Meditation on Blackness, by Bayo Akomolafe

Bayo Akomolafe, is the chief curator of The Emergence Network, a research inquirey in the otherwise. It asks the questions: What if the way we respond to the crisis is part of the crisis. Here is his poetic offering: In the morning, you won’t find me here, A Meditation on Blackness.

In the morning, you won’t find me here, A Meditation on Blackness, by Bayo Akomolafe

I am a black man.

I was planted in deep, loamy, black soil by my black father.

Cradled, cultured and coaxed out like a tuber of yam by my black mother.

Though I came from one womb, I am birthed by many mothers – some of skin like bark and timber, some of eyes of yellow like cassava.

I have a scandalous affinity with shadows in this here regime of light.

I know the suffering, the shame of being late no matter how punctual I get.

I want to be held and seen and known, to be allowed the luxury of variance.

I still feel the stings of a thousand lashes on my ancestral back, the cuts bleeding into my dawn, haunting my dusk.

This justice, this one promised by your identity politics, it makes room for me, I thank you.

Though this room is a dank cell with no bleeding windows. I cannot fly here.

It holds me captive in a mathematical equation. It closes me off from how things spill, how things wander off, how things lose their way.

In this house of brittle bodies, one must thread softly.

In this grid, emancipation is the proliferation of more grids, all hovering magnetically above the radiant equality sign, awaiting entry into the citizenship of representation.

I cannot stay here too long. I cannot abide the routine of this jail cell. I am tired of guarding these concrete walls.

I must spill.

I am a black man.

My mother is water, and my father is movement.

My blackness is not an identity, stable and secure like a stain on white cloth. My blackness is a roaming principle, a geological force uncovering the otherwise, a departure from convenient algorithms, a fierce conjuring in a language so secret that the words themselves do not realize they are part of the spell. My blackness is an invitation to the sensuousness of the pothole, to the hospitality of the crack in the wall. My blackness is what happens when loss touches itself, when a people is brought to the edge of apocalyptic Atlantic waters, and still carry a strange hope. My blackness is the creolized promiscuity at the borderlands of goodness. My blackness is the miraculous undoing of identity.

In the morning, you won’t find me here. I will have gone to the place of my many mothers, their palace webbed with herbs and incantations and patient hospitality. And they will lay me down, and press a strange smelling paste into my brittle skin. They will close off the pores and bind me with their embroidered wrappers. When I am ready and done, after three days sweating in the hot sun, I will be good to go, good enough to fall apart like they do.

I will be lighter than air.

I will know the highway of blackness in its fluid ethereality.

I will know how to fly,

for what is my blackness if not the secret of flight?

Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.) is Chief Curator and Executive Director of The Emergence Network. Author, lecturer, speaker, father, and rogue planet saved by the gravitational pull of his wife Ej, Bayo hopes to inspire a diffractive network of sharing within an ethos of new responsivity – a slowing down, an ethics of entanglement, an activism of inquiry, a ‘politics of surprise’. Born into a Yoruba family, Bayo graduated summa cum laude in psychology in 2006 at Covenant University (Nigeria), and then was invited to take up a lecturing position. Largely nurtured and trained in a world that increasingly fell short of his deepest desires for justice, Bayo conducted doctoral research into Yoruba indigenous healing systems as part of his inner struggle to regain a sense of rootedness to his community. He has been speaking about his experiences around the world since those moments back in 2011. Bayo understands he is on a shared decolonial journey with his family to live a small, intense life. He often refuses to share pictures of himself that do not include his wife, Ej, who is (everyone can assure you) the more interesting part of their entanglement. He is an ecstatic (and often exhausted, but grateful) father to Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden.