by Bayo Akomolafe
October 16, 2018 (EmergenceMagazine.org)
In the age of the Anthropocene and entrenched politics of whiteness, Bayo Akomolafe brings us face-to-face with our own unresolved ancestry, as it becomes more and more apparent that we are completely entwined with each other and the natural world.
A STUNNING INVITATION is in the air, urging us to rethink ourselves, our bodies, our hopes for justice, and how we respond to the politics of whiteness. In these times of painful displacements, unavertable crises, and unexpected entanglements (the Anthropocene), the logic of race and identity collides with genetic technologies and splinters into new emergent insights into how bodies come to be enfleshed—granting us hope for becoming otherwise.
The story I write here might have a neat beginning and an ending, but this story is really about the middle-ing space that gives birth to beginnings and endings. To be sure, it is about a good number of things—about race and racism, about black bodies, about the exterminations perpetrated in the name of superiority, about healing and decolonization, and about technology. And yet, it is at heart a letter about middles—not mathematical middles or the morality of balance in the way we often strive to find the golden mean between two extremes, but about how things interpenetrate each other, and how that leads us to interesting places. The middle I speak of is not halfway between two poles; it is a porousness that mocks the very idea of separation.
This is a tale about the brilliant betweenness that defeats everything, corrodes every boundary, spills through marked territory, and crosses out every confident line. The Yolngu people of Arnhem Land in northeastern Australia have a name for this “brilliance”: bir’yun (meaning “brilliance” or “shimmer”). It refers to a Yolngu aesthetic that is effected in paintings by crosshatching patterns and lines, which leave an optical impression of a shimmer. Bir’yun, more than just an artistic technique, speaks of ancestry cutting into the present, identities queered, tongues rendered unintelligible, and im/possibilities opening up. Bir’yun speaks of middles. And everything dies and begins in the middle.
When I was a child, I heard a story of beginnings from our Yoruba traditions about how the world came to be: they say there were once primal seas and raging waters below—and no land mass to counter their fury. Up above, the sky churned with the politics of a restless pantheon of Òrìshàs, non-human mythical beings who lived before humans. Olókun ruled the waters, and Olodumare—supreme above all—ruled the heavens. Between them, there was nothing. But, you see, “nothing” is never really as empty as some might think.
Obatálá, son of Olodumare—curious, restless, and uneasy with endless bliss—was inspired to create a people and the land they would rest on. With Olodumare’s blessings, he took leave of heavenly places and made his way down to the waters to begin his task. Just before he made his way, Obatálá consulted with Orunmila, Òrìshà of prophecy, who told him that he must prepare a chain of gold; gather palm nuts, with which he might hold the sand to be thrown over the waters; and obtain a sacred egg which contained a bird that would come in handy along the way. Obatálá did as instructed and secured these items. At the moment of departure, he fastened the golden chain to the sky and climbed down.
Can you take an instant to visualize this event? Imagine it for a moment: sky and swirling blue traversed by a shimmering chain that irrevocably and rudely links the heavens to the terrestrial, the divine to the mundane, the transcendent to the immanent, the infinite to the finite, nature to culture, masculine to feminine, beginnings to endings, unsettling both, re-configuring both just as well. In a sense, Obatálá’s epic adventure recreated everything.
On Obatálá’s golden chain, poised in the grand between, hangs not just a riveting account of beginnings-that-are-not-originary (or “middles”), but a figure of shocking intersections or transversal happenings—a figure that is particularly alive and much needed right now. This chain—like Obatálá’s golden chain—disturbs everything, remakes everything … rethinks everything. Its helixes weave together new practices that open up new considerations about how to ask questions related to identity and racial justice. I speak of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA.
DNA IS THE HEREDITARY material found in humans and most organisms. Its molecular structure was discovered in 1953: two chains that wrap around each other to form a double helix shape.1 These chains, called nucleotides, hold genetic information and instructions that tell organisms how to behave, grow, eat, develop, become susceptible to disease, and heal themselves. In the years following its “discovery,” this molecule has become a site for different imaginings of what it means to be human, and our place in a larger web of mattering. Finding it was like a sentient pot of soup discovering the recipe book that created it. The closer we have looked, the more the wondrous molecule has divulged secrets about our “deep material” connections with the world around us.
DNA is frequently portrayed in popular culture (and even in scientific discourse) as something unchanging, as divine code that determines biology—how we think, eat, look, and grow. DNA as destiny. Although a thrilling consideration, it is from this bio-determinist take on DNA that some have insisted the molecule serves as a stern foundation upon which they might construct racist structures, or show why women are less well-off than men. This view attempts to reduce behavior, traits (phenotype), and everything that makes us human to changes in genetic sequence (genotype). It is a view that simplifies the complexity of life and makes way for absolutist thinking. We can now contest these claims to bio-determinism, racial superiority, and sexism by noting that the DNA molecule is not an essentialist script whose text—like some divine revelation—tells us what we really are.
DNA, like any other “discovery,” isn’t innocent or static: it isn’t just out there, awaiting the perfect lab instruments to open it up for scrutiny, pristine and disconnected from our approach. How we talk about it or the technologies we employ to measure it actively “create” it. The means and the end are intimately connected, and to change the former is to alter the latter. In this sense, the molecule most often shows up as a vector of determinism, inheriting the thinking that life’s startling complexity can ultimately be categorized, hierarchized, and reduced to a single or few sources. Over time, however, the idea of bio-determinism, though sticky and influential, has become largely discredited:2 The burgeoning influence of epigenetics has turned our attention to the environment as a critical contributor to the traits we exhibit. And feminist thinkers—reading determinism as oppression—have also tended to resist any attempt to deny the impact of culture, power, gendered privilege, and perspective on these supposedly neutral measurements of DNA and insist that the more popular iteration of the molecule (DNA as destiny) engenders racism and sexism.
A different vision of the DNA molecule is gaining ground, one which does not read the code as essentialist—a “beginning” or a source—but as an ongoing worldly practice, a meeting of bodies and environments, open to alterations. A middle. A crossroad of surprising intersections. The processes by which bodies become bodies are more complicated than simply attributing how bodies materialize to a linear causal flow from a single source (DNA) to bodily traits.3 A lot more is happening than racial or sexist categories can contain.
This is a tale about the brilliant betweenness that defeats everything, corrodes every boundary, spills through marked territory, and crosses out every confident line.
This is why we re-turn to DNA. Because “it” now unfolds within the Anthropocene—a time of blurred boundaries, a time of noticed confusion, when essences and static identities have become untenable. Because a curious inflection of events means Obatálá, Òrìshà of middles, now holds the molecule in his corrosive grip. With it, he whips open simple categories and established hierarchies of flow, making things spill out of their old containers. A new story soils the ground, one which confounds the neatness of racial order and racial justice. A complex portrait of how bodies come to matter is becoming definable and discernible. Like bir’yun art—composed with crosshatched lines, lending to the appreciative eye a visage of brilliance and movement—Obatálá’s chain perversely connects things to each other in unexpected ways.
We are not precisely who we thought we were. We are composite creatures, and our ancestry seems to arise from a dark zone of the living world, a group of creatures about which science, until recent decades, was ignorant. Evolution is trickier, far more complicated, than we realized. The tree of life is more tangled. Genes don’t just move vertically. They can also pass laterally across species boundaries, across wider gaps, even between different kingdoms of life, and some have come sideways into our own lineage—the primate lineage—from unsuspected, nonprimate sources.
—David Quammen4
I LEARNED THE WORD “Anthropocene” quite late, not in my younger days, when fiery gods and their pagan escapades were whispered about at the edges of our Christian lives, but when I put on a tie and began teaching in the university. The term means “Age of Man”; but it spells trouble, because it tells us of all the havoc we’ve caused by presuming ourselves lords over the earth, by not listening to the pollination songs of bees and the sermons of roots. Stories have consequences; ideas have bodies. And today, the idea of Man—phallic and independent—is in crisis.
Here’s what characterizes the Anthropocene: corrosive spillages and a frightening excess of broken ecological boundaries, damaged ecosystems, poisoned oceans, plastic landscapes, deforested landscapes, toxic multi-species exchanges, nuclear holocausts and mushroom clouds piercing the once-sacred demarcation between ground and heaven, rising carbon emissions, rising sea levels, oil spillages, loss of biodiversity, and proliferation of the horrific, evinced not merely in terms of genetic mutation but in our evolving analyses and capacities to notice how bodies interpenetrate other bodies, often in monstrous and unpredictable ways. What the Anthropocene refers to is the stunning impact of human activity on a now damaged planet; the very conditions of this epoch imperil both those who are blameworthy and those who are “innocent.”
But perhaps most important about this time is that the image of the human is being composted—or, we are experiencing great difficulty determining where the nonhuman stops and the human begins. Everything touches everything else in the Anthropocene—an observation that is supported by, say, current thinking about “holobionts,” assemblages of bodies within bodies within bodies, or intersecting communities that toss out notions of separable individuality. We are holobionts. We live and are lived through; we are composite beings, companion species, emerging within and among assemblages.
It is not only bodies that melt into other bodies in the Anthropocene. Time itself is shorn of its noble disinterestedness, and the past and future touch each other. In fact the Anthropocene does something queer and perverse to spacetime5—upsetting its presumed linearity and unidirectionality, making the past contemporaneous with the present, and resituating the “future” with the present and the past in the thick “now.” Time folds and melds in the Anthropocene the way taffy folds in on itself in the levers of a machine. My people, the Yoruba people, speak of circular time, slushy time, or time that collapses on itself. There are no arrows of time that fly forwards in Yoruba indigenous imagination; none of the incessant tick-tocking that has fuelled progress, that has become the soundtrack of our busy, delimited lives.
Indeed, it has been said that the Anthropocene is some sort of time travel—a sinful glimpse of the present from the vantage point of the deep future (“sinful” in that it upsets the supposed order of things). It is almost as if we are looking “back” at ourselves from the devastation of a toxic post-human world, trying to understand our age. What we see from this vantage point is allowing us to tell new stories about everything.
That’s why Obatálá is also the Òrìshà of the Anthropocene. Today, he is silhouetted against a wounded sky sewn with the rising plumes of smoke and dust, just above waters poisoned by oil and plastic and fed with the bodies of black slaves who drowned as ships carried their families to dehumanizing fields of labor. He hangs in the middle, redefining everything that precedes and succeeds. In revealing him as the deity of the Anthropocene, we notice another aspect of Obatálá. Later in the story, we learn that—after establishing the first settlement and populating it with humans that he himself creates from the dirt—Obatálá gets careless and gets drunk on palm wine. Tragically, in this state of stupor, he creates more people with broken limbs, bent-over backs, blind eyes, and bent bodies. He proliferates monstrous deviations from his original models, but then calls these his “special children,” loving them no less. By embracing the monstrous, the occluded, the forgotten, the queer, the disenchanted, and the displaced, not as a gesture of pity or compassion but as an act of acknowledgment, Obatálá foregrounds the strange—and calls them by a familiar name. He wields his shimmering chain today, showing hospitality to the monstrous—where we must now go to bring forward a different vision of race.
The future is necessarily monstrous: the figure of the future, that is, that which can only be surprising, that for which we are not prepared, you see, is heralded by species of monsters.
—Jacques Derrida6
MONSTERS ARE ADMITTEDLY horrific entities. But monsters did not sprout autonomous of context or history; they have always been in dynamic interaction with the “city” that exiles them to the wilderness. This is why monstrosity can serve as a cultural means to examine ourselves. To meet ourselves as if for the first time.
And, perhaps, there could be no better time to confront ourselves than now, in these times charged with racism and extermination.
I read monsters as cultural technology—as mythic figures that have always been intimately entwined with human becomings. From a time past remembering, we’ve needed monsters to define ourselves, to teach our children what not to do, to sound warnings about the future, to define the territorial boundaries of our habitats (and therefore carve out the wilderness), and to dream about the impossible. Indeed, monsters play a crucial social role: they challenge our addictions to particular forms and disturb the familiar. Their unusual appearances and queer bodies have long been employed as warnings of divine wrath to come, or something gruesome and perverse happening behind the scenes. In the sense that monsters cut through the parallelity of our lives, upsetting the business of the hour … astonishing us and opening up new considerations that were previously unavailable, they are transversal disruptions of order. They are playful reconfigurations of flesh and therefore embodiments of the radical openness of the real. Monsters teach us about the otherwise.
The emerging picture is that we are truly monstrous, composite all the way down, and that if we were to meet the meaty dimensions of our bodies, we would be frightened by just how unwieldy identities are. What we are learning about material embodiment is that to a certain degree we really are at a loss for words when it comes to making affirmative statements about our core identities: where we come from, where we belong, and what makes us, us.
Monstrosity can serve as a cultural means to examine ourselves. To meet ourselves as if for the first time.
THE IDEA OF RACE as a basis for human identity has a rich and troubled history, often dated back to the early seventeenth century when English colonists established Jamestown in the New World, hoping to happen upon gold but settling for tobacco and cotton when the prospects of finding the former began to dim. I wish there were space and time to follow the meandering paths carved out by this history, allowing us to notice that what we think of now as “natural” prejudices against colored people may not even have been present in 1607; and that there were Africans living in the “New World” as early as 1619 who were accepted as members of the turbulent colonies, some of whom had servants of their own, even European servants. There were marriages between “blacks” and “whites” that were not considered “intermarriages,” and there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that Africans were discriminated against for their physical appearance. In fact, in one of the New World colonies, Africans were deemed more “civilized” than the Irish.
After the armed rebellion of Nathaniel Bacon in 1676 (the agitation against the repressive policies and rule of Governor Sir William Berkeley of Virginia), the rulers of the colony began to institute laws that discriminated between Africans and their European siblings in the same socioeconomic class. These laws restricted Africans’ mobility, rescinded their claims to property, allowed them to be classified as property, and led to the importation of more Africans directly from Africa in the transatlantic slave trade.
In time, physical appearance (colorism) and other phenotypic features, like musculature, would become symbols of social status, and differences between populations would be exaggerated in order to justify the dehumanization of a “lower” class of people for economic motivations. Black blood, black brains, and black bodies became reified in this new atmosphere—and the emergent technoscientific enterprise, entangled with political-patriarchal-religious-economic interests (as is still the case today), began to write reports and produce knowledge that reinforced these increasingly white epistemologies of newfound supremacy. Eighteenth-century American physician Samuel Morton wrote extensively on the subject of craniometry, establishing a classificatory system that ranked Caucasian brains over African brains and Native American brains. Brain size was indicative of intellectual capacity, and the eventual demotion of non-Caucasian brains concretized white bodies as emblems of rational superiority: a stratagem for ensuring permanence and the longevity of the embryonic concept of whiteness.
In short, the fabric of the growing English colonies and, eventually, their American counterparts (post-1776), comprised of the emerging institutions and governance structures, was stitched with this superintending desire and intergenerational longing to maintain control over the dissident bodies that agitated against the ruling elite. The politics of racial segregation harks back to these twilight moments.
BUT STILL I WONDER: why does racism exist?
Why were black bodies in West Africa sold to seafaring traders from America? Why were they bought? Did the whip-bearer not see the humanity in the eyes of those whose backs he embroidered with scars and death? Did their stories not bleed out to query his fury? Did the Muselmänner prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps, standing gaunt and stripped of humanity, know the fleeting intervention of a passing smile—an acknowledging glance? What are the conditions making it possible for American immigration officials—themselves fathers and mothers—to participate in the incarceration of migrant children stripped away from their families at US borders? What stirred in spacetime or squirmed in gut-microbial-courtrooms when that white Starbucks store employee called the Philadelphia police on two black men, who had committed no crime except to delay their orders? Or when that white Subway employee decided that the Dobson family—black parents and their four black children on their way home from their grandmother’s birthday party—were about to rob her restaurant? Or when that gentleman called the police because a black woman using a public pool was “suspicious”? Or when those presumably well-meaning police officers gunned down a young black man in his own backyard as he clutched his phone?
Do we call these disturbing behaviors “evil”? Is this some DNA issue? Do we chalk it up to “hate,” “ignorance,” “wickedness” (as some religious folk back home might call it), or some attitudinal issue—this sticky and bewildering refusal to grant other-than-white bodies their humanity? What about my melanin-rich body makes some folks pucker up or wilt away in stereotypic fright?
Who will love my children? Who will love my stories?
Continue reading WHEN YOU MEET THE MONSTER, ANOINT ITS FEETThe stark reality is that in our global order of intra-connected nation-states, black and brown bodies still occupy lower rungs on the ladder of humanity.