New Gods At the End of the World: Bayo Akomolafe & Sophie Strand
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Maurizio Benazzo: [00:00:00] Welcome. My name is Maurizio Benazzo.
Zaya Benazzo: My name is Zaya Benazzo, and we are usually together in the same room facilitating. So this is a very new experience for us, and it's, yeah
Maurizio Benazzo: it's so weird. Yes.
Zaya Benazzo: Yeah. Thank you everyone for joining us. This is going to be a really beautifully rich, deep, and playful conversation with our beautiful guest, Sophie Strand and Bayo Akomolafe.
Maurizio Benazzo: I wanna say also. That to, for geographic, I see some people from Maurizio, and whenever I see the name, it makes me laugh 'cause my, it's a long story about my [00:01:00] grandmother and being baptized, but that's a long story which I'm not gonna share here.
And I want to say that we, me and Zaya resides now in the occupied territory of the South Pomo and OC people here now called the Northern California, just for give a geographical framework to our position in this bizarre planet. We all in Abbit together. So I want to introduce one of my favorite people in the world.
Really Bayo. He is like such a yummy brother. I love you so much. So let me start to be serious. Now, Dr. Bayo mfe is widely celebrated international speaker teacher, public intellectual essayist and author of two books. This wides beyond our fences. Letter to my daughter on humanities. Search for home and we will tell our own story.
The Lions of Africa speak. He's the visionary founder of the Emergency [00:02:00] Network and chief host of the Popular Line Offline Course and Festival. We will dance with Mountains. Bayo has been visiting professor at many university around the world and he currently lectures at Pacifica Grade Graduate Institute in California and at the University of Vermont.
He sits on the board of many organization, one of them being the well renowned co organization called Science and Non Duality. Such an honor to have you with us. So now he's living between India and the United States Bayo considers his most sacred work to be learning how to be with his daughter and son.
And Kia and their mother is wife and life Nectar. Bj. Oh, Bayo. I, since the first time I met you, I have this kid. I, yeah. I can only say I love you and I leave it to that. And I'm honored [00:03:00] that you are always part of our community and I know everybody will get so much out of you. Thank you, brother.
Bayo Akomolafe: Thank you brother.
Maurizio Benazzo: Thank you.
Zaya Benazzo: And by, I still remember you coming to send, I think three, four years ago, eternity. Three years ago. Three years ago. Three years ago. It was like an eternity. And everybody was like, who is this? Who is this Bayo? What is he gonna talk about? And your line, like when times are urgent, slow down, became like a mantra for the gathering.
And it's still reverberating through the same community. And I think it touched so many people. You brought a new vibration to the,
Maurizio Benazzo: yeah, it's one of, it was one of those turning point. Yeah. It was one of those turning points in our culture as a community.
Bayo Akomolafe: Your talk. Thank you. So you guys are making a Black man blush.
You should never do that.
Thank you. Thank you so much. I'm [00:04:00] grateful to be here and for sand and the beautiful community that is gathered here to do this. Let's do this together.
Thank you.
Zaya Benazzo: Our our other guest that is with us today, Sophie Strand, and I personally discovered Sophie's Sophie recently through her writings, and I really felt so moved and enchanted reading Sophie, and it just went so deep.
The words. The way you write of it's so eloquent and so playful and so deep that it really cracked something in me in a way that I haven't felt before. So I feel so honored and delighted to meet you today in person and to have you with us. And for those who don't know, Sophie Strand is a writer based in Hudson Valley who focuses on intersectionality of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology.
And my ology, right?[00:05:00]
Very fungal and very fungal, exactly goes to the core of life. And your first book is going to be released very soon, and it's called Flowering Wand Rewilding, the Sacred Masculine, and it'll be published. On November 22nd and people can already pre-order it. I look forward to reading the book Sophie, and thank you so much for being with us today.
Sophie Strand: Thank you so much for having me. And I'm just always honored when I get to be alongside Bayo. I actually, was remembering three years ago being like alone in my little kitchen listening to Bayo Talk and just like holding on to his words like they were gonna keep me alive. So it's pretty amazing to be able to share space with him.
Hi, Bayo, and
Bayo Akomolafe: just, hello my dear sister. Hello.
Maurizio Benazzo: I [00:06:00] just wanted to add myself that when I discovered Sophie literally a few days ago, and I back it up, and last night I decided to 'cause to watch something of Sophie, right? I said, okay, I'll watch something. I got stuck all evening until midnight watching videos of her.
I'm so fascinated by a work, as Zaya said, she's so eloquent, but you will see that and so profoundly playful and it's such a joke. So I just want to add this to the, thank it is an honor to have you with us.
Sophie Strand: Thank you, Maurizio. It's an honor.
Maurizio Benazzo: Where do we start?
Zaya Benazzo: Where do we start? We have an exciting team, exciting topic that I'm actually personally a little bit intimidated by it, so I don't know, maybe by, you want to start off by introducing the topic as an inquiry and guide us into it, and then we can bring questions. And
Bayo Akomolafe: in
Zaya Benazzo: the den
Bayo Akomolafe: that is like [00:07:00] heralding your approach of gods, and that is no mean task.
So I don't know that I could effectively introduce, but before I even begin to do that I'll like us collectively to acknowledge everyone that is taking, beautiful space and time to join us in creating this assemblage of inquiry.
If it feels strange that we are having a conversation about new gods in a time of war, in a time of pain and suffering and trauma and loss and heat waves that have names and weather conditions that are so errant that we no longer know how to predict tomorrow, if it seems queer or inappropriate then you might be working with, a strange, an equally strange notion of gods. When I think about gods, I don't think about something that is so abstracted that it's of [00:08:00] heavenly relevance, but no earthly relevance. I'm thinking about something that is as close to us as our own breadths, as our own skin. So this is not some philosophical self sophistry into or play with words and concepts.
This is a grounded, situated and pen, ultimately playful attempt at thinking through the divine and the sacred and how that is already, I implicated in the questions, the urgent questions we have about our days, about what it means to be in hope, about losing hope, about losing trust, about losing our lands, about losing our bodies.
So this is. Serious business and serious business can only be seriously approached playfully. So the times are serious. We have to play. And I'm here with my dear sister [00:09:00] to Defract, compose and braid new tapestries with you. And we're not looking for resolution or consensus, even though you are one of the foremost theologians of our time.
I knew you laugh at that one. But I'm just here to weave and cobra with you sister and see what emerges. Surprise, surprisingly from our conversation.
Sophie Strand: Thank you Bayo. So I was a medieval studies major in college and I was fascinated with saints and how they're really tutelary deities of certain places that then get a name and you go to them with certain issues.
There's, if you lose something, you go to, is it St. Anthony, you have an impossible problem. You go to St. Jude. And these are less people and they're more like land beings that have very, that sometimes do work, sometimes don't. In folk tradition, if they don't work, you turn them upside down, you yell at them.
And for me I need [00:10:00] help quite often. I'm in dire conditions all the time in terms of my body and the way I navigate the world as a skin silhouette of matter. And I don't find that these Christian saints work for me anymore, but I do find that beings take on a kind of pan the pantheistic relevance for me.
And I wanna offer one that came to me a couple of days ago, and I've been having a lot of, my spine is not working recently. I've been feeling like kinda like a pasta noodle. I can't stand up, right? Can't really do anything, my body doesn't work. And Deloy rot ofra came to me and said, I have some good news for you.
And the good news has no human language attached. And in fact, it doesn't even do, doesn't even have sex in the same way that humans do. It is the queen of Perh Agenesis and Klepto Genesis. So I wanted to offer that as like a starting point. Do you know about oid?
No, I didn't. Oh, [00:11:00] wow.
Sophie Strand: I'm here is Delo.
I'm giving Delo Ferra to you. Because she, they have been very helpful. So Delo has been having a sexually reproducing for 80 million years, which in biology is supposed to be actually a very bad approach. And usually a sexually producing creatures do it during bottleneck events. And they do it very briefly, and then they switch back to sexual reproduction because there's no way to actually create the evolutionary novelty that lets people, that lets beings adapt to shifting conditions when you're just cloning yourself again and again.
But
Sophie Strand: OID is this tiny little nematode worm. This little like. Disgusting being that lives in puddles and like septics tanks, it's only parth. Agenesis only reproduces itself. They can't find a male and they don't understand how it's been around for so long. If it's, it turns out it's even more powerful than a tardigrade.
It can would stand more radiation, really more [00:12:00] desiccation. It's just hearty. They found out that the way that it actually persists without having sex in the correct way is by eating shit literally, and then not digesting that DNA and stealing DNA from fungi, from bacteria, from viruses. So it eats shit and then incorporates it into its own body.
And that's the way it evolves. It doesn't evolve in any of the ways we think we're supposed to. It evolves by process of indigestion, and so I wanted to offer the OID as this being. As we're facing. Like it can be desiccated without breaking down. So it can be like in, in a puddle, and then the puddle can dry up and it can last for a million years.
So
Sophie Strand: it has a lot to teach us about drought and heat and about intense conditions and about not being able to find a mate [00:13:00] has a lot, and about eating shit as a way to evolve.
Bayo Akomolafe: I'm especially attracted to that prospect. Me
Sophie Strand: too. I thought you might be.
Bayo Akomolafe: Yeah. Yeah. I wonder if Zaya wants to come in or Maurizio, or do we continue to waltz and dance?
No, please
Maurizio Benazzo: continue to waltz. Your dance is so beautiful. It's such a joy. Please. And when we feel the urge to step in, we definitely will step in. But please waltz. This is your dance floor.
Bayo Akomolafe: I'm that critter reminds me. The thematic or the motif of some of the things that I want to share today have to do with breakdowns and eating shit and being in shitty situations, and how displacement kind of produces gods new gods, if you will.
Okay. That's the spelling for anyone who wants to find out about this critter. So I've been speaking about mispronunciation Sophie.
[00:14:00] Yeah.
Bayo Akomolafe: A couple of months ago I had an interview and this lady, invited me to pronounce my name. She was not going to get it wrong, so she said, might I ask how to pronounce your name properly?
And I challenged her, part of my politics is to situate myself astri the morality of Euro-American centrism. Yeah. And to not be eaten up by that. And I think it's a gift, not just to my context, but to the context that I find myself speaking to sometimes. I refuse to pronounce my name properly.
I leaned into the mispronunciation and said, my people offer the gift of mis pronunciation. Actually made that up in a moment, coined it. But the phenomenon is not made up. And the story is we celebrate mispronunciation. We don't, we don't [00:15:00] shy back or shy away from it. We lean into it because it's how we notice God as if for the first time, right?
So we lean into the strange. Our cosmologies, our ies, are built around the flight errors, errancy shitty situations, mispronunciations. So I encouraged her to mispronounce my name. This is not some universal, this is not some universal template, just a cultural situated approach of a given people and how they meet the world of gift and surprise.
And then I started to think about mispronunciation as something that is more than a verbal event, more than a linguistic matter. How does the world mispronounce itself? If we were to think beyond words and tongues and voices, how is mispronunciation more than human, more than lingual, more than [00:16:00] verbal?
And I think, if you start to think about displacement and loss, then you come to a place where you realize that the world is constantly shaking and moving and mispronouncing itself leaning away from the static or the identified or the familiar and constantly seeking other ways of being with itself.
And this is where the trickster comes up. But I want to leave it at that before I continue the story. As we defract compose something we don't know together this feels like the start. This displacement feels like a start or the beginning of an adventure into how the world co-create new gods and invites us to cultivate gods and goddesses new archetypes.
And this is a challenge. This is a challenge and this situates our conversation in a very alive and vibrant and animated [00:17:00] politics of responsivity in challenging times. This is how I feel to enter this conversation with you, sister.
Sophie Strand: I love the idea of mispronunciation as being both macro cosmically and micro cosmically, bigger than just language.
And I was thinking a lot about how evolution mostly works by accident through these glitches that then begin to build a whole new molecular syntax and through. And so beings only survive. In as much as they can mispronounce themselves, as they can let themselves be. Coded incorrectly, and then that in that incorrect pronunciation then becomes the way they survive. I've been, one of the things that, so I have a body that doesn't work. I have con genetic, connective tissue disease and [00:18:00] like my spine is out of alignment. I'm always correcting in incorrect ways. And so recently, people are always trying to come in and telling me how to stand correctly and how to fix my gait and fix my hips so that I don't dislocate, and so that I can look more, correct.
Move more correctly. But I've been thinking lately that human beings are not built to be well or to be correct. They're built to keep moving forward so that they can escape danger and to get more food. And in fact, if you correct someone and then they feel pain. They suddenly are in the, they're syntactically physically correct.
Suddenly they can't move as fast, they can't survive, they can't keep moving forward. So it's this ways that your body mispronounces itself, even in a very skeletal kind of fascial way that help you keep moving. So recently someone corrected me, a very, talented body worker corrected me and it [00:19:00] destabilized my entire body.
I, I'm holding, I'm not supposed to hold myself like this, but this is how I keep moving. It's the way I mispronounce my own body that keeps me surviving. And so I've been thinking a lot about how, especially in body work, we think about correcting the body, but sometimes the ways the body has corrected itself are the ways in which it keeps moving.
Bayo Akomolafe: The. Human beings are not built to be. I have to write that down. There's, they're built
Sophie Strand: to keep moving forward. We're really like, just meant to just keep,
Bayo Akomolafe: It's the ontological, epistemological trap of modern civilization. What it wants to create is rectal linear figures.
And what it wants to propagate is a notion of closure, right? Wellness is closure. What it means to be correct is or correctness is, represents some idyllic plate [00:20:00] world out there, some transcendent world. And so we are representing that world. This is an escape from imminence. This is an escape from ecology.
This is an escape from our bodies and the errancy, the vibrant creative errancy that makes us possible. So Sophie I was also thinking about pronunciation as this act of correcting, right? What this person is, or you spoke about, tried to do pronunciation would be then this act of cutting through the multi-dimensionality, the multiplicity, the duplicity, the indeterminacy of things, right?
