Tending the Threshold: Bayo Akomolafe
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Maurizio Benazzo: [00:00:00] Welcome. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever in the world you are.
My name is Maurizio, but you know that name is, my name is Z.
Yes.
No, your name is Zaya. My name is Maurizio. We are the film director and your host. We are speaking today to you from Sebastopol, California, which is the ancestral and unceded territory of the Southern Pomo and coastal Miwok people.
Zaya Benazzo: Welcome, and we have a very special guest today. Yeah. Our brother, Bayo Akomolafe.
Yes.
And Bayo is a Yuba philosopher poet, post humanist thinker known for weaving meets radical [00:01:00] uncertainty. Into pathways of transformation and broader bio. You have been taking all the certainties from our knowing for years now, and this is it.
This is the time to be sitting, not with knowing and clarity and purity, but with the unc. And I would say initiated us starting 10 years ago now probably when you came to
Maurizio Benazzo: sand
Zaya Benazzo: and Right. Everybody was like, what is this man talking about? Wait, we just got it. We were just, we are almost enlight to him with this guy.
And when you just took it over it.
Bayo Akomolafe: Yeah.
Zaya Benazzo: Great.
Do you feel like in a libation or a prayer just to begin with this space?
Bayo Akomolafe: Yes. Thank you brother and sister. And greetings to my siblings from wherever you're calling in from.
I'm in India now now just [00:02:00] landed. And I'm home. And my journeys took me through Brazil, Canada, South Africa, Morocco, Nigeria, and now here. While I was in Nigeria, which is where I was born I met with a b Lao and a babalawo is to many people who are not familiar with the term like a shaman.
And he told me a story which I want to share with us. A creation story that I'd never heard before from my own people, the Yoruba people, and I felt it was youthful. Good to ate. This opening, and I'll tell it very briefly, it has to do with the Orishas the superhuman deities, the gods, and the goddesses of the Yoruba Pantheon.
The traditional system, right? Which [00:03:00] is not a religion, which is not just spirituality. It's not just science. It's not just medicine. It's not just ecology. It's not just psychology, it's all of these and more. When the creation of the planet was beginning the 16 Orishas were sent, you might have heard of some of them sh go, ogun, the God of metal or bat the God of creation. So many 16. They were all sent, one of them was a woman, just one of them. One outta the 16 was a woman. Now when this 16 landed on what we now name rudely as planet Earth, they got to business. They started to weave and fabricate and make trees and make humans and make everything and make metal and make resources.
In their being busy, they forgot who is the goddess of the [00:04:00] waters, the goddess of anything that's fluid, the goddess of the rivers. They forgot her behind and they got really busy over time. To cut my story short, over time they started to notice that creation wasn't working. Things weren't coming together as they thought it would.
And so they went back to Olo de Ma, who is the chiefest of the gods, doesn't have anything. He doesn't busy himself with human affairs. Too large for that. But they went back to Olo de Ma and said, creation isn't alchemizing itself in the ways that we had expected it to. We are doing all of these magical things.
Experiments are coming together. But why is everything suddenly drying up? Because around that time, all the rivers started to dry up. All the water started to disappear. The milk from the female breasts started to disappear. Even semen from male reproductive organs started to disappear.
Everything fluids started to [00:05:00] disappear. And they said, why is this happening? And although DeMar said, you may have forgotten one of the Orisha, I think you should go back to her. And they went back to Ocean and they all frustrated themselves before Ocean and said, please restore us. Please forgive us for forgetting your place, forgetting how things move.
The story goes on beyond that. But I offered this as a soft opening, an invitation to memory, an invitation to flow. An invitation to the eternity of the song that we are being enlisted by this moment to sing together. Now, this is not a time for being busy. This is not a time for the solutions that we are busy with.
This is not a time for rushing through with our Linearities and our choreographies and our Confident Maps. This is an invitation to stay [00:06:00] with Flow, to listen to the yellowing goddess who sits at the Banks of Rivers and invites us. To steady ourselves in the flow and the tide of things, and not to be so sure in our weaponized masculinities that we forget that creation reality is a moving, not a settlement, but a moving.
