Báyò Akómoláfé on fugitive ideas
How We Live Now with Katherine May:
Báyò Akómoláfé on fugitive ideas
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Katherine speaks to author and public intellectual Báyò Akómoláfé. We consider how we can step out of the belief that humanity is in control of a passive planet, and instead wonder how we can learn to read the intelligence of the systems and landscapes that we inhabit. We meander our way to autism, and begin to think about how we can create a new language of neurodivergent experience that resists the labels applied from disinterested - or disgusted - outside viewers. And we take a look at ‘hushes’, the shadowy, scuttling figures that disrupt Báyò’s narratives.
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Listen to the Episode
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Katherine May:
Bayo, welcome to How We Live now. It's such a privilege to have you here. I have been thinking for a long time about how I could get you onto the podcast because your book, These Worlds Beyond Our Fences was just such a revelation to me in so many ways. But I don't want to talk about that specifically today because that's too easy. But I wanted to invite you on to share your incredible perspective on the world. So welcome.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Well, it's a great pleasure to be here, sister, and to have this conversation with you. And I've been looking forward to this as well. So the feeling is mutual - let's do it. Yeah.
Katherine May:
It's a good way to spend an afternoon. Okay, well, let's just let everyone know who you are and where you come from first of all. You've got a fascinating background you come from... I'll let you tell it. You come from a Nigerian family.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Yes.
Katherine May:
But you don't live in Nigeria anymore?
Báyò Akómoláfé:
No. I was born in Nigeria three months out from being born. Obviously, I moved to Germany with my family. My father was a diplomat, and so we moved to Germany, which happens to be the place where I'm speaking to you from now. And we were a very itinerant family, traveling all over the place. But I did most of my growing up in Nigeria, schooling in Nigeria, teaching in Nigeria. And then I got married to a beautiful African Indian woman and moved to India. And that is where I have made my home.
Katherine May:
Which links to your work as well 'cause I think you spent some time as an anthropologist researching Indian life in slums. Is that right?
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Oh, I was trained as a psychologist. I don't think it would be improper for you to actually tag me with anthropology, because I've always been fascinated with cultures and anthropology. Even having my own teaching colleagues say, “stick to the tried-and-true path of psychology and don’t wander off the highway”. But I never saw disciplinarity as a single monolithic enterprise. I always saw it as transversalized, as crisscrossing, as crossroadian, and as tricksterish, my adventures in studying and staying slums, or wanting to understand from different perspectives, have always been transdisciplinary in that way. Yeah.
Katherine May:
Well, it's funny because my first degree was transdisciplinary in social psychology, anthropology and sociology. So I think I don't know the difference between the three of them, honestly.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Yeah, yeah. It's a way to go. It is the way to see the world. From my perspective, there is no easy Newtonian thing to arrive at. We live in a crossroads.
Katherine May:
So how did you come to the point of writing? Did that emerge from a kind of academic impetus, or was it more about telling your life story? Because you're a beautiful memoirist, aren't you, I think.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Thank you so much. I'm blushing. You can see it, but I'm blushing. I started to write at a very young age, I had elaborate plans to write encyclopedia.
Katherine May:
I love that.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Which didn't make any sense whatsoever to my parents, but I just wanted to write. I remember as a freshman... No, I think I was a sophomore in the university, and I wanted to give a public lecture just because professors were doing it, so why not a student? And so they asked me to actually, yeah, let's have a student try to give a public lecture. So I wrote my lecture. It was very Christocentric, which described my religious persuasion at the time. And so I wrote a public letter called Moses or Darwin, how... I forget the tagline. It was something about creationism.
Katherine May:
Oh, wow.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Yes. And it became 200 pages. I wrote 200 pages.
Katherine May:
That doesn't surprise me at all.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
And to the university council that then and persuaded me to make it a book. Yeah, because I-
Katherine May:
That's amazing.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
... I just felt so from a very early age, I've always felt this what I might call an ecological ventriloquism, like something possesses and wants to write so that in a sense, I'm not the author.
