Tami Simon: I have a question here from inside the caterpillar that doesn’t want its job. “I don’t want to become a butterfly, gosh darn it. I’m not going to do it, and you can’t make me.” And yet, we find ourselves at times we have outlived something, whether it’s a structure or a set of ideas or the framework, and even hearing a conversation like this or coming to an event like the Three Black Men tour, whatever we’re coming with in our inner life that’s happening where we’re clearly in a transition, but we don’t feel we have the inner resource to move to that next—I mean, Bayo, you talked about it as generative and generous, and I thought, “Maybe,” but it could also be an inner crisis that doesn’t feel that way. It doesn’t feel generative and generous. “In fact, I don’t know if I’ve got it to make it through.”
And I’m wondering if you can talk to that person who’s in that space with whatever breakthrough; they’re in the breakdown part.
Resmaa Menakem: Can I step in for a second, brothers, just for a second? That idea of having, first off, of looking for a breakthrough, is actually anti-creation. When we’re talking about the Blackness, we’re talking about the caterpillar and resisting, what we’re talking about, that is part of creation. That’s not an inconvenience to creation; that is literally part of creation. We have been structured so that when that happens, we look for a way out. We look for, “That should not be happening to me.”
If I’m going to come to a place where Black men are talking about these pieces, I want to be in a place where I can handle it. You don’t get that. You don’t have the things communally and you don’t have the things individually to be able to whole these pieces, because that comes on the back end, not the front end. The pieces that you need in order to be able to actually contend with some of these pieces, you will not [INAUDIBLE] because the constructs don’t allow for you to have those pieces.
So what I say to people is, this is why we say the pieces around nibbling, around contain, around communal, because you will, if you are really about this life of becoming a transformation and understanding race and understanding trauma, understanding the monstrous, if that’s really what you’re about, there is no safety net. There’s only communing with other people as you go through it and noticing your fears and your limitations and how your virtues literally hide your limitations.
The resistance by the caterpillar is not something to be extinguished. The resistance is just part of what is needed in order for the bends to happen, in order for the questions to happen, in order for the caterpillar to say, “Could I just drop off of this damn branch? No, I’m going to hang on just for one more second. I’m going to nibble on this for one more second, and let’s see what emerges from that.” As human beings, we always want to come to something like this. We want to come and say, “I want to make sure I’m safe.” Well, you don’t get that. I don’t get that. That’s not the bargain of creation. The bargain of creation is to go into the Blackness, learn the pieces that you need to learn as you’re going through it, and see what emerges and do it with other bodies.
Orland Bishop: It might come truthful for some to say, “I don’t know how,” but there’s this other point one must relinquish the authority that you carry in the world, and to presume that you don’t know and you still want the authority to carry weapons, to carry whatever, it’s where we are calling the society into a question of what is just.
There are times when we come to this place, and it’s a place of humility to say, “I’ve outgrown the capacity to manage the positions of authority that I was given.” And it’s time to relinquish it with common sense, asking who could be in service now? Society must alternate leadership. When elders mature the capacity to carry, then we let them move into the position. But to want power without allowing the monstrous to guide you is dangerous for the person themselves and for the society that leadership then expresses itself.
We can look at the individual, but part of our work is to look at the society at large and say, “There are people who have been showing their talents, and there’s no occupation for it. There are people who have been protesting for some basic truths and rights for life, and there is no justice for it.” So part of the idea, if the society is going to be a butterfly, we have to actually have good judgment, good discernment, and good, in a certain way, relationships with trust to say, “Who could lead this forward?”
People who create, first create music, not anything else. And if we look at the historical creation of music in this country, we will see the butterfly. We will see the butterfly, what Black people have been giving, as sensitivity for the whole culture to trust the creative acts that have been maturing. And it’s not that it’s any overthrow of any power of authority in any case. It’s saying we could add to the beautification of the world. We can add to the humanization of the world from the feelings that sustain our lives. The feeling of this tension and was brought up, Resmaa was saying, to keep hanging on to some hope that maybe some other day, we’ll get a chance to fly.
The day can only be true if others are saying, “No more oppression. No more denying that it’s my right to govern or my right to enforce or my right to secure.” These are relational factors, and the butterfly as an analogy to the collective soul of a group of people, we all know that we could help each other be better. We know that. So why aren’t we doing it? Why aren’t we saying, “I need you to be able to be myself”? This is a critical step in the tension between the chrysalis and the butterfly.
Resmaa Menakem: Yes, the tension.
Orland Bishop: The tension.
Resmaa Menakem: We don’t want the tension.
Orland Bishop: We don’t want the tension. It’s not just a natural—it’s a supernatural factor.
Resmaa Menakem: That’s exactly right.
Orland Bishop: Because human consciousness is actually hosting something far more creative than what we have already lived into. And this tension between past and future requires us, requires the human being of our time, and yes, welcoming all the inspirations from these other beings who show us how to be with nature and the future when they live out their life. Something dies, and then something is reborn.
Bayo Akomolafe: Thank you, brothers. I want to come at this, this way. Of course, joined from the strands of our conversation and using that beautiful figure of the disappearing caterpillar, if you will. And I think there is a term for the unproductive, non-instrumental goop or soup called imaginal cells.
And I think our problem, or rather, we fall into this habit of beginning analysis with the individual,l and so it gets really sticky. We start with the individual and the individual’s salvation and the individual’s experience. The prime mover, if you will, is the individual. The fetish of modern civilization is the individual. The fetish of white modernity is the individual, the dissociated self. So the self that has been cut off from ritual, from movement. The movement that precedes the eye that moves is not part of the analysis.
But once we start to bring that into the equation, then you can understand how resistance is part of the material for novelty. You can start to understand how even our attempts to push it back is just exactly what the new condition needs to thrive. Because it’s not the individual acting; it’s an assemblage acting. It’s an ecology that is acting. It’s a field. It’s a territory that is breathing together with that situation.
I often tell the story of the Trickster that traveled with the slaves. Brother Orland knows this one well. Brother Resmaa knows this one well, as well. The Yoruba Trickster God issue—and I think, Tami, we’ve spoken about this some other time—travels with the slaves across the Atlantic in the slave ship. This is one of the stories we tell in Yorubaland, in Nigeria and West Africa, that even capture, even that colonial vessel of capture, had a stowaway reality, had a sneaky, unaccounted-for figure that was domiciled and hiding in it. That oppression is never completed all by itself. It’s never fully total.
You could come with your boots and with your flags and with your anthems and with your colonial surveillance technologies and stamp your presence, but even in that, you are creating the very conditions for your upset. You’re creating the very conditions for your own demise. So there’s no totalizing form of containment that is not already inhabited by the Trickster.
Resmaa Menakem: That’s it.
Bayo Akomolafe: Well, we’re living in times of leaders and heroes and all of that. But these are the themes I’m diffractively composing from, listening to my brothers here, that it seems that beyond the leader, beyond the seminal figure who has all answers, there’s a different need in this time. There’s a different need. There’s a shift of the gaze, a power shift, so to speak. And this is the moment for the Trickster to come in and upset those binaries and create something different. Yeah.
Resmaa Menakem: Beautiful, brother. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
Tami Simon: This conversation will be happening in quite a bit more depth: two days in Los Angeles, June 24 and 25. That’s the beginning of the Three Black Men journey. You can join on the 24th for a Black men’s gathering from 10:00 to 5:00, and then on the 25th from 10:00 to 5:00, it’s open to everyone. And the event on the 25th will also be being livestreamed. You can learn more at threeblackmen.com.
And to hear a little bit more, tell me why you decided to structure it this way with one day for Black men and one day for the general public, and if you will, what this prophetic assemblage, the hope might be, if that’s a reasonable thing to put out, for each of these days?
Bayo Akomolafe: Resmaa, Orland, you want to go on this one?
Orland Bishop: The intention was actually a gift to say, if we are together, when the three of us met to host the space, we did not leave out our grandmothers, our mothers, our sisters, our friends. We didn’t leave out the world community that we have always appreciated how they contribute to who we are. But it was the same. If we are together, can we find the level of dynamism, this monstrous goal? Can we actually allow it to come as close to us as possible by being ourselves?
