08/03/2025
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I often ask myself what my cosmopoetics truly offers these times of suffering and pain, what it offers these moments of relentless movement-building, and our shared longings for a more beautiful world.
The ideas of the paragogical (that we cannot unlearn dominance by force of will), of the crack (that agency and transformation are not human stories) and of weird fidelities (that care is a form of harm) are especially unpopular things to say. It would seem that most folks would rather just stick to tried-and-tested humanitarian imaginaries, to "resist-resist-resist", and look for victory in systems of containment.
To suggest that even victory is a function of dominance is to leave people pondering: "then what else?" I often struggle here: I speak with the cadence of the fugitive and in the tense of the subjunctive, which resonates with the unsettled, the not-yet-legible, the minor key. The subjunctive doesn't quite sell like the indicative.
The subjunctive doesn't sell because it can't promise arrival. The indicative offers destinations: "We will overcome." "Justice will prevail." "The arc bends toward..." But "my" cosmopoetics offers something more unsettling and perhaps more honest - a way of moving without destination, of being in relation without resolution.
The promise might be precisely in refusing promise. What this processual poetics offers is a way to stop reproducing domination through our very resistance to it. If even victory reinstalls the master's house with new management, then maybe the gift is learning to inhabit the crack itself - not as a means to somewhere else but as a way of being.
I think about how exhausting the indicative becomes - the constant demand to perform progress, to show we're winning, to prove harm is decreasing. The paragogical tremor I attempt to language into a poetics of slippage offers something like... rest? Perhaps not the rest of completion, but the rest of no longer having to pretend the world makes sense, that care can be pure, that we can touch without wounding.
Cultivating a weird fidelity to monstrosity might be the only honest relationship to a monstrous world. Not to fix it - which always seems to require new forms of capture - but to stay with it, to find the subjunctive spaces where different movements become possible.
People resist this because it feels like giving up. But maybe it's giving up the right thing - the fantasy of innocence, of clean hands, of movements that don't reproduce what they oppose. This ocean-bound cartography suggests navigation without conquest, ways of moving that don't require solid ground.
The promise might be: you can stop pretending. You can admit the harm in your care, the capture in your resistance, the way even your refusal speaks the master's grammar. And in that admission, perhaps something else becomes possible - not victory but a kind of fugitive dignity.
Báyò Akomolafe
Photo: Kyah's drawing of a superhero he calls "Benny". Ironically original.