And I pray with the cadence and the wisdom of these times that as you join us to listen and to pray together, and to think together, that our times will flow. We will happen upon surprising places that all our technologies could not have taken us to. ashe.
Maurizio Benazzo: Wow. Should I wanna start with something from the movie, A line you said in the movie that completely you don't know, but yeah. But the and a lot of people [00:07:00] are referring to the line as one of the highlights. At one point you said that you're recovering psychologist and you said.
The couch is too small of a place for healing
Zaya Benazzo: a territory. It's too
Maurizio Benazzo: small of a territory. Healing, you know that to heal, we need community, but not only human community. Yeah. That line, and you have the chuckle there. And I see in the theaters, everybody from the back, we see everybody like they jump up.
Such a good line. It's such a good line because it really touch us deeply, in our.
Zaya Benazzo: And I feel like in the last three, four days, we've been really sitting with that line and opening that line is like a opening, a portal asking what healing, what is healing when it's not limited to this body, to this skin, and Right.
Another line, the movie, we're gonna quote Bio Kamala from the, is that limited to our bodies. We had the rivers the. [00:08:00] The grass on the side of the freeway is part of what, yeah. What is healing? What is wholeness? If the healing doesn't happen on the couch within four pole. With a therapist.
Bayo Akomolafe: Such specificity. But thank you. I can't quite remember the line but I hear it now and it's something like I would've said in the moment growing up in Nigeria and entering into the profession and the world of therapy I was an academic, I trained at the Federal Nurse Psychiatric hospital in Eastern Nigeria.
East of Nigeria. And very quickly my siblings, I noticed that what was articulated as healing as a therapeutic path to wholeness, to wellness was not some universal neutral thing. It was deeply political. It was very political. I remember because I trained [00:09:00] in the humanistic, not so much the psychodynamic and psychoanalytic traditions, but the humanistic traditions and I often mixed together cognitive behavioral therapies with my humanistic leanings and all of that.
I remember, however, inviting an elder to my, to my space, to my office. Now, the psychiatric hospital was in a remote part of the city and administered to people who were in the villages and the smaller towns, people who are not quite familiar with western stouts therapies. And I would sit there and I remember once just inviting someone to lie down.
As I wanted to listen to him. He was way older than I was. I didn't, my beard wasn't white then. My, my beard got white over the weekend. That's how much I've been traveling. But I invited him to lie down and he just gave me a stare. He just looked at me and said, I have [00:10:00] your type at home.
Now, if you're not Nigerian, you probably dunno what that means. That was an insult. Wrapped up in caring response, but also wrapped up in a way. In a sentence that said, know your place. You don't tell me an elder to lie down and speak to you. I don't care what your training is. I don't care about your PhDs.
I don't care about that. I'm not lying down and narrating my life history to you. It was one of those cross-cultural moments that reminded me that healing and the ways that we frame it. It's deeply political. It's culturally alive and vibrant. It's never some universalizing, troope and maybe my sense of things in a larger frame.
Is that what we usually habitually frame as healing is some kind of manufacturing of subjectivity. It's how the city, it's how [00:11:00] civilization frames and anoints articulates and incarcerates the self. It's how we've been told we ought to behave. Other colleagues like Professor Aaron Manning would think of this as neuro typicality.
It's good behavior. It's what the slave plantation also did. It's how it said this is how to be a proper self. We will strip you of your connections with the wild. We will give you a name so you're legible. Legibility is increasingly confused as healing. And so my legibility, my eloquence within the nation state is what we often name as healing.
And I wonder if that is in a form of incarceration, a Sian bed in which we're tied down so that we fit neatly within the measures that have been already measured at. And maybe that's what I mean, brother and sister, that if healing is being [00:12:00] articulated. Is being designated, is being propertied, is being legitimized within already precarious circumstances such as white modernity, then I don't want to be available for that.
I don't want to be available for that kind of healing. I want my body to do stranger things than the healing that prescribes me three feet by three feet within a slave ship. I want the healing that allows my body to transgress the already notarized dimensions of civ, of civility. I want to travel differently, and so maybe that's what I meant.
Wow.
In a unstable nutshell
that yes,
you meant that. Yes. And you
Maurizio Benazzo: expressed it very
Bayo Akomolafe: well.
Maurizio Benazzo: Then now
is so beautiful.
Zaya Benazzo: Yeah. In the movie we do speak a lot about colonialism and the history of colonialism. I. And colonialism [00:13:00] is not over. It breeds through us. Oh. It's the architecture of modernity and lives in the way we think, the way we relate the way we even dream.
So I. What, what does it mean to approach decolonization, not as a metaphor or a moral project, but as a lived unlearning experience. Ground on which we stand. And another thing you said when we met that decolonization is not just a human work along if you No, but yes. So yes. What did you mean by that?
Bayo Akomolafe: There is, this is what my daughter thinks about where we are as a species. She thinks that if only we can get rid of humans, she's 11 years old. So she's working her way through the philosophies of it, and I'm working by her side. She thinks if only we can get rid of humans, the world will be fine.
She thinks, [00:14:00] yeah she thinks that humans are getting in the way of the flourishing of the planet and she wants more dogs, more cats, more cockroaches. She's very post humanist in that way. However, in gentle homeopathic doses, I've often invited her to consider that the human is not the isolated thing that we think it is.
That a human is not even the anthropo, centrical, anthropomorphic shapes we're used to. The human is a territory. You can get rid of human beings and still have human territories, right? You can get rid of human beings, human figures, and still have a practice that is human. Because the human is not so much a thing as it is a rationality, a logic, a way of being with the planet, right?
And that already, if we are to take seriously siblings, if we're to take seriously the idea that we are entangled with the [00:15:00] world, then we cannot isolate ourselves, in a bit to save the world and say, oh, let's get rid of ourselves. But that's not possible any longer. We're not separate from the world.
We have to think of ourselves as part of ecology. We have to think of microbes as part of politics. We have to think of densities and forests and intensities and algorithms and Facebook and this phallic mic on my table as part of what the world is doing, right? We no longer have the luxury even in our grief about the anthrop scene.
We no longer have the luxury of extricating ourselves uniquely from the world. And so it's from that, if we take that as a scaffolding, we allow ourselves room to consider that coloniality is not human beings interacting with the world alone. That is such a very, let me call it. It things along with [00:16:00] the logic of original sin.
The Augustinian theology of original sin. The idea that we are born into the world with an original sin, and the thing to do is to get rid of our sin by the purging of the blood of the Christ. I know y'all don't know your Bible. But the idea is not to, if we think along the lines of.
Purging ourselves of an original sin, then we're still performing the same logic of extrication, of separation and separability. But if we allow ourselves to consider that we are part of ecologies, and ecologies are already implied in us, then ality has never been simply human. It's what sugar is doing.
Right? There are interesting studies on how sugar implicated slavery, right? This is not to dismiss accountability. It is to notice that accountability is distributed. We have to think like forests and networks and [00:17:00] fungal streams now. So just to wrap the point up. The coloniality for me is how systems unlearn themselves.
It's not about individuals going on salvific personal journeys to discover themselves or to discover new identities. It's always a matter of fields and systems trembling with the vitality of difference and noticing that even their claims to settlement are never fully. Articulable or legitimate, right?
So I think in terms of cracks that in systems, whether it's capitalism or modernity or coloniality or racism or whatever ism you want to throw out there, wherever we are, there are always cracks. The crack is the instance of the universe showing itself up. As always, teenage always awkward, always still [00:18:00] becoming, and it is this stream of becoming that allows us to speak about decoloniality.
It's not about solving problems, it's not about justice. Even it's about. A universe that is never complete. Fred Morton would think of it as the radical incompleteness of things. This is what I think of as blackness, but I digress. I.
Hey and not Blackness as identity, but Blackness as the promiscuity of everything.
Blackness as the womb that births even identity blackness as geo tivity. That is my own highfalutin way of saying that the world is not still. The world dances. The world crisscrosses. It's wats. It's constantly moving. The idea that the world is still is the framing of modernity, but the world being alive cannot allow flags to be planted in its belly.
It's constantly traveling. And this traveling, this movement, this fugitivity is our claim to [00:19:00] de coloniality.
