These Wilds Beyond Our Fences

by Bayo Akomolafe

  When we were little, my sisters and I—especially me—thought it a thing of pride that we didn’t speak Yoruba, the language my mother and father spoke fluently. During birthday celebrations or some other excuse to get together, my father often shared folk proverbs with his friends; in the jocundity of their renewed kinship, they would throw in their wise sayings like playing cards on a table, clapping their hands as the more impressive sayings with the more mysterious sentiments piled to the top of the heap. If I were within hearing range, I would block my ears with my hands in mock nonchalance. My dear father, noticing, would often approve—with haughty laughter. Being a diplomat, he preferred that we spoke good one-tongue. I suppose he was of the classical school of thought that believed in the nobility of his own traditions and dialect, but also trusted in schooling, the Bible, and the Western values in his catholic upbringing. When he left us, I put away the childishness of closing my ears, and listened to proverbs wherever they were uttered.

  One which I learned recently says:

  À ńpòyì ká apá, apá ò ká apá; à ńpòyì ká oṣè, apá ò ká oṣè; à ńpòyì ká kànga, kò ṣé bínú kó sí.

  What that translates into is:

  We make circles round the mahogany bean tree, but it is too much to handle; we make circles around the baobab tree, but it is too much to handle; we makes circles around the well, but it is nothing to jump into in anger.

  I find that truly compelling, don’t you? That the world cannot be embraced or encircled or paraphrased inspires a sense of awe in me—a feeling that the home I sought for you and now tell you about through these letters is a big place.

  This is what Tortoise found out the hard way—as the Yoruba story goes—when, one day, he sets out to gather all knowledge to himself. To become the wisest of all. He takes a hollowed-out gourd—the one with the big pregnant belly and the narrow neck hung out thirstily to the world—attaches a string to it, places it on his neck, and goes on his way. When he meets eagle, he takes eagle’s wisdom of flight and stuffs it into his gourd. From lion, the wisdom of strength and courage; snake, his notorious cunning; mountain, her proud silence and resoluteness; the sea, his radical hospitality; and human, how to make a fire. When Tortoise’s project to encapsulate the world is done, the next thing to do is to secure his precious cargo. He chooses the Iroko tree, tall and durable, able to withstand the onslaught of untoward winds. He plans to take it up, tie the gourd at the topmost top of the tree, and camouflage it among Iroko’s deciduous leaves. But no matter how hard he tries, Tortoise can’t wrap his stunted limbs around the large hardwood tree’s trunk: the gourd, heavy with the world’s wisdoms, is between him and the tree, and weighs down heavily on his neck. As he battles with gourd and trunk and despair, a snail crawls by, observes Tortoise a while, and says, “You know you could simply put the gourd on your back and climb the tree. See if that doesn’t help.” It does. Tortoise swings the gourd to his back, climbs the tree, and reaches the top—only to be confronted by a paradox. Even though he has all the wisdom in the world, he is not the wisest. The poor snail, slow and pathetic, is the one that has given him a way to climb the tree. Tortoise removes the cloth he has tied around the gourd to secure its contents, and releases them into the air. The world will not be embraced, owned, or encircled. It is “too much to handle.”

  This indigenous notion of a thing being “too much to handle”—of the world retreating from our constant attempts to grasp it, to circumscribe it with words, with culture, with knowing, with definitions, or with discussions about identity and power—coincides with an emerging tradition that seeks to bring attention back to the material world. It is as if we, citizens of eternal flatlands, supposedly burdened with God’s rare breath and the curse of sentience, now seek depth and shadow. We want to be met in this stretched-out and awkward muteness of daylight—but we are and have always been. Only now, we are slowly coming to terms with the significance of those encounters. The world, once laid bare before us—too docile to resist the advance of our attempts to understand it, too meek to rebuff our claims of inheritance—is mounting an insurgency, forcing us to reconsider our place in the cosmic scheme of things.

  It turns out that there are things beyond story—beyond human subjectivity. Beyond experience. Like what, you ask? Well, the inner lives of bats, for one, the affective states of machines, the creativity of swerving atoms, and the romantic affair between churning ground and charged sky—an attraction so alive we often glimpse the severity of their lovemaking as lightning. Red is not just a word or an idea; there is “something outside” what we can say or think about it—“something” in its doing that slips away from the best descriptions, even those that come from verbose writings like mine.

  I am not playfully employing figures of speech here—I do mean that there is a curious sense in which objects … nature … matter … things are coming back into focus, and their reemergence is both a terrifying thing to consider and yet our most stunning source of hope for understanding home and homecomings.

  You probably haven’t forgotten my account of heaven in my previous letter (you always had this stunning ability to remember things your mum and I had long forgotten), but I think it serves to briefly survey the ground covered, why we are at this point, and why the spaces opening up before us are very important to my quest to fulfil my promise to you. I think it is important that I stress how I have come to see that the home I offered you—over and over again in silent whispers and with long-held gazes of disbelief mixed with gratitude—must take into consideration a world of nonhuman participants … things that will not be paraphrased, encircled or reduced to the discussions we have about them.

