“Look how things sprout from other things. How nothing is itself all by itself–or without the contributions of other things. When you happen upon a flower, especially one whose otherworldly beauty and feminine fragility contrast sharply with its less endearing environment, you might immediately treat it as this localized ‘thing,’ as an object–one deserving of admiration–but an ‘object’ nonetheless: removed, unique, separate, and even audacious. What our linguistic conveniences blind us to is how that very flower is no more distinguishable from the dirt, the erratic weather, the traffic of pollen bearers that come from far off, the blazing sun, and even the occasional imprint of a boot worn by an uncharitable tourist, than a wave is distinguishable from the sea” (Akomolafe 2017: 123).
Bayo Akomolafe, in his book These Wilds Beyond Our Fences, sets out to write letters to his daughter in search of ‘home.’ What he finds on his journey is a never-ending procession of middles, not the illustrious homes found in the happy endings of fairy tales. In the ontoepistemology of new materialism (see works by Karan Barad) beginnings and endings are not possible, only emergences and becomings. The world is a meshwork of entanglements where nothing – not human bodies or minds, not flowers, not oceans, not waves – can be separated from the processes that make it. Akomolafe writes, then, that there must be a “redescription of the ‘human’ as a ‘becoming,’ not a final product. A doing, not a noun” (112).
These thoughts bring me back to my reading of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass. Her chapter “Learning the Grammar of Animacy” teaches us about the failings of the English language to breathe agency into the material world around us. Our language sticks us in this Cartesian and postmodern concept of the centralized human that arose during the Age of Enlightenment and has engulfed us throughout the unfolding of modernity. While English fails to realize the agency of the world around us, Potawatomi has ancient wisdom about the world embedded into its grammar structure. Kimmerer uses the English word ‘a bay’ and its somewhat equivalent Potawatomi word ‘wiikwegamaa’ to describe the difference between these two languages:
“A bay is a noun only if water is dead. The bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegamaa–to be a bay–releases the water from bondage and lets it live. ‘To be a bay’ holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers. Because it could do otherwise–become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that, too. To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive. Water, land, and even a day, the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things, through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms. This is the language I hear in the woods; this is the language that lets us speak of what wells up all around us” (Kimmerer 2013: 55).
Akomolafe and Kimmerer speak to the same notion: that ‘things’ are constantly changing, always becoming, shaped by their agency and by the processes of the world around them. We must learn not to see ‘flower,’ ‘wave,’ ‘ocean,’ or ‘bay,’ but how these ‘things’ in this time came to be in this place. To BE a flower, to BE a wave, to BE an ocean and to BE a bay. This way of looking at the world opens up our minds to see our interconnectivity with the materials around us. How did we come to BE human? How did we come to BE ourselves, the you that is sitting now in the chair reading this post? I am as much shaped by my mother and father as I was by the woods I grew up in, and the microbes that live in my gut.
Next post: how Akomolafe’s writings ask us to treat COVID-19 — concepts of alterity, monstrosity, and more entanglements.
The Edited Jottings of an Amateur Anthropologist 