Zaya Benazzo: So the undoing, the clonality or any, it's part of life. Of the stream of life, of becoming and becoming. And yesterday we had our Maori elders who traced ancestry back to 17 billion years ago. Where to the Celeste becoming to I hear you speak to that perspective as well of deep time. Yes.
And I wonder how, and again, this is modernity that has taught us to say, is this or that Is Yes, [00:20:00] is black or white, and at the same time. We do have a world that it, there are poly crisis. There's genocide happening in Gaza right now. There's wars, absolutely.
There's
buts and there's fires.
And how do we stay present to that reality without numbing or retreating into fixing fantasies, and without trying to solve it, but to stay in that threshold that has the potentiality. Yes. Of something else coming through.
Bayo Akomolafe: Yes. Sorry, I'm feeling very air airport ish, right?
Because I'm just from an one of several airports and I remember standing at my, at the carousel waiting for my bags, and I remembered just watching as the as the bags, as the architecture of the space spat up. Beautiful boxes, red and green and neon blue and colorful and flowery. And it just kept on speeding up.
And I was [00:21:00] like, this is diversity. This is a lot of diversity, right? This is incredible Diversity. A diversity of boxes, different shapes, different sizes, different presumptions, different philosophies. Each of these boxes had their own cosmology, right? But there was something that was damning about the architecture because no matter what shape it came that was spat out no matter the form, the shape, the presumption, the origin of the box, it went around in a circle.
I. Right. Or in an oval right? No matter what happened. No matter the how the box looked, it just the diversity of it was caught up in this modular tality where it, it just kept on going around in a circle no matter how it looked. And that reminded me of the ways that our solution stick enterprises are part of rationalities that often repeat themselves.
In fact, I would, I [00:22:00] dare say that a solution is not a resolution. A solution is a postponement of tensions within a field to some other part of the field. I'll say that again. A solution does not resolve tension. The universe is tension. The universe is chaos. Continental philosophers, ulus, all of them spoke about difference, right?
And imminence, right? It's not that we have order. I. And then there's chaos. No, it's that chaos is the mother of order, right? And so we are always in tectonic instability, right? We just cr craft moralities from that tectonic poetry poetics rather. So a solution does not resolve it just. Postpones the tension to another part of the field.
It postpones it, it shifts it out. For instance, think about the ways that we're trying to address climate chaos, the recycling, the moralities around, disposing your [00:23:00] waste properly. And then we tell ourselves, if only we do that, if only everybody can do that, we'll be fine. What happens? 90% of that, as I say, over and over again, like a broken record, does not go to a green Emerald City.
It goes to Nigeria, it goes to Vietnam, it goes to India. We push it out. We postpone the tension. We find a place, we find moralities in notions of inclusion, and we celebrate that. But then from the side, from the back alley, we push our waste to them and we say, take care of this for us. So a solution does not resolve where we are at as a people now is that the moralities and the rationalities that we're used to are getting tired, and so we don't know how to push it out any further.
It's it's coming back. We've run out of space. In that moral field, the carousel is tired. It's been taking boxes around for so long, it doesn't know what to do, and so it's full, the boxes are crowding on each [00:24:00] other and there's nothing else to do, so I. I am very suspicious of claims.
Well intentioned as they are. I'm very suspicious of claims to resolution. I think right now, alongside the very well intentioned brothers and sisters that are trying to do stuff around the world, we need a different kind of politics. I. I call it a para politics. It's a politics that dwells on the side.
It's a politics that knows how to lean into cracks that may not announce itself as a solution, may not announce itself as justice. It may look like grieving together zaya. It may look like cooking together. Maurizio, it may look like us J together. It may look like us following my autistic son and walking around those circles.
It may not look pragmatic, but I think pragmaticism is often in the way of change.
Zaya Benazzo: This is a note on which we closed yesterday. That understanding is [00:25:00] overestimated. It's with the, yeah. And the film calls in causes into that remembering that indigenous people have walked for millennia of community, of sitting together, grieving together with Mother Earth, not on mother Earth, earth, growing.
Yes.
Yes. We wanna take this again, another thread you introduced. We will bring into the next film that specifically talks about the Afro diasporic community in the us reclaiming. If a spirituality, you invoked the Orisha Eshu that was a companion to the enslaved and it traveled, you said it traveled through the wound.
