Latest / The Trauma Therapist / Looking For The Cracks with Dr. Bayo Akomolafe

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Looking For The Cracks with Dr. Bayo Akomolafe · The Trauma Therapist

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  Speaker 1: Trauma Theverist Podcast. Plus listeners can listen to episodes early
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  Speaker 1: going to Apple Podcasts searching for the Trauma Theverist podcast
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  Speaker 1: and signing up today. Welcome to the Trauma Nevers Podcast,
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  Speaker 1: a show about the incredible people dedicated to helping those
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  Speaker 1: who experienced trauma. My name is got macpherson and my
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  Speaker 1: mission is to raise awareness of trauma and to inspire
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  Speaker 1: each of us to help those around us. Are you ready?
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  Speaker 2: Never?
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  Speaker 1: Okay? Here we go five for three, two and one.
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  Speaker 1: Our folks, welcome back to the podcast. Very excited to
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  Speaker 1: have as my guest today. Doctor Bio Acamalafe Bio Welcome,
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  Speaker 1: Thank you, You're welcome. So Bio rooted with the Yoruba
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  Speaker 1: people in a more than human world, is a widely
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  Speaker 1: celebrated international speaker, host, humanist, thinker, poet, teacher, public intellectual essayist,
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  Speaker 1: and author of two books, including These Wilds, Beyond Our Fences,
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  Speaker 1: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity, Search for Home. He's
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  Speaker 1: a founder of the Emergence Network, a planet wide initiative
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  Speaker 1: that seeks to convene communities and new ways in response
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  Speaker 1: to the critical civilizational challenges we face as a species.
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  Speaker 1: He's also the host of the Post Activist Course festival
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  Speaker 1: event We Will Dance with Mountains, and currently lectures at
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  Speaker 1: pacifica graduate institute in California. By all, welcome to the podcast.
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  Speaker 1: Thank you brother, so good to be here. Awesome. So
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  Speaker 1: before we get going, share with the listeners where you're
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  Speaker 1: from originally and where you are currently.
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  Speaker 2: I'm in Massachusetts now in Great Barrington, just for a
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  Speaker 2: couple of months with my family. I'm well a number
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  Speaker 2: of things with Clark University, the Council of Uncertain Human Futures,
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  Speaker 2: and Schumacher Center for a New Economics, where I'm appointed
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  Speaker 2: as the inaugural w EB the Boys Scholar in Residence.
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  Speaker 2: So I mean a couple of things have brought me here,
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  Speaker 2: and I'm constantly flying in and out of the United
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  Speaker 2: States from India, where I live with my family. Ordinarily,
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  Speaker 2: my wife is Indian. My family is mixed and confused,
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  Speaker 2: and that's just fine. But I come from Nigeria. I
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  Speaker 2: grew up in Nigeria, and yeah, my family is home.
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  Speaker 1: You know. In preparation for this, looking at the work
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  Speaker 1: you do your website, one can easily one gets an
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  Speaker 1: impression of a certain focus, a certain message, a certain
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  Speaker 1: fashion that comes fourth. So I say that as an
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  Speaker 1: introduction to my next question, which is what do you
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  Speaker 1: say to people when they ask you what do you do?
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  Speaker 2: I think people have learned not to ask me that, really,
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  Speaker 2: because it's I often think of myself as a as
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  Speaker 2: first and foremost a partner to EJ, my life partner,
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  Speaker 2: my wife. She grounds me and makes everything possible. And
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  Speaker 2: I introduce that I'm a father or a becoming father.
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  Speaker 2: I haven't quite achieved fatherhood, right, It's not a trophy
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  Speaker 2: to be one. I'm still learning. So I like to
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  Speaker 2: situate myself on the spectrum of becoming. So I call
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  Speaker 2: myself a becoming father. But in other context I might
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  Speaker 2: suggest that I like to think I'm a thinker, a philosopher,
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  Speaker 2: a recovering academic. I think the vocation of public intellectualism
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  Speaker 2: is strong. The force is strong with me on that one.
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  Speaker 2: Even though the traditional ideas of public intellectualism have to
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  Speaker 2: do with speaking truth to power and speaking to the public,
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  Speaker 2: I'm speaking to a public that hasn't shown up yet,
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  Speaker 2: which which complicates issues, I guess. But I speak about
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  Speaker 2: sensitizing bodies to different kinds of realities that I think
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  Speaker 2: are obscured by our fascination with the one true one,
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  Speaker 2: which is what white modernity presupposes we have.
