Onto-fugitivity: Grounding Sanctuary in the Cracks

Onto-fugitivity – a recurring theme in Báyò Akómoláfé’s writings – is closely related to the idea of sanctuary. More than a concept, onto-fugitivity is a gesture towards a processual/relational ontological position, an invitation to sense beyond ethical monocultures – an invitation to meet and “become with” the multiple agencies at work on this planet.

I also argue that Báyò Akómoláfé’s “methodology of exile” draws from the historical diasporic response to trauma calling for a radical sensorial healing of the rift between “world” – anthropocentric social organization  and “earth” – the metabolic assembly of human, non-human and more-than-human agencies.

Akómoláfé queers and “composts” previous theological traces, rewiring their deep intuitions with contemporary cutting-edge critical thinking. Historical examples of fugitivity include slaves’ practices of marronage, fleeing to the mountains or starting autonomous quilombos. Another way they resisted assimilation was through the adoption of mimetic attitudes, hiding diasporic spiritual practices in the colonizer’s own rituals, furthering creolization and new relational contexts while keeping alive and renewing an “Afrocenic” ethos. Such fugitive sanctuary “at a standstill” – this “generative incapacitation” – dances open a portal out of carceral dimensions rather than reinforcing their status quo by “speaking truth to power.”

But how to disappoint exclusive claims to power, how to renew generative fugitivity in the current neo-liberistic regime of securitarian hyper-visibility, data-mining, global tracing, the biometrical turning bodies into borders? Dreams often gesture towards knowing otherwise and Akómoláfé’s postactivist suggestions bring down to earth the making of “sanctuary in the cracks.”