on agility
Yesterday I listened to an interview with the thinker Bayo Akomolafe, where he talked about trickster ecologies, thinking beyond Western/Christian moralities, and his idea of “post activism". He talked about the generative possibilities that emerge when we stop thinking in received systems of good versus evil, when we instead ask what roles we play in creating the moral systems that shape our lives. He told a Yoruba story about the orishas Ogun and Eshu, a story that left me both comforted and unsettled by its ambiguity (When it seems like our gods abandon us, is it always that clear-cut? What does it mean to cross the ocean with a displaced people instead of saving them from displacement? Can we sit in the neither here nor there outside Christian morals, without seeking to correct?)
I was moved by Akomolafe’s discussion about morality, and specifically about goodness. I know Mary Oliver said we do not need to be good, do not need to walk on our knees, etc. But I didn’t realize how much I still orient my behavior around a received notion of Good and Just as centrally important, static ideals.
I was raised to be good. You probably were too. Whether good meant respectable, intelligent, even “spunky” or “feisty” in a liberal feminist sense, this societal frame was always there as a guidepost. As I got older, good shifted. Good means something different in organizing circles, in academia, among people who work to shift the oppressive power structures of our world. But always, good was a destination. A clear and central goal.
I took a workshop last week with the poet Ica Sadagat. We’d spent over an hour trying to unlearn language together, reading poems backwards, playing with voice and breath and the sonic. The breakout rooms on Zoom weren’t working. Ica pivoted. “We stay agile here,” she said. I wrote it down.
The moving away from received morality that Akomolafe invites us to, the sitting in the messiness of the break, is a practice of agility. “Forward movement is no longer possible,” he said when speaking of post-activism. “We must now dance awkwardly.” What does it look like to be agile with the moral systems we have been told are rigid and unchangeable? What does it mean to stay agile here, in this place and this world of unceasing turmoil and change? What does it mean to refuse the Good in service of something deeper, more embodied, and more troubled?
In Western and Christian moralities, the Good is of course tied to God. “God is still figuring themselves out,” Akomolafe says. To refuse the Good is to refuse received authority. To stare into the uncertainty and reality of an ever-shifting and co-created divine.
Akomolafe reminds us that “good is just one of many moral archetypes available, not always promising for the project of thriving on this planet.” We are being called into new forms of relation, new practices and technologies of survival. What lies beyond the good? “In what way does being good actually become an obstacle to becoming sensuous?” Akomolafe asks. “In what way does it become an exoskeleton that chains us to the ground?” I’m thinking of the cyclical forms of protest and publicness that can feel as meaningless and futile as they feel urgent. For Akomolafe, post-activism isn’t a way of losing engagement with collective struggle, but of refusing the reductiveness of the Good. Forward movement is no longer possible. It is time to feel our way towards sedition, to dance as if relearning our bodies.