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  Speaker 1: So going a little deeper, say you say more about
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  Speaker 1: that that that last thing you just said, there be
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  Speaker 1: more specific.
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  Speaker 2: I've heard that so many.
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  Speaker 1: Times, especially because I want to get at I want
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  Speaker 1: to get at the core of what the hell you
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  Speaker 1: what your message is? I don't know what do you?
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  Speaker 2: I really don't. The thing is, I don't know what
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  Speaker 2: I do. I just know that I'm being done by things.
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  Speaker 2: Often I can give, you, know, give snapshots of what
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  Speaker 2: is this thing that is doing itself? But I don't
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  Speaker 2: know how to professionalize myself and say here, here's my card.
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  Speaker 2: I don't know how to but but but yes, that
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  Speaker 2: that other thing I said about gesturing into other worlds.
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  Speaker 2: Maybe a good way to for the space of our
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  Speaker 2: conversation would be to refer to Octavia Butler. Octavid Butler
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  Speaker 2: has this beautiful sci fi writer, one of the greatest
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  Speaker 2: who She has this saying, yes, there are no there's
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  Speaker 2: nothing new under the sun, but there are new sons
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  Speaker 2: and and and and that idea that the world that
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  Speaker 2: what's normal, what's neurotypical, what's obvious is already a distraction,
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  Speaker 2: is already an obscuration of other potential kinds of worlds.
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  Speaker 2: Is among the things that are or to my explorations,
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  Speaker 2: to my theorizations, which are radically incomplete and are still
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  Speaker 2: meandering and seeking. But I think it's opening up space
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  Speaker 2: for capacity and thought for people today, which I'm very
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  Speaker 2: grateful for.
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  Speaker 1: When and how did this start? For you? This pursuit,
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  Speaker 1: this passion, this lack of a better word, this this
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  Speaker 1: this calling.
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  Speaker 2: So there was a crisis on my planet and my
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  Speaker 2: father and mother Joel and you know, they put me
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  Speaker 2: on a spaceship and sent me to planet Earth. So
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  Speaker 2: I wondered, if you're a nerd like I am, I'm
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  Speaker 2: joy you wondering what's this guy? No, I'm not from Krypton,
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  Speaker 2: but it seems the conditions of my first tastes of
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  Speaker 2: philosophical desire. You know, are you know you're coterminous with
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  Speaker 2: the passion of my father. My father passed away, and
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  Speaker 2: he left a gaping hole in my heart and in
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  Speaker 2: my still emerging world philosophy. I grew up in a
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  Speaker 2: very crystal centric world in the South of Nigeria, and
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  Speaker 2: that was my world. It's just that I never really
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  Speaker 2: thought about it. It was just a background two things.
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  Speaker 2: Even though I was quite you know, people situate me
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  Speaker 2: on the autistic spectrum. I was quite a self involved,
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  Speaker 2: very insular child because I was constantly on my own,
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  Speaker 2: not by choice, not by circumstance. So my father's passing
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  Speaker 2: just kicked something into gear. It started with my explorations
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  Speaker 2: of the limitations of my faith. I didn't start out
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  Speaker 2: trying to find the limitations. That just kind of happened
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  Speaker 2: upon it.
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  Speaker 1: How old would be when this happened.
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  Speaker 2: I was fifteen when my father passed away. Fourteen fifteen
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  Speaker 2: when he passed away, and yeah, it shocked. It rocked
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  Speaker 2: my world. He was my best friend and he is
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  Speaker 2: passing kind of offered some rude ontological shock. It was
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  Speaker 2: like an electrical shock, you know, and it joted me
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  Speaker 2: into the world of real things where people pass away.
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  Speaker 2: I'd heard of death, but it never really occurred to
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  Speaker 2: me that it could occur to me or to someone
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  Speaker 2: very close to me. So that took me on a
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  Speaker 2: journey that in summary might look like a leap from
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  Speaker 2: a crystal centric fundamentalism to an exploration of a multi
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  Speaker 2: faith assemblage, which took me into an exploration of postmodernism
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  Speaker 2: and then ushered me into some social constructivist imaginations. And
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  Speaker 2: where I find myself today is not beyond all of that.
