These Wilds Beyond Our Fences

Bayo Akomolafe left a teaching position as a professor and clinical psychologist in a Nigerian university to pursue “a small and intense life”— a life outside the highways of the familiar, outside of fences. In a sense, his decolonizing journey in the wilds, in the borderlands of globalizing culture, began when he met Ijeoma, his wife of Indian and African descent, and when a healer suggested to him “that I could find my way if I were willing to become generously lost.” His quest is to tell the stories of the occluded, to make room for other spaces of power and invite the proliferation of multiple natures. This, his first book is a foray into the ordinary “which the extraordinary is always trying to become.” Akomolafe lectures and gives talks internationally, mostly keynote speeches, and is Chief Curator for an earth-wide commonwealth of curators working from a different ethos of responsivity, called The Emergence Network. He currently lives in India with his “life-force,” Ijeoma (or Ej), and their two children: Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden.

Bayo Akomolafe left a teaching position as a professor and clinical psychologist in a Nigerian university to pursue “a small and intense life”— a life outside the highways of the familiar, outside of fences. In a sense, his decolonizing journey in the wilds, in the borderlands of globalizing culture, began when he met Ijeoma, his wife of Indian and African descent, and when a healer suggested to him “that I could find my way if I were willing to become generously lost.” His quest is to tell the stories of the occluded, to make room for other spaces of power and invite the proliferation of multiple natures. This, his first book is a foray into the ordinary “which the extraordinary is always trying to become.” Akomolafe lectures and gives talks internationally, mostly keynote speeches, and is Chief Curator for an earth-wide commonwealth of curators working from a different ethos of responsivity, called The Emergence Network. He currently lives in India with his “life-force,” Ijeoma (or Ej), and their two children: Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden.