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These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home
Tackling some of the world's most profound questions through the intimate lens of fatherhood, Bayo Akomolafe embarks on a journey of discovery as he maps the contours of the spaces between himself and his three-year-old daughter, Alethea. In a narrative that manages to be both intricate and unguarded, he discovers that something as commonplace as becoming a father is a cosmic event of unprecedented proportions. Using this realization as a touchstone, he is led to consider the strangeness of his own soul, contemplate the myths and rituals of modernity, ask questions about food and justice, ponder what it means to be human, evaluate what we can do about climate change, and wonder what our collective yearnings for a better world tell us about ourselves. These Wilds Beyond Our Fences is a passionate attempt to make sense of our disconnection in a world where it is easy to feel untethered and lost. It is a father's search for meaning, for a place of belonging, and for reassurance that the world will embrace and support our children once we are gone.
352 pages, Paperback
First published November 14, 2017
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March 28, 2022great book for question-building. aside, do we review books or do they review us ?
September 16, 2021
Your mileage will vary with this book. It is equal parts exquisitely written and pretentious/purple. It is profound and perfunctory, enlightening and overreaching, understated and grandiose. As with all of these types of books - ecocritical/ethical/existential pseudo-memoirs - a lot of it can come across as quite wishy-washy, for lack of a better term. No real, actionable solution is put forward, merely an agenda or manifesto that draws inspiration from literary/political theory and alternative belief systems which requires a lot of skill to be able to convey without sounding like a highlight reel of platitudes linked tangentially by some stretches of logic and overrationalisation to make it fit into a neater narrative.
What is not debatable, however, is the authors skill at descriptive writing. Parts of this book stand up there as some of the most poetic pieces of prose I have read in a good few years.
What is not debatable, however, is the authors skill at descriptive writing. Parts of this book stand up there as some of the most poetic pieces of prose I have read in a good few years.
September 6, 2020
Listening to Bayo Akomolafe speak is quite something: his words blend philosophical complexity, a playful spirituality and a frenzied urgency to rethink the assumptions that underlie how we live. This book is not quite as vivid an experience, but it compensates by slowly retracing the steps that lead to his sometimes difficult-to-follow arguments. Akomolafe draws novel connections across physics, race, feminism, religion, history, environmentalism and more to demonstrate… what exactly? There is no end goal that he has in mind; rather, it is a journey that opens up more questions than answers: a journey “awkward” instead of forward:
The book is in the form of seven (very long) letters to Akomolafe’s daughter, each one blending stories of his family’s history with those of Yoruba and western culture and traditions and various modern and contemporary thinkers to depict the wide panorama of human thought — and what is missing from it today. The letters parallel a quest to answer his question of how to be a good parent: a Yoruba priest instructs him to find ten “hushes” that will emerge when the conditions are right. What a hush is is never precisely defined, except that it is a kind of black, multi-legged insect. I couldn’t find any animal with such a name, though that is likely the point: the hushes represent what is wild and unknown to us, and tell us to accept and embrace this uncertainty.
Akomolafe draws a lot from Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism, in which humans are not the only ones with agency, but are just one part of a thick entangled web of “intra-actions” where we cannot draw a clear line between us and other living things or inanimate objects, or even who is responsible for any course of action. Thus, blaming climate change solely on humans only perpetuates a paradigm where we, with our technological mastery, stand apart from the earth. In a world where activists are scrambling to organise against a wide array of injustices, Akomolafe cautions that we need to slow down and move away from quick solutions, to consider that how we respond to a crisis could be part of the crisis itself. An example is the reduction of climate change to an accounting of carbon emissions, a narrow perspective and a continuation of “colonial time” that “imposes a single dimensionality and directionality, makes room for a single class of actors, and invests in a solutionism that alienates a more sensuous ‘politics of possibilities’ … a politics of many streams”. But he is also quick to point out that this is not an argument for inaction:
All this verbosity can be enlightening, but ultimately left me wondering how to put this knowledge into action. Noticing and examining the structures and mechanisms that make up everyday reality and its problems is one step towards dismantling them or building something better, but the book is short on real-life examples of how to do this. Akomolafe’s own organisation, the Emergence Network, seems to lean towards bringing people together to undertake these journeys of unlearning together. Hopefully, it is not too late to embrace the wilds collectively and build a home that can flourish together with humanity.
Justice is awkward. Awk-ward. Not forward. “Forwards” speak of gold-plated futures in wait. “Awkwards” take note of something else. A Middle English word for “clumsy,” “backward,” or “perverse” was awk. The word itself evokes the idea of things lacking a certain grace about them, being of many minds as opposed to walking resolutely in one direction. In spite of the many negative connotations attached to the idea of being awkward, awkwardness is a profusion of grace, and not the absence of it. When we don’t know what to say or what to do or where to go, it is often because many paths are open to us, many possibilities are known, and many agencies are making themselves heard. The tip of the tongue is a diving board into finer waters.
The book is in the form of seven (very long) letters to Akomolafe’s daughter, each one blending stories of his family’s history with those of Yoruba and western culture and traditions and various modern and contemporary thinkers to depict the wide panorama of human thought — and what is missing from it today. The letters parallel a quest to answer his question of how to be a good parent: a Yoruba priest instructs him to find ten “hushes” that will emerge when the conditions are right. What a hush is is never precisely defined, except that it is a kind of black, multi-legged insect. I couldn’t find any animal with such a name, though that is likely the point: the hushes represent what is wild and unknown to us, and tell us to accept and embrace this uncertainty.
Akomolafe draws a lot from Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism, in which humans are not the only ones with agency, but are just one part of a thick entangled web of “intra-actions” where we cannot draw a clear line between us and other living things or inanimate objects, or even who is responsible for any course of action. Thus, blaming climate change solely on humans only perpetuates a paradigm where we, with our technological mastery, stand apart from the earth. In a world where activists are scrambling to organise against a wide array of injustices, Akomolafe cautions that we need to slow down and move away from quick solutions, to consider that how we respond to a crisis could be part of the crisis itself. An example is the reduction of climate change to an accounting of carbon emissions, a narrow perspective and a continuation of “colonial time” that “imposes a single dimensionality and directionality, makes room for a single class of actors, and invests in a solutionism that alienates a more sensuous ‘politics of possibilities’ … a politics of many streams”. But he is also quick to point out that this is not an argument for inaction:
Does that mean we shouldn’t do all that we can, and work harder in the particular ways we can? Of course not. A neomaterialist offering like Barad’s doesn’t pretend to teach the “correct way to act/think”; it doesn’t offer a model or platform that guarantees the results we might want to see. It doesn’t postulate a “background reality” that we are ontologically distanced from, and to which we must tie our actions if we want “true” or lasting solutions. It doesn’t dismiss the “previous” or think of itself as truer than other explanations we give for the world. Instead, it can serve as a strategy for examining the material-discursive frameworks of assumptions, of place, of time, and human and nonhuman populations that produce specific realities—to the exclusion of others, and the ethical implications of those we have taken for granted and those that are occluded. In other words, agential realism can help us examine how differences are co-enacted—how we draw lines between old and new, good and evil, correct and incorrect, fact and fiction, and so on.
All this verbosity can be enlightening, but ultimately left me wondering how to put this knowledge into action. Noticing and examining the structures and mechanisms that make up everyday reality and its problems is one step towards dismantling them or building something better, but the book is short on real-life examples of how to do this. Akomolafe’s own organisation, the Emergence Network, seems to lean towards bringing people together to undertake these journeys of unlearning together. Hopefully, it is not too late to embrace the wilds collectively and build a home that can flourish together with humanity.
August 9, 2018
dense, but ravishing. i LOVED this book. for the wide view, written in language that maintains it's sense of awe, read this. yum.
Want to read
March 25, 2023Mentioned on the BBC A Good Read Podcast - March 21, 2023
April 27, 2024
This book is like mulch for composting your mind. I couldn't recommend it more highly. I'm definitely going to give it a few more rereads in my life.
February 3, 2025
A love letter to his daughter that sometimes landed like a lover letter to me, the reader. How does one find or gift a feeling of home? Of belonging?
A fantastical exploration into the nature of reality that posits Aristotle/Descartes as thesis and post-modernist theorists of narrative as anti-thesis and then this exploration as synthesis drawing heavily on a feminist “New materialism” aka “agential realism.”. (see p34 “Will we find alternatives to the modern project of escape, and the linguistic denial of the material world?”).
Xxxi I do not know how to meet this haunting, this feeling of alienation from community, from joy, from meaning, from my skin and from my “self” […] I do not know how to find home. And yet I am possessed by this longing. […] A promise of reconciliation.
Xxxv If you want to find your way, you must become lost.
2 [Modernity] What does a home mean in this world of shifting sands and eroding foundations? What good is home if it doesn’t preserve you for a while longer than if you were without it?
3 […] many spoils from cultures plundered. And yet we are exiled from home. There is no arriving. We know no welcoming shores.
5 […] the problem with safe shores is that they are never too safe from the ocean they pretend to protect us from. Indeed, the anxious work of keeping the ocean to its watery confinements, and of hoping it does not arrive too heavily on the shore, is futile.
6 Instead, the ocean enacts the shore […] The shore performs the ocean –a co-constitutive mutuality that makes doubtful the prospects of xenophobic havens, where the pure are inside and the Gentiles are out. The inside and outside are not easily divided. […] The heavens we seek are secreted by our own longings and performative quests for a final, static home. […] But there is no “there”; there is only a yearning, an aching, a struggle, for “there” – and in the struggle, we change.
18 […] could all of this be the masterpiece of a God tired of his eternity?
[…] We must learn to live in the Fall, right here in the middle of things. […] This middle – what with all its tensions and exclusions – is beautiful, dear. […] we are left with a reimagination of “the” afterlife, and thus a reconsideration of the home-as-fixed-destination thesis.
19 In seeking home, we are coming down to earth, and we will not arrive intact.
22 Burrowing deeper will not bring us closer to the essence of things, or home at last; it will only generate a lot more dust.
26 In the quest to stand resolute against the sandstorm, to affirm our place in a bold stance of anthropocentricity, and ensure a home for posterity, we only accelerated and enhanced the felt disconnect between us and the world around us.
30 [post-mod v. modernism] In a milieu that was largely predicated on the idea that truth was universal, the idea of difference and diversity mounted an insurgency.
The dust murmured in the air, and the most austere and most eloquent speakers coughed and choked on their claims to building a universal home.
31 Truth was annulled, and story was enthroned in its place.
33 The banishment of matter from our descriptions of home has, in both instances of modernity and postmodernity, coincided with the globalizing threat of a neoliberal monoculture of war, blood, and suffering. […] What might “home” look like if we respected the world around us?
47 Because the self […] and its manifesto of estrangement […] – is so closed up, so ontologically distanced from everything else, modernity produces an exhausting verticality, forcing upward movement or transcendence by denying the significance of our connections with others.
62 We took it for granted that all that mattered were our stories, our language. We rescinded our commitments to an empirically verifiable world […]
64 […] narrative dynamics aren’t the only things we must take into account as contributory factors in the world’s emergence.
Untangling the project of returning to Eden, or living with the Fall, means we have to rethink everything. Because modernism cannot account for the role of discourse in shaping the seen, and constructionism cements this bifurcation by positing that language is the stuff of the world, we need to meet the universe halfway – a way of bringing the world back in, without reducing it to dead matter, and a way of acknowledging the contributions of culture as well.
65 […] the faint wisdom of God’s response to Job begins to leak through: what could be better than an answer to a question? The gift of bewilderment. The incoming rush of something foreign to the linear logic of the inquiry. […] The motif of becoming generously lost.
69 One day you will learn to live in a world where things don’t add up neatly.
77 […] I am afforded a private moment to imagine reality as a cosmic cackle, lingering and persistent, without some lofty purpose at the end of it – for there is no “end of it” […] Just laughter spilling into laughter long after the joke is spent.
88 Let it suffice to know that the wounds we often inflict on others have roots that connect oppressor and oppressed in a loop of shared unrequited yearning. Such is the ubiquity of trauma and the promise of leaning in farther than we are used to, if only to acknowledge that we are all collectively smitten – and that even evil has a story.
92 The aroma of the home I seek for you drifts in the air, opening into a finer country – a home only to be found in the deepest woodlands, and for which a queer feminism of the monstrous is required.
98 By centralizing human subjectivity, postmodernism effectively denies the material effects of the world that hosts us and shapes us. And that has real consequences. […] sooner or later, we face the retribution of the finite elasticity of things: the world snaps back and stings us.
