When You Meet the Monster, Annount its Feet
Illustrations by Jia Sung
by Bayo Akomolafe, Illustrations by Jia Sung
In the age of the Anthropocene - the time humans have adversely affected the earth - 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.
“The 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.”
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.