be considered secondary to the real business of converting the commonwealth of forms and gifts into products and profit. What the material world does; how it miraculously regenerates itself; how it initiates, makes possible, destroys, enables, experiments with, and seeks to understand the genius of an anthill, the patience of a tapering stalactite in a limestone cave, the politics of wolves in a hunting pack, or the performances of bees in search of new locations for a hive—is hidden away. In the cracks on heaven’s walls. The dust swept under its ornate rugs.

  A home that proliferates refugees is no longer home. No longer at ease. A certain gravity pulls us “back” to the material—not the old atomic conception of material that was useful to old industrialists, but to a different one that gives it its due and acknowledges its contributions in worlding the world. What might “home” look like if we respected the world around us? If we came down to earth, and did not try to escape its sensuous rhythms in phallic perforations of the sky? It is not immediately clear. Perhaps you know.

  Whatever the case, if we are to know how to even ask questions aright, it is to the cracks we must go. The dark alleys where the rejected and mad ones can no longer abide the excruciating sanity of the city. The shadowy places where Lilith, long rejected from heaven, and her children—those who speak with plants and know the mischief of the earth—still roam. We must go to the slums, where the poor make their home. We must listen for the ghosts that haunt our performances of escape, and investigate the contours of our vision. Will we find new homemaking possibiliti
es along the spectrum of how we can make do with our planet? Will we find alternatives to the modern project of escape, and the linguistic denial of the material world? Will we happen upon colors that we might not yet see?

  To begin Bàbá’s ritual and my quest for hushes, I thought I’d begin in the dusty places—in the forgotten edges of my adopted city. It was there in a slum—in the pursuit of my hushes and of new ways of thinking about home—that I learned a valuable lesson about story and the elegance of being met by something deeper than words. It was there the wild hushes taught me that with regards to “home,” I must speak with a lisp and write to you with a groan that will not be corrected or comforted.

  For the umpteenth time, my eyes fall open. Through the paper-thin aqua-green brick and cement wall, I can hear the sound of those growling dogs … loud and menacingly close. I stir uneasily on the floor where I am stretched out. I want to sleep, but I can’t. And barking dogs are the least of my worries. I am imagining cockroaches crawling out from behind the steel containers near my head, or worse, a cat-size rat squeezing itself through that big gaping crack in the wooden door, and nibbling on my feet while I sleep.

  “I give tea, tell me” Kutti, my host, says, his voice keeping me awake. He is sitting on a wooden chair just next to my head, still chewing on paan, which he will later on spit out the door. His wife, Geetha, is folding some clothes, moving expertly between the sleeping bodies of her mother, her aunt, her aunt’s husband, and her two children. Her daughter is coughing. “Thank you, Kutti. I’m very fine.” Geetha says something to him in Tamil.

  “Dosa, tell me,” Kutti says, a few moments later. “Very full, very full!” I reply, gesturing with my hands on my belly to show how much I enjoyed dinner with his family an hour earlier.