104 There is much more at work in the production of reality than the processes and activities of language and politics. […]
106 The world is an ongoing relationship where “things” are constantly rupturing and congealing due to human and more-than-human practices. Intra-action presumes entanglement, not independence. <>
110 The implications? Not that matter is illusory, but that matter is fluid, ontologically undetermined, and always co-emergent with the measurements made. The nature of nature depends on the measurements made. <>
112 A world where relata (or “things”) and their properties emerge from relationships, and not the other way round. A world of co-becomings so penetratingly deep that it leaves in tatters the Newtonian myth of independent objects, and the myth that proclaims humans to be ontologically unique […]
[…] What tugs at our strings is a reimagination of things, not as objects, but as participants. And goes along with this resacralization of things is a redescription of the “human” as a “becoming,” not a final product.
114 In a differentially entangled world, separation is […] not something to solve.
117 […] the world is made of surprise. […] The closer we look, the more we find that we never act alone […]
119 It is to strip matter of its own desire, will, intention, and movement so that it doesn’t present an impediment to our concerns.
[…] A world of hard facts, yes, but a world that dances.
120 How does this address the initiating question of home and place? […] the world is now open for play, and yet closed off seductively … and that in this playground there are mysteries and beings and other presences (and absences) that totally recalibrate the logics of our quests so that the questions to ask about the future, about our lives, about living well, might not even be here yet for the asking. There are hints of an invitation here in this ecstatic redescription of feminism: to stand still in the face of a monster, warts and all, and recognize ourselves.
124 The world is mutually infectious, an orgy of touching.
127 Meeting the “something that calls” cannot be on your own terms.
131 Perhaps to stay with this trouble, to pray to her, to hug this monster, is to learn – very faintly – that what stands in our way is also part of the way home. <>
138 I wish for a world that loves you the way I do, that knows something the world I now live in doesn’t know.
143 […] we are living in times of a deep forgetfulness, and because the subject of home cannot be dealt with without thinking of homes we’ve already lost.
144 I was trained to think of the world as a dead place I could eventually plunder.
160 In fetishizing my blackness, I was perhaps “guilty” of some kind of conservation of victimhood and polishing of enemy figures.
What began to give way was my firm grip on identity. There had to be something beyond the stark proliferation of gated communities of racialized bodies, each staking a claim for itself in the flatness and scarcity of modern life.
166 For healing to happen to both white and black, to address white supremacy, a new ethos is demanded. A quantum leap from keeping the other at bay to noticing we are already the “others,” already entangled in palimpsests of trauma and possibility and co-becoming. […] And how this can inspire a different ethos of responsivity.
170 It does not deny difference; it queers separation.
182 This is not to say that we should just hold hands […] and walk into some future, forgetting the whispering of our ancestors and the tender wounds inflicted upon us even now. Entanglement […] is instead […] noticing that we are inseparably interconnected – and this is tragedy and hope.
183 We are in the marked time of a global socio-economic order that hinders us from noticing our sensuous connections to each other.
185 Perhaps an asé of racial becomings can gain ground in a politics of possibilities thrown open by this commitment to entanglements. […]
186 None of these are […] without risk. None of these are solutions […] an ultimate portrait of racial justice. They are provocations to “think otherwise, to become otherwise.”[…] What asé as a new materialist, posthuman redescription of racial matterings and a different ethos of responsivity provokes are opportunities to be otherwise – opportunities to come in touch with times other than the one Future of neoliberal progress that has hijacked racial justice imaginaries. Opportunities to re-member.
[…] Do I dare dream of a decolonial politics that allows us to confront these troubling ties we have with the supposed Others? One that frames engagement not merely in terms of reconciliation or equality […] – since equal opportunity within a structure reinforces the structure – but in terms of seeking out crossroads, and pouring libations in the places our bodies intersect with the many others that are already and already yet to be a part of us?
194 In your mum – and I trust you know this already – I found a home. A beautiful stillness. […] I suddenly longed for small spaces. When you are in love, no space is small enough.
195 […] “a magical consciousness – which for me indicates some liberation from the shackles of patriarchal godhood stories; some freedom to subversively negotiate my origins and destiny; a small life of joyfully intense intimacy with those that I ‘love and care for’; an ebullient sense of undying adventure and wonder; a restrainedly rapturous and liberating culture of insignificance […] Most of all, I long for a soft, poetic sense of serenity – a life mindfully improvised.”
196 And you are so much a part of that tapestry of love that enchants our days.
197 […THERAPY] Being a clinical psychologist, I have had ringside seats to deep suffering, and struggled with the practices I was trained to perpetuate as a modern alchemist of happiness and well-being.
210 We are sophisticated, and we no longer have many places to grieve.
215 […] no solution to the dark. We are never not broken; we are never not whole.
218 Pills and talk therapy might help in recovery, but they shut out other ways of listening to the others around us, other ways of giving darkness its day in the sun. […] Suffering needs a new onto-epistemology – not one that rules it out for eventual fixing, but one that recognizes its entanglement with well-being.
219 I must learn the slow process of letting go, of allowing you the privilege of sorrow without seeking to console you to numbness. […]
229 And don’t get me started on the church’s “prosperity gospel” practices that seemed at odds with the conditions of the poor and, worse, totally clueless about the colonial-neoliberal conditions that generated inequality in the first place. […]
It took the implosion of […] Truth with a capital T – for me to notice […] that “making it” was more often than not an empty phrase for clinging to the rules of life-denying pyramids of social ascendancy. […]
But, you see, faith might be the lack of resistance to what we hope is possible and true. But doubt is the awareness of those possibilities.
230 ALEINU (see Isaiah—whole world full of his glory vs separating) Whereas those people were called out to separate themselves as “holy” (the Hebraic word for “holy” is qadosh, I think – which means “set apart”), we are called into an immersion.
[…] for a “species” that has lived as if everything were possible […] We are not here to get around it; we are here to meet our limitations, to sit with the trouble of discontinuity, […] to know the privilege of being refused further access, to feel the pull of gravity on our feet, to know we are claimed and we are not our own.
249 […] the story of humans going out to fix the world that they are destroying still feeds a politics of binaries and tells a story of nature being the vassal of culture, of mind preceding matter, of thought” being an alien brooding over the deep, and of man rearranging the whole world with language. This isn't to deny what we feel in our bones to be urgent: the need to address poverty, to create governments that truly exist for people (and not for big corporations), or enact radically different political imaginaries that sidestep the biased distribution of suffering made possible in nation-states.
The "problem" is that thinking in terms of agential loneliness, or thinking of the human as a homogeneous block of agency, has powerful material effects, and-in my reading-often leads to more sameness and disenchantment. Until we see activism as a politics of encountering the unsaid, of meeting the abject "other," of sticking with trouble, of noticing how entangled we are with a world which the language of fixture and solutionism presumes is external to us until we see difference-making as a becoming-with, instead of a coming-through, the violence and rudeness of the familiar will hinder us from the bold and risky "newness" that lingers on the edges of awareness. […]
Perhaps, dear, nowhere is the world 's wayward shrugging more apparent than in most institutionalized attempts at resolving our many troubles. […] I cannot rule out that there are situated practices that call for institutional action; […] <>
259 Does this mean we shouldn’t care about global warming? I would argue that moving outside the framework of progress expands the space of caring and being accountable, and opens up a space where new patterns are possible for being responsive to the myriad ways weathering bodies are co-enacting the ground beneath, the sky around, and the spaces between us.
[…] What if we befriended dying? What would life look like?
261 New materialisms like agential realism ease the tensions by rethinking nature as fluid, open, and generative.
264 Summarily, you can only expect solutions in a world where humans are truly separate from everything else, where we can disclose the elegance of things from a vantage point. Not only is such a standpoint not possible, but it has dangerous imperialistic consequences.
265 A neomaterialist offering like Barad’s […] can serve as a strategy for examining the material-discursive frameworks of assumptions, of place, of time, and human and nonhuman populations that produce specific realities – to the exclusion of others, and the ethical implications […]. In other words, agential realism can help us examine how differences are co-enacted […]
266 In short, we don’t make the world alone, the world makes us too.
271 “”Requited or unrequited, to love is to move between homecoming and exile.” – David Whyte
277 Home is homey because of particular sympoietic practices that are not entirely within our control. […] this embrace of home and exile […] of what we are co-becoming.
278 The call to take seriously the generative implications of living with a world […].
283 […] Emergence Network […] a way of remaking indigeneity after the “Fall.” […] our own efforts at re/turning to the dynamics of the local […] of working with our immediate contexts to reconfigure and decentralize our place in the world […].
284 This home that is a dance with exile?
This realization that there is no permanent home, no permanent ground, just rupturing places and condensing fields of welcome […] drives us to find new kin in plants and mountains and human others. […]
This is a time to stay with the trouble of knowing that there is no becoming that is not a becoming-together.
[…] The invitation is to know them, to stop for a drink, to resist unsheathing a sword, to be grateful for a wound, and to share a joke with shadows.
[…] we are coming to see that the things we name as obstacles are invitations to shapeshift […]
287 I love you. Don’t leave me alone.
290 Home is such a slippery concept. She misbehaves […] & then vanishes in the tightening grip of your efforts to own her. […] It is not enough to find one’s way home. Arriving will not suffice where naught is still, where everything moves.
--
xi-x Ambitionless life as 1st response to demoralizing neo-colonialism and Stalinism.
Xxix Same demoralization of technocratic solutions and revolutionary manifestos: “Will I leave you a world with no enchantment? No community? No surprise?”
Xxx agony
9 dance v prosperity gospel
12 not in conditions of our own making: always we are in the middle
27 modernity and what it offers re: truth
75 story vs colonial stabilization and a response to both
93 Cartesian knowing requires alienation, distance & patriarchy
102 obstacles as good
103, 105, 115-6 Karen Barad and New materialism (vs Descartes)
107, 111. Light as particle/wave (Neils Bohr) as image to understand reality/rx
118 nature
167 call and response as world (African)
203-4 blank slate vs empathy & grief
209 impermanence
213 joy & sorrow
217 indigenous healing immersive/ communal
220/9 unschooling
A fantastical exploration into the nature of reality that posits Aristotle/Descartes as thesis and post-modernist theorists of narrative as anti-thesis and then this exploration as synthesis drawing heavily on a feminist “New materialism” aka “agential realism.”. (see p34 “Will we find alternatives to the modern project of escape, and the linguistic denial of the material world?”).
Xxxi I do not know how to meet this haunting, this feeling of alienation from community, from joy, from meaning, from my skin and from my “self” […] I do not know how to find home. And yet I am possessed by this longing. […] A promise of reconciliation.
Xxxv If you want to find your way, you must become lost.
2 [Modernity] What does a home mean in this world of shifting sands and eroding foundations? What good is home if it doesn’t preserve you for a while longer than if you were without it?
3 […] many spoils from cultures plundered. And yet we are exiled from home. There is no arriving. We know no welcoming shores.
5 […] the problem with safe shores is that they are never too safe from the ocean they pretend to protect us from. Indeed, the anxious work of keeping the ocean to its watery confinements, and of hoping it does not arrive too heavily on the shore, is futile.
6 Instead, the ocean enacts the shore […] The shore performs the ocean –a co-constitutive mutuality that makes doubtful the prospects of xenophobic havens, where the pure are inside and the Gentiles are out. The inside and outside are not easily divided. […] The heavens we seek are secreted by our own longings and performative quests for a final, static home. […] But there is no “there”; there is only a yearning, an aching, a struggle, for “there” – and in the struggle, we change.
18 […] could all of this be the masterpiece of a God tired of his eternity?
[…] We must learn to live in the Fall, right here in the middle of things. […] This middle – what with all its tensions and exclusions – is beautiful, dear. […] we are left with a reimagination of “the” afterlife, and thus a reconsideration of the home-as-fixed-destination thesis.
19 In seeking home, we are coming down to earth, and we will not arrive intact.
22 Burrowing deeper will not bring us closer to the essence of things, or home at last; it will only generate a lot more dust.
26 In the quest to stand resolute against the sandstorm, to affirm our place in a bold stance of anthropocentricity, and ensure a home for posterity, we only accelerated and enhanced the felt disconnect between us and the world around us.
30 [post-mod v. modernism] In a milieu that was largely predicated on the idea that truth was universal, the idea of difference and diversity mounted an insurgency.
The dust murmured in the air, and the most austere and most eloquent speakers coughed and choked on their claims to building a universal home.
