These Wilds Beyond Our Fences Read online

  CONTENTS

  Titlepage

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Prologue

  Letter 1: All the Colors We Cannot See

  Letter 2: Consider Leviathan

  Letter 3: Hugging Monsters

  Letter 4: Libations at the Crossroads

  Letter 5: Tears Do Not Fall in Space

  Letter 6: Awkward

  Letter 7: The Call of Compost

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  About North Atlantic Books

  These Wilds Beyond Our Fences

  Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home

  Bayo Akomolafe

  Copyright © 2017 by Bayo Akomolafe. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the written permission of the publisher. For information contact North Atlantic Books.

  Published by

  North Atlantic Books

  Berkeley, California

  Cover art and design by Nathaniel Russell

  Interior design by Happenstance Type-O-Rama

  Printed in the United States of America

  These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home is sponsored and published by the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences (dba North Atlantic Books), an educational nonprofit based in Berkeley, California, that collaborates with partners to develop cross-cultural perspectives, nurture holistic views of art, science, the humanities, and healing, and seed personal and global transformation by publishing work on the relationship of body, spirit, and nature.

  North Atlantic Books’ publications are available through most bookstores. For further information, visit our website at www.northatlanticbooks.com or call 800-733-3000.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Akomolafe, Bayo, author.

  Title: These wilds beyond our fences : letters to my daughter on humanity’s

  search for home / Bayo Akomolafe.

  Description: Berkeley, California : North Atlantic Books, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017024072 (print) | LCCN 2017031790 (ebook) | ISBN

  9781623171650 | ISBN 9781623171667 (paperback) | ISBN 9781623171650

  (e-book)Subjects: LCSH: Akomolafe, Bayo—Family. | Authors, Nigerian—Correspondence.

  | Fatherhood. | BISAC: BODY, MIND & SPIRIT / Inspiration & Personal

  Growth. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs.

  Classification: LCC PR9387.9.A39277 (ebook) | LCC PR9387.9.A39277 Z48 2017

  (print) | DDC 828/.9209 [B] —dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017024072

  Printed on recycled paper

  North Atlantic Books is committed to the protection of our environment. We partner with FSC-certified printers using soy-based inks and print on recycled paper whenever possible.

  Foreword

  Dear Alethea,

  I met your father when he was a young man still searching for a proper channel for his ambition. This, more than our intellectual resonance, is what called us into friendship. You see, our generation faced a quandary. Full of youthful ambition, we had awakened to the wrongness of every ready-made goal that society offered as a way to express that ambition. First, we rejected the most obvious conventional goals of money and power, seeking outlet instead in academia, NGOs, science, or any other realm we imagined to be untainted. But as our understanding grew, we realized that every institution was part of the same world-dominating, world-destroying complex. There was nowhere for us to go.

  With nowhere to go, perhaps we could find our own way. Perhaps we could channel our ambition into revolution, or into “building the alternatives.” Yet when we tried that, we discovered the same familiar ways of thinking scaffolding our dissident organizations and our alternative programs. It wasn’t just that society offered us the wrong map; it was the whole formula for making and following a map that was wrong. We saw that the revolutionary elite behaved not much differently from the financial elite, that countercultural idea celebrities embodied the same basic archetype as conventional experts. The very recipe for change-making was part of what needed to change: the smart guys in a room coming up with a brilliant idea, a plan, a blueprint, and then convincing the public and especially the elites to enact a change. And so, even the ambition to bring an important new idea into the world was lost to us.

  Some of us, your father included, dabbled in the idea of an ambitionless life, an understandable refuge given that those who have tried to save the world have done it the most damage. We thought, perhaps, that ambition was a bad thing. But to suppress it was as impossible as confining steam in a boiling pot. No matter how hard one presses on the lid, it finds another vent.

  That is what this book is: the eruption of a long-simmering ambition that has not yet quite found its object. What does ambition do, when it lacks a destination, an aspiration? It turns toward adventure, a foray into the unknown. The title of this book is apt then, not only in reference to its content but also in reference to its animating impulse.

  It would be inaccurate to say, though, that this book of letters has no destination, just as it would be to say that an adventure has no purpose or a wandering no outcome. It is just that the purpose is never, in the end, what we thought it was. On the contrary, it is something that was unknowable, residing as it did in the wilds beyond our fences.

  These letters are among other things a chronicle of a search for home; they are also steps on that search. Fittingly, your father eschews at the outset the possibility of success: “There are no beginnings that appear unperturbed, pristine and without hauntings. And there are no endings that are devoid of traces of the new, spontaneous departures from disclosure, and simmering events that are yet to happen. The middle isn’t the space between things; it is the world in its ongoing practices of worlding itself.” We are always in the middle, he says. The home he seeks never did or could exist.

  Yet I have to say, it is not a delusion that draws him on this search.

  It isn’t that the bull’s-eye, the destination, heaven, home, doesn’t exist. It is only that it doesn’t exist in linear time. It is like a crystal hanging above our entire timeline, refracting partial images of itself onto our world that we recognize as home. That is why the mystics tell us it is always there, closer than close. Nonetheless, our journeys away from home have their purpose. A will stronger than our own sends us on these journeys. If we do not someday leave home, then home will leave us.

  Maybe, thought your father as he embarked on these writings, home will come through their completion. Maybe, he thought, I will have arrived somewhere. I certainly thought such a thing when I first became an author, loathe though I would have been to admit it. Can he say, “Now I’ve made it?” “I’m home now?” Perhaps not. Yet something has changed. I just talked to him on Skype today and got the sense that here is a man more at home with himself, more at home in the world, and more at home with his lingering homelessness than ever before.

  I wonder if that is more because of you, Alethea, than anything else. It might be trite to observe that family grounds a man in reality and arrests his flights into unwholesome over-abstraction. It is relevant to mention it here though, since this is after all a book of letters to you. I remember you well, you know, your clarity of will and the aliveness of your eyes. We joked about betrothing you to my son Cary, also two at the time, whose will and eyes resemble yours. But I digress. All I mean to say is tha
t it is quite natural that a book that is a journey to and from home, would take the form of letters from a father to his daughter.

  I won’t venture to name what I think the destination of this book may be, but I am certain these letters will take you somewhere, Alethea. The same goes for anyone who reads them. While it may be true that there are no real endings, no final homecomings, no place untainted with what your father calls the dust, the messy incompleteness of the world, it is equally true that there are endings, homecomings, and destinations everywhere. I do not think this book will take you to a middle and dump you there. I think it will make the middle feel more like home.

  Love,

  Charles

  —Charles Eisenstein

  Prologue

  B/reach

  Mama, I don’t want to be alone again!

  It’s turning out to be a horrible Wednesday evening in Chennai. I pull myself up the old limbs of the ladder and look into the room through its lattice window. You are at the door on the other side of the room—your tiny fingers surveying the annoying contraption of steel and wood before you. The latch is, however, resolute. Firmly shut. Just before I surface, Mama has been speaking to you from behind the door. I can’t see her but she has been trying to pass instructions to you on how to open the latch. She wants to sound reassuring and calm. Anything to put you at ease. Only those who listen closely enough, or those who know her as well as I do, can discern the desperation in her voice—the submerged strain of dread that threatens to surface.

  “Alethea? Alethea! Alee! Listen to my voice,” she bellows. Pleads. But you do not … cannot listen. I’m sorry, mama! You already know how to say sorry. You are not even two years old, but the words you’ve been crying out arrive with the gut-wrenching urgency of an elder breathing for the last time.

  Beneath me, the rung I stand on creaks uneasily, its protest followed by echoes of “Bayo, be careful … take it easy” from those below who are trying hard to steady the feet of the ladder. Down the narrow and broken walkway that borders the building, and on the tiny street it creeps into, there are enquiring men with their lungis tied about their waists and some children peeping through whatever space the men’s potbellies haven’t taken. Two women clad in various stages of their dupattas point at me, moving their heads this way and that in animated conversation. I balance myself precariously on the old ladder, acutely aware of how far away the ground is. Up where I am, the air is stiff with the whiff of cow dung—an all too familiar motif of the city of Chennai. Inside the room where you had wandered while playing and somehow locked yourself up, the ceiling fan whirs on cavalierly, as if nothing is at stake.

  Behind the door, Mama begins to sing the wheels on the bus go round and round, sobbing softly as her words flail at the wooden obstacle separating her from her only child. At this time, this is your favorite rhyme. I have coaxed you to sleep many nights singing this song, and you would sing with me, giggling happily when we get to the part where the horn on the bus goes beep-beep-beep … all day long. Do you remember this? On this night, however, you bravely manage to stutter a few lines, choking back the sudden and very jarring distance of things, but only for a little while: your young resolve gives way—and the floodgates of tears are open again. It seems that the singing has only made it more apparent how dire your situation is. You are not comforted.

  “Alee mama! It’s Dada,” I call out to you from the window. You turn around to find me. I will never forget your face: a ghastly portrait of fear, an existential query struck at the heart of my fatherhood. How could I have allowed this happen to you? Your face is covered everywhere with streaks of wet and dried phlegm, and your tongue is trembling with every passing wave of grief. “It’s Dada, dear! Come to Dada!” I squeeze my arm through the rusty railing, adjusting my feet to enhance my reach. A flicker of hope shoots through your eyes, and you run across to me, trying to climb up the window, as if that would do any good. If I keep you close to me at the window, the concerned men who ran up to the apartment to offer their aid can break down the door with you out of its way.

