Intro to The Trouble and Joy of Coming Together: An Essay on Nepantla

In preparation for our first gathering of curators, custodians, basket-weavers and other tricksters, Báyò Akómoláfé sent out this “note” to the network. It came – in part – as a response to a phenomenon that was beginning to grip the world at the beginning of 2020; something known in Swedish as flygskam, or flight shaming. A moral imperative seemed to be spreading from the eco-conscious, progressive movements of the world that air travel was something sinful that must be done away with as soon as possible. Báyò’s piece, The Trouble and Joy of Coming Together: An Essay on Nepantla, troubles the waters of right and wrong (as is tradition) and provokes us to question the ‘true origin’ of everything from games to climate change. Here’s a brief excerpt:

In a short while, we will all be in India…

 

I have been looking forward to this. To welcoming you here and sharing with you. I dreamed up The Emergence Network when a previous partnership with a dear elder failed. I wanted something different, something that was queer enough to trouble the familiar modes of engaging the world. I wanted something that felt like family, like a trans-local network of creatives supported to do impossible things. I have learned more about my initial vision by sitting humbly at your feet, by listening when it was hard to. It has been a troubling-tragic-poetic-glorious ride, riven with shadows and cracks and promise and prophecy. Except for teaching and speaking and studying the universe, I wouldn’t do any other thing in the world: nothing compares to this vocation of opening up new sites of power, which I feel is desperately needed today.

 

When we meet in India, many of us would have flown for thousands of miles to get here. In a former life, there would have been absolutely nothing wrong with this.

 

But Greta Thunberg just took a boat to New York, you might say.

 

Thanks to the sea change in climate politics, the problems associated with air travel are now popular enough to warrant hesitation about taking that next trip. The heavy ritual of flying is now being called into question, given the milieu of militant (often passive-aggressive) carbon activism we now live in.