31 Truth was annulled, and story was enthroned in its place.
33 The banishment of matter from our descriptions of home has, in both instances of modernity and postmodernity, coincided with the globalizing threat of a neoliberal monoculture of war, blood, and suffering. […] What might “home” look like if we respected the world around us?
47 Because the self […] and its manifesto of estrangement […] – is so closed up, so ontologically distanced from everything else, modernity produces an exhausting verticality, forcing upward movement or transcendence by denying the significance of our connections with others.
62 We took it for granted that all that mattered were our stories, our language. We rescinded our commitments to an empirically verifiable world […]
64 […] narrative dynamics aren’t the only things we must take into account as contributory factors in the world’s emergence.
Untangling the project of returning to Eden, or living with the Fall, means we have to rethink everything. Because modernism cannot account for the role of discourse in shaping the seen, and constructionism cements this bifurcation by positing that language is the stuff of the world, we need to meet the universe halfway – a way of bringing the world back in, without reducing it to dead matter, and a way of acknowledging the contributions of culture as well.
65 […] the faint wisdom of God’s response to Job begins to leak through: what could be better than an answer to a question? The gift of bewilderment. The incoming rush of something foreign to the linear logic of the inquiry. […] The motif of becoming generously lost.
69 One day you will learn to live in a world where things don’t add up neatly.
77 […] I am afforded a private moment to imagine reality as a cosmic cackle, lingering and persistent, without some lofty purpose at the end of it – for there is no “end of it” […] Just laughter spilling into laughter long after the joke is spent.
88 Let it suffice to know that the wounds we often inflict on others have roots that connect oppressor and oppressed in a loop of shared unrequited yearning. Such is the ubiquity of trauma and the promise of leaning in farther than we are used to, if only to acknowledge that we are all collectively smitten – and that even evil has a story.
92 The aroma of the home I seek for you drifts in the air, opening into a finer country – a home only to be found in the deepest woodlands, and for which a queer feminism of the monstrous is required.
98 By centralizing human subjectivity, postmodernism effectively denies the material effects of the world that hosts us and shapes us. And that has real consequences. […] sooner or later, we face the retribution of the finite elasticity of things: the world snaps back and stings us.
104 There is much more at work in the production of reality than the processes and activities of language and politics. […]
106 The world is an ongoing relationship where “things” are constantly rupturing and congealing due to human and more-than-human practices. Intra-action presumes entanglement, not independence. <>
110 The implications? Not that matter is illusory, but that matter is fluid, ontologically undetermined, and always co-emergent with the measurements made. The nature of nature depends on the measurements made. <>
112 A world where relata (or “things”) and their properties emerge from relationships, and not the other way round. A world of co-becomings so penetratingly deep that it leaves in tatters the Newtonian myth of independent objects, and the myth that proclaims humans to be ontologically unique […]
[…] What tugs at our strings is a reimagination of things, not as objects, but as participants. And goes along with this resacralization of things is a redescription of the “human” as a “becoming,” not a final product.
114 In a differentially entangled world, separation is […] not something to solve.
117 […] the world is made of surprise. […] The closer we look, the more we find that we never act alone […]
119 It is to strip matter of its own desire, will, intention, and movement so that it doesn’t present an impediment to our concerns.
[…] A world of hard facts, yes, but a world that dances.
120 How does this address the initiating question of home and place? […] the world is now open for play, and yet closed off seductively … and that in this playground there are mysteries and beings and other presences (and absences) that totally recalibrate the logics of our quests so that the questions to ask about the future, about our lives, about living well, might not even be here yet for the asking. There are hints of an invitation here in this ecstatic redescription of feminism: to stand still in the face of a monster, warts and all, and recognize ourselves.
124 The world is mutually infectious, an orgy of touching.
127 Meeting the “something that calls” cannot be on your own terms.
131 Perhaps to stay with this trouble, to pray to her, to hug this monster, is to learn – very faintly – that what stands in our way is also part of the way home. <>
138 I wish for a world that loves you the way I do, that knows something the world I now live in doesn’t know.
143 […] we are living in times of a deep forgetfulness, and because the subject of home cannot be dealt with without thinking of homes we’ve already lost.
144 I was trained to think of the world as a dead place I could eventually plunder.
160 In fetishizing my blackness, I was perhaps “guilty” of some kind of conservation of victimhood and polishing of enemy figures.
What began to give way was my firm grip on identity. There had to be something beyond the stark proliferation of gated communities of racialized bodies, each staking a claim for itself in the flatness and scarcity of modern life.
166 For healing to happen to both white and black, to address white supremacy, a new ethos is demanded. A quantum leap from keeping the other at bay to noticing we are already the “others,” already entangled in palimpsests of trauma and possibility and co-becoming. […] And how this can inspire a different ethos of responsivity.
170 It does not deny difference; it queers separation.
182 This is not to say that we should just hold hands […] and walk into some future, forgetting the whispering of our ancestors and the tender wounds inflicted upon us even now. Entanglement […] is instead […] noticing that we are inseparably interconnected – and this is tragedy and hope.
183 We are in the marked time of a global socio-economic order that hinders us from noticing our sensuous connections to each other.
185 Perhaps an asé of racial becomings can gain ground in a politics of possibilities thrown open by this commitment to entanglements. […]
186 None of these are […] without risk. None of these are solutions […] an ultimate portrait of racial justice. They are provocations to “think otherwise, to become otherwise.”[…] What asé as a new materialist, posthuman redescription of racial matterings and a different ethos of responsivity provokes are opportunities to be otherwise – opportunities to come in touch with times other than the one Future of neoliberal progress that has hijacked racial justice imaginaries. Opportunities to re-member.
[…] Do I dare dream of a decolonial politics that allows us to confront these troubling ties we have with the supposed Others? One that frames engagement not merely in terms of reconciliation or equality […] – since equal opportunity within a structure reinforces the structure – but in terms of seeking out crossroads, and pouring libations in the places our bodies intersect with the many others that are already and already yet to be a part of us?
194 In your mum – and I trust you know this already – I found a home. A beautiful stillness. […] I suddenly longed for small spaces. When you are in love, no space is small enough.
195 […] “a magical consciousness – which for me indicates some liberation from the shackles of patriarchal godhood stories; some freedom to subversively negotiate my origins and destiny; a small life of joyfully intense intimacy with those that I ‘love and care for’; an ebullient sense of undying adventure and wonder; a restrainedly rapturous and liberating culture of insignificance […] Most of all, I long for a soft, poetic sense of serenity – a life mindfully improvised.”
196 And you are so much a part of that tapestry of love that enchants our days.
197 […THERAPY] Being a clinical psychologist, I have had ringside seats to deep suffering, and struggled with the practices I was trained to perpetuate as a modern alchemist of happiness and well-being.
210 We are sophisticated, and we no longer have many places to grieve.
215 […] no solution to the dark. We are never not broken; we are never not whole.
218 Pills and talk therapy might help in recovery, but they shut out other ways of listening to the others around us, other ways of giving darkness its day in the sun. […] Suffering needs a new onto-epistemology – not one that rules it out for eventual fixing, but one that recognizes its entanglement with well-being.
219 I must learn the slow process of letting go, of allowing you the privilege of sorrow without seeking to console you to numbness. […]
229 And don’t get me started on the church’s “prosperity gospel” practices that seemed at odds with the conditions of the poor and, worse, totally clueless about the colonial-neoliberal conditions that generated inequality in the first place. […]
It took the implosion of […] Truth with a capital T – for me to notice […] that “making it” was more often than not an empty phrase for clinging to the rules of life-denying pyramids of social ascendancy. […]
But, you see, faith might be the lack of resistance to what we hope is possible and true. But doubt is the awareness of those possibilities.
230 ALEINU (see Isaiah—whole world full of his glory vs separating) Whereas those people were called out to separate themselves as “holy” (the Hebraic word for “holy” is qadosh, I think – which means “set apart”), we are called into an immersion.
[…] for a “species” that has lived as if everything were possible […] We are not here to get around it; we are here to meet our limitations, to sit with the trouble of discontinuity, […] to know the privilege of being refused further access, to feel the pull of gravity on our feet, to know we are claimed and we are not our own.
249 […] the story of humans going out to fix the world that they are destroying still feeds a politics of binaries and tells a story of nature being the vassal of culture, of mind preceding matter, of thought” being an alien brooding over the deep, and of man rearranging the whole world with language. This isn't to deny what we feel in our bones to be urgent: the need to address poverty, to create governments that truly exist for people (and not for big corporations), or enact radically different political imaginaries that sidestep the biased distribution of suffering made possible in nation-states.
The "problem" is that thinking in terms of agential loneliness, or thinking of the human as a homogeneous block of agency, has powerful material effects, and-in my reading-often leads to more sameness and disenchantment. Until we see activism as a politics of encountering the unsaid, of meeting the abject "other," of sticking with trouble, of noticing how entangled we are with a world which the language of fixture and solutionism presumes is external to us until we see difference-making as a becoming-with, instead of a coming-through, the violence and rudeness of the familiar will hinder us from the bold and risky "newness" that lingers on the edges of awareness. […]
Perhaps, dear, nowhere is the world 's wayward shrugging more apparent than in most institutionalized attempts at resolving our many troubles. […] I cannot rule out that there are situated practices that call for institutional action; […] <>
259 Does this mean we shouldn’t care about global warming? I would argue that moving outside the framework of progress expands the space of caring and being accountable, and opens up a space where new patterns are possible for being responsive to the myriad ways weathering bodies are co-enacting the ground beneath, the sky around, and the spaces between us.
[…] What if we befriended dying? What would life look like?
261 New materialisms like agential realism ease the tensions by rethinking nature as fluid, open, and generative.
264 Summarily, you can only expect solutions in a world where humans are truly separate from everything else, where we can disclose the elegance of things from a vantage point. Not only is such a standpoint not possible, but it has dangerous imperialistic consequences.
265 A neomaterialist offering like Barad’s […] can serve as a strategy for examining the material-discursive frameworks of assumptions, of place, of time, and human and nonhuman populations that produce specific realities – to the exclusion of others, and the ethical implications […]. In other words, agential realism can help us examine how differences are co-enacted […]
266 In short, we don’t make the world alone, the world makes us too.
271 “”Requited or unrequited, to love is to move between homecoming and exile.” – David Whyte
277 Home is homey because of particular sympoietic practices that are not entirely within our control. […] this embrace of home and exile […] of what we are co-becoming.
278 The call to take seriously the generative implications of living with a world […].
283 […] Emergence Network […] a way of remaking indigeneity after the “Fall.” […] our own efforts at re/turning to the dynamics of the local […] of working with our immediate contexts to reconfigure and decentralize our place in the world […].
284 This home that is a dance with exile?
This realization that there is no permanent home, no permanent ground, just rupturing places and condensing fields of welcome […] drives us to find new kin in plants and mountains and human others. […]
This is a time to stay with the trouble of knowing that there is no becoming that is not a becoming-together.
[…] The invitation is to know them, to stop for a drink, to resist unsheathing a sword, to be grateful for a wound, and to share a joke with shadows.
[…] we are coming to see that the things we name as obstacles are invitations to shapeshift […]
287 I love you. Don’t leave me alone.
290 Home is such a slippery concept. She misbehaves […] & then vanishes in the tightening grip of your efforts to own her. […] It is not enough to find one’s way home. Arriving will not suffice where naught is still, where everything moves.
--
xi-x Ambitionless life as 1st response to demoralizing neo-colonialism and Stalinism.
Xxix Same demoralization of technocratic solutions and revolutionary manifestos: “Will I leave you a world with no enchantment? No community? No surprise?”
Xxx agony
9 dance v prosperity gospel
12 not in conditions of our own making: always we are in the middle
27 modernity and what it offers re: truth
75 story vs colonial stabilization and a response to both
93 Cartesian knowing requires alienation, distance & patriarchy
102 obstacles as good
103, 105, 115-6 Karen Barad and New materialism (vs Descartes)
107, 111. Light as particle/wave (Neils Bohr) as image to understand reality/rx
118 nature
167 call and response as world (African)
203-4 blank slate vs empathy & grief
209 impermanence
213 joy & sorrow
217 indigenous healing immersive/ communal
220/9 unschooling
October 9, 2023
At times enthralling, at times exasperating.
June 9, 2022
This is a beautiful book. It stretched my thinking. I required a dictionary now and then. I didn't start underlining until page 150 or so, and then had to restrain myself after that.
July 11, 2023
Incredible. Will read yearly.