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  Speaker 2: It's not like I've traveled down a sophisticated line and
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  Speaker 2: I'm now a feminist, new materialist, posthumanist, animist, you know,
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  Speaker 2: post structuralists think or no, I don't think succession is
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  Speaker 2: the key here. I think I now see that I
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  Speaker 2: haven't quite abandoned those selves. That I'm in a world
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  Speaker 2: that is entangled, and I'm still in relations, in conversations
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  Speaker 2: with those aspects that I thought i'd left behind, and
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  Speaker 2: that is shocking, scandalous, but also poetically liberating all at once.
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  Speaker 1: What would I hear you describing this is a flight,
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  Speaker 1: a journey to discover, but also this continued groundedness with
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  Speaker 1: who and what you are and where you came from.
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  Speaker 2: You could put it that way. I don't know if
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  Speaker 2: I'm very confident about grounds or you know, I think
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  Speaker 2: grounds are contrived, even ontological grounds. It seems that the
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  Speaker 2: thing for me is to, in fact, I find more
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  Speaker 2: security in groundlessness than in grounds. I was seeking grounds
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  Speaker 2: until I found that maybe the best form of groundedness
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  Speaker 2: is a groundlessness, right, that doesn't resolve itself in who
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  Speaker 2: I am really authentically or what I am, but in
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  Speaker 2: this quest to constantly this pilgrimage that never ends. Right.
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  Speaker 2: So it's a continuous seeking. It's an inquiry that never
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  Speaker 2: quite completes itself, and that feels relaxing to me in
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  Speaker 2: a way that I can't quite translate into words, or
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  Speaker 2: I could try, if we have two hours.
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  Speaker 1: What is what is important to you when when you
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  Speaker 1: get up in the morning you talked about your relationships? Dog, Yes,
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  Speaker 1: when you get up, what's moving you? What's pulling you?
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  Speaker 2: M M, well, there a couple of things, a federation
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  Speaker 2: of things. Actually, one is might belonging to my family.
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  Speaker 2: That I'm in good relations with my wife, with my
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  Speaker 2: daughter and with my son. That feels primary I'm unable
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  Speaker 2: to function the you're about. People have a proverb that
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  Speaker 2: what we have to eat is more important than what
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  Speaker 2: we have to do, So that you know that they
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  Speaker 2: rank eating and jiving and being well on an ontological
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  Speaker 2: high ontologically higher skill than any other thing that we
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  Speaker 2: can do. My family is that is that thing for me?
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  Speaker 2: Is that eating. If I'm not eating well, if I'm
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  Speaker 2: not being with them, well, then nothing else matters. But
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  Speaker 2: then when you speak about waking up, I'm constantly haunted
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  Speaker 2: by this idea, this philosophical notion that which I've expressed
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  Speaker 2: in my concepts like post activism, parapolitics. The key concept
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  Speaker 2: here is that it seems, in this time of crisis,
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  Speaker 2: brother climate, chaos, racialized politics, pandemics, war in Gaza, all
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  Speaker 2: of that, it seems that the more we try to
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  Speaker 2: attempt to resolve these issues, the more they come back
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  Speaker 2: to us in other forms. So I say that the
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  Speaker 2: way we respond to the crisis is becoming the crisis.
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  Speaker 2: What happens when we're stuck in an infinite loop and
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  Speaker 2: keep on going around in circles and repeating the scene things.
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  Speaker 2: So I'm very fascinated and want to keep on exploring difference,
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  Speaker 2: how difference, or how different differences occur, not because we
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  Speaker 2: say it happens, not because we hold up a trophy
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  Speaker 2: and announce victory, but because I think if we're stuck
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  Speaker 2: in a pattern, then the thing we want to look
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  Speaker 2: for is bricks, And that's what I'm fascinated by. Bricks, cracks, openings,
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  Speaker 2: not solutions, but openings.
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  Speaker 1: Differences and discovering patterns. I mean specifically with responses to
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  Speaker 1: the way we've been dealing.
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  Speaker 3: With all these issues, with all these issues, Can you
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  Speaker 3: pick one out and be specific about how maybe an
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  Speaker 3: attempt to respond is in itself the part of the.
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  Speaker 1: Crisis or the crisis.
