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.
In short, Bayo has given up his longing for the “end-time” and is learning to live in the “mean time”. In the middle, where we must live with confusion and make do with partial answers. His greatest vocation is, however, learning to be a satellite orbiting his greatest gift, his goddess Ijeoma, and knowing the blessings of her gravity.
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!
Websites:
Discussion of this interview in the BatGap Community Facebook Group.
Interview recorded April 25, 2020
Video and audio below. Audio also available as a Podcast.
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
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