January 30: Slowing Down in Urgent Times
Bayo Akomolafe in conversation with Ayana Young
So, one of the most persistent and sticky habits of perception that has possessed those of us gestating in modern civilizations is we tend to see things as separate from each other. The mic is separate from the one who speaks into the mic; the podcast is separate from the computer that broadcasts the podcast; cars are separate from their drivers; we are separate from our technologies. We see things as bounded and as atomized in some Newtonian, Cartesian sort of way. And it’s a good strategy. It is a strategy that has produced a kind of world, and I’m not in the habit of naming it as evil, or bad, even though that’s a strategy in itself too. I see the strategy of separation is to create safety, permanence, fixity, once and for all, to name things in a final way. That’s the modern impulse, I would say. Now, you run into trouble when things like what's happening today start to crop up.
First thing I'll say is that we are slowly coming to terms with a world that is more entangling, and more relational, and more processual than our modern habits of seeing can allow us to notice or appreciate. We are noticing that we are not as distanced from our technologies as modernity would have us believe we are. In shaping computers, we are shaped by computers. In participating in networks, we are conducting and performing emotional labor of some form, and shaping ourselves in that way. In very practical terms, we are now consuming more dairy products than human beings thousands of years ago. Our bodies are not used to it. And there are artistic impressions and experiments that are trying to decipher how we would look if we continue to drive cars, for instance, and if we continue to sit in cubicles, how we would look like in the next hundred years? I don’t want to conjure macro-evolution here, as if we’re headed for predestined space, but to say that we are changing, and we are not as human as we think we are.
What does this mean for this rude thing called climate change? It means that we think, act, behave, see, want, yearn, practice, perform, do things, only with the world or only with others, basically. That is, the perceptual stickiness, or the assumption that we act as individuals, is already being haunted by the idea of an entangled world. That when Ayana thinks about building a house that is something ancestral as well, that is something ecological as well, that is the lives, and breaths, and size, and hopes of multitudes and the manifold that are mostly invisible seeping through and being performed. So that we are always intergenerational, so that our failures are shared by community that are not always noticeable or perceptible.
So this idea that we are in community also has its risks, because it means that there are ways behaving that are become resilient, and that is very difficult to shake off, and basically, my work in thinking about climate change through the prisms of Indigenous realities, and poetry, and entanglement, is basically to notice that, yeah, those ways have become very sticky and become troublesome, and so we need to find all the places of power with which we might respond to something that is beyond us. We are responding within a machine, and the machine is tired and exhausted. [...]
I have been very fascinated with the wealth, and abundance, and the beautiful gifts of thought and conceptualization that were always around me but I couldn’t notice. It wasn’t time to notice that then. The Yoruba people, mainly in West Africa, but also in Brazil, the so-called New World, prostrate before their Elders when they see them. It’s a deeper form of genuflection. And the Yoruba people call it the ìdọ̀bálẹ̀,—a man literally falls flat on the ground and is still until the Elder says, “Rise.” For the ladies it’s called ìkúnlẹ̀, and the lady just bends her knees a bit, and—and rises, just briefly. I was shocked to learn there is deep mythological significance to prostration. It’s not just a gesture, it goes deeper than that. To literally prostrate is to be still in the face of the storm, that is how Yoruba people see it mythologically. That there is a great God called Shango who is the God of thunder, and seismic shifts, and upheavals. And when he shows up, you don’t run, you don’t run away, you don’t fight it too. The habits of war have already been heard when we say things like “We’re gonna fight climate change,” “We’re gonna defeat climate change,” and stuff like that. That’s war lending itself again to how we’re framing it. But these other teachings tell us to stay still, to lay perfectly still in the face of the storm, and it’s from these that I was able to tease out this beautiful idea that the times are urgent, let us slow down.
Slowing down has been interpreted by many communities as, basically, doing what we’re doing but at slower speed. That is—literally slowing down the pace of things, who we are, not typing our memos as fast as we once were. I literally had a German brother write to me and say that “Your slowing down invocation isn't working because my bosses are still on my neck. Slowing down to type a memo isn't really working,” and I responded by saying—slowing down is not a function of speed, is a function of awareness, and I don’t want to make awareness a mental construct, it’s a function of presence. So, when I invite slowing down, I’m inviting us to research, to perform research into the ancestral tentacularities that proceed from us. I’m asking us to touch our bodies, and touch our colonial bubbles. I'm asking us to listen, as you say, to witness, no not just to witness, to ‘with-ness’; to be with land, and community, and ancestor, and progeny, and children in a way that isn’t instrumental. Activism is increasingly instrumental, so it’s performing a form of power that is tied to the logic and algorithm of the status quo. Which makes activism, even in the search for justice, a creature of the status quo, which makes hope and justice, as ironic as that sounds, a creature of the things we're trying to leave behind. So, slowing down seems to be a hacking of the machine. It’s like we're taking on other forms of body, of embodiment, that allows us to penetrate into different kinds of realities, other worlds, if you will.