  Let’s revisit that account by way of a different set of coordinates.

  In the previous letter, we began with heaven—the home in the distance I desperately wanted. Modernity was a kind of heaven—a project of transcendence that probably had some of its lasting philosophical roots in the work of French philosopher René Descartes.

  In the seventeenth century, Descartes took to himself the task of ending the world, erasing it in one swoosh of intellectual rigor. I’m serious; there was even motive. He had had a tumultuous childhood, which involved losing his mother a year after he was born, and bearing the pains of what some suppose was tuberculosis. I’m pretty sure that his eschatological background and faith were just as significant in shaping what he later on became quite famous for—insisting that the world was essentially made up of two kinds of stuff: mind stuff or thought and, well, stuff. Ideas and things.

  To Descartes, the world didn’t count for much—it was too unwieldy and unserious. In his time, Descartes believed philosophy needed new heights to scale, and had become so confused about its objectives that it felt true to say it exchanged its noble gowns for the torn and tattered rags of the marketplace servant. What was needed was certainty—the definite, exalted, rigorous and systematic empiricism of the sciences that arrived at unshakeable truth propositions about reality. In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes announced a disciplined and methodical skepticism that pointed to that absolute metaphysical ground he sought: he would systematically doubt everything that existed, until he arrived at a place where denial was impossible. And so he did away with mountains, rivers, and estuaries, beavers, trees, burrowing worms, and the soils they aerate, glowing sun and pollinating quasars. He even doubted his own body’s existence—considering it expendable on his quest to find the holy grail of absolute knowledge, which was to be the foundation of his philosophical system.

  Descartes soon found out that the one thing he couldn’t eliminate was his weapon of choice: he couldn’t doubt that he was doubting. For him, the mind was the one stable thing in the universe, primary and foundational—everything else was ephemeral. “Cogito ergo sum,” he then declared—Latin for “I think, therefore I am.” With that, Descartes ruled a thick, unbridgeable line between thought and mental stuff—composing the world into a prolific collection of binaries (m
ind versus matter, soul versus flesh, God versus human, man versus woman) and—some might argue—inaugurated new geometries of contact with the physical world.

  If what Descartes claimed to be true doesn’t sound new or out of order, then his Cartesian philosophies are just as pervasive and widespread as many agree they are—or it could be that he merely happened upon what should be obvious to any sane person. I mean, even you were once livid with my suggestion that cows could talk if you listened well enough! You were just two years old, but during our daily walks (which, I regret, started to become less frequent as I grew busier and busier), when we passed a certain decorated cow that lived, fed, and defecated freely on our street in India, I would ask you to say “hello.” You would reply, gripping my hand as we came closer to it, that “cows don’t talk, Dada”—which I would counter by asking you how you came to know this, and to which you would respond, matter-of-factly: “I know everything, dada. You don’t know everything.”

  It does seem painfully obvious that cows don’t talk, that we possess some internal quality of awareness that stones don’t possess, that when you leave a box of toys under your bed they don’t peep out after you are gone, and that the world truly would be mute, inert, and small if we—humans—were not around to grace its undulating surfaces. And while we might allow a slice of the divine in animals with big brains and bodies, we cannot bring ourselves to acknowledge that “dead” things—pebbles, tables, combs, and the toxifying carcasses of slain rats—are worthy of consideration—except as property or trash.

  From the seventeenth century onward, the period historians of European timelines often mark as the beginnings of the Age of Enlightenment, Descartes’s reductionistic doctrine helped consolidate the discursive practices of humanism (the system, their concerns, and human subjectivity as central to the world), the development of the scientific method, and the industrial revolution. Our world of towering steel and asphalt owes its unrelenting quest for growth and its desire to climb more and more into dizzying heights of disembodiment to that vision of the material world as a dead, dank, deaf, and dumb place.

  Matter doesn’t seem to matter. Yet, it is not so easy to dismiss it completely. In fact, it is possible to think of the history of Western philosophy and science as a history of its tense engagements with matter and form.

  Are you following, dear? Stick with me. This matters.

  Mind was thus the frontispiece of Cartesian thought. Great mind. Wonderful mind. The essence of the human being. The extended thread of stolen divinity in soil brought to life. Promethean fire. It was the one thing that stuck, and remained resolutely eminent the more you tried to get rid of it—for doubt only circled round and proved it. It was the one thing that separated us from the brute world around us.

  Several philosophical traditions followed Descartes’s map—hoping to pitch their tents in a way that honored and adhered to the formula given them by the French reality-cartographer. One of those traditions, representationalism, concluded that home was reachable (so good news, right?), but that it was only accessible via a specific set of coordinates.

