The Slave Ship in the Anthropocene

Bayo Akomolafe wants to break our "hypnotic trance" in conversations about healing and justice.

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Resonant World #6

We all know that feeling of hearing something that stops us in our tracks.

But it’s a rare speaker who manages to do that every time.

I only came across the work of the author, poet and philosopher Dr Bayo Akomolafe quite recently, but his interview at the Collective Trauma Summit 2022 has been reverberating in me for the past week. (You can watch it here for a limited time for free as part of the summit encore).

Eighteen minutes into the dialogue, Dr Angel Acosta, one of the summit co-hosts, pitched Akomolafe a gigantic question: Reflect on the “world-shaping impact” of the trans-Atlantic slave trade over the past four centuries. Specifically, Acosta wanted to know more about Akomolafe’s interrogation of the history of the slave ship to find new perspectives on today’s social and economic ills.

“I started to really take the slave ship seriously when it occurred to me that it didn’t vanish,” Akomolafe replied. “With due apologies to National Geographic, the Clotilda wasn’t the last slave ship.”

The slave ship didn’t vanish because the drive for profit-at-any-cost that enabled society to treat human beings as objects didn’t vanish, either. It assumed a new guise in what Akomolafe calls “computational capitalism” — the marriage of neoliberalism, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, that seeks to turn every form of transaction into an opportunity for profit. Akomolafe cited the capture of modern dating by Apps such as Tinder, but he could have chosen a million other examples. For me, another obvious facet of “computational capitalism” is the “financialisation of nature”: The push to assign a dollar value to ecosystems such as forests or wetlands on the grounds that harnessing market forces is the only remaining hope of preserving them.

“The slave ship didn’t disappear, in the way that I like to tell it. It vomited its guts upon the shore – and its soul, if you could think about it that way, became our society,” Akomolafe said. “This is a dramaturgical, performative way of storying the ongoing adventures of the slave ship as a central figure of the Anthropocene.”

Akomolafe had thus drawn a straight line between the horrors of the slave ship’s hold and the deepening environmental crises of our current geological age — from accelerating climate breakdown to the cascading collapse of coral reefs and the Amazon. It was an observation that made me catch my breath.

Climate trauma

Why did Akomolafe’s words have such a deep impact?

I think it’s because his portrayal of the slave ship as an enduring, archetypal character in its own right had answered one of the core questions that Resonant World is seeking to address: What is the relationship between the climate crisis and collective trauma?

In Resonant World #1, I drew on the work of Zhiwa Woodbury to argue that the concept of collective trauma throws new light on the question of why the world has missed so many chances to avert climate breakdown — and can point the way towards a more meaningful response. Nevertheless, in considering such questions, I easily find myself getting stuck at the level of abstraction. Colonialism, imperialism and racism may have laid the foundations for the economic exploitation that has brought the world to the brink of disaster in this new age of the Anthropocene. But how to bring these connections to life?

By interrogating the slave ship, Akomolafe had provided a viscerally powerful answer — right down to his description of the nets the owners of the vessels plying the Middle Passage installed to prevent despairing slaves hurling themselves over the side — “architectural solutions to the problem of slave suicide,” as he called them. His goal: To knock his audience out of the grooves of well-worn arguments about current problems and explore how the same patterns of thought that shaped historical atrocities renew themselves in subtler guises.

“I guess with that terrifying and terrible visage of the slave ship, I want to invite a shock to the modern subject. I want to break through the hypnotic trance that is how we discuss healing, or how we discuss justice,” Akomolafe said. “We could do well and install solar panels on the slave ship, but we are still here, caught up in its antics.”

Crucially, Akomolafe was offering more than a spiraling diagnosis of the roots of our seemingly intractable crises. He wants to bring a new lens to our conversations about trauma and healing — to look from the perspective of animism; of indigenous cosmologies; and Eshu, the Yoruba trickster god, among others, so we can see our predicaments with fresh eyes — and source our responses in radically new ways.

“How do we solve climate chaos? It’s not just simply by developing climate cancelling technologies,” Akomolafe said. “We might have to listen to the Atlantic ocean. We might have to listen to the bones of those that were able to jump far ahead of safety, into the waters. We might have to do that kind of work.”

What I have written here doesn’t begin to do the interview justice — which is worth watching not only for Akomolafe’s eloquent and provocative delivery, but for Angel Acosta’s superb, empathic and penetrating interviewing skills. (As a fellow co-host of the summit, I can confirm that watching Acosta at work taught me a lot about how to do a summit interview). Check their conversation out here (free for a limited time only).

And if you’re not familiar with Akomolafe’s work, I highly recommended immersing yourself in his incredible website and The Emergence Network (where he serves as executive director and chief curator) — both rich sources of inspiration, and new perspectives on what it might mean to heal.

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