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  Speaker 2: Do you throw your trash out in carefully delineated boxes
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  Speaker 2: plastic here, glass here, others miscellaneous things to do that
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  Speaker 2: exactly every time I travel to the United States, come
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  Speaker 2: to the United States, you know, sometimes I you know,
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  Speaker 2: we've been here for up to six months now and
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  Speaker 2: we've become part of that practice, but we've never quite
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  Speaker 2: lost the chuckle, the sarcasm that glints in our eyes
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  Speaker 2: because we know, and this is verifiable data, that more
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  Speaker 2: than ninety percent of discardable waste actually doesn't go to
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  Speaker 2: a green Emerald city. It doesn't go to you know,
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  Speaker 2: across the yellow brick road. It goes to Africa, it
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  Speaker 2: goes to the global self. Right, hundreds of thousands of
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  Speaker 2: tons of plastic you know, is deposited in somewhere that
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  Speaker 2: is conveniently far away. This is this is a notion
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  Speaker 2: of sustainability that is obscured or that obscures or waste
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  Speaker 2: colonialism the right. That is important to have a discussion about.
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  Speaker 2: But beyond discussing this brother, another question begs to be seen.
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  Speaker 2: What do we do then, if the only way to
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  Speaker 2: address deliterious environmental conditions is actually obligating the problem. I
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  Speaker 2: remember John Stewart actually had a debate about this some
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  Speaker 2: time ago, I think last year. But the way we
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  Speaker 2: know how to respond and to resolve this is actually
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  Speaker 2: part of the crisis. What then do we do? What
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  Speaker 2: does what does responsibility mean? When the medicine is part
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  Speaker 2: of the harm.
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  Speaker 1: We're blindly moving forward and repeating our actions without understanding
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  Speaker 1: what what what the issues are, how to move out,
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  Speaker 1: how to how to separate ourselves to see these differences
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  Speaker 1: that you're talking about? There you go, So what do
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  Speaker 1: we do? What can I do? What can listeners do?
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  Speaker 1: What steps can we take exactly to wake up? Basically?
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  Speaker 2: Stay with this metaphor, it's not it's more than a metaphor,
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  Speaker 2: it's a figure. It's a very potent one, I think,
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  Speaker 2: and it tries to underscore the idea that we are
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  Speaker 2: not ourselves by ourselves. What do we do?
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  Speaker 1: You know?
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  Speaker 2: We often think starting from the individual who has to
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  Speaker 2: act upon the world. What is lost in that frame,
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  Speaker 2: that framework, is that we are not acting upon the
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  Speaker 2: world so much as the world is acting upon us.
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  Speaker 2: And it's not that we are above the world in
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  Speaker 2: its becomings. We are the world in its exploration of itself.
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  Speaker 2: So stockness is a real possibility. But here's a figure.
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  Speaker 2: And often go into a thing that entomologists called a
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  Speaker 2: death spiral. I don't know if you've heard about it,
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  Speaker 2: but a death spiral is in some sense a pheromonic accident.
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  Speaker 2: They secrete these semio chemicals, which supposedly helps them guide
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  Speaker 2: themselves home. Otherwise they're blind. They don't know how to
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  Speaker 2: move through the world except by these GPS systems, these
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  Speaker 2: chemical GPS systems. Sometimes it glitches this system, and at
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  Speaker 2: least from our perspective, and they fall into a loop
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  Speaker 2: and they walk around in a circle, and they're unable
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  Speaker 2: to break from that circle. Some of these circles are
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  Speaker 2: as large as sports in a arena, as a football stadium.
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  Speaker 2: They just keep on walking around and eventually they die die,
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  Speaker 2: they die out of exhaustion. That reminds me of us, right,
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  Speaker 2: It reminds me of how we keep doing things over
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  Speaker 2: and over again. We've been talking about climate chain, for instance,
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  Speaker 2: in the seventies. We assure ourselves that progress is being made,
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  Speaker 2: but it seems in larger doses we are doing the
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  Speaker 2: same thing, moving the pieces around, convincing ourselves that innovation
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  Speaker 2: is happening or solutions are happening. But it seems we're
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  Speaker 2: still in within the logic of that capture of that trance.