Katherine May:
Yeah. So that something else is speaking through you.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Yes. And I know that sounds corny sometimes, but it really feels like a very pressing and compelling felt experience that I'm not the one moving the pen. And I ritualize this in some ways by listening to music to write. And without that agency writing becomes impossible for me.
Katherine May:
That's so interesting. And it's definitely my experience too, that I can't access the part of me that writes. I don't know where that comes from. And I certainly have no control over it. I only wish I did. And it always feels like when I have written that I can look back over it and just wonder where those thoughts connected together. When did those connections happen and how-
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Exactly.
Katherine May:
... it's mysterious.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Exactly. I have the same feeling. This is nice. I'm viewing it as if for the first time it is reassuring.
Katherine May:
Well, every now and then I get asked to write something that the spirit isn't moving me for. And that's so hard. And I wonder if that's how other people find writing all these people that hated writing at school. I think that's how it must have been for them. No wonder they hated it. It's awful. It's dreadful.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Yes.
Katherine May:
So we are talking in this season about enchantment, which I've just written about, and my perspective on it was really that of a beginner and a learner to be more enchanted and to let that fluidity between the observable and the provable and the stateable to other people flow with those edges of my perception that I can't give voice to. And that are maybe not the same as other people's perception either. And I think for me, your work often speaks at the edges of that too. That you are thinking about that huge mixture of what it is to be human. Does that make sense to you?
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Yes. I mean edges, we are constantly performing edges to give ourselves definitions. Our stories are replete with edge ritualizing work. This is where the city stops, and this is where the wilds begin. This is what it means to be human. And the other side of that is the monster. So we're constantly making edges. This is the reason why I named my book, These Wilds Beyond Our Fences. It's like at some point we will need to lean on the fence long enough to break into the so-called disreputable wilds to meet the monsters that we've cordoned off or quarantined or pushed away. Because the ontology of where we are is hollowing out and it's pushing us and to the edges, so edges.
Katherine May:
And I feel, I was writing about this morning actually, I've always identified as an edge dweller. That's where I'm comfortable on the borders between. And I think that's maybe where writers live in lots of ways. We're interpreters between those two places. We speak both languages.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Yes.
Katherine May:
But I feel like this age is the age of the edge dweller. We are beginning to feel at home when everyone else is getting intensely uncomfortable.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Yeah. I put it this way that, I mean, I've often written it this way that I think it was Karen Barad that said that we are in a time when the world is kicking back. I like the idea of the world kicking back. Suddenly the world isn't this mute, instrumental backdrop to human sociality. The world is also an actor on the stage, or the stage is an actor as well. And the stage is mounting an insurgency against a plot, if you will, whether it's the hero's journey or whatever is playing out on the stage. The stage is like, I will have my say. And I think that's the very definition of enchantment for me. When things spill, when things refuse categorization or instrumentality.
Katherine May:
And in your hands, the world is sentient. I mean, there's not even a sense of animism that I read in you. There's a sense instead that we are interacting with another sentient system and indeed a part of a sentient system. Is that-
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Yeah. Please go ahead, sister. Yeah.
Katherine May:
No, I was going to turn it into a question, but actually it isn't really, it was just a provocation for you to talk.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Well, I lean heavily on panentheistic, not pantheistic, but panentheistic, which of course is processual thinking and thinks about God or whatever you want to call it, as becoming. Not as a grand pure ontology of being, but as a becomingness. In the same way, I think there's a lot of talk these days about entanglement and how we are related with the world, especially in times of IPCC reports and Doomsday Clocks and pandemics and the Anthropocene. We are learning that we are entangled with the land, but I don't think that even goes far enough because it suggests that we are these independent qualities that we have independent edges and boundaries face a complete, we already made.
And then we have relations with the world. No, I think the world, what we rudely and conveniently call the world is a flow of relations. Somehow, we concretize, or we are crystallized from those ongoing relationships. So yes, this is sentience touching itself, orgasmically looking forward, looking forward. It informs my view, for instance, about AI and the hubris of believing that intelligence can be natural in the ways that we presume it to be when we name clunky bits of metal, artificial, and then we look to our flesh, organic and pink and we call it natural. There's a sense in which the world is denaturing itself, that nature isn't some place location in the distance that nature is a constant denaturing of itself. It's a constant exploration of place and space and temporality.
Katherine May:
I'm more and more troubled by this word nature and natural.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Yes.
Katherine May:
Because I don't know, I think if you are a white female writer writing in the West, and you write about human experience, you get called a nature writer at the moment. And so that's often pinned on me, and it comes with this set of assumptions about what I believe. And so quite often when I'm being interviewed, people will say, "Well, of course you think we should put our phones down and go out and walk in nature." And I'm like, "I actually don't." I love walking, but I feel like I'm in nature everywhere. I don't understand where the line is drawn and how other people see that line as being so definitive.
But also, I don't understand how that doesn't extend onto my phone, honestly, and into the environments that are created there and the contact I feel with other people on there. It just doesn't make any sense to me. It feels to me like such narrowed, boundaried thinking and it's fundamentally punitive, which is, it's just the spirit of how we talk about everything, but it punishes us for wanting to make connection in a world that feels so dislocated. And I don't see the problem with us seeking connection, really.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Those are wise words, it’s the sticky and resilient enlightenment thinking. Its nature is out there, and we are in here. And then the involutions or the inflection points ,now say, "Oh no, we are connected to nature." And so we then see built environments as not nature, which only reinforces the same thinking that led us to thinking about nature as outside in the first place, the patch of green in the distance. So seeing phones as nature might be shockingly offensive to someone who stays in the farm and gets his or her nails dirty and spends time with animals. There is a desire to preserve the authenticity of that experience. But beyond that, the question really is, where do we draw the line? If we see nature as a thing, as an object, then it becomes amenable to colonization. It becomes amenable to fascism. But if we see nature as process, then we see freedom being possible.
Katherine May:
For me, the bigger problem is our, I don't know, the distance between our living and the materials that we are using. And I think that's often what people are talking about when they talk about nature, is this idea that things are basic, that natural things are basic down to their bare building blocks, and we can understand them as organic. And for me, the problem isn't our sense of disconnection from that, it's actually our sense of material complexity that's grown so great that we don't quite understand it anymore. Because as much as I love the links that my phone can make for me, what I don't love about it is that I can't repair it and that it's drifted very far from my sense of reality actually. It's become this sort of celestial object that if it dies, if the screen goes blank one day, there's nothing I can do about that. And I don't understand how it's composed or made or how it thinks.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Yes, yes, yes.
Katherine May:
That's my technological naivety though, I think.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Works for me as well. It's the same. But doesn't that also, I mean it's like the things around us that we could readily describe as natural processes. If we delineate the world in that way, when things die, there's no fixing that, right? I don't know how plants work, right?
Katherine May:
Not really. No.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
They're just as inscrutable to me. I don't understand how ophiocordyceps unilateralis, the fungi, I don't know how it invades ants’ bodies and converts them into zombie ants and performs this movie-like intelligence that leaves me astounded. So there is a sense of awe that is maybe a call to worship that is constantly held, not just with dying phones, but the emergence of all things.
Katherine May:
And a life cycle that is expressed in our technology as much as it is in this natural world that we imagine this projected natural world that is just continuous with the rest of life as far as I can see it. And that brings us to questions of culture, and seeing as I've like mislabeled you as an anthropologist already, that's the concern of anthropologists.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
A mislabeling that I wholeheartedly embrace, by the way.
