Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.) considers his most sacred work to be learning how to be with his daughter and son, Alethea Aanya, and Kyah Jayden - and their mother, his wife, and "life-nectar", Ijeoma. "To learn the importance of insignificance" is the way he frames a desire to reacquaint himself with a world that is irretrievably entangled, preposterously alive, and completely partial.
Bayo was born in 1983 into a Christian home, and to Yoruba parents in western Nigeria. Losing his diplomat father to a sudden heart complication, Bayo became a reclusive teenager, seeking to get to the "heart of the matter" as a response to his painful loss. He sought to apply himself to the extremes of his social conditioning, his faith, and his eventual training as a clinical psychologist - only to find that something else beyond articulation was tugging at his sleeves, wanting to be noticed. After meeting with traditional healers as part of his quest to understand trauma, mental wellbeing, and healing in new ways, his deep questions and concerns for decolonized landscapes congealed into a life devoted to exploring the nuances of a "magical" world "too promiscuous to fit neatly into our fondest notions of it."
A fugitive to manicured disciplinarity in the academe, speaker, and proud diaper-changer, Bayo leads an earth-wide organization (The Emergence Network) as its Chief Curator and Director. The organization is set up for the re-calibration of our ability to respond to civilizational crisis - a project framed within a feminist ethos and inspired by indigenous cosmologies. He considers this a shared art - exploring the edges of the intelligible, dancing with posthumanist ideas, dabbling in the mysteries of quantum mechanics and the liberating sermon of an ecofeminism text, and talking with others about how to host a festival in Brazil - and part of his inner struggle to regain a sense of rootedness to his community. He also hosts a course (We Will Dance with Mountains) among other offerings.
Bayo is visiting professor at Middlebury College, Vermont, and has taught in universities around the world (including Sonoma State University California, Simon Frasier University Vancouver, Schumacher College Devon, Harvard University, and Covenant University Nigeria – among others). He is a consultant with UNESCO, leading efforts for the Imagining Africa’s Future (IAF) project. He speaks and teaches about his experiences around the world, and then returns to his adopted home in Chennai, India - "where the occasional whiff of cow dung dancing in the air is another invitation to explore the vitality of a world that is never still and always surprising."
Bayo has authored two books, ‘We Will Tell Our Own Story!: The Lions of Africa Speak!’ and ‘These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home’, and has penned forewords for many others.
Websites:
bayoakomolafe.net
emergencenetwork.org
Discussion of this interview in the BatGap Community Facebook Group.
Summary and transcript of this interview
Interview recorded April 25, 2020
YouTube Video Chapters:
00:00:00 - Introduction to Buddha at the Gas Pump
00:04:46 - The Times Are Urgent, Let Us Slow Down
00:08:42 - Slowing Down in Times of Urgency
00:12:36 - The Challenge of Thinking in Different Terms
00:16:10 - The Balance of Preciseness and Unboundedness
00:20:51 - Dancing with the Masquerade: Rediscovering Core Values
00:25:50 - The Evolution and Devolution of Ideas
00:29:05 - The complexity of the universe and the pieces of the puzzle
00:33:12 - Devolving and the Emerging Universe
00:37:16 - The All-Pervading Intelligence of God
00:41:19 - The Excess of Meaninglessness
00:44:27 - The Future as Creator
00:48:10 - The Beauty of Contrast and Difference
00:52:44 - Blind men feeling the elephant
00:56:28 - Embracing the Impermanence of Truth
01:00:57 - The Influence of Environment on Judicial Decisions
01:05:14 - The Color of a Triangle
01:09:23 - Panpsychism and Panentheism
01:13:40 - Variations of Non-Dualism and Multiple New Materialisms
01:17:15 - The Ongoingness of Materializations
01:20:59 - The Absurdity of Non-Dualism and Anticipation
01:24:29 - Futures Literacy: Noticing and Shifting Perspectives
01:28:08 - Post Activism: Slowing Down to Meet Other Bodies and Other Agencies
01:32:04 - The Recycling Ethics and Environmental Impact
01:35:24 - Imagining a More Beautiful World
01:38:58 - Aligning with the Flow of the Universe
01:43:29 - The Newtonian-Cartesian Paradigm and Harmony vs Disruption
01:48:07 - Understanding the Fundamentals of Creation and Consciousness
01:52:57 - The Story of the Trickster Tortoise
01:56:09 - The Tortoise and the Hidden Wisdom
01:59:34 - Reflections on the Current Time