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  Speaker 2: And even though there's a lot of energy being expanded,
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  Speaker 2: there's a lot of advertisement, there's a lot of publication,
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  Speaker 2: but it seems we're still within the logic. So what
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  Speaker 2: do we do? I don't I think that question lends
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  Speaker 2: itself to the kinds of ontological frameworks that I'm trying
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  Speaker 2: to bracket. I'm trying to suggest that maybe that question
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  Speaker 2: gets in the way of other kinds of considerations. That
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  Speaker 2: the world is doing something that we have never been
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  Speaker 2: holders of agency, that the world has agency in a sense,
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  Speaker 2: and that maybe the thing to do here, as much
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  Speaker 2: as we're able, is to investigate the openings that might
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  Speaker 2: shift our experience of ourselves. And that this feels pertinent
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  Speaker 2: not just solving with you know, solving creating solutions like
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  Speaker 2: driving an electric car or turning off the light, but
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  Speaker 2: actually terror forming the ways that we understand ourselves in
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  Speaker 2: relation with the planet. And that is more potent than
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  Speaker 2: any old solution.
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  Speaker 1: And what would it look like then?
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  Speaker 2: Mhm, at the risk of offering another metaphor, and and
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  Speaker 2: and the reason why I offer these are there's a
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  Speaker 2: lot of there's a lot about this that is speculative,
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  Speaker 2: but I I I offer this speculation in the spirit
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  Speaker 2: of pragmatism. It's speculative pragmatism. These questions you ask are prestigious. Yes,
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  Speaker 2: what would that look like? We don't always know. And
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  Speaker 2: and that idea that we can anticipate the effulgent, maybe
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  Speaker 2: that's not the right word. The magisterial, processual dignity of
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  Speaker 2: an emergent, always emergent universe, I think feeds into this
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  Speaker 2: crisis of being a modern citizen because we hope that
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  Speaker 2: it lands into our hands. We hope that we can
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  Speaker 2: put a handle on it. But I'm not speaking about
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  Speaker 2: doors and doorways here. I'm speaking about cracks. Doors are
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  Speaker 2: easy to handle, but doors are already anticipated. We're speaking
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  Speaker 2: about when the building itself starts to sprout cracks. And
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  Speaker 2: I think about those cracks as opportunities for investigating failure,
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  Speaker 2: of investigating imagination, of playing with the spaces where we
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  Speaker 2: don't quite measure up. It might look like even stained
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  Speaker 2: with grief. Brother, Right, I'm a psychologist, but I understand
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  Speaker 2: that my work and my training has been to keep
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  Speaker 2: people being productive, right, to keep you youthful. What I'm
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  Speaker 2: speaking about is the pragmatics of the useless. To borrow
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  Speaker 2: a term from air in Manning, It's not useful, but
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  Speaker 2: its youthfulness lies in its uselessness because it's not available
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  Speaker 2: for how we often get caught up in patterns. So
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  Speaker 2: grief is not useful. It is incredibly pathological in the
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  Speaker 2: eyes of many dominant institutionalized thought patterns. But I think
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  Speaker 2: having space for grief, for instance, might shed, might mark
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  Speaker 2: out a groove in the experiences we're sharing and open
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  Speaker 2: out new world for us reef.
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  Speaker 1: On global level, individual level.
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  Speaker 2: Grief is never individual. It has never been. It's not
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  Speaker 2: you know. This is what psychologists call an external cognition,
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  Speaker 2: an external mind. Right, What we experience as personal grief
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  Speaker 2: is already an ecological condition, is already happening at large,
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  Speaker 2: you know. And that's the point here that those ways
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  Speaker 2: we sectarize the world from the global to the nation
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  Speaker 2: state level, to the individual to the molecular is useful.
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  Speaker 2: I understand that hierarchy and what work it's trying to do.
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  Speaker 2: But I think those hierarchies break down under the weight
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  Speaker 2: of something that trans transversalizes them, that spills beyond them,
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  Speaker 2: and we're in a time of spillage. So that is
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  Speaker 2: what I feel this planetary research might look like. This
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  Speaker 2: planetary research is personal and it's not personal. It's both
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  Speaker 2: at the same time.
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  Speaker 1: So even viewing, for example, grief individually is in and
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  Speaker 1: of itself part of the part of the issue, part
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  Speaker 1: of the challenge.
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  Speaker 2: There you go and it has never been. Grief is territorial,
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  Speaker 2: not personal.
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  Speaker 1: So with our time remaining here, yes, what do you
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  Speaker 1: want to shift gears a little here? And as you
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  Speaker 1: emerge and claim the role of father, what do you
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  Speaker 1: feel it's important the teacher kids?
• 23:04
  Speaker 2: Well, I did share recently that I I had a
• 23:10
  Speaker 2: conversation with my daughter and she had very strong opinions
• 23:13
  Speaker 2: about some aspect of Indian society. I could share here
• 23:17
  Speaker 2: that what she was talking about was, in her view,
• 23:21
  Speaker 2: the colonial edifice of the caste system. She's only eleven.
• 23:31
  Speaker 2: But she had very very strong opinions and well considered
• 23:34
  Speaker 2: opinions about and she cares deeply about the marginalized and
• 23:38
  Speaker 2: de oppressed, and so she felt this is wrong. I
• 23:43
  Speaker 2: felt led in that moment to hold her the beauty
• 23:50
  Speaker 2: of what she was exploring, definitely not archiving it or
• 23:55
  Speaker 2: banishing it or dismissing it, but to hold it, but
• 23:57
  Speaker 2: to hold it in context of life, larger patterns that
• 24:01
  Speaker 2: are emerging, and and and to offer her this idea
• 24:07
  Speaker 2: not to get trapped in in being correct right right,
• 24:13
  Speaker 2: because it's a trap you're that I have the correct
• 24:16
  Speaker 2: point of view. I wanted to offer her a vision
• 24:19
  Speaker 2: of a world that is spilling and moving, a world
• 24:23
  Speaker 2: that is not atomic on Newtonian, a world that is
• 24:27
  Speaker 2: more processual, emergent and you know, diffracted. And so I'm
• 24:34
  Speaker 2: I'm learning to learn with my children about this world,
• 24:40
  Speaker 2: this sensuous world that is not resolvable to atomic points.
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: You know.
• 24:45
  Speaker 2: It's it's more metaphysics of lines and seeking lines than
• 24:50
  Speaker 2: it is a steady container of already wrong or correct opinions.
• 24:55
  Speaker 2: And so this is this is complicated work, but I
• 24:58
  Speaker 2: feel that it's needed. That we're losing nuance. For instance,
• 25:02
  Speaker 2: in politics, we don't even know how to have a
• 25:04
  Speaker 2: conversation any longer. It's that I have the right opinion
• 25:07
  Speaker 2: and you're obviously wrong. Because I have that opinion, I
• 25:11
  Speaker 2: don't want my children to participate in that kind of culture. So, yes,
• 25:17
  Speaker 2: that is something powerful for me. Maybe the last thing
• 25:20
  Speaker 2: I'll say on that is my son is autistic. He
• 25:24
  Speaker 2: is teaching me about losing my way when people say,
• 25:28
  Speaker 2: in order to find your way, you must lose it.
• 25:30
  Speaker 2: And there's something about the ways that I'm relating with
• 25:33
  Speaker 2: my son, the ways me and my wife are relating
• 25:35
  Speaker 2: with our son that is inviting us to lose our
• 25:38
  Speaker 2: way and to find other kinds of worlds embedded in
• 25:42
  Speaker 2: the ordinary that we think we already know.
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, by a man half hours not enough, obviously. How
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: do people learn more about what you're doing? What's the
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: best way?
• 25:56
  Speaker 2: If you don't find me in a psychedelic session, you
• 26:01
  Speaker 2: probably would find me. No, I I haven't done psychedelics.
• 26:04
  Speaker 2: I mean, if you don't find me in a dream
• 26:06
  Speaker 2: or some you know more than human highway, then you
• 26:10
  Speaker 2: can check my website. Just time my name in Google
• 26:12
  Speaker 2: and you can find stuff that I'm doing I guess okay, all.
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: Right, and we'll have that linked up at bio dot net. Yeah,
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: we'll have a length up here at the show notes
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: page at the Trauma Taps podcast dot com. Bio appreciate it, man,
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much. I'm gonna think twice now when
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: I'm separating out my trash and respect.
• 26:33
  Speaker 2: Even then you will toss your trash.
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: We are a star brother.
• 26:40
  Speaker 2: Thank you, thank you very much. Thank you
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: Dom