Katherine May:
That's been on my mind a lot as people bring up nature to me all the time, that this kind of differentiation we have between nature and culture and the idea that humans have culture and everything else is either technology or nature. And obviously from what I've said, I already think that's a false distinction, but I begin to wonder about this idea that we've always had about humans holding culture because I actually think as a white Westerner, I was raised academically to believe that I was culturally neutral, that almost I didn't have culture and that other societies had culture. And there's a sort of inflection of primitivism in there that there are these more simple societies that have culture that we can observe, but ours is actually neutral and technocratic.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Yes.
Katherine May:
How does that distinction work in this world now? It's becoming absurd to even think that way, I think.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
I mean it plays out in the exact ways that feminist, materialist, and ecologists and indigenous thinkers and Black scholars have been naming for a long time, that the moment you start to think of nature as this thing apart and culture, then you are creating this anthropocentric division, this gash in the world and a problem that you now try to feel, solve, or resolve by trying to re-entangle yourself. It's the Cartesian idea, right? First, we separate ourselves and then we wonder why we're separated from the world and then we now try to make moves to reconnect ourselves. But the prevailing and underpinning assumption is that we've never been apart with these dumb, mute and insignificant processes - that we're heading for the stars. And I think there's a resilient part of Western culture that is this search for transcendence, like a Baldurian epic search for a final singularity where we are shaved off and finally divorced from dust and materiality. And this longing is implicated in climate chaos, is implicated in the issues we're contending with today.
Katherine May:
Sorry, I've got a multitude of thoughts all springing up at once. But it strikes me that we want that Cartesian duality, we want to be the separate mind and body, but we want to integrate into the fabric of the universe from that standpoint rather than abandoning it first. So we want to stay separated and then backwardly immersed rather than abandoning this idea of separation in the first place.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
I think there is a morbid fear and disgust about entanglement, even though we speak poetically and glowingly about it. There's a sense in which we're frightened about the prospects of losing our independence. And sometimes I wonder, while chuckling, about the hidden microbes and the plant life and animal life and viral bacterial life and all the architectural instigations, textural instigations, and the world around us that makes it possible for us to feel that fear.
So that even our fear about losing our independence is already a mark of our intradependence with things, our interaction with things. So the thing here is not, is that most of the time we're thinking of entanglement and enchantment as something to come, right? It's futural, it’s that one day we will unite with nature, and I think that's still enlightenment beating around the bush, thrashing around in the mud, not wanting to let go of the idea that it has always been affiliated and relational and processual.
Katherine May:
We just no longer have the opportunity or the right to think that we're separate from the mud and the dirt. It’s coming back to visit us.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Yes. The mud is speaking, right? It's what Deleuze might call desire. It's that there's this vast beautiful, non - well, I don't want to say beautiful, but I think of it poetically as beautiful - this more than human force that shape-shifts our bodies. You might even notice its shape when you find Will Smith speaking on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah and his words are communicating one thing and his body is communicating loudly, different stories, different. It's how body language experts read the word is the idea that we are speaking with two tongues, right? There's what we say and there's what the world is saying with what we say.
Katherine May:
Yeah. And how we are handling that. Yeah. I wanted to ask you about hushes, which you write about.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Oh, there we go.
Katherine May:
Yeah. I feel like we're approaching hush territory. Can you try and articulate what hushes are. They're very poetic ideas, I think.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Well, I think the gig is up at this point, so I'll just let it slip or let it go. I've been playing this game with my reader for some time, especially people who interview me about hushes. And I always keep mum about it. I'm very silent. I never say a word about it. I just say, "What do you think about hushes?" People write me all the time and say, “I really try to find out the picture of a hush. It's biological distinctions and all of that, but I really cannot locate it. Could you lead me to some references about it?” And I chuckle, but just the gig is up. Maybe I'll just go ahead and say that.
Katherine May:
You're going to have to fess up.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
I'm just going to fess up that hushes are attempts, literally attempts to disturb our notions of completion. It's the blind spot. They are peripheralities, if you will. They live at the corner of our eyes, and I went so much, I took some trouble to actually describe how they live in the corners of our eyes. I'm trying to populate worlds beyond the visual regimes that we're used to, to see straightforwardly is an energy of modern civilization, it's how we are trained to see, to deal with the problem, gain clarity about the problem. Clarity is the paradigm of choice. Well, beyond choice. It's more than volitional, clarity and seeing straightforwardly.
But I want to see how, or notice how there are worlds to the edges of straightforward thinking. I want to notice stupidity in a different way. I want to agentialise wisdom and to also bring in the idea that... there's no sort of finality we can aspire to, that there’s a place where things are finally done. I love the writer Ursula Le Guin, and how she writes about, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. Disrupting finality in a sense, breaking utopia. So hushes are agents of disfinality. I just made that up. I'm sure that's okay with you.
Katherine May:
You're a master phrase maker. I think they're the kind of dirty seething seeds of the next life to come. They're these evasive, fugitive little notions that are shifting in your peripheral vision which are impossible to interrogate.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
It could be impossible to interrogate. Yes. Yes.
Katherine May:
I adored that. My whole body spoke to that.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Indeed. Indeed. It's the reason why I never find the final hush. It's the reason why the book ends with failure is the reason why the book ends with me dead, speaking from dust. The book was never meant to be a project of completion. It was meant to interrogate completion and to also honour things that spill away from, like you say, beautifully interrogation, textuality, clarity. It's the right to opacity using Edward Gleeson's phrasing.
Katherine May:
It's very hard to assert that right to opacity, but also to assert the right to incompletion. And it's really interesting that you raised Ursula Le Guin because I think she expresses that other notion of storytelling so well that is in conflict with the hero's journey, that the fundamental problem of the hero's journey is it represents actually nothing to do with real life. And that there are these other ways of telling a story. And that is a foraging metaphor.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Carrier bag, right?
Katherine May:
Yeah, rather than a kind of murderous killing and overcoming kind of metaphor.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Yeah, phallic spears and all that. Yes.
Katherine May:
And to me, those stories are by nature unfinished and unfinishable, they're continuous.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Indeed. Beautiful. Here's my proposal and I'm making it live to everyone here. How about we write something together, Katherine?
Katherine May:
Yeah. I love that.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Even if it's an essay or something, and we call it the right to incompletion.
There is a sense in which modern civilisation, and even if we’re to think beyond those atmospheric concepts or localize it even further, cities, streets, social algorithms, we are being trained to see from the perspective of completion. It might be implicated in how we think about morality, for instance, how we look back to the 1960s and say “huh! This person should have used this language, or done this, or behaved this way”, it’s that we assume the way that the world is a chunk of moral bits and pieces that are readily available to any proper individual, that this idea of propriety and correctness and completion - this is not to say it’s wrong, either, I don’t want to binarize the world, I don’t traffick in binaries that way, but notice what that is doing, how we are creating sediments of completion, and how that might turn back and hurt us.
Katherine May:
Yeah. I think as I age, I know this more intuitively than ever, that life is fundamentally unstable, like human life and human experience is fundamentally unstable. And when I try and explain what childhood was like to my son and the expectations of us then, and the very different human relationships that happened around that, compared to how we parent now, it's inexpressible. And yet there was nothing wrong with it, it's just that we are a species in constant flux, and we think we are stable, but we change so much. And culturally we change enormously, and we don't notice it happening, but we believe that we can trace it, and I don't think we can. It's much more random, it’s sedimentary. It's like the floating up of sediment from the bottom of a stream and the swirls. It's that random to me, I think as I get older.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
That philosophical riddle of the ages of the ship of Theseus. It's that we are constantly changing, but I think we memorialize or lionize selves as monoliths. And so we think of ourselves as complete. It's how we even practice activism today, the creation of boogieman and villains. And of course, I know probably the strategy of villainizing could be useful in some way who's to say-
Katherine May:
It works.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
It definitely works for some ends. So this is not a way of saying, "Hey, by villainizing capitalism, for instance, or just creating isms, you are doing the wrong thing”.That would be to think within those architectural spaces. But it's to notice that it does certain things. There's a cost to ontologizing the world in specific ways to knowing the world in specific ways. And maybe we are at a point in our collective, and I use collective very sparingly and loosely, but maybe we're in a point at our collective planetary cautionary tale of existing and becoming together where we need to make new moves and take new directions and dance on the streets instead of just walking in rectilinear fashion. Maybe the public order is populated by cracks, and the work of our time is to stay within these cracks as spaces of inquiry.
Katherine May:
Yeah, let the cracks open up.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Yeah.
Katherine May:
I think this is a good moment to talk about autism, actually, because you've written beautifully about your son's autism. I don't think you identify as autistic yourself, but am I wrong about that? I don't want to get that wrong.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Everyone else does.
Katherine May:
Well, I wasn't going to say anything.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Including psychologists, they're like, "Yes, you're autistic."
Katherine May:
Oh, really? That's really interesting.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
But I have no diagnosis to verify that. I respect what people say I am.
Katherine May:
That's interesting. Okay. I wanted to ask, because I didn't want to kind of talk over your head on that front.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
No, no. No problem.
Katherine May:
Well, I have enormous problems with the culture around diagnosis anyway, but maybe this is not the moment, but I wanted to talk about your work in trying to understand your son's resistance to the world around him and how that opened up a space for you to think about, I guess, resistant politics in lots of ways that the autism is actually as I see it, and I think as you see it too.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Yes.
Katherine May:
Fundamentally political and wearing that label is actually a political statement of resistance for me, now increasingly.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
That is a brilliant way to speak about autistic politics. That even feels tautological speaking with you, sister. Autism is fundamentally political, is a beautiful way to notice that sometimes the world spills. And I'm intrigued by excess that by spillage, by-
Katherine May:
Exuberance.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Exuberance, by what the Aztecs called a sleeping excrescence, which is the name huitlacoche, which is what they gave to the phenomenon of a fungal infection on corn.
Katherine May:
Ah, okay, yeah.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
I love it. So poetic and how they made this disease, what Americans will call corn smut, how they made that disease, a delicacy beautiful dish, right? Sleeping excrescence.
Katherine May:
Beautiful.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Autism is like a sleeping excrescence to me, from one perspective, from the perspective of white modernity - and of course, by white, I don't mean white identified bodies. This is not reducible to individuals in the ways that popular activisms may reduce it. This is about terraforming projects. This is about the impersonal politics of whiteness and how it co-opts and enlists bodies to materialize itself. I feel that what white modernity, neurotypicality, is trying to do is to flatten the world and in its efforts to flatten the world, to make it possible for the individual to thrive so that there are no confronting monsters, or wilds. In trying to do so, it meets the ironic, it meets the paradoxical, and in trying to label something in a final way, that thing gains some kind of fugitive life and does something else.
And you could almost tell the story of at least one genealogy of how we came to the idea of autism, along with the rise of industrialization. The more we laid down the markers of civilization, it seemed, intriguingly, that at the same time we started to measure more autism, right?
Katherine May:
Yeah.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Started to say more about autism. Maybe autism is the city resisting itself. Maybe that is the ecstasy of modernity exploring itself. Maybe that's quantum physics, maybe that's spillage. Maybe that's Blackness. So when I speak about autism, I'm speaking about errancy, right? Or what some might say errantry. I'm speaking about losing one's way, and I'm speaking about that as a politics, that we have congregated politics around baseline realities and stable natures for so long. So that all we do is try to enact inclusionary politics. That is a language of accommodation. Let's give you a place of power. Let's create more room for minorities to sit on this table. But what if there are other tables? What if there are other rooms? What if there are other ways of being in the world? And I think until we stray and learn to stray together and experiment with straying, we will continue to be trapped and incarcerated in a reality that no longer seems to work for most of us.
Katherine May:
No, absolutely. And the more I speak and write about autism, the less I become interested in autism itself. And the more I become interested in neurotypicality and what that means and what that is, because both of them are fundamentally fugitive concepts. And the more that we research autism, the less we understand what it is. And it begins to seem to me that autism is the word that we use for deviation from the pattern and actually for resistance. And one of the things that is common among autistic people and how we get that label in the first place is at some point we've resisted, and for some people that resistance is met with violence, honestly. And with incarceration. And for others of us, we grow up being seen as difficult or troubled or other or weird. Weird is the word that chases us around forever.
And that's exactly where I'd want to be. I can't imagine any other situation that I'd want to take up in this world other than different to that neurotypical mainstream. And yet we don't understand what neurotypicality is and what we mean by it. And the fundamental values embedded in it. Again, it's seen as neutral, and it is not neutral. It is something.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Yes. Oh, beautiful. This has inspired a short story I'm currently writing, I'm beginning to write, I think I've called it Dr. Johnson's Asylum for the Sane. Something like that. But it definitely ends with the asylum for the sane. And it's a story of... Well, I don't want to give it all away now, but it's basically-
Katherine May:
No. No, plot spoilers.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
... it’s the story of an inscrutable, mysterious rich man who starts up an asylum, but not for the people that you would think asylums are made for, but for the people who think they're not. Everyone else, the people who go to work on time, the people who are punctual, the people who know how to regulate their emotions, basically. And this strange man is basically looking at what clinical psychologists might tag a meltdown, a tantrum with pediatric autism, right? And say, "Don't you see that the air is enthused around this person that they're feeling intensely. You want to feel as well, when did you stop learning how to feel? When did you stop feeling? When did you stop playing?" And this is not to romanticize autism either as some fairy, God-like status. But it is to call into question the forms we've taken. And what we're missing out on is to put some buoyancy and credence and value to the rumors that there are other ways of being alive.
Katherine May:
Absolutely. And what you're saying makes me think immediately of my perception as a child, which was that the other people were numb and I was feeling, because I'd watch other people move through public spaces, and I'd be flinching at every loud sound or shrinking away when people banged into me and normally itching away at a seam or a label in my T-shirt. And other people would walk across that same space with no seeming affect at all. They were not confronted by it. And it's only later in life, when I realized that the label autistic fitted me, that I realized that people thought that I had no affect, that my affect was wrong, that my emotions weren't working at all. And I'd always assume that about them. I could never understand why people were not feeling this incredibly kind of assailing universe around them that was assailing me.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
It's right there in the name, right? Autism, it’s self. It's like you're so stuck on yourself that you don't feel.
Katherine May:
Yes, I know. Yeah. It's quite a... I mean, that term, autism, we've all rushed to adopt it because it's been a clarion call and we wanted to gather under that umbrella, but I am troubled by the way that that label was created, which came from this idea of self-absorption and self-obsession.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
How about experimenting one now, sister.
Katherine May:
Oh, let's...
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Experiment with a new name now. How about now?
Katherine May:
I know you can do this because you create the most amazing strings of words spontaneously. So I feel like it's like jazz. You could just improvise 100 of those in the next 10 minutes. It's going to be beautiful.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
It has to be something that basically says: there isn't a stable self that the supposed autistic is stuck on. Instead, you’re feeling intensely, seeing intensely, right?
Katherine May:
There's something, and we are skirting Deligny here who we’re both a fan of who worked with autistic young people and essentially set them loose on a mountainside in France just to exist. But he talked about the idea of the Arachnean, which is this imaginary society, culture, world, that you might compare to a kind of Atlantis in which we are fully alive to our interconnection, but to the way that this interconnection is really fragile and kind of improvised in the moment and fleeting, but profound and beautiful. And I would love the word for autism to express that, because I don't think we are separate. I don't think that we are isolated anyway. I think we actually feel those roots of connection very, very profoundly. But they're often outside of language.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Well, I'm thinking about my son and the meaning of his name is never far off, he's always beside. And I'm thinking about autism as this sidling intelligence one, which, also inspired by Deligny, I have written in my notes as the paraterranean, right? Almost very similar to the Arachnean is a form of subterranean life, but not subterranean in the ways that might invite you to abseil down a crack or something. But the subterranean in the sense of a paraterranean to the side of that invites you to walk on your toes to see it, to bend your posture, to feel it. That there are between bodies. You know the Harry Potter esque notion of running into the wall at the train station.
Katherine May:
Yes.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
That almost feels autistic. It's like everyone's walking this path, and you go the wrong way. There's something about autism that feels like taking the wrong path, adopting a different posture, feeling intensely as a result. So yeah, we'll come-
Katherine May:
There's something very... Yeah, we will. And I think the metaphors that always come to mind for me, although apparently, I'm not able to create metaphor because I'm autistic, but there we go. Interesting. I find autistic people like very symbolic thinkers, but is a mycelium and this kind of fine, threaded network that weaves its way between multiple actors in the woodland and which is vast, unfathomably vast and unfathomably ancient, but it's also fundamentally interstitial. It never wants to be the main picture. I don't know. It's too evasive for that. And that makes so much sense to me.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Of course, we've already touched on this, that autism in this... I don't want to say in itself as if it has a stable meaning of its own, but we're describing something that is fugitive that will not be named finally. But there is some value to straying away from the idea of a narcissistic self that can only behold itself, which is the designation, autism.
Katherine May:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
And I'm really leaning into myceliumism now. Or fugitism. Something that says that there's a different posture here. And it's not pathological, it's political.
Katherine May:
It is. It's fundamentally political.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Yes.
Katherine May:
And I suppose to kind of close a huge arc that we've been talking in, when I first read about hushes in your book, I wrote autism in the margin.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Autism.
Katherine May:
Hushism, yeah.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Yeah.
Katherine May:
We are the hushes.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Wow. That feels right.
Katherine May:
I think that's a moment to close our conversation, because I would love to continue it many, many times, and maybe we can, but that's a really beautiful place to land now.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
I think so.
Katherine May:
Thank you. That feels like my brain has been set on fire in 100 different places all at once.
Báyò Akómoláfé:
Me too. Me too. Different places. Thank you. It's been great.
Show Notes
In this week’s episode of How We Live Now, Katherine speaks to author and public intellectual Báyò Akómoláfé. We consider how we can step out of the belief that humanity is in control of a passive planet, and instead wonder how we can learn to read the intelligence of the systems and landscapes that we inhabit. We meander our way to autism, and begin to think about how we can create a new language of neurodivergent experience that resists the labels applied from disinterested - or disgusted - outside viewers. And we take a look at ‘hushes’, the shadowy, scuttling figures that disrupt Báyò’s narratives.
Born in Nigeria, Báyò is a writer, speaker, teacher and founder of The Emergence Network who finds his most sacred work in fatherhood. His book, These Wilds Beyond Our Fences, is an extraordinary meandering through the cutting edge of contemporary philosophy framed in letters to his daughter, Alethea. He is also the editor of We Will Tell Our Own Story, an anthology exploring Black African scholarship and knowledge. He now divides his time between Germany, India and the USA. You can read more about him here.
Links from the episode:
Bayo’s website
Bayo's book, These Wilds Beyond Our Fences
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“Katherine May gave so many of us language and vision for the long communal ‘wintering’ of the last years. Welcome this beautiful meditation for the time we’ve now entered. I cannot imagine a more gracious companion. This book is a gift.”
New York Times bestselling author Krista Tippett