  Put differently, representationalism is the view that the mind never really perceives objects as they are; it merely perceives mental images, or representations, of those objects external to the mind. All we have are short-lived and naive interpretations of the world that are subject to the chaos of our lives. However, all these interpretations couldn’t possibly be correct. Only one tells the real truth about the world out there—if the plastic “chair” I presently sit on is really a spirit, an ancestor come back, or senseless atoms cohering to form a structure. So, you see, we don’t really interact with the world directly—our bodily knowledges cannot be trusted, except sanctioned by the final authority of science. All of our experiences, all our knowledges, all our wisdoms are incomplete and inferior—and, whether we like it or not, are already inside a funnel that progressively leads to the narrow end, where only the pure … the real … is produced.

  Representationalism says the world outside our minds is objective, empirical, and ontologically motionless, external to and independent of our opinions or discussions about it. This idea is closely allied with positivism, which assumes a scientific unity at the heart of all reality—whether physical or social reality—and doubles down on the belief that the only way home is via the mediation of rationality and the logic of the scientific method. For representationalism to work, it needs its Cartesian heart—it must first assume the world is divided into two or made up of two basic properties: mind inside and matter outside. The twain never do meet, or they shuffle around each other—two irreparably estranged sides. At times, they do correspond with each other; the lines fall in pleasant places, and we get it right: mind syncs with matter, and correct theory is born. Pristine truth. Alchemical gold birthed through the filth of by-products.

  Modernity is about investing energy in the politics of getting it right—in painstakingly numbering the table, naming things, creating hierarchies and categories and protocols for arriving again and again. It is about creating spatial-historical maps that contribute to “creating a world of things in themselves, where everything seems clear, objective, indisputable, in which the abstract is mistaken for entities and tangible links.”2 Other ways of knowing that were not founded in scientific rationalism led to dark, wild, and horrible places. One needed the cold, calculating tools of rationality to tell what the world is really, really like. Just the cold, hard facts—no colors and poetry allowed.

  But then other critical traditions, later to be assembled under the banner of postmodernism (a word coined by French philosopher and literary theorist Jean-François Lyotard in the late twentieth century), observed with dismay the coalescing of power around a “few men,” whose procedures and practices the rest of us were to accept as likelier to grant us access to the real world. Postmodernism stepped up and named the game—saying it was not about truth or discovery, it was about the consolidation of power. Whether intended or accidental, science was a cultural project of denying the significance of other cultural modes of knowing. Postmodernists thus rejected these supposedly irreproachable institutions of rationality, deconstructing them as instruments of political control, not discovery. They rejected the structure of the funnel—or Tortoise’s wisdom gourd.

  Linguistic constructivism studies within the broad tradition of postmodernism sought to show that modernity was really a cultural pretension to superiority and supreme access, one which produced ethically challenged arenas that excluded the contributions of women and colored people. Science wasn’t apolitical, innocent, or neutral; rationality wasn’t cold and clinical. Science was just as compromised as those other forms of knowing it rejected as incomplete. Wasn’t it more than a bit suspicious that science seemed predominantly occupied by white men?

  To the question about what reality is, then, or how we were to come to understand ourselves in relation to this quest for home, they replied: leave that alone. Abandon it as a derelict project that leads nowhere, and toss it away in uncharitable depths and shadows. Our proper concern shouldn’t be about what reality is, but how we speak about it, how people profit and gain from speaking about it one way instead of another, how white slave owners exploit black cotton-pickers by saying they are “naturally” inferior, three-fifths of proper men. Follow the smell of power, be suspicious of anyone claiming to know—once and for all—the truth about reality. There is no one home to arrive at; there are many realities, each arbitrary, not fixed and still like the modernists say. The laws of physics were not written by God—they were promulgated by a conspiracy.

  Linguistic constructionism thus took on the postmodern mantle of turning attention to the complicated dynamics of discourse, of language, of words—or how we create meaning, the politics of sight (or how perception is already irretrievably burdened with human subjectivity … so that our hopes of discovering the real world outside of our representations of it were largely hopeless), and how the material world there
fore dwells at an inscrutable distance from our cultures and rituals of knowing. The energy moved from what exists (ontology) to how we know what exists (epistemology)—and new settlements sprouted in the now conquered fields. In time, these ideas percolated into mass culture and especially subcultures concerned with consciousness and social change, spawning memes of “change the story, change the world.” We took it for granted that all that mattered were our stories, our language. We rescinded our commitments to an empirically verifiable world, because it reminded us too much about what we had vomited and left behind. We gave language too much power.

  At some point in my search for settlements—for my place in the world and how to navigate its dumbfounding intricacy—I was of the opinion that linguistic constructionism provided a map and an ethics that spoke to my disaffections with heaven or with imperialistic arrival points that did not account for diversity. Your mother—her body a mulatto sermon rebuffing the neat notions of identity and belonging I grew up with—significantly influenced my appreciation and longing for a world of difference (I’ll give you all the cringe-worthy details of how I fell in love with her, later!). A world that was better off because of the many perspectives, cultures, and ideas that populated it, and not in spite of them.