  I hold on to you for dear life, my hand close enough to wipe your tears as your eyes tell me that you are wondering why I am so close and yet so far away, why my attempts to fill the distance between us only concretizes it. I watch you turning pale, the familiar constellations of joy fading from your eyes. Outside the room, I shout out a signal into the room, and the men begin kicking at the door. It is a very strong door, made from proud wood. It would take more than a few kicks to bring the whole thing crashing down. In the meantime, you are out of harm’s way. There I stand, on a borrowed ladder still vehemently protesting its enlistment, my palm curled up under your chin as your silence metastasizes into soft frightful shivers. “I’m here, my dear,” I whisper to you, as the pounding on the door starts to get louder. More worried.

  I’m here.

  Let me hold you …

  Home, the spot of earth supremely blest,

  A dearer, sweeter spot than all the rest.

  —Robert Montgomery

  My dear Alethea,

  Of all the critters that crawl across the earth’s meandering planes, and hide in the shadows of her belly folds, a hush is perhaps the most difficult to find. You don’t bump into one of these every day. That’s not because they are rare; as a matter of fact, they are actually quite common, even right here in this city. And yet, it’s very easy to miss them … to go about one’s business without having to meet one. Coming across hushes (they mostly move in packs, stringed to each other with their “tails”) mostly depends on where you are and what you do when one or several show up. In a way, they are like slugs, or better yet, cockroaches, who, in spite of all the hideousness associated with their always unsolicited appearing, are magnificent and resilient creatures. Did you know those infamous bugs can live without their heads for weeks? It gives a whole new meaning to having one’s head in the clouds, doesn’t it, dear? But I digress. Hushes too, like cockroaches, are present, hiding in cracks, staring back out of the dark holes they often inhabit with yellow unblinking eyes, and scurrying past our busy lives with their hairy-scaly-tentacular kin, nary a sound made in their ghostly trafficking. They thrive best in the corners of our eyes, stealthily making their way up the wall or floating free in midair without a care in the world. There one moment, gone in the slice of a sigh.

  We are strangely drawn to hushes and yet simultaneously possessed by a crippling fear to actually meet them. I have seen a burly local rat-catcher, you know, one of those intrepid night-dwellers that prowl Chennai’s moonlit alleys looking for rodents the size of little dogs—I have seen one shriek out a perfect falsetto as two hushes no bigger than gulab jamuns crawled up his thigh. There are no myths or portraits or stories told with these creatures. No blue gods are adorned with their image; no place where they are at home, and I have been to many places. One gets the sense that while we regard them with dread, they couldn’t be bothered at all. They really couldn’t care any less. They are quite indifferent to the prospect of making friends with humans. They seem unafraid for their survival, and live vanishingly brief lives, breeding rapidly and often shamelessly feasting on their own young. So, no, the fear isn’t mutual.

  But that’s about all most of us know—or want to know—about these inscrutable fellows. Of course, there is also the matter of how they leave annoying slime trails wherever they go, and secrete a horrendous foul-smelling liquid whenever anyone attempts to hold them too tightly. It’s all too much: the most common gesture is to look away, maintaining an unwritten rule to act as though hushes don’t exist. One might thus say that the things are difficult to meet because we’ve taken such pains to avoid them, to pretend they aren’t there and keep on doing what we were doing before—and also because we don’t exactly know how to look for them, or what to do with them, or how to give them names, or tether them to our schedules, and domesticate them into pets. They don’t act like they want to be loved or cuddled or storied. They are too spritel
y to stay put. Indeed, to speak about them is enough to violate something quite fundamental to them.

  So why do I speak of them, then? Why are they of any importance to you? It’s because these letters before you have more than a thing or two to do with hushes.

  I met a wild man once. He lives at the edges, where the wild things press their faces against the borders and make funny noises. This man knows hushes. Sorry, I should say he knows of them: I do not think anyone can claim to have befriended them entirely. Well, this wild man knows the thick silence that comes with waiting, the forlorn itch of unrequited wanting. He is reacquainted with death, with not knowing what to say or what comes next, with things gone awry. With yearning for sense or meaning where there is none available yet. He is a bank of many sorrows. Many griefs. He knows how to wheedle a hush with rapidly spoken more-than-words, thrusting his fist in the sixteen directions of noble things, rolling his eyes this way and that way, every gesture a feint. He speaks his incantations with tongue in cheek, with a gentle cadence in his full-mouthed enquiries. He says a hush is not a trifling matter, that a hush has a message to share, and that to truly meet a hush, one must approach it with hesitation. One must be prepared to be marked, broken, mocked, and dismembered. To sit with a hush is to meet oneself as if for the first time. It is to come home. And this, coming home, is why I write you.

  I remember the journey to this man.

  The Wednesday sun shimmers in a cloudless sky. Not even an orphaned bird crosses the bright blue, save the stubborn contrails of airplanes long vanished from view. The metallic green motorcycle or okada we’re on has seen better days, but it bleats and splutters in defiance, often snapping and coughing out its own white smoke like a flatulent old-timer doing his utmost to convince onlookers of his vivacity. The road we travel is unforgiving, threatening to derail our rude pilgrimage through Adó-Odò, this tiny western Nigerian town.