Bayo Akomolafe on "The Untimely": Staying in the Gap Between the Tick and the Tock
The Long Now Foundation
At the Long Now Foundation's Cowell Theater talk in San Francisco, poet-philosopher Bayo Akomolafe tried out an idea he said he was "still working out": the untimely. He started from a question the host posed in the introduction. If time is not natural or neutral, but a constructed story with an agenda, what does it mean for something to be untimely, and what might untimeliness make possible? Akomolafe did not answer with a new model of time or an alternative clock. He argued that the clock we already live by is incomplete, that it has always produced an excess it cannot account for, and that this excess is where something new is happening. He drew on Yoruba birth-order traditions, histories of the Middle Passage, recent physics papers, and his autistic son's relationship to calendars. He called the result "theory together," and said the best kind is the incomplete kind.
Time as Wallpaper, and Time Misbehaving
Akomolafe began by noting how thoroughly time is taken for granted. It is usually treated as a universal backdrop, the narrator of the universe's story, "with David Attenborough's voice." He grew up in Nigeria hearing that time is money and that time must be invested. He attended time management classes, and he joked that these rarely make anyone better at managing time, just as work-life balance classes "don't actually balance anything out." In this view time is "massive wallpaper," an eternal witness to everything that exists.
Yet he argued that we are now in a moment when "time is misbehaving." Time seems "calibrated to our extinction," and he linked this to the Anthropocene: the sense that we are already dead and moving inexorably toward a threshold of no return. He cited Simon Stiell, executive secretary of the UNFCCC, who said in 2024 or 2025 (Akomolafe wasn't sure which) that the world had two more years. That puts the end of the world, in Akomolafe's wry framing, "around this time." Constantly running out of time, he said, is frightening and upsetting.
Why Alternative Clocks Don't Get Us Out
One response to this disappointment, Akomolafe observed, is to proliferate temporalities: indigenous time, spiritual time, yoga time, "hammer time." Among these he named long time and deep time, and he noted that long time is exactly what his hosts at Long Now pursue with their 10,000-year clock. Both are meant to offer something other than confinement in classical time.
His objection is that neither dislodges us from what he called the logic of modernity, which he identified as the logic of human supremacy. "You can extend time and still keep yourself in the seat of mastery." Thinking 10,000 years ahead still keeps the human at the center of the analysis. Deep geological time promises humility. Akomolafe argued it produces pride instead: look at us, able to calculate millions of years forward and back. If every alternative to standard time repeats the logic of human centrality, he said, then "we're stuck and we're going around in circles."
This is where he placed his own suspicion. As a Black studies scholar, he described himself as "programmatically suspicious of time," a disposition he traced to the thinkers who formed him: Frantz Fanon, C.L.R. James, Fred Moten, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka. From them he learned to look "with squinted eyes" at time as an accepted category.
Taiwo, Kehinde, and Idowu: A Yoruba Story of Twins
To introduce the untimely, Akomolafe told a story from Nigeria. According to him, Nigeria has more twins than anywhere else on the planet, with India second. Scientists travel to Igboora, a Yoruba town, to study the phenomenon. When asked the secret, locals say they don't know, and multiple documentaries have not explained it.
The high rate of twins has produced what he called "twin-sensitive technologies and rituals," especially naming by birth order. The first-born twin is always named Taiwo, meaning roughly "I came out first to see the world." The second is Kehinde, "I came out after the one who came out first." In Yoruba understanding, though, the order inside the womb is reversed. Kehinde is the elder and sends Taiwo out first to check whether the world is fine and to cry loudly as a signal to follow. By outside reckoning Taiwo is older. In the belly, Taiwo is the younger one, sent ahead.
The story then turned personal. A woman told him that in 1981 she gave birth to twin boys who both died the same day. The first came out too soon and died. The second was incubated, and a nurse mishandled him. She used the word "murdered." The woman is Akomolafe's mother. He said he learned the full story only recently. It had been a family secret that was "not quite a secret," floating in the air without ever being digested. He is now writing a new book about it with her.
Akomolafe was born after his brothers died, and the child born after twins has its own Yoruba name: Idowu, meaning "I came after the twins." He described himself as grown "in that field, the sweltering heat of trauma." According to the Yoruba, he said, Idowu is actually the eldest of the three. Twins arrive with a feverish, speculative energy; one soul is believed to take two bodies. That charge could debilitate the community hosting it. He quoted a proverb: a mother who has twins but no Idowu will go mad. Idowu's role is to hold the twins' charge. Idowu does not resolve the binary. Idowu hosts it, exceeds it, "compost[s]" it. His elders now tell him that since his brothers have been "sublimated into the atmosphere," he must meet culture as if it were his brothers, holding the binary of modernity the way Idowu holds the twins.
This became the organizing figure of the talk: "the untimely is Idowu." It names the excess, residue, and surplus of temporality, whatever cannot be resolved in time.
Against Alternatives, Toward Excess
From Idowu, Akomolafe turned to a critique of "alternatives." He argued that one of the most devastating moves activists made in answer to the claim that "there is no alternative" was to insist that there are alternatives, because building an alternative repeats the logic of what you are escaping. His example was anti-capitalism, which capitalism readily turns into a product: "How do I make it juicy and productive?" Alternatives replicate the original "like twins."
What trickster cultures, feminist epistemologies, indigenous cosmologies, and Black studies invite instead, he said, is attention to excess. His provocation was that we should turn toward the clock itself rather than away from it. The clock "is producing much more than time"; it secretes "a strange kind of Idowu." There is something between the tick and the tock, "something older than the count." He had earlier described this to the public as "temporal droppings," "autistic meanderings that stray from linearity," little curls and sedimentations of time. He admitted it almost resists language. His best formulation: Idowu is "the third that is not part of the count, but that breaks the count itself. It's not 1, 2, 3. It's 1, 2…"
Dancing the Slave: The Whip, the Downbeat, and Capoeira
Akomolafe then went to the Black Atlantic, citing Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, and Hortense Spillers (whose phrase about the "hieroglyphics of the flesh" he invoked) as people he thinks with. His first example was the Middle Passage practice known as "dancing the slave." On some voyages, enslaved people were brought up from the hold to be aired and made to dance. The ship's surgeon justified this as keeping the "commodities marketable," getting blood moving through their veins.
He asked the audience to imagine dancing shackled to the ship, ankles grating against steel so that every movement cut flesh, with a whip keeping the count. Comparing it to a metronome, he said the whip was the downbeat, the command "Now!" Its landing on their backs "created a temporal subject."
But the dancing produced something the whip did not anticipate. As bodies moved to the beat, against the steel and with the heave and sway of the ship, "some other movement besides their movement was happening," a movement "not part of the ledger." He described this as an interval, a gap, which became a forebear of what Brazilians today call capoeira. He explicitly said he was not claiming a direct causal link between the shipboard punishments and capoeira, only that they "came from the same underbelly of the ship." In the swinging bodies there was resistance the masters could not see. He described it as the upbeat, "the body syncopating coloniality," disturbing the count. In his voice: "They made me dance… but as I was dancing, I was dancing the ship. I was dancing my destiny."
The Plantation Bell and the Gaps Where Music Grew
His second Black Atlantic example was the plantation bell, which he offered as one reason Black scholars "recoil from time." The bell commanded: eat now, stop eating, go to the fields, come back. It produced the subordinated subject and the constant "showing up," being ticked off on the ledger. "Time has a prestigious history of colonizing bodies within the metronome of anticipation."
Yet every mark also creates a not-mark, he argued, just as creating an exit creates an entrance. Each time the bell tolled and the ledger made its "imperial signature," a gap opened. In those gaps people made songs, and he traced a chain through jazz, hip-hop, reggae, and the blues. Here too he stopped himself: "I'm not saying there's a causal link… It didn't exactly happen that way." His point was that these forms "came from the gaps between the times," the intervals the bell produced without intending to.
Quantum Papers and a "Wobbly" Time
The third strand, which he said he would not dwell on, came from physics. He mentioned two papers, one released May 3, three days before the talk. He admitted he doesn't fully understand their mathematics and is still digesting them. His reading is that both say time is "not settled": the more precise our measuring instruments, the more we find that time is "speculative," a superposition, something here and there at once, "like Taiwo and Kehinde." He summarized them as suggesting time is "fundamentally undecided."
He connected this to his Black studies sources. The implication he drew is that coloniality cannot stake a final claim on bodies because time itself is "jiggly and wobbly and shaking and twerking," and the clock hides this dancing. Together, he said, the Black Atlantic stories and the physics papers invite us to revisit our claims to mastering time. The point is not to mass-produce alternative clocks but to notice that "the clock itself is masquerading its incompleteness." "You were never locked into the plantation," he said. The temporal disciplines that make us good subjects of the nation-state "are fugitive and doing crazy things at night," which he compared to Toy Story.
The Accommodation and the Paraterranean
Akomolafe then made what he called a critical claim: that we live inside an "accommodation." He described it as a house or field where bodies become legible and visible and take shape. Modernity's accommodation is "machinic," he said; it "hates cracks" and anything incomplete. It works through "categoricity," the urge to finalize what you are and draw a steady line around you. That, in his account, is modern power: once you can be figured out, you become archivable, surveillable, incarceratable.
Beneath the accommodation he placed what he called the "paraterranean," an unresolved underbelly that tickles the accommodation's marble surfaces and reminds it that it is not finished. He promised to say more about the term another time.
The accommodation keeps its shape in several ways. One is inclusion. He said the history of modernity is "the history of the pathologization of monsters," and that what modernity doesn't understand it either pathologizes or offers "a seat at the table" so it can be known and seen. He cited what he called an apocryphal set of Chinese curses: may you live in interesting times, may you be seen by the emperor, and "the cursiest of all curses," may you get what you want. The accommodation offers you what you want. You believe the desire is your own when it is "ecologically engendered" by the accommodation, and you call the choice between Pepsi and Coke freedom. Even speaking truth to power, he said, can be a form of legibility that sustains the accommodation, a kind of "ecological ventriloquism."
Another way it keeps its shape is by misnaming the untimely as lateness. His example was "African time," the self-reproach that Africans are perpetually late and will never catch up with the West, civilizationally or at gatherings. He suggested instead that "something in our bodies resists the punctuality of colonization," something "not available for imperialism." The accommodation teaches us to pathologize it as a flaw to remove.
The Parapolitics of the Untimely
Every time the accommodation clears the stage and renews itself, Akomolafe argued, it creates an excess. As technologies grow more precise, as life becomes more endangered, as we become "more technologically sophisticated in creating genocide," the cracks appear everywhere and "we are feeling it in our bones." He named grief that is "not even our own," and a sense that agency, solutions, and even calls for justice are "not enough."
He called what this opens the "parapolitics of the untimely," distinguishing it from politics, which he described as being about being seen. He placed the term in the cadence of Du Bois and the thinking of Fred Moten, Nahum Chandler, and Saidiya Hartman: the way modernity has "cradled" us is too violent, and something "in excess of ontology, in excess of the world" wants to meet us in our most vulnerable places. The untimely, he said, is not counting time or a known future. It is staying with uncertainty, failure, and what doesn't fit.
Eshu in the Slave Ship: Decolonization as Incompleteness
He returned to Yoruba cosmology for a piece he had left out. Eshu is the trickster who lives at the crossroads and straddles worlds. Akomolafe claimed Eshu appears in unexpected places in popular culture. He said the Washington Monument is, in Yoruba stories, Eshu's phallus, "and I'm not even kidding." He also said the designer of the xenomorph in Ridley Scott's Alien modeled it on Eshu. Most importantly, Eshu is also called Idowu: Eshu "comes after the twins."
The story he said he loves, learned from his elders, is that when the slave ships arrived, Eshu "did not fight the clock" and did not build an alternative to mastery. He entered the slave ship and "unpackaged" it, undoing power from within. That is the operation Akomolafe said we are now invited into. Decolonization cannot be about building another world, which risks repeating what we oppose. It means "insisting that the world… that is upsetting us is not complete." Decolonization, in his phrase, is "the radical incompleteness of things": noticing the cracks and inhabiting them through experimentation, cooking, reading, and gathering together amid genocide, loss, climate change, pandemics, fascism, and "presidents that insist they're Jesus Christ."
To those who say we are out of time, he agreed: "yes, we are out of time." But he added that there is "sanctuary." Sanctuary is not a project for Tuesdays and Thursdays; it is "what the world is conspiring to create with the cracks in our own bodies." He rejected the humanist framing of a speaker telling an audience to go practice what they've learned. The untimely "is not something you practice. It's something that practices you," and it is already enlisting us. The task is to stay alive to it rather than glossing over the cracks in an effort to buy more time.
"There Are Things I Have to Do That You Know Nothing About"
He ended the talk with his eight-year-old autistic son, the reason he calls untimeliness "autistic time." In 2023, while the family lived in Germany, his son woke every day saying "Merry Christmas," sincerely and joyfully. It became so intense that they bought a Santa Claus costume, which Akomolafe still has, and his wife decorated the house, in April. One exhausted morning Akomolafe told his son that Christmas happens only once a year, on December 25th. With tears in his eyes the boy replied, "But it's Christmas." Akomolafe said the moment wounded him, or broke him open.
He brought the story to his friend Allan Bishop while they were traveling in California for Three Black Men, a documentary with Resmaa Menakem. Bishop paused and asked why Akomolafe was "gentrifying this boy." What if his son perceives time radically differently from a neurotypical mind? What if he is slow to buckle his shoes because "his head has to pass through the Milky Way to get to his feet"? Akomolafe said he has held onto that ever since. The discipline of citizenship, he said, blinds us to the world's excess, to the fact that "the world has never been in short supply of enchantment," and that seemingly solid things are "undecided and unsettled." (He also added, "Please pay your bills.")
His son often walks in circles. When Akomolafe asked why, the boy answered: "Dad, there are things I have to do that you know nothing about." Akomolafe took this as the definition he opened with: the untimely is "something to do that we know nothing about." It is not a blueprint, project, plan, or foundation, yet we are being enlisted in it. Quoting Édouard Glissant, he recalled that the bodies taken across the Atlantic had no plan or GPS; they were "dragged into the mist," and that being spirited away "blessed them strangely with new kinds of sensibilities." He suggested that we, at the thresholds of modernity, are being taken by "untimely ships" too: into grief, new forms of ancestrality, recapitulations of trauma, "stories of twins that haven't quite left us." The work, he said, is to stay with it, travel with it, and listen, in intergenerational work none of us will figure out "in one fell swoop."
Conversation: Grace as Monstrous, Not Amazing
In the conversation that followed, the interviewer, who had worked with Akomolafe on his latest book, Selah, asked about his idea of grace as monstrous. Akomolafe said he thinks of grace as "awkward, not amazing." He recalled the parable in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov in which Christ returns to the church. As he remembered it, the church locks Christ up instead of welcoming him, telling him he is disturbing too much and spoiling their business. He called this a potent picture of grace: "monstrous in its appearing."
By monstrous he did not mean the Disney-style criminalized monster. He meant the folkloric, indigenous sense of something that reworks time and bodies, and he said the root of the word means "to rework." The monster is neither good nor bad; it reworks the binary. To illustrate, he gave what he called an "ungentlemanly" example. Someone in a room or on a plane releases a fart; everyone wrinkles their nose, deflects suspicion, and gradually gets used to it. Then someone new walks in and asks, "What's that foul smell?" The instinct, he said, is to treat the newcomer as the monster, because the monster reveals our desensitization. "It's not the monster bringing the chaos. The monster is introducing us to the chaos we're already in." Grace, for him, is that arrival: a reminder that we are not well put together, and that this is fine. If we were final and complete, "there's nothing else to do. We're stuck in coloniality." Grace is "the entrance of movement" into a sterile, carceral, colonial dimension.
Progress, the Catch-Up Imperative, and Ancestrality
Asked how our conception of time supports particular ideas of progress, Akomolafe called progress teleological, a discretization of life-worlds "to fit the imperatives of the highway," built on time as an arrow. He recalled, without being able to name him, a sociologist who arranged civilizations on a line with the United States, the global North, and Europe at one end and Africa and Asia at the other. This produces what he called the "catch-up imperative" in Africa: the sense that "we need to look more like California in order to be fully ourselves." In his own education, he said, he learned more about U.S. presidents than Nigerian ones, and learned to approximate a BBC newscaster's English rather than his grandmother's.
Progress, he argued, "empties locality. It makes place space." To travel straight, it must get rid of ancestrality. But he warned against mistaking ancestrality for a romanticized past. He sees this especially in the United States, as a "heavy originalism," a treatment of indigenous cosmologies as things to pick off a shelf and apply, "the magical negro in other forms." For him ancestrality is "the immediacy of other bodies in the room," the sense that the world is not empty. He cited James Hillman on the world as replete with life, the anima mundi. "We are too crooked to travel straight," he said. However much modernity wants us to walk straight, "we must limp. And that limping is our salvation."
Time as Collaboration: The Great Dismal Swamp
Asked what it would mean for time to be a medium of collaboration rather than accommodation, Akomolafe pointed to the Great Dismal Swamp, which an audience member confirmed lies between North Carolina and Virginia. People escaping plantations in the antebellum South found their way there, not with a map, but because "somehow their bodies took them there." The swamp had a temporality entirely different from the plantation's tick-tock downbeat, so different that it kept out dogs and masters. He noted that it has since shrunk and dried, and that archaeologists are still recovering the tools people used to live in a place both hostile and hospitable. For him it is a story of "how life worlds are built in the cracks."
Today, he said, we meet through schedules and calendar appointments, but there are other ways of showing up that are not in the ledger and can only be spoken through poetry, or through the words of an autistic boy walking in circles. He declined to define the untimely: "I cannot nail it down… I refuse to do that." What he could say is that something is working on people's bodies and ancestralities that won't leave them tidy. They may already recognize it as a dream that keeps them awake, a chronic lack of punctuality, a failure at time management, "something getting in the way of your being a good citizen." That, he said, might be how we reach each other, in compassion for our failures, even hugging a stranger.
Audience Questions: Friendliness With Time, and Time as Currency
To an audience question about becoming friendlier with time rather than fearful, Akomolafe joked, "Take a time management class." He then answered seriously that he does not want to be friendly with time. His body is positioned differently toward modern temporality; he is "looking for fugitive spaces" and wants out of the arrangement, and said a TEDx speaker would be better for that.
A cryptically punctuated question about time as currency in lieu of money drew laughter and some fumbling. Before answering, he gave a caveat he said he repeats often: reducing whiteness to white bodies is itself "an operation of whiteness," because it treats the isolated individual as the field. He described Nigeria as "the blackest nation on Earth" and yet "pretty white," because, following Fred Moten, whiteness is a practice, not an identity. Currency, he argued, is how white modernity arranges value in ways "coterminous with settlement." He compared it to frequent flyer miles that can only be spent within the establishment that issued them, so that spending reproduces the system. Time circulates in the same way, hence "time is money." What interests him more is not noting this but asking what else the currency does: where time pools, forms eddies, goes around without completing the circuit, and fails to become investment, as when philanthropy "fails" and becomes gift. That, he said, is how time is "autistic."
The Messiah and the Cracks in Attention
The final prompt invoked Walter Benjamin's angel of history, messianic time, and a Talmudic saying: three things come when you're not looking for them, a scorpion bite, a lost object, and the Messiah. Akomolafe connected it to what he is exploring in his new writing, the "attentional." He proposed that "no one actually pays attention." Attention is not something we give; it is more like weather or geology that holds our bodies. His example came from a woman in Brazil. In a room she made a point she considered brilliant and no one responded; a white man with a PhD sitting beside her repeated it and got applause. The problem was not a bad audience, Akomolafe said, but an "infrastructure of attention" that bends toward value and congregates around the presentable, credentialed figure.
To say "let's pay attention" therefore obscures too much, he argued. He wants to investigate how the attentional drags and magnetizes bodies, like gravity, into repeating the logic of modernity, and to look for its cracks. "Maybe the Messiah comes through the cracks, not from the sky, but through the cracks. Maybe that's where new futures are buried." He added that these cracks are not distraction either, but said that was a longer story for another time.
The untimely is something to do that we know nothing about. It's not a blueprint. It's not a project. It's not a plan. It's not a foundation. It's something to do that we know nothing about, and yet we are being enlisted in the doing of it.
Of all the systems that give shape, meaning and order to our collective and personal lives, time may be one of the most taken for granted. I mean, time is, I don't know, time. There's past, present and future. There's seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years. There's calendars and clocks, seasons and cycles. For most of us, time is simply the water we're swimming in.
But what if I told you that time is not natural, nor is it neutral? Time is conceptual, constructed. Time is relative, scientifically speaking, but also culturally. Time is a story. Time has an agenda.
You might then take the time to ask, "Well, if time is a story, what story does our society's version of time tell? And if time has an agenda, whose agenda does that story reinforce?" Furthermore, what might it mean within the context of that story and agenda for someone or something to be untimely? And what might that very untimeliness make possible?
I can think of no better guide through the various scales, cycles, seasons and stories of mythical, mechanical and even messianic time than my dear brother, Bayo Akomolafe. Please enjoy the rest of this untimely evening.
My name is Bayo Akomolafe and thank you for coming out to listen to this talk on the untimely. I'm still working out what this means, but I thought that we could share together and create theory together, which is the best kind of theory, the incomplete ones.
I want to give thanks to time. Okay? We really do give thanks to time, right? We just imagine time like Eden came out a while ago and said time is just there. There's this presumption that time is just this universal backdrop, right? But I want to thank time in a way, at least in the popular imaginations that we have about time. In a sense, we are in time's story, right? This is, in a sense, time's tale, its own speech.
If there were any grand narrator of the emergence of the universe or the emergence of species, it would be time with David Attenborough's voice, possibly. But yes, we seem to be living in time's story. We're speaking about beginnings, we're speaking about time, we're speaking about ending, we're speaking about time. Time seems to be all in all.
I grew up in Nigeria and we had songs that basically came down to the idea that time is money, right? And you must invest your time. And we went to time management classes. How many of you have been to time management classes? Just raise your hands up. Don't be shy, it's okay. How many of you actually got good with managing your time from those management classes? Oh, okay.
Right? They're just like the work-life balance classes that don't actually balance anything out. Well, that's how we see time. It's just massive wallpaper. This background, this eternal witness to everything that persists and exists.
And yet, it seems we're in a time when time is misbehaving. Right? It seems we're in a moment when time isn't doing what we expect it to do. I said to some folks yesterday that it seems that time now is calibrated to our extinction. Right? We call that the Anthropocene. It's the idea that we are, in a sense, already dead. And we're just moving inexorably towards that threshold of no return.
And so, you hear people speaking about there's no more time. Or that we have 2 more years. That's the new one. Right? In 2028, we would have crossed the threshold of no return, and climate effects would kick us into oblivion or out of the Garden of Eden. Right? And that's the new prognosis. That's the new idea. We keep on running out of time.
Simon Stiell, he's the executive secretary of the UNFCCC. I'm not sure how many C's are there. There's a couple of C's. He's the dude that is in charge of the UN's framework for climate change. And he said in 2025 or 2024 that we had 2 more years. So, the world is supposed to end around this time. According to him.
We're in a day and a time when time seems to be winding down, and there's something scary and upsetting and unfurling about that. And so, what we're doing is we are proliferating other kinds of temporalities in response. And so, we have indigenous time, and some people speak about spiritual time, and some people speak about yoga time, and some people speak about hammer time, and some people speak about, you know, we're proliferating the clocks, aren't we?
Too many times we're proliferating clocks as if to create an alternative to the massive disappointment that classical time is. Right? The standard time isn't treating us too well. So, let's proliferate other clocks.
There's long time, there's deep time. You've heard about long time, right? It's what exactly my brothers and sisters in this organization are doing. Let's build a 10,000-year clock. Right? But there's something about building 10,000-year clocks, or deep time, deep geologic time, considering the massive scale of our emergence, right? Billions of years. If we consider that, maybe that would be something to do other than what we're already incarcerated in, in classical time.
But long time, which is preservationist, and deep time, they don't quite dislodge us from the logic of modernity, which is the logic of our supremacy. Because you can extend time and still keep yourself in the seat of mastery. Right? You can say, "Let's think 10,000 years into the future." But you still keep yourself central in that analysis.
And deep geological time isn't really shaking us off from that orbit either, because it's the idea that if we thought millions of years into the past or millions of years into the future, we might be humble. But I don't think it's making us humble at all. In fact, what it's doing is giving us the sense of pride that, look at us, with the capacity to calculate millions of years into the future.
So, it seems the centrality of humans is maintained, no matter how deep you go, how far you go, how far you travel. That is a problem. If all the kinds of alternatives we're creating to offset standard classical time is just repeating the logic of centrality, then we're stuck and we're going around in circles. And we're really stuck in time, and there's nothing else to do at first glance.
And this is where my suspicion kicks in. As a Black studies scholar, I'm programmatically suspicious of time. Right? I don't take time for granted. It comes from my training. It's not just Frantz Fanon, it's not just C.L.R. James, it's not just Fred Moten, it's not just Chinua Achebe or Wole Soyinka. It seems— Not yet. We've not gotten to the mic drop part yet. We'll get there. That was— It's untimely, it seems.
It seems that all the people who nourish me have from a distance taught me to look with squinted eyes at this notion of time, because of the ways that we've accepted it as a category.
So, I want to speak tonight about time differently. Not in the ways we are programmed or habituated or taught to think about time. I want to take a step back and think about time in different ways and then introduce this concept of the untimely. And what I mean by the untimely will be unpacked gently. And remember, I'm still working this thing out, okay? It's still unfurling, but there's such promise in the unpacking.
To do this, I want to tell you a story. And some of you have heard this story before. Some of my siblings here have heard this story before. It comes from Nigeria. So, here's a question. How many of you know the country that has the most twins on the planet? I've said this before. If you know the answer, keep your hands down, okay? But if you don't know the answer, you are my people right now.
You know where the Earth produces more twins than any other place on the planet? Just raise your hands up. There's a prize. There's money involved in this if you get it right. I can't see your hands really. No. No. Not you. Absolutely not you. I'll just tell you. It's Nigeria.
Nigeria has more twins than any other place on the planet. You can check it out on Google if you want to. The last time I checked, I think our averages were so far beyond the global average that it's a phenomenon. Like, scientists travel to a place in Nigeria called Igbo-Ora. It's a Yoruba place. You people know of the Orishas and you've heard about the Yoruba people, right? Have you heard about Nigeria? You've heard about Nigeria? It's just next to Wakanda. I shouldn't do that. I shouldn't do that. I shouldn't do that. Okay.
So, Igbo-Ora produces more twins than any other place on the planet. And as a result, we have twin-sensitive technologies and rituals. For instance, the way we name our children according to their birth order and according to their proximity to the twins.