The first day with Black men, it was really for us as well, because we have to inhabit something that is far more everyday challenging to be with in a society where, again, if two or more like us come together, there is some conspiracy for something, to trust that it could be that in some people’s minds, and yet we know the truth, and to give this same expression for Black men or men who identify with their bodies in a world in which they need to have this time. And it really is a gift; it really is a gift to ourselves and each other to ceremonialize the fundamental agreement that puts us in a category of choice, to say, “We are going to choose this as our way to be with each other.” It’s not just a projection. We are saying we are choosing who we are and who we are to be for each other and let that feeling come in, and then we host the larger community.
Resmaa Menakem: For me, to answer this quickly, the day without the white gaze, G-A-Z-E, the day without the gaze of white [INAUDIBLE] looking at us is a day that we can be intimate with other Black men without that gaze being so prominent. And what does show up in the room in terms of internalized white gaze and alignment, we can work with it in our own instruction. So for me, it was about a level of intimacy. And then once we got that, once I got that nutrient, got nurtured by that, then I knew I would be better able to serve another group, a larger group, a group of other types of bodies. But I needed this first.
Bayo Akomolafe: And maybe I will add this. My spiritual intellectual traditions, the traditions that nurture me, which are still ongoing, compel me to say that I don’t even think—I cannot think of Blackness as reducible to identity. I don’t know how to do that. I’m of the Yoruba people. It was shocking for me to learn, not when I was young, when I was quite older, that the Yoruba people did not even christen themselves “Yoruba.” Yoruba, the name Yoruba, is not a Yoruba word. It’s from the stranger. The stranger came, “Oh, those are Yoruba.” And then we’re actually named by the stranger.
This is why I invite people to mispronounce my name. I call it a gift of mispronunciation, because we are constantly in exile and exile is not pathology to us. We’re diasporic. We’re a diasporic culture. We’re constantly traveling. Our work is to travel and disseminate. And this is the reason why the Ifa culture or the Ifa tradition is such a vibrant Afrodiasporic force in the world right now.
And this all leads me to say that there is a sense in which, and I’m speaking through the voices of C.L.R. James, Hortense Spillers, these Black scholars, Fred Moten, that Blackness is not about Black people. Blackness is about arrangements, arrangements or what Brother Orland might even call agreements, and what has been lost and the possibility for newness.
But there is a gift in convening, even within those cartographies that have been traced out. There is. Because how do you define a Black man? How do you define a Black man? But Orland might have something to say about it that might be different from what Resmaa says about it that will be different from what I have to say about it. If we’re going by visuality alone, I’m the Blackest of the three. I mean, these three. I’m pretty Black. I’m blackity Black. But these definitions and identities are roaming and migrant just as well. So there isn’t some pure concepts to arrive at, but that doesn’t mean that we cannot convene around those, even those scratched-in-the-ground definitions that might shift.
And I have to say as well that in how I language whiteness, for instance, it’s not reducible to white bodies as well. I don’t reduce whiteness, because I think whiteness is an arrangement. It’s a posture. It’s a posturing. Nigeria is the largest conglomeration of Black bodies on the planet as in a nation state, Westphalian order. But we are very, very—well, I say all the time, to a comical effect, we’re pretty white because our posture is we need to look like New York, we need to look like London. How do we catch up? It’s a catch-up imperative. And it’s not unique to Nigeria. It’s invading the coast of Africa. We cannot see and identify ourselves and trust ourselves. And I’m not speaking universally, of course this isn’t universally true, but there is a pervasive sense in which we lean forward to the Eurocentric as salvific and messianic. In that sense, we are co-opted and we are enlisted in the reinforcement of white stabilities, white coloniality, a real estate project that enlists bodies in how it comes to matter.
So the white gaze to me is the gaze of the familiar, is the gaze of the neurotypical, is the gaze of the neurotypical, is the violence of visuality that insists that this is how a body is, when bodies are tentacular and masquerade-like and doing more things than visuality can notice. Bodies are diasporic. My name is traveling far beyond your lips can articulate, so mispronounce away, but my name has traveled beyond the moment.
I don’t want to reduce it to reason, but we’re staying with that moment. When we convene Black men, however already troubling it is there with that moment, when we convene Black men, we’re staying with possibility, we’re staying even, and we’re imploding definitions. And then we come to a place where Blackness is a trope of generosity, of radical hospitality. And we’re saying, “Everyone come because you need to be here, because whiteness isn’t working for you as well, because you’re on top of this pyramid, and when you’re on top of a pyramid, it’s very lonely. There isn’t space to be around, but there’s space here in the cracks.”
Tami Simon: One thing, Orland, that you said that stuck with me, maybe you’ll find it surprising, was when you said the first creative act is making music. And I think I found that surprising, because during the whole first half of our conversation, I had the experience that I was listening to music, listening to the three of you talk together. I kind of felt, inside my body, this is what it feels like when I listen to really good music.
And the question that occurred to me is I’m curious how you each experience your sort of inner instrumentation, if you will, or vocalization or inner music, what that’s like for you as individuals who are now playing, creating music together, what that’s like for you?
Resmaa Menakem: I have had the experience from being with these brothers, and it’s interesting that you just couched it like that, because ever since I’ve been starting to meet with these brothers, one of the ancestors’ images that keeps popping up for me is Miles Davis. He keeps popping up, and it’s just a quick image of him onstage with the trumpet down. And ever since we’ve been talking and convening with each other, that image has been coming up.
And I believe that the vibratory languaging is that we are jazz. We are doing this jazz thing with each other, and I’m doing it with Coltrane and Thelonious Monk. You know what I mean? And we are doing this thing, and we’re playing these pieces, and we’re playing. That’s the thing about good musicians and good artists and people who do things well. At some point, they find a way to play, get back to the play. The resistance of the caterpillar resisting butterfly is a form of play.
And so that’s what I kind of see. I see us as this kind of jazz trio that’s doing these things and then we look at each other and we pitch each other and I go, “Oh yeah, I like that shit. I like that shit, yeah. Oh, yeah.” You know what I mean? He’s like, “Oh, you like that? Let me do this.” That’s what I kind of see us doing, and this whole experience, this thing that we’re doing with each other in LA, that’s the way it is. That’s what it’s going to be. It’s going to be a jazz.
Orland Bishop: And that’s the arrival space, the jazz level, but there’s a progression. So from the Negro spirituals, as they were called, those labor songs in which they had to invoke from the earth a kind of sanctuary, to create sanctuary in the slave plantation, to create sanctuary in the spaces where there was so much violence. The only way it was to create a kind of guardian over the sense perception that you don’t live in the terror all the time. Music was the Trickster again, giving compassion to sense perception, teaching it how to survive, not to live within, and develop certain kinds of codes that then were transmitted in the music, building a consciousness field of relatedness so when somebody hear this song, they’re comforted.
And so there were comfort songs, and progressively a pedagogy in it that strengthens the will. Even the Civil Rights Movement had its songs to accompany the risks that they were taking, to prepare the psyche to have certain kinds of visions and determinations.
By the time we got to jazz, we were getting to the level of a kind of improvisation, the capacity to overcome the patterns of oppression that had to be learned and negotiated. But music is actually a prophetic space preparing the human perception to adapt, and who doesn’t like jazz? All souls, whether you’re Black or white, get the motivation of it, which is to step out, step out of the habit of predicting what may come next and just listen and create the listening as you listen, to create the anticipation of a certain kind of freedom, to appreciate something that the other one will—you prefer the other one to play it than you.
So this is jazz; you don’t compete. You create something and give it to someone else to add to it, and it moves. This is civilization in its potential becoming. And I think why these beings who have given us such great music are being felt now because they’re the elders of a culture. They’re the elders. They’re the ones who prepared the capacity to be a host for the creativity that will come from all of our struggles.
Bayo Akomolafe: This one overwhelms me because I don’t know how to—every time I write, I write with music, I think with music, so that it’s become impossible for me to think of myself as an author, as a separate eye that composes words. That’s a very neurotypical assemblage. What comes first, the singer or the song? Is it a singer that produces the song, or the song produces the singer?
In a very powerful sense, speaking about the musicality of this project, and this is how I want to see it, there is a sense in which this is rippling and simmering and bebopping and bouncing with multiple beats and rhythms. I’m hearing hip-hop here. Hip-hop is here, and hip-hop is realistic, and hip-hop is LA. We went around to the origins of hip-hop to sports, and we’re marking territories, and we’re tracing out histories. That’s hip-hop, and hip-hop, I think everyone knows the history of that. It’s samba in Brazil. It’s the rhythmic refusal to be part of the surveillance state. How samba developed was in hideouts, sitting in Rio, and then the soldiers marched past and request Black bodies to show themselves, but yet they will be hidden in pequeña Africa, the little Africa, and they would compose these seditious, scandalous beats that came to be known as samba.
And this project is also Afrobeats. It’s Fela Aníkúlápó Kuti inviting people into the spiritual underground, saying, “Hey, I don’t want to be part of the human rights. I’m an animal.” Almost like take away your human rights. That’s one interpretation. Take away all your human rights. How dare you invite me into that space, as if you invented what it means to be human. These are the resonant and dissonant rhythms that are coming from this assembly and informing our movement together.
Tami Simon: Bayo Akomolafe, Orland Bishop, Resmaa Menakem, three Black men together in Los Angeles, June 24 and 25. The 25th event will be livestreamed and open to the public. You can learn more at threeblackmen.com.
Before we end, I just want to throw it back open and at you. Any final comments you’d like to share? Anything coming through?
Resmaa Menakem: I’m just anxious to get to LA. That’s the only thing I got.
Orland Bishop: The invitation is to bring humor to this as well. I want to emphasize the humorous part. We want to be able to, after this, really have a good laugh about the things that happen, not just to kind of—community ends with this kind of celebratory space. We really want to invoke the sensitivity towards not taking all of this so seriously that we leave out the fun of being human. It’s a reflection where friendship replaces all the power dynamics. There’s so many powers that we could all pursue and have and dream of, but when we leave a space as friends, it’s the most amazing gift.
And we’ve been cultivating our relationship. Every moment we get a chance to organize, we actually build on something that we know we all need from each other to be able to have that. And after some of the calls and time spent, there’s so much beauty to reflect on, and I need this from my brothers. I need this from my community.
Bayo Akomolafe: All I’ll say is let’s get it.
Resmaa Menakem: Let’s get it.
Bayo Akomolafe: Let’s eat.
Resmaa Menakem: That’s it, that’s it.
Bayo Akomolafe: Let’s joke. Resmaa, what’s it? The dozens, right?
Resmaa Menakem: Yeah. That’s it.
Bayo Akomolafe: There’s going to be a lot of—this is storytelling at the edge of demise.
Resmaa Menakem: That’s it. Yeah, that’s it.
Bayo Akomolafe: It’s at the edge as things flail and dissipate and flow into the ether. There is a kind of work that is present, that is embodied, that is both grounding and releasing and expansive, that this is an attempt to experiment with. And I cannot think of any other person I would rather do this with, any other persons I’d rather do this, with than my elder brothers. Emphasis on elder.
Resmaa Menakem: I knew he was going to do that. I knew he was going to do that again.
Bayo Akomolafe: Yeah, yep.
Orland Bishop: And I would just say as well, Tami, this kind of hospitality, this space, this forum is the example of the kind of relationships we want to, in a way, honor. It’s not just an interview. This is a hospitality that I think it’s time that we all share. So thank you as well for hosting us.
Bayo Akomolafe: Thank you, Tami. Thank you, Tami.
Resmaa Menakem: Yeah, thank you. Thank you for hosting us.
Tami Simon: Thank you. Thank all three of you for your deep hospitality and welcoming of me and the Sounds True audience. I have tremendous gratitude pouring out. Thank you.
Resmaa Menakem: Thank you.
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