Excerpted (by Kevin Lay) from Jo delAmor’s interview of Bayo Akomolafe 

 What is ‘marronage’?

Bayo mused, “…my mind is immediately taken to the escapades, the agency, the history of slaves … and how they suffered not just in the United States, in Brazil and other places across the Caribbean, but how they often performed escape, how they removed their bodies from the labor of the plantation. This act of doing that, of refusing the terms of captivity, is called marronage.”  

Time-marronage, Bayo explained, is “All the ways that we don’t fit within clock time.  Not reducible to intentions, not a project of activists, but all the ways that we are molecularly called away from Universal Time. For instance, the American Psychological Association in its 2022 publication basically says that healthy grief happens within one year.  So, grief becomes a product:  grief is tethered to a notion of time which is already in service to capitalist relations or to patriarchal relations. It’s that if you want grief, you know, yeah – grieve within this time, but beyond this time, then there’s something wrong with you somewhere. Then we need to lean in and pay attention to what’s happening. I think we’re grieving today collectively in ways that cannot be set to clock time. Right?” 

Jo responded.  “Yes, actually, that leads into how this concept of time or this structuring of time, this force of linear boxed-in-time, is a product of this larger project I’ve heard you talk about, as like a project of modernity. I was listening to a podcast you did with Ayana Young in For The Wild, where you were talking about the posture that this project of modernity requires of us, a kind of upright forward moving rectilinear posture. Can you explore that a little bit, about what you mean by posture?”

  “Since we’re still dancing with themes from plantations and ideas of marronage in slavery and slave ships, I mean to say that one never leaves the plantation with his head held high.  That’s not the posture of marronage.  The posture of marronage is scurrying by, is hiding, is squeezing oneself through cracks, is of becoming animal. The posture in this [shows an opened hand, chopping left to right], that’s the posture of arrival of the gentleman, of the elitist, right? of the citizen. But the posture of the fugitive is, is bent, and, you know what I mean, is animalistic.  It’s animist, it’s vitalist.  It’s more in keeping with the elements.   You want to hide and to render yourself as invisible as possible.

“Indeed. You could say that that uprightness is funded and subsidized by Universal clock time. If you we stand upright, it’s a function of our intrinsic worth, our divinity divorced from ecology.  We stand upright to ennoble the city, the nation state, right?  We stand upright, almost, it seems, like it’s a corporal gesture for the transcendent.   Like, the more we straighten our backs, the more we are in tune with something that is beyond the natural, that disses or kisses at the mundane, the poverty of the mundane, the ordinary.  It’s almost like we are holding our titles or badges of being strangers to the material world by keeping that posture. 

And the way white modernity subsidizes or resources the individual is with time, is with the idea that we are marching forward, we’re going forward. That this project of white modernity, and again, whiteness is not white people, I believe, white people were captured right into the machine. White people were captured. The black people were captured. Brown people were captured.   It is the clearing that is whiteness.  It’s the enforcement of a neuro-typicality that is whiteness. It’s the racialization of bodies and situating power at the top of this pyramidal scheme, and the idealization of a default type of body, that is whiteness.  To reduce that to white people would be to reinforce the morality of this whiteness in its production of particular kinds of worlds, to the exclusion of other kinds of worlds. I feel this whiteness is white modernity, this whiteness that is jiving and vibing with modernity, the flattening of worlds, and it’s vibing with capitalist relations, and is vibing with apartheid, and is vibing with neurotypicality.  

“You know, there isn’t a call to wade in the water that presumes walking upright is the way to do it.  To wade in the water is to become water, is to take on those attributes as much as you can. That’s what I mean by adopting new postures. The ways we’re trained to think, the ways we’re trained to understand the world is being disrupted–it is being syncopated. This is what I call white syncopation. And, and in a sense, we are being forced to dance. Syncopation is connected with rhythm and DanceAbility. If there is no syncopation, there is no DanceAbility, is just boom-boom-boom-boom and that becomes boring over time. But if you boom-boom [with accents on some beats], then you have syncopating rhythm and the groove, and now DanceAbility comes in. And when you dance, you are given to forces at large.  I like to say DanceAbility is disability: it’s kind of losing yourself. It’s giving your body to forces beyond you, to the excess around you. That’s what it means to dance. So, in a sense, postures change when we dance; we’re not standing strict. You go into the ground, you’re moving, you’re expressing yourself in ways that are open ended, and yet to come. So, we are being forced to dance now, sister.  The straight and narrow have to dance now, because excess is coming in, is expressing itself, is teasing the borders, is inviting us to slow down and to take on new shapes.

“We are all in this colonial space together. What that does is cuts us off from other postures, from other ways of seeing, other ways of being. It’s a form of captivity really. I’ve been thinking about the spin-off of this idea of clock time, that is called emergency.  You probably would think of emergency in terms of climate emergency, the idea that time is scarce. We don’t have enough of it now and we must act to save ourselves. That’s the trope now, the topos.  That’s where we are.  It’s like, ‘we’re in trouble, folks, you know, there isn’t time, there isn’t enough time to do anything’. 

