Last Born In The Wilderness

[Intro: 8:44] In this episode, I speak with Bayo Akomolafe, author of 'These Wilds Beyond Our Fences', Executive Director and Chief Curator for The Emergence Network (A Post-Activist Project), and host of the online writing course, ‘We Will Dance With Mountains: Writing as a Tool for Emergence’.  We begin by discussing Bayo's recent essay ‘I, Coronavirus. Mother. Monster. Activist.’: “One of the central questions I ask with this essay is: If this is indeed a war, do we really want to win it? What if winning is the worst possible outcome we could imagine? Do we want to come out on top, stamp out this viral enemy, and restore agency to the cold ossified tentacles of the familiar? Are we sure this disruption is not what we want, what we’ve cried for in unvoiced ways? Should we not treat this opening as our grand marronage, our fugitive departure from exhausted cottonfields? Nothing about this moment is romantic. And we should be careful about smoothening the hard and recalcitrant edges of this phenomenon to