It traveled with them while they were sailing.
Yeah.
If the history darkest corridors are not just sites of trauma, but thresholds of initiation, how we might listen [00:26:00] Yes. Sacred in the sorrow. Yes. And not to bypass the wounds of history that many of us carry and feel to this day and the he pain from those wounds, but you invite us into a different way to see, as well as Orland Bishop spoke about that yesterday as well.
Of
course, my Big brother
Zaya Benazzo: initiation can.
Bayo Akomolafe: Of course there's a trickster in every scar. There's a trickster. In every wound there's a trickster even on aboard slave ships this very point. Was taught to us by Professor Femi Yuba. He's a Nigerian playwright, I believe he's in his nineties and he's in the US and this idea he Iraq. He has a book.
He has a book that I'm desperately looking for. I haven't been able to find it. I went [00:27:00] around the most famous bookstores in Lagos and searched everywhere. For this book, I would pay anything. It's called a golf. And it's a small play. The Gulf. Yes. And it's a small play, but the heart of this play is the, is this idea that when the slave ships came to West Africa to the continent, that the Orishas mounted up an insurgency to fight back, to push back.
It was a very causal, kind, linear kind of politics. If they come, we will fight them and push them away, and then they would return and we will save ourselves. Basically. That's the idea. But one among them whose name is Issu, did not think about reality issue is the trickster. Issue is the trickster God, the one who sits at the crossroads, the God of [00:28:00] miscommunication.
The God of mispronunciation. He's not available for clean talk, right? He lingers at the edges of clean talk to mock and disappoint your claims to eloquence long enough to know that you've seen nonsense, right? So issue whispered to his siblings and said, maybe we shouldn't do this.
Maybe May. Maybe instead of fighting back today, we can do it tomorrow in the morning when it's daylight and we see what we're doing. How about that? And he proceeded to into his siblings, the other Orishas and their armies, and sense them to sleep. And then according to this story, which is now sublimated into popular culture, and is the heart of my next book issue, proceeded to sneak aboard the slave ship.
Travel through the wound refusing to close the wound of the transatlantic slave theft, he left the wound open and traveled into it. The only way that we c Crystalize worlds, the only way that [00:29:00] rites of passage take place, the only way that life actually emerges is through wounds. It's through those cracks, through openings.
And if you realize that victory was too much of a risk if they won the war, if they won the battle, they would turn around and find out that they were the thing that they were fighting against, which is exactly what the African Independence movement realized, right? We looked around and we saw, oh my goodness, we've chased away the British people.
We've chased away the colonizers. And we looked back, we looked in the mirror, and we were now wearing princely suits. And we were driving Rolls-Royces and we had briefcases begging for money. They were empty begging for money from the IMF or from the World Bank, right? If you realize this, he said victory is too risky.
What we need to do is to become different, and the only way to do that is a rite of passage or ritual of presence, is what my dear sister Laura Penta [00:30:00] would call it, a ritual of presence. We need to travel through the crack. I think that is the invitation of our time. The paradox of healing. If healing is closure or return to normativity, you might be returning to the very logic that gave birth to the need for healing in the first place.
Right? And so what to do is to stay with those cracks, is to stay with those openings. It's not to. Conflate the door with the crack. The door is already the architect's presumption, the architect's blueprint. If we stay with the door and we walk through doors, we might be sustaining the algorithm of the house.
What we want to do is to notice those places where the house cannot contain itself, where it's engorged with desire, where it cannot stay by the blueprint. That's the crack, and it is the crack. That issue followed into, and it gave birth to Santer, [00:31:00] K, Blair, Umanda, raaf, Samba, everything. It gave birth to new kinds of worlds, and I think maybe that's the invitation of a para politics.
Zaya Benazzo: So anything to do with finality and arrival and clarity.
This is
enslavement of modernity. We want to be clear. We want to be comfortable that we were sold. Yes. And safety, oh, are we safe to. What does it mean to be safe even? Yeah. And so in, in your story of Yuba people like dispersing and finding, dispersing, bringing that spirituality all over yeah.
Fights us to hold identity lightly in a different way. Identity as a yes, that is not fixed. That keeps evolving and ship shaping. Yes.
What does that do to [00:32:00] modernity? If we will hold identity in such way? Not remember
Bayo Akomolafe: That is scandalous. That is scandalous to the modern, to mo. Modern imaginaries must frame identity as ontology, right? Modern. Modern cosmologies seek to pin down once and for all our bodies within a flattened, comfortable, safe terrain.
To say that you are this right, it's almost Aristotelian, right? It's what you are, because we have, since the Greeks learned to think about. Ideation and materiality as binaries, as distant, right? We don't know how to reconcile the stoics knew how to do that, but we do know how to reconcile ideas, the world of ideas with the world of ma matter.[00:33:00]
So we think of them apart and then we create plateau worlds of forms that are ID ideas, the princely. Eloquent essentializing ideas, which our bodies are just echoes of, right? That's just one modern cosmology you might say. But once we start to see the world asal zaya, once we start to see the world as a flow.
Ideas are material and material things are ideational, right? They're not apart. They're always flowing together. Then it's possible. It's possible to imagine, it's possible to imagine, a world where things are not so steadily named. The Yuba people have an ethos of mispronunciation, for instance.
If you were to go to Nigeria, some parts of Nigeria, of course, other kinds of logics are coming into the stream. Now, if you were to say [00:34:00] what is your name and someone said their names to you and you mispronounced it, it wouldn't be a politics of you got it wrong. It would be a, it would the response is more likely to be, I like the way you mispronounce my name, which is not supposed to be some universal thing that everyone adopts.
I don't think about ethics or morality as universal, but the geo moralities of the Yoruba people seems to suggest that mispronunciation is a way we meet ourselves for the first time. That if you, if, and you will never get my name right, Zaya, just to let you know that every time you say bio, you are going off Kta.
Every time you say you've already, you've, you're going somewhere, you're heading into the forest, the highway is here, you're heading somewhere else. And I delight in it because it's a way of hearing the Yuba tongue togi. So the language is so tonal. It's marked by this carnivalesque festive tonality. So every time mis pronunciation [00:35:00] lands, it feels like a meal, like an invitation to stay with God as if for the first time, right?
Which is not to say that people, for instance, in the United States who are bling with different kinds of mis pronunciations are wrong for doing so. This is not judgment, but it is a way of noticing that we don't have to stick within those moralities. That precision or safety as has been prescribed or prescribed by modernity could be a trap.
And black studies and indigenous studies and ecofeminist studies for a long time has noticed that safety can be a form of a trap, can be an incarcerating device. Those people that traveled on slave ships across the Atlantic. And often try to kill themselves to end their lives rather than settle in the plantation.
They were often bordered and boundaried by their captains, the captains of the ship who would [00:36:00] write, we care about your safety. But if safety is part of how my body is productized and instrumentalized and object wise within modern civility, then it's a very worrisome kind of safety indeed.
Zaya Benazzo: Yeah. Yeah. And the our names come from a language and the language comes with a rhythm, and the rhythm comes from the land. So unless we know beautiful the land, we will be always mispronouncing not to make it wrong. It is just knowing that each place has its own rhythm that each
Bayo Akomolafe: place has, its.
Rhythm, even language is sonars and sibilant and whispery and never quite amenable or available for the gram for the grammar of the city. Like we are, I often say that I've said elsewhere that poetry is where language came from. You would expect that it's the other way [00:37:00] around.
That language or poetry came from language. That's a very reductionistic way to see poetry. Poetry is much more than meter and rhyme. Poetry is the refusal of anything to be still. And poetry is the language of the apocalypse. Poetry is the wolf's howl. It's the secretion of ants in their death spirals.
It is a fungal entity called ep. Unilateral is plain with insects in the forests, it is the rhinoceros. It is the air, it is the microbial In its activism, nothing is still, and that is poetry. That is where language comes from. But language is just a tiny aspect of what the world is doing. Like my sister Vanessa Ti would say that meaning is not everything.
There is resonance. And resonance is much more than meaning. I.
Zaya Benazzo: Yeah. So poetry is much closer to the origin of language. The poetry the language [00:38:00] is the river, the language. Indigenous people say our language came from the mountain. Others say our language came from the river. So poetry is much closer to that movement of life than the grammar.
The proper pronunciation.
Bayo Akomolafe: The proper pronunciation. Yes. And I should add quickly, 'cause I'm jumping, taking quantum leaps here and there, my sibling. I would even say that even the idea of Origins are too, the idea of Origins is too limited. Like the idea of Origins is still. Available within language.
I think reality is too promiscuous for origins, too promiscuous for destinations, middles, and origins, right? Like we will never be able to circumscribe. What reality is the idea that we could. Pin down the ravenous black hole, like poetry of billions of years. The idea that we can sidestep it or [00:39:00] nail it down to a calendar and say 15 billion years ago, I think the hubris in those kinds of steady temporalities is too difficult for me to hold space for.
So I recognize that even origins are a convenience. Something beyond Origins, destinations and middles are available.
Zaya Benazzo: [00:40:00] . Someone said yesterday, we are in the middle of eternity. This is the line we heard from not. We have lots of questions and I have one last
now you. You are of Yuba origin and colonialism and Christianity came hand in hand to most indigenous communities. Yes. But also your family and your community is practicing Christianity.
Yes.
How do you walk with these two realities? Yes. And Christianity is part of tracing it back also in Europe is the beginning of the colonization came from Christianity when it came and disconnected people from the land put the god above the above life.
How do you walk with these two world and yet, many of us Christianity or [00:41:00] religion has provided comfort and
I think sense of the biggest one.
Bayo Akomolafe: Yes. At the risk of betraying some of my darlings which is my book ideas. I have one which will come after this one called the Boy Who Stayed Outside.
It's a book of short stories and one of those stories is about a priest, a Catholic priest in pre-colonial or colonial Nigeria. Who comes to, to Nigeria, present day Nigeria, to evangelize his faith. But he's at the same time having a crisis of faith. He's a priest, he's a Catholic priest who falls in love with a wild woman from one of our villages, like who falls in love with her and through, I'm not gonna give you the whole story because I know that spoilers are bad.
But through the entire story, they go on this adventure by the end of this short story. [00:42:00] His faith is addressed by his conversion to the evil people's tradition, right? He no longer is held by his Christian faith, but on the same, by the same token, this woman he's in love with converts to Christianity, right?
And how that happens is the genius of this short story, which I'm not about to betray because I haven't figured it out yet. But here lies, what I forget, the author's name calls the fidelity of betrayal, or the betrayal infidelity, is that we often think about faith or religion or systems as if they were categorically pure.
Christianity is one monolithic entity and Christianity came to Africa, but Christianity is not one. Christianity is manifold. Christianity is becoming. Christianity is also animist. There are strands of [00:43:00] Christianity that speak to PHA and your of Christianity that cannot stand iffa. So the invitation here is not to think in terms of purity.
Category is to think with small fonts, not big capital letters, but small fonts to think in terms of threads of relations. So it is possible to imagine faith in betrayal or betrayal in faith because the world is mycelial, right? And this is what the trickster invites us to think about why the trickster is set to.
To hang at the tip of the tongue mocking our attempts at eloquence that every attempt to speak is already short-circuited by the trickster. So yes, Christianity did come to Nigeria. Christianity did erase culture. Christianity did a lot of harmful things. But if I were to stick to categorization, I would be thinking like modality, and I cannot afford to think that.[00:44:00]
Zaya Benazzo: Wow. Wow. You are relentless. And that's freedom I this livening to feel that, to think that way.
Thank you for this. Thank you. There is no clarity. There is no fixed identity. That's an invitation that it's a gift. It's precious for these times that we all grasp to know and be safe and to arrive finally in a place that feels home.
But Home is here, right?
Bayo Akomolafe: Actually Home is here, yes. Thank you. Thank you so much.
Thank you. Thank you for all your support with the film.
You've been instrumental, walked with us for three years in the creation. Yes. It was beautiful. Deep gratitude for that.
But I think you both, and I know how much you are. You strived and worked hard. I knew your tears and your sweat and bless you. May your work thrive in these times so that [00:45:00] new springs of life and abundance might well up in our hearts, in our terrains, in our cities.
In our worlds. ashe.
[00:46:00]