Jo asked.  “But how do you find that posture that relates to this climate emergency sense of we need to do something … Many of us coming to this work and who are listening to this call are concerned about the world.  What might you invite us into in relation to shifting our posture to time and moment?”

  Bayo thought a moment and replied. “The problem with a paradigm or with a framework of emergency, is that it collapses agency into pre-constituted options. Right? It doesn’t really allow for creative manner of ability.  It kind of collapses everything, it squeezes the richness, the multi dimensionality, the expressive ability, the fluidity, the indeterminacy of the world, to a set of functions that have already been predetermined. The world becomes some kind of button system. You press this, or you press that, that’s all there is. I’m thinking of Gaza right now. And the situation there, and how that has been described in terms of an emergency. Right? And basically, our ethical response to it has been button like, almost app like.  You press this and you stand for Palestine; you press this, and you stand for Israelis. And that lends itself to repeatability. It kind of preserves the conditions of war. 

“Rectilinearity, the gait of a proper citizen, the propriety of goodness, the uprightness of the individuated or individual self, the final Imperial magisterial subject, citizen subject that rectilinearity is, is a practice that has been impervious to flows, right?  It’s almost like the eye that refuses to see that it is movement. And the ‘I’ that refuses to notice how it is already imbricated and entangled with things that are out of time and out of whack and will not be resolved within the airtight measurements of the clock. 

And thinking about trauma, there is a sense in which trauma marks the boundaries of the proper subject. It’s political, the way we name trauma, it’s a civilization or a civilizing ethic, this naming of trauma. Our bodies are doing things that we don’t intend for them to do, our bodies cannot be fully contained within the labor camps of the modern, right? We try to contain the outbreak, we try to define it beforehand, to reduce the impact on the labor that we’re doing. And it is labor. 

“This is how I want to conclude, sister: it is labor. Even the idea of safety is a form of labor, that might even be conceived in Marxist terms, that to be safe is to labor within certain preconditions, or pre-conceived tendencies. There were ships that suffered the losses of slaves jumping overboard during the transatlantic slave trade. They would just jump – and that was loss economically. So, what some of those captains did was to put nets on the sides of the ships to catch the slaves, to keep them safe. Right?  Think about the insidiousness of safety then.  They might have [painted] on the walls of the slave ship, ‘We care about your safety’ because they needed them to be productive within the plantations.  I’m thinking about the ways that dynamic of safety is labor.  And we are laboring in resourcing our separability – that’s what we’re laboring in. We’re laboring in plantations, all of us today. We’re not producing cotton, we’re producing individuals.

And we are kept within that safety bubble. We’re told that to prevent hegemonic relationships and Imperial relationships, we need to be safe. We need to reduce risk as much as possible and predefine social realities and social spaces before we enter those social spaces. But the stickiness of that is that we find that those relationships we want to avoid repeat themselves because in predetermining how I meet you, prior to meeting you, I might, at my meeting you, become a method, instead of emergence.  I might become a voting pushing notion, or investigation or, or a search for conformity instead of an invitation to the open ended-ness of love in its becoming.” 

Jo enjoined, “Yeah. Thank you. It feels like an invitation to really just be with what is and be curious about what’s emerging.”

  Bayo continued.  “I would say let’s be radically hospitable to the fugitives and cracks. I want to invite people to notice that we are not as well put together as we think. We are late already. And if punctuality is stabilization within clock time, then there is a sense in which we’re all late and that is, ironically salvific emancipatory. I invite people to lean into the cracks of that. 

“We’re confused, we’re not exactly sure where to go, where we spill over without grief.  And there is a sense in which all of these things: the cloud, the confusion, the grief, the not knowing, the uncertainty, all of those ways that white modernity cannot resource the individual any longer. Those are the cracks. A psychologist comes and says ‘One year has passed’. Such are the places where becoming monstrous and monstrous time is the invitation to other kinds of time.  

  “There are places we can gather and create artistic enterprises of listening and falling together. There isn’t something to do that is a project of the human. But there are spaces of doings that open up when we find ourselves in those cracks and openings. Those things that sprout are invitational.  And that is my invitation to people. By what I mean when I say the times are urgent, let us slow down.”

 

“Thank you Bayo.”

“Thank you, sister. Thank you.”

---

This article is an edited transcription of a talk given at the Gaian Gathering of the Work That Reconnects Network in November 2023.  A video of the full talk is available on the WTR Network website here.

---

Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.), rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, is the father to Alethea and Kyah, the grateful life-partner to Ije, son and brother. A widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, public intellectual, essayist, and author of two books, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books) and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak, Bayo Akomolafe is the Founder of The Emergence Network and host of the postactivist course/festival/event, ‘We Will Dance with Mountains’. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California.  See www.bayoakomolafe.net  and www.emergencenetwork.org.