Read
November 22, 2023This part was meaningful to me:
"When I consider one of the more mesmeric implications of this idea that we are in this together for all the questions we pose to the world, and all the claims we make about what feels fair and just, I realize that the asking itself—the mereness of a question—might be inexhaustible in its own right and may not require the redemptive intervention of an answer for it to be valuable or profound in its way.
Questions have a complete partialness. Another way to say this might be to say that the way to think about or think through our problems—how to ask this question of home, how to navigate dislocation, how to reconcile ourselves with the matterings of the world at large, and how to understand pain as the larger project of a community of others—may not be available yet. Let me elaborate.
It is often taken for granted that the opposite of a question is an answer; there is a cosmic, platonic double-step logic about it. Black is to white, as night is to day, as cats are to dogs, and questions are to answers. But what if questions are not free-floating formations that are summarily resolved with answers? What if questions are not made only of words? What if questions are material things, speciated and tactile, with body parts, particular histories of their own, affective accompaniments, genealogical ties, and burial grounds? What if questions are like guests to a home—to be welcomed, catered to, dusted up, considered affectionately, spoken with, and put to bed? And what if giving an answer is sometimes the ethical equivalent of slamming a door on the face of a guest as soon as you’ve said hello?"
This part was also meaningful to me:
"Only under the regime of Light—the Apollonian politics of permanence— would death and darkness be treated as enemies. Perhaps this is why it is extremely difficult for moderns not to think that the world is here for us, for our own enjoyment, our own movements and definitions and terms. But the world is not “designed,” put in place, or created for our well-being—at least not in the absolute sense that there is a universal harmony awaiting our awakening. The world dips in and out, retreats and proceeds, produces and eats up its own genius a mere gasp later.
Suffering needs a new onto-epistemology—not one that rules it out for eventual fixing, but one that recognizes its entanglement with well-being. Grieving must be part of the lives for happiness to become meaningful.
There aren’t enough places to grieve around, since every place is adhering to the imperatives of development, but I do pray that your world will have “soft places to yield”—where the generativity of grief can be met with in its troubling presence, where darkness can be known as a menstrual wound, and failure, a portal to wild worlds beyond our ken.
It often takes Lali to remind me that you have to move and have your own way in the world. To tell you the truth, I cannot bear to see you in pain. Just the memory of your tears brings water to my own eyes, not to mention actually watching you cry. And yet, if I embrace you too long, then I lose you. I must learn the slow process of letting go, of allowing you the privilege of sorrow without seeking to console you to numbness.
Perhaps this is why I have written this particularly long letter, taking a break from my hunt for hushes ... to invite you to consider that your discomfort is a holy ally, a redeeming interruption. Where you are most confused, exhausted, distressed, and compromised is where the wild things grow. Where crazy colors, beguiling angels’ trumpets, decadent air ferns, and wise old spruces sprout with festive abandon. Where the thrumming of frogs, the discourse of cricket limbs, the ambivalence of a nightly mist, and the audience of a delighted moon contrive an unheard score. It’s where your primal self, where the unthought, calls to you softly—reminding you that you are not to be easily resolved, reminding you that you are larger than you could ever imagine.
You will encounter troubles of your own. You will be “traveled” by things words cannot encircle. Find the others who can hold space with you. Then, when in the alchemical dynamics of things, the sun emerges again, don’t walk off rudely into his arms. Turn toward the smoldering darkness whence you came, and thank her for shaping you, for scaring you, for wounding you, and defeating you, and shaking you, because in her womb you were thoroughly purged, and made fresh for new glimpses of wonder. And as you walk farther into the domineering light, the dark will bless you with a gift to remind you that you are not as contained or as limited as you think, that there is more to you than what meets the educated eye, that whatever you do, the whole universe does the same along with you—imitating you with a childish keenness, and that you are never, ever alone."
"When I consider one of the more mesmeric implications of this idea that we are in this together for all the questions we pose to the world, and all the claims we make about what feels fair and just, I realize that the asking itself—the mereness of a question—might be inexhaustible in its own right and may not require the redemptive intervention of an answer for it to be valuable or profound in its way.
Questions have a complete partialness. Another way to say this might be to say that the way to think about or think through our problems—how to ask this question of home, how to navigate dislocation, how to reconcile ourselves with the matterings of the world at large, and how to understand pain as the larger project of a community of others—may not be available yet. Let me elaborate.
It is often taken for granted that the opposite of a question is an answer; there is a cosmic, platonic double-step logic about it. Black is to white, as night is to day, as cats are to dogs, and questions are to answers. But what if questions are not free-floating formations that are summarily resolved with answers? What if questions are not made only of words? What if questions are material things, speciated and tactile, with body parts, particular histories of their own, affective accompaniments, genealogical ties, and burial grounds? What if questions are like guests to a home—to be welcomed, catered to, dusted up, considered affectionately, spoken with, and put to bed? And what if giving an answer is sometimes the ethical equivalent of slamming a door on the face of a guest as soon as you’ve said hello?"
This part was also meaningful to me:
"Only under the regime of Light—the Apollonian politics of permanence— would death and darkness be treated as enemies. Perhaps this is why it is extremely difficult for moderns not to think that the world is here for us, for our own enjoyment, our own movements and definitions and terms. But the world is not “designed,” put in place, or created for our well-being—at least not in the absolute sense that there is a universal harmony awaiting our awakening. The world dips in and out, retreats and proceeds, produces and eats up its own genius a mere gasp later.
Suffering needs a new onto-epistemology—not one that rules it out for eventual fixing, but one that recognizes its entanglement with well-being. Grieving must be part of the lives for happiness to become meaningful.
There aren’t enough places to grieve around, since every place is adhering to the imperatives of development, but I do pray that your world will have “soft places to yield”—where the generativity of grief can be met with in its troubling presence, where darkness can be known as a menstrual wound, and failure, a portal to wild worlds beyond our ken.
It often takes Lali to remind me that you have to move and have your own way in the world. To tell you the truth, I cannot bear to see you in pain. Just the memory of your tears brings water to my own eyes, not to mention actually watching you cry. And yet, if I embrace you too long, then I lose you. I must learn the slow process of letting go, of allowing you the privilege of sorrow without seeking to console you to numbness.
Perhaps this is why I have written this particularly long letter, taking a break from my hunt for hushes ... to invite you to consider that your discomfort is a holy ally, a redeeming interruption. Where you are most confused, exhausted, distressed, and compromised is where the wild things grow. Where crazy colors, beguiling angels’ trumpets, decadent air ferns, and wise old spruces sprout with festive abandon. Where the thrumming of frogs, the discourse of cricket limbs, the ambivalence of a nightly mist, and the audience of a delighted moon contrive an unheard score. It’s where your primal self, where the unthought, calls to you softly—reminding you that you are not to be easily resolved, reminding you that you are larger than you could ever imagine.
You will encounter troubles of your own. You will be “traveled” by things words cannot encircle. Find the others who can hold space with you. Then, when in the alchemical dynamics of things, the sun emerges again, don’t walk off rudely into his arms. Turn toward the smoldering darkness whence you came, and thank her for shaping you, for scaring you, for wounding you, and defeating you, and shaking you, because in her womb you were thoroughly purged, and made fresh for new glimpses of wonder. And as you walk farther into the domineering light, the dark will bless you with a gift to remind you that you are not as contained or as limited as you think, that there is more to you than what meets the educated eye, that whatever you do, the whole universe does the same along with you—imitating you with a childish keenness, and that you are never, ever alone."
Read
March 31, 2023I had to change my way of reading for this book. I couldn’t read it as slowly as it was asking me to. I was lent The Wilds Beyond our Fences by a neighbour, and I had no idea what to expect. I was hesitant to pick it up, and it sat on my shelf for a few months before I felt like my mind was ready to tackle it. I had to wait until I was in the right place. On the days I had the right mindset, it was easy-ish to read, and I felt very aligned with what Akomolafe had to say. It’s a privilege to read through an epistolary intimacy between father and daughter, and this positioning really touched me. Beyond that, the relational materiality approach was right up my street and a delightful surprise. There were sections I wished I could highlight, but this copy was not my book. I wish I’d taken deeper notes; but at the same time it was refreshing to glide through and just pick up what stuck. I often Labour through this kind of book, but what I found it could give me was a looseness of writing style, and that couldn’t have been more timely with my master’s essay on materiality due next month.
August 15, 2025
There is something beautiful and enchanting about the way Bayo writes and speaks. I chose to listen to this as an audio book, and I’m so grateful I did. Though at times I did wish I had a copy infront of me to re-read and re-read some of the things he had written. This book came to me at a time of my own father’s passing, and Bayo’s reflections in and about grief resonate deeply with my aching soul.
I found this book to be a balm for and reflection on my own musings about death, life, a fathers love for his daughter, a daughters relationship with her father, and how we as a species navigate this world together.
I’m grateful for the teachings about the Yoruba Ifa, and glimpses into life in India.
Thank you Bayo for sharing these deeply intimate letters to your daughter with us. It’s a medicine I didn’t know I needed.
I found this book to be a balm for and reflection on my own musings about death, life, a fathers love for his daughter, a daughters relationship with her father, and how we as a species navigate this world together.
I’m grateful for the teachings about the Yoruba Ifa, and glimpses into life in India.
Thank you Bayo for sharing these deeply intimate letters to your daughter with us. It’s a medicine I didn’t know I needed.
September 2, 2024
I first heard Bayo Akomalafe on the excellent Spaceship Earth podcast.
Started out a bit rolleyes at the way the child was the centre of this book, however I got past this based on:
- questioning myself for being rolleyes at explicit child centred parenting
- accepting that as a book structuring device, it works.
I am a massive fan of Barad's agential realism and posthuman critiques of modernity and this book brings it all together in a western de-centering. There are moments of discomfort and disagreement but the book is navigated with a consistent push to act in the middle, recognise our intra-active world making, and most beautifully, to move AWKwardly shunning modernity's narrative of 'forward'.
Started out a bit rolleyes at the way the child was the centre of this book, however I got past this based on:
- questioning myself for being rolleyes at explicit child centred parenting
- accepting that as a book structuring device, it works.
I am a massive fan of Barad's agential realism and posthuman critiques of modernity and this book brings it all together in a western de-centering. There are moments of discomfort and disagreement but the book is navigated with a consistent push to act in the middle, recognise our intra-active world making, and most beautifully, to move AWKwardly shunning modernity's narrative of 'forward'.
December 24, 2025
Some parts are beautiful, insightful, quotable — but there’s also a lot of ranting, and the ideas that finally emerge are often not particularly fresh. I was interested enough to keep on reading, in spite of the rambling style, an often unnecessary (and exhausting) verbosity (bordering on, and bleeding into, purpleness) and the not-so-occasional garbled sentence — and I feel I’ve learned a thing or two. But this book is not a keeper.
March 13, 2023
This book was dense and philosophical and, to be honest, there were some ideas I couldn’t quite grasp. But there were times i went racing for a pen to write down quotes, times i had to drop everything and meditate on what i had just read. It took me to new levels of thought about the interconnected of the world.
June 24, 2024
“What could be better than an answer to a question? The gift of bewilderment. The incoming rush of something foreign to the linear logic of the inquiry. New air sucked into the nostrils and lungs. The terrain breaching the neatness of the map. Confusion —or better yet, con-fusion: a mixing together, a messy mangling of things. The motif of becoming generously lost.”
June 28, 2020
The most provocative book I think I've ever read, and the language so breathtaking while he's at it. Queered, wild, troubling... Busting us into new layers and spaces of potential existence. JUST READ IT. READ IT RIGHT NOW.
November 26, 2020
The book over all is very thought provoking. But parts of it were slow and over my head. I think I got the majority of the authors purpose, but it gets a 3 star for this reason. It has highs and lows, interesting and dis interesting parts. I think it was worth reading for sure.
September 9, 2023
I wish I had a daughter to write letters that would build the containers for unanswerable questions. So many things percolating in my being after reading this. So many unanswerable questions. I am well on my way to being lost.
January 10, 2018
I won it in a contest and it was a good read.
April 30, 2023
Writing a review of Bayo seems like a foolish attempt to “understand” or simplify his words. I underlined passages and wrote in the margins. I will come back to this book again.
April 8, 2024
Didn't finish this book. I found myself spacing out over the ramblings.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 19, 2024
In the search for home in the current world this book opens a panoramic sense of finding home in the most alluring places, absolutely a must read for anyone, especially for parents.
Read
April 14, 2025A significant thinker of our time
Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews