June 13: How I am Unlearning My Whiteness
From a talk given by Bayo Akomolafe in 2017
I think this was my salvation, if you will. I came to the edges. In my search for psychiatric alternatives, I went to my people. I took the trip. I worked in a Christian University and it was really frowned upon that I took this step because you don’t go to the devil. You stay in the light. But I went to the darkness and I sought them out. These guys live underground, metaphorically speaking. They don’t advertise their stuff, it’s by word of mouth that you go to meet them. I am speaking of traditional healers, you may call them shamans, you may call them healer priests, you may call them herbalists. I went to them and started to seek answers to my deep questions about Blackness, about the practices of wellbeing.
I remember one of them answering me when I asked him a question: “how does one become mad?” He would say, “when you step out in the morning, and the wind comes in your face, you can become mad!” And no… that’s not exactly how I was trained. You have to look into the DSM manual, you have to have a diagnostic structure. That’s not how it works. So I ask, “What about schizophrenia or bipolar disorder or all these things, how does one develop it in your own conception?” He says, “Oh! When your eyelash falls to the ground and you step on it, you can become mad.” And I said “no, no, no.”
I went to seven of these men, and they all gave me quirky, trickstery answers. But they were teaching me a deeper truth: we like to think of the world in terms of Newtonian dynamics: A+B=C. That’s causality, that’s how the world works. What even our sciences are revealing today, is that that’s not how the world works at all. Causality is sensuous. Light could become a particle or a wave depending on how you measure it. That’s queer. It seems at root, the world is weird. The world is not only weirder than we think, the world is weirder than we can think. The world is not made up of atoms and electrons and protons and all of that, it’s made up of surprise, it’s made up of astonishment. It seems that the story of the world is a gasp and at root there is magic.
This is what these tricksters were trying to bring me to reconsider: that things are not exactly how you think they are. Not “this is the root, this is the active ingredient” and if you can just extrapolate from the active ingredient, you will find what you are looking for. That’s not how it works. Maybe that’s why we say tricksters build the world. Because the world is too promiscuous to abide faithful to any one ideology.
What did I learn from these men? That the material, nonhuman world, it haunts. It matters. Now, what we did in modernity is to deny our entanglement with the nonhuman world. It was our tower of babble moment, to escape the floods, to escape embodiment, to reach for the stars and deny that we are entangled with ground, with people. Biologists have a concept called symbiogenesis or sympoiesis -- the idea that there is no becoming that is not a co-becoming. Relationship proceeds the things that relate. You can only understand the world in terms of relationship. This is what these men were trying to teach me: that the nonhuman world is alive! It’s alive! It might seem a preposterous thing to say but I assure you it is a preposterous thing to say. The world is alive! It is breathing, it is agentic, it has effects.