Is to cut through it and enact closure, enact a definition, right? It's the equivalent of reductionism, right? During the pandemic for instance, the official
Question 1: no
Bayo Akomolafe: understanding was the wisdom of the time [00:21:00] and we're still in those times, was that
the virus is the enemy, right? The thing to do is to get rid of the enemy. Is to get rid of it. And there's this man in Kerala that's that built a temple to, I think I told you this story, I dunno if I told you this story, but built a temple.
Yeah.
Bayo Akomolafe: To worship the virus. And he was canceled, right? He was attacked abroad.
And in India, people started to say, this is primitive, this is rubbish. We should adopt a very serious approach during this pandemic. And he was of the opinion that if God is everywhere, then God is also this virus. There was this processual, relational, gentle liminal thinking that was part of his offering, that the virus is God.
The virus is furniture, the virus is salvation, the virus is [00:22:00] suffering, the virus is pain. Things are many things right At the same time, nothing exists by itself, but the act of pronunciation is the act of reducing the world to stability. It's like a wave function, collapse right to, from ethics to morality, codes and rules for governing bodies and minds.
It's the collapse from from chaos to order from indeterminacy to determinacy, to definitions, to identity. But there are moments when mispronunciation becomes this crack, this tricksters crack that bursts through everything and upsets the established order. And I feel. This is when New Gods are born.
Mispronunciation is not just verbal, it's a cosmic act. It's the invitation to the divine. Yes. Maybe I'll stop there for now.
[00:23:00]
Sophie Strand: Oh, I have so many thoughts. I love that. I also love the idea, like I'm deathly afraid of rabies and I have been attacked by rabid bats and animals before. And so this is like not con conceptual.
It's real and lived and for whatever reason it's a phobia of mine. So I started praying to rabies because I was like, you obviously want my attention. I have to start making eye contact with you in some way that's not going to be actually getting rabies. I have to start the [00:24:00] dialogue before it becomes, it slips, sub perceptually into my actual body.
So I was just thinking about that in terms of the virus and how we. When we don't start the dialogue begins in a material incursion that if we begin it in this kind of spiritual sense, we can perhaps avoid having to physically manifest it so it gets our attention. But what I was thinking actually about is eco tone and about those moments where one ecosystem very dramatically becomes another.
And there's this slice between the two, this gradient, this interface that you've talked about interfaces before. I think it's just such an interesting idea where there's much more biodiversity. There are many more animals and species and types of animals. And this brief o overlap spot, this tension, the ecotone comes from household and from tension.
So it's the surface tension of two ecosystems not quite participating in each other. And that's where the most life comes about is right in that spot. [00:25:00] And so that spot to me is the crack. It's the place where two, two bodies. Are interacting in a way that it's, it far exceeds moral categories, that they're creating friction and tension.
Maybe they're rubbing the skin off of each other a little bit. It's a kind of, it's a traumatic interface, but that's where the new gods are born, where new birds and new fish often come into being our, in these like title zones.
And I was thinking about this other idea I've been playing with lately is, so we have these original cells that were unicellular.
And then at a certain point, multicellularity comes into being, but what would that age feel like to the single cells? It must feel deeply traumatic to bump into someone and to suddenly to never separate. What does it feel like for these single selves to suddenly be making these concatenated larger selves permanently?
And then I was thinking about what you were [00:26:00] saying. In regards to trauma being a territory we're all inhabiting right now. It's a place that we're living, not something that we own or can extract from ourselves. It's some, it's a place we have to navigate. Yeah. And I was thinking like, what if trauma is the symptom of a moment when cells are becoming something quite different?
And what if trauma is this interface between bodies that are merging,
Bayo Akomolafe: right? With that thought about trauma is deeply, I think of trauma as body proofing rituals, right? This is, if you were to go to space, you would need space juice. I don't know. I don't know. To hold you while you're in space, you would need a prop, right?
You need some this is where Bateson Gregory Bateson shines, bursting through the habituated ways we see the body, that bodies are not just this morphological outline we're used to. Our bodies are diasporic, [00:27:00] our bodies are molecular, our bodies are tentacular doing things that escape visibility, right?
And that's the invitation here, right? The, when we think about trauma, we often drive it through the capitalist individual, right? The capitalist self that is isolated, that is identifiable, that is some kind of a wave collapse function again. Seen through animist lenses, trauma becomes more than human.
It becomes all the things that we are doing. And by we, I don't just mean humans, but how territories take shape, how bodies are reinforced, re inscribed, and put together again and again in place making rituals of co compositional politics, right? How we come back together again and again, but most importantly is what is left out right?
[00:28:00] Like body proofing against something. It's like a defense mechanism. Something rushes in. These things have many names we just spoke about multi multidimensionality, right? A virus is not just simply a virus. An experience is not just simply an experience. I think I've told you many times about or we've had this conversation and there's too many conversations to have my sister about sitting with a Yoruba.
A babalawo is a don't, not a shaman a healer who's a priest, right? Notions of healing in Yoruba culture have little to do with medical paradigm that we inherited. You would see a baba Lao as some kind of a cosmic lawyer. He negotiates your case with the Pantheon what are you guys doing?
Come on, this is my brother. Do something about it. Through the agency of plants and calories and sonic driving and all of that, you could [00:29:00] think of a b, other, the shaman. Anyway, I sat with seven of them more than a decade ago, and I remember asking my very hearty Western inspired question about diagnostic tools.
Here is this clinical psychologist in his suit and tie, and I was asking questions about how do you think about oratory hallucination, right? How do you diagnose it? It came to that question anyway. How do you diagnose it? How do you treat it? What's your opinion on it? What are your, where's your DSM manual?
Where's the indigenous version of the DSM? And he was like, why would you want to get rid of those voices in your head? What if that's your grandmother? What if that's your grandfather? What if that's the voice of a God? It was shocking to me because it was palpably obvious to him that the world was not neat and [00:30:00] tidy that way, that in those places of cracks and openings, there are ancestral energies, there are archetypal longings, and that is a site of destruction, but also creation.
It is harmful and risky, but at the same time, the kernel of the yet to come is embedded in those cracks in those mispronunciations. And
I think of you as one. Let me see if I could, lemme see. I, if I could tell this very briefly the story to preach that the story we tell about how cells know how to create eyes and organs of our body is that they're instructed by genetic code, right?
DNA in our cells tell them what to do and they know how to make whatever the bodies parts of our bodies that become us. But this observation prior to cell differentiation shows something [00:31:00] else is at work, right? That crack that zoomed across the embryonic surface was not genetic code. This was not, this was.
A selfie snap, almost like Petri dish prophecy, something that was not supposed to be there was caught, predicting where the organs of the frog would emerge. It was something, I don't know how to put this, I don't have the language for it, but it feels like something she called it a bioelectric signal and I've heard people like Karen Barat speak of it as potential, something flashing up something that is not part of the structure there, but a signal bursting through and prophesying the organs that will come.
It almost feels like this is the, this is crack, these are cracks. This is how bodies are reconvened. This is how bodies are born. Yeah. Let me stop there for now. [00:32:00] Before we go elsewhere.
Sophie Strand: Have you read Terrence Deacon Bayo? Terrance Who? Karen Deacon. The neuro anthropologist.
Bayo Akomolafe: No, I don't think
Sophie Strand: I have.
That's what I'm thinking of. So Terrance Deacon says, and I'm really interested in embryogenesis, which is that
right?
Sophie Strand: How to potency, omni potency moves to potency, then moves to these these patterns that shouldn't actually exist. That we've never, and that DNA is actually one of the most passive parts about our human makeup.
That we've hidden the black box of this mular process that actually reads it and creates our patterned bodies. For me, I love Terence Deacon talks about it as an essential, which is it's, there's an absence just as and I think it's in the e ching, it talks about how like the thing that draws the wheel into shape is the absence at the center of it. And it's this absence, it's this absence of our form in our future that sucks us into being, it's this essential, this [00:33:00] predictive quality of our shape in the future. And I like to think of that in a very kind of erotic way, which is it's a yearning that draws, it's the shape in you.
That has not been filled. That draws in matter, but it's the shape. So what I'm interested in is this idea of, it's not even just this electric spark that's moving through it, it's not something Right?
.
Sophie Strand: It's an absence of something. It's this absence, this it's an act, an active absence. Yes.
At the core that draws us into shape. I am always so worried when I listen to things like that from scientists, even though I love their research, because when we have fixed the human race can no longer evolve like we were. We think of ourselves as a climactic species, but we're living in dynamic environments that are shifting, that we will need to glitch out and become disabled in order to inhabit.
And so I
worry about fixing. These bodies that are beginning to experiment at the very edges of the eco tone of what is [00:34:00] supposed to be materially like appropriate. So someone whose body could be fixed, I wonder if I should be fixed.
Oh
Bayo Akomolafe: yes. Glitches and flashing through and bursting out an absence as material and the apha theologies and negative.
Exactly. Yeah. Theologies that, that say the void isn't empty. And this is what James Hillman, the archetypal psycho psychologist would say that Gods the Gods are everywhere. We are swimming in dynamic animated tentacular. Territories, and there is no escaping that. There is no removing ourself from that.
We're always in conversation with these biofuel signals, right? And these signals are, thinking with mispronunciation as a glowing point in our conversation, like it, [00:35:00] this flashing through reminds me of the stories of that some of my elders tell about the challenges of today and the kinds of moves that we need to make.
We're discussing the, we're discussing the emergence of cracks. We're discussing the emergence of new gods, we're discussing their proliferation, their abundance. I know we wanna make a link between that and the politics of today, right? We wanna say that this is, of course, like I started, this is not just some structural game.
This is grounded. This is. This is us thinking about how we think. So Sophie, this story is about issue. Who is the trickster in the Yoruba pantheon? And this this, the story is told that he he embarked upon the voyage, the slave, the middle passage, the transatlantic slave trade. He was on all of those trips, right?
He did his best to subvert the attempts [00:36:00] by his brother, Ogun, the God of victory and iron. He did his best to try to cut off the insurgency to chase away the slave masters. Instead, what he did was to invite those ships, which is troubling. It's an, it's a moral intervention that is deeply troubling, but issue embodies deception and shape shifting.
Villainy and. And all the things that tricksters embody, but there's something about him embarking upon that trip that tells me about the kinds of politics we need to convene today. Because I think that Voyage, the Middle passage was an attempt of making sanctuary. We're making sanctuary is not about keeping people safe, right?
That's some idea of sanctuary. But making sanctuary is about protecting something fragile, something. So what you call the active absence, right? Something so [00:37:00] infinitesimally and vanishingly small, but is the voice and the cry of novelty, right? And he embarked upon those trips. I can imagine that upon the embryonic surface of the Atlantic Ocean, there were cracks, these signals flashing through, and the gods that were going to be born in the Creole lies Americas.
We're born through those cracks, through kble and Santer and all the traditions, the Afro diasporic spiritualities that emerged as a result of that mispronunciation, as a result of that displacement. So I think what we're saying is how displacement and errancy and falling away from the rectal linearity of being corrected actually is as painful as that might be, is the invitation to cultivate new gods together, right?
A politics that is alive to the [00:38:00] cultivation of tar degrades as gods and this friend of ours, Deloitte, as part of a pantheon, an ecological priesthood. A new form of worship.
Sophie Strand: Yes. I've been thinking so much about your thinking about is issue. There you go. He
Bayo Akomolafe: doesn't mind
Sophie Strand: the idea of stowaways and syncretism and especially in relation relationship to invasive species.
There's an intense drought in the Hudson Valley right now, and for whatever reason, it's the invasive species that are able to still survive. It's the chicory, the European invasives, the chicory and the purple loose strife and the mustard greens and the knotweed that can still thrive in this intense heat.
And then they come in the hulls of ship, ships, there are viruses and there are invasive, seaweeds that are on the bottom of cargo ships that do come [00:39:00] along with these, get excreted into harbors with wastewater and then take over ecosystems. And we have this very.
Problematically narrow idea of what a climactic ecosystem is, where, invasives are not allowed in. But when the ecosystem is shifting, it's those invasives, it's those other gods that need to arrive on the scene and open up the cracks and create new connectivity. So I've been thinking a lot about how in my home right now.
All of these shallow rooted trees are falling down because the soil is no longer able to keep them upright with,
With alternating periods of extreme humidity and then aridness. And that these invasive mustard greens have a fungal quality where they kill off the microrisal associations of these trees and bring them down.
And they can be seen as being terrible. But what I see them doing is they're being the midwife of this ecosystem. They're deciding which trees can't be upright anymore. They're bringing [00:40:00] them down, they're creating meadows, where then suddenly there's more biodiversity. They're the, they're create mid wifeing new ecosystems.
And so I've been thinking about these gods, these tricks are gods and these invasive species that they come un on the underbelly of those colonizing boats, those species arrive and the pig, this is the best this is. I've been praying to pig since. So do you know that. Pigs who were brought over by coloni colonizers, you're laughing at me 'cause I'm getting so excited about the pigs.
I love pigs. They're brought over to Terraform and destroy the indigenous land steward stewarding practices to take down the trees. But then pigs, when they get loose, they go wild and they grow tusks. And they become undomesticated in two weeks, sometimes less such that they can never be domesticated.
And it's becoming a huge problem in America and Canada. And they think it's gonna be one of the biggest issues in climate change are these roving [00:41:00] crowds of pigs that have escaped are terrible, capitalistic way of farming animals and have gone rogue and wild. And they came with the colonizers and now they're suddenly like,
fighting
back. And they go and they I love the idea that they go wild so quickly again, that their whole morph morphology changes.
Bayo Akomolafe: This is the part of your book. This is Rewilding. This is the there is a I think about the troubles of our time and I think about these, this gravitational pool from rectal linearity to the diagonal right there, there is a sense in which we're called to [00:42:00] worship.
And I love that the fugitive position, which is a, an epistemology of hiding, right? The fugitive does not want to be seen or recognized. The fugitive does not wanna stand up and to speak truth to power. The fugitive has to run. The fugitive is the glitch of the plantation, right? And so he, the fugitive has to bend.
It has to be in di in some kind of diagonal, erotic conversation with locality, with the ground, with pigs, with viruses to see things anew. And this maybe thinking about mispronunciation and embarkation by the way. I feel that in since pattern is often repeats themselves, there are new ships that are coming to the shores of modern civilization.
And I think we all are being invited. Those of us just stating in cities are being invited to come into this diagonal [00:43:00] worship. Again, we're being called to go and exile. We're being called to embark. And this is the, this is how to cultivate new gods. It's cracks have emerged, right? And it's convening.
A crack is a convening of a new form. It's a resub subject, ization of the body, like a creation event. And we are in creation, destruction events at this point in time. And this is the place where we prostrate, or like Yoruba, people would say, we double ballet. We fall to the earth, we press our bodies to the ground.
And so embarkation is exile. It needs exile for us to try to drag the gods. Sophia, I wanna say this that, when we speak about gods, we often think that these are beings in other places, right? In the supernatural, which is probably the most unfortunate word ever invented.
The supernatural as if the natural [00:44:00] were just a province of reality, right? But I think of, I think they're everywhere around us. The divine, the sacred and they often hide in glitches. They hide in the places. They hide in shadows, they hide in table corners. They hide in the places we don't usually linger, go to, right?
Or linger in. The effort of a politics that is responsive to these times and to the gods that are sprouting through the cracks of these times is a politics that knows how to dance and move and cultivate new postures to hold these gods and their archetypes. The les religion part of the work is possession, right?
A God possesses you, right? And a priest who is super, just curating that ritual would notice that this is issue or this is ogun, or what species of issue has entered this person today. Alright? These are the dance [00:45:00] moves you need to do to host this God well. I think in modernity, we don't know how to host Gods, right?
Because our posters are carceral are stuck on this front facing positionality. So we don't know how to move, right? Our practices are not that animated for us to move from side to side. And this is why the playful epistemologies of cracks invite us to move. We need to know how to cultivate these new archetypes that are showing up or else they show up as all the things that we're witnessing today.
This division of politics, this tribalized politics, where we can no longer have a conversation is an effect, a symptom of a morality that doesn't know how to do anything anymore. So we need transoral transgressions of playfulness that allows us to cultivate these divine infiltrations, if you will, procession.
Sophie Strand: I love that. I [00:46:00] also love the thinking about, is it's called the DSM, which is all of those different diagnoses as being uhhuh a playbook for all of the positions you can take. When you are possessed, you're like leafing through, you're like, which one should I perform? Which one is the correct one?
I really love thinking about Joan of Ark was someone I was fascinated with when I was growing up and then studied in college.
Me,
We should do a thing on that. There's a lot there. I've been thinking of her is she's a great moment of the psychosis of the pantheistic mind that's only been given a monotheistic box.
I love reading her trial where she's talking about all of these different beings and I sometimes think that. The issue she's experiencing is that she's getting a lot of different directions and she's trying to create one homogenized view of what they're telling her. But there are a lot of different beings who disagree with each other talking to her.
And she needs to, she doesn't have the tools to be able to host a more interesting [00:47:00] conversation 'cause she's only given this monotheistic idea and that she's constantly saying voices, but actually voice. Who is it really? And I've been thinking about the, we need to learn how to have pantheistic like pantheistic minds, again, uhhuh to let those voices in that might have more interesting advice on what positions to hold.
How to dance inappropriately. Something that was interesting for me was I very severely injured my knee. Two years ago, I ripped off my kneecap and like I was like basically walking on flat ground and just it really did feel like something came and just went like this and it ripped my kneecap off, but it grounded me and I couldn't move in the ways that I thought I could.
And I ended up just sitting on the ground moving like a sea anatomy, just like just trying to move from like my root, which was on the ground. It was like a totally inappropriate way to move. But it was only as I began to move inappropriately [00:48:00] because I was grounded, that I started to have more interesting ideas.
Like I could say that all of the ideas that I had were accessed by holding positions that were uncomfortable, that I would've never ordered off the menu. So how do we help each other hold positions that are uncomfortable?
Bayo Akomolafe: That is a, that is a vital centralizing grounding question.
How do we support each other in these times to take those can cando ballistic shapes, right? That dance to have carnivalesque arrangements where we move our bodies. And I'm not just talking about dancing in public, which is a beautiful thing to do twerking in public. We do that more often. My family keeps on not just my family here, but my family around the world keeps on inviting me to twerk in public.
I'm yet to summon the courage to do that. But by dancing, I mean something that is deeply political. Something that is more than just the politics [00:49:00] that is premised on critiquing oppressive systems, which we need, right? Something that is supplementary, if you will, an underground politics or transnational politics that knows how to sniff out what the gods, the more than human, the unspeakable, the unthinkable that which is not available for analysis is doing.
I, what comes to mind now is that rabbinical story of Moses, it's, this is not, this is apocryphal. I think it's in the, it's stories that were told.
That's another conversation. But Moses as a child is, as a beautiful boy, is seated on the laps of the Pharaoh, right? The king and he's in court when Moses grabs the crown. Of the king and the king is livid, right? And the priests are [00:50:00] livid. They're saying This is a sign that this boy will take your place, so kill him now just let's end him.
But some party the other, some other priests say let's do a test. Then we will put your crown in front of him and we will put some, coal hot burning coal in front of him. And if it goes for, which is brighter than a crown and more attractive, I think if it goes for your crown in that instance, then we should kill him.
But if we go for the coal, then we should spare him, right? So it's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. And Moses being true to his nature, I guess goes for the crown. But it is said in that moment that an angel. Intercepts and draws his hands to the coal. And so Moses takes the hot burning coal and puts it on his mouth.
And this long story is a way for those rabbis to say something [00:51:00] that it's in the glitching out, it's in the disability, it's in the dys, it's in the place where we lose our eloquence, that God comes in. So he was granted the gift of a lisp in order to be eloquently available for the emancipatory project of freeing the Jews, right?
So I refer to that story because of, I feel we're at a place where we need to attempt different things now. The clues are all around us. He said, DSM, that's a beautiful reframing of the DSM, right? It's these, that's a map, that's a cartography of failure, but that's where we wanna dance to, right?
Fernan Dini, have you heard about him?
Bayo Akomolafe: In spite Delos and Ari, these are our French philosophers and psychotherapists and psychiatrists, Fernan Delini gathered a community of autistic nonverbal children and refused to correct them. Saw them as wild gods, right? That [00:52:00] refused the thesis, the lacanian psychoanalytic thesis that we are at root verbal creatures.
Language is what gives us selfhood, right? He rejected it and he started this beautiful project of mapping lines. Mapping lines of flight, right? Mapping the dancing, the wandering lines of the children, and thought that these lines, these maps were co-creating together is a map of emancipation. If we have a politics that is devoted, not curing, autistic children or giving them language or imposing on some rectal linearity, but seeing them as altars, which is what my wife often calls my son an altar, a wild place, right?
The object is not to cure him or drag him into sanity, gentrified sanity. The object is to worship, to stay in the trouble of his yelps and his screaming, [00:53:00] right? If we can do that, if we can convene community around that bonfire, then we might have created a politics of surprise together, which will not guarantee our salvation, but it'll shift us closer.
To those cracks, those unbecoming flashes of possibility.
Sophie Strand: Oh, I love that. I love the idea of beings as wild alters. I'm always struck by our earliest graves of human beings are usually disabled people. And the people who were given the most extraordinary burials were often people who were not normatively shaped or were with the glitches.
And so we can see in this, in our history of burials of ceremonial burials, of creating these alters in the earth, we can see that the glitches were what we did honor. They were where we put our prayers, where they were the seeds we put on the ground. Yeah. I also, it's interesting [00:54:00] to think about nonverbal.
My, my friend actually composes music for from nonverbal children. She says she collaborates with them and then she creates music from them. And I was thinking about how it's a great way of thinking about how we all need each other to create certain kind of communication. Yeah. That we're all a prosthesis for someone else.
And that if you can do it all on your own, suddenly there's no relationality, there's no world building. It's, my disability is an invitation to become part of a larger body. And the invitation disability in an is an invitation to relationship that, the things that I can't do for myself are ways in which I build community.
Because suddenly the people who do those things for me are part of my extended body. It's like the ghost pipe with the Russell fungi under the ground, like the ghost Pipe can't photosynthesize. So it has to create this relationship with the fungi. And it's that opening that creates the whole ecosystem.
It creates, if we're, if we can do everything on our own, [00:55:00] if we can speak at all, if we're utterly pronounced correctly, then we've become that atomized self. We've become isolated. Yes. But to be correct is to be isolated.
Bayo Akomolafe: To be correct, is to be isolated. I'm not gonna add anything to that sister.
I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna stay with that. I know Zaya and Mauricio are dancing in the cracks right now. But yes. If you give Sophie and I two days, we'll be here. So
Zaya Benazzo: thank you for this winding, disorienting, confusing, and celebrating the complexity and knowability of life conversation because I feel this is really, the new gods are gonna have a lot of those qualities of discomfort and completion. Being with places of falling apart, we didn't get to talk about the gods [00:56:00] that might need to be decomposed or are in the process of de composting through the practice of the world.
Maurizio Benazzo: Yeah. Thank you. Thank
Bayo Akomolafe: you big sister. Thank you. Thank you.
Sophie Strand: Thank you.
Bayo Akomolafe: Thank you. [00:57:00]
