Meet at the Crossroads: A Final Note from Aerin, Báyò and Yeyo

I wish I’d a knowed more people. I would of loved ‘em all.

If I’d a knowed more, I would a loved more.
― Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

We begin this final letter with something else… something words could never fully articulate: a feeling. A memory of what it has been like to sit with you studying carrots, chai, and cosmologies; time, tomatoes, and temporalities; dance and decoloniality. In short, this letter is more than just a communicative act; it is an unholy sacrament to honour the beautiful brevity of our scandalous love affair. We feel a deep sense of gratitude for the undulating spirits, waltzing aurorae (harbingers of end-times), and whispered rumours carried by errant winds that brought you to us and us to you – at these prophetic crossroads, at these soft spaces, where we hoped to embark on many humble quests for elsewheres of fugitive imagination.

Just so we remember what this was all about: “Meet at the Crossroads” began as a co-learning experiment at the edges of the usual, a democratic assembly of fugitives navigating the debris and flotsam of a fluid, troubled, pandemic world. An end-time study at the fault lines appearing across the land. At the heart of our study has been the invitation – simultaneously historical, mythological, and contemporary – to get lost, to lose our way. Losing one’s way is an act of emancipatory failure or generative incapacitation, a coalitional network of co-worlding, a refusal to continue to pay our tithes at the altars of anthropocentric continuity, a placemaking act that invites collaboration with strange entities, oddkin, crawling critters, and discarded feelings. The promise of losing one’s way is that we might take on new shapes because of our travels.

Through six episodes, six guest-hosts, many breakouts, tears, laughter, music, and the surprising politics in a pot of chai, we revisited the ordinary, jumped from South Africa to India to Costa Rica and the United States, and glimpsed (in small homeopathic doses) the elseworlds that haunt our suffering civilization. We remember it all – and we are thankful for it, and for the call to get lost. 

But what is memory and gratitude without prophecy? What is looking back, if not a queer form of anticipation?

We do not know if we will gather again. The world is too molten now, and we must learn to live with its fugitivity. We must learn to speak with our tongues glued to the sides of our mouths, with humility. And yet, our prophetic imaginations tell us we cannot lose this vocation, and that it is of some use to the times. And to you.

If you would like us to gather again, gift us with the energy to reconvene. Help us meet the moment, so we can continue to assemble griots, tricksters, prophets, and teachers who traffick in lost arts to teach us to live in a terrifying time.

Love,
Aerin | Yeyo | Báyò