The first child that comes out, right? The first child of the pair of twins that comes out is always named Taiwo. Okay? And the second born— Any twins in the house? Good. Okay, I'll tell you stuff about yourself you don't know. The second of the pair is called Kehinde.
So, Taiwo means I came out first to see the world, right? That's what it means literally. I came out first. And Kehinde means I came out after the dude that came out first. That's what it means: I came out after that person, right?
And so, if you travel to Igbo-Ora in Nigeria— the second on the list is India, by the way. Nigeria's first and India's second. I don't know who's third. But if we traveled there and you ask the people, "How come you have twins all the time? What's the secret sauce?" They don't know themselves. It's been the study of multiple documentaries. No one understands why we have twins at this rate, why we're producing twins, and I digress.
Taiwo comes out first, Kehinde comes out second. But according to the Yoruba people, some queer story is happening there. Because in the tummy of the mother, Taiwo is actually the younger one. Not Kehinde. Taiwo is the younger one. Remember, Taiwo comes out first, but in the belly, Taiwo is the younger one.
So, the story is Kehinde, who is older in the belly, says to Taiwo, "So, you go out into the world, check things out, see if things are fine, and if they're fine, I want you to scream loudly, and that's the cue that I will, you know, follow suit." So, that's the idea. So, Taiwo comes out first, and in our own temporality, Taiwo is older because Taiwo comes out first. But Taiwo in the belly is the one that's sent to go see the world first, right?
Now, I tell you this story because I met a woman in 1980— no, I mean, she told me her story. Not that I met her in the 1980s. I was born in the 1980s. She had twins in 1981. I don't remember the month, but that's inconsequential now, because the day she had those twins, her boys, they died. The same day she had those boys, they died.
The first one came out too soon. Taiwo came out too soon and died, and the second one was incubated. And the nurse handling this boy did not handle him appropriately. And so, this woman tells me that her son was killed. She used the word murdered. That my son was murdered. And of course, it's a horrible thing to lose one child, not to speak of two children in a single day.
I know this woman because she's my mom. She's my mother, and I only got to learn this story recently in all its dimensions. It was a family secret, but not quite a secret. It was kind of floating in the air and never quite landing for gestation, for digestion. And I've been speaking with my mom and writing a new book about this right now.
And I came after my brothers died. I came afterwards. And there's a story here as well. Because the child that comes after the twins also has a special name. So, it's Taiwo and Kehinde and Idowu, according to the Yoruba people. And Idowu also means something very simple. It means I came after the twins. That's what it means, right?
And I came after the twins. I was grown in that field, the sweltering heat of trauma, and came out into the world. But there's something really powerful here. Because according to the Yoruba people, Idowu is older than the twins. Idowu is the oldest.
Why? Because the Yoruba people say that twins come with a feverish energy into the planet or into the world or out of the world, right? They come with such charge and speculative power. In fact, it is believed that a single soul comes into the world and takes two bodies. Right? That's how twins are born. But there's something about twins that could quickly debilitate the community that hosts them.
And so, it is said, this is a proverb, a real one. It's said that a mother who has twins but does not have an Idowu will grow mad. Right? That you must have an Idowu, and the Idowu's work is to hold the charge, right, of the twins. I don't know how true that is in your experience, but the one who comes after the twins in Yoruba cosmology is to hold the twins, not to resolve them, but to kind of be in excess of them. To be beyond them in some sense, to host them, to be hospitable to them, not to resolve the binary, but to hold the binary, just to kind of compost the binary.
So, Idowu's work is challenging, it's beautiful, and my elders tell me now that, of course, my brothers have been sublimated into the atmosphere, and so I must meet culture as if it's my brothers, right? I must hold the binary of modernity as if those are my brothers. And that's the way that I want to enter into the story of the untimely, right?
Because the untimely is Idowu. When I'm thinking about the untimely, I'm speaking about Idowu, and Idowu is the excess, the residue, the surplus of temporality. We're speaking about that which cannot be resolved in time.
And I'm inviting us with this concept to not try to create logics of alternatives. I think to myself most of the time that one of the most devastating things that activists said to Margaret Thatcher's "There is no alternative" was to insist that there are alternatives. Because to create an alternative is to repeat the logic of what you're escaping from.
Right? Like, oh, there's an alternative to capitalism. What's that? Anti-capitalism. And then capitalism is like, yes. Yes, indeed. Right? How do I make a product out of anti-capitalism? Right? How do I make it juicy and productive? And that's exactly what we do when we create alternatives. We create the same logic and we duplicate it, and it's like twins. We just replicate it. Right?
What we are being invited to by trickster cultures, by feminist epistemologies, by indigenous cosmologies, by Black studies, is to notice the excess. The excess, the surplus.
And so, my provocation this evening is that the clock is what we should turn to. The clock we've been trying to get away from. Because, in my opinion, the clock is producing much more than time. The clock is secreting a strange kind of Idowu. It's not just the tick and the tock. There's something in between the tick and the tock. Right? There's something in between. It's the Idowu. There's something older than the count that wants to get our attention.
And I want to speak about that and go through a little bit of history. I don't want to take too much time to speak about time, but the invitation is to stay in the places where the clock is not quite itself.
I had some things that I wrote when I was introducing this topic to the public. I wrote: temporal droppings. Temporal droppings, that's when time takes a— Autistic meanderings that stray from linearity, little sedimentations, little curls of temporality. I'm trying to describe something that almost resists language.
But my best way to describe it is as Idowu, right? The excess, the third that is not part of the count, but that breaks the count itself. It's not 1, 2, 3, it's 1, 2— Right? That's what Idowu is, it breaks the counting. There's something about the clock that is something in excess of itself.
But let's go back in history. Let's go to the Black Atlantic to consider the clock and why I'm saying the things I'm saying about timeliness or untimeliness. Frantz Fanon, anyone know the dude? Upcoming intellectual. He had lots of things to say about time.
He had lots of things to say about black bodies. Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers. These are people that I think with today. They had things to say about the man, right? They had things to say about the flesh and the hieroglyphics of the flesh, right?
A particular story that bears upon my mind right now is the story of the Middle Passage. 400 years on the Black Atlantic. The carrying of bodies across the Atlantic.
On some of those voyages, bodies would be brought out, black bodies would be brought out from beneath the ship or within the hold of the ship to the surface to be aired out. And what were they asked to do? They were asked to dance, right? You must have heard about this, right? It's called dancing the slave.
They were asked to dance and the surgeon who recommended to these enterprises and captains to dance their slaves had a justification for this exercise. The justification was "You need to keep these commodities marketable. You need to keep them economic. They need to let blood go through their veins. So, dance them on the surface. Let them dance."
And so, they would be brought to the surface. I'm not sure what they were being danced to, right? I'm not sure if the music was that good, but they were made to dance. And they were made to dance to the beat, right? There was a whip involved, and they were shackled to the ship, right?
And so, think about this, if you can, for a moment, what it means to dance under such circumstances. When your leg and your ankles are grating against the cold and the brutality of the steel that has been incarcerating your body. So, every time you move, it cuts a little bit of your flesh. But they were made to dance anyway.
And so, the whip was there, and the whip had a count. Anyone know about the metronome here? Right? The metronome, the upbeat and the downbeat. The downbeat was the whip. It was "Now!" And the whiplash was the command. It created a temporal subject when it landed on their backs, and then they were made to dance, just to jog their bodies and make their bodies viable for the trade.
And they danced, and they danced, but something was created that the whip did not anticipate. Because, you see, as they danced, and as their bodies moved to the beat, as their bodies grated against the steel, and as their bodies adjusted to the heave and the ho and the winding and the ginga of the ship, some other movement besides their movement was happening. A movement that was not part of the ledger. A movement that was not anticipated by the whip.
You see, they were creating something in excess of what they were commanded to create. An interval, a gap, something stranger, something that became the forebear of what Brazilians today call capoeira. Has anyone heard about capoeira?
Right, capoeira is the body swing. I'm not saying there's a direct causal link between these punishments and that beautiful dance that was developed in the plantation, but they all came from the same underbelly of the ship.
They were made to dance, and capoeira came from the swinging of the body, and their bodies were swinging, and the master did not realize that in that swinging there was resistance. Right? In their movements, there was resistance. In the dancing, there was resistance. They could not have anticipated that. It was like the body was beside itself doing something that the whip did not anticipate. It was the upbeat. It was the body syncopating coloniality. It was disturbing the count.
That was dancing the slave. They danced me, they made me dance, I danced for them, but as I was dancing, I was dancing the ship. I was dancing my destiny. I was dancing new futures. Right? The clock created an interval. A new gap, a new thing that was in excess of the count.
But that wasn't the only story from the Black Atlantic. There was also the tolling of the bell. Right? This is one of the reasons why black scholars recoil from time. Right? Because when the plantation manager came out and rang the bell, the tolling of the bell was a command to do something or stop doing something. Eat now. Stop eating now. Go to the plantation now. Come back from the plantation now. The bell created the subordinated subject.
Time has a prestigious history of colonizing bodies within the metronome of anticipation. And so, the bell rang. And then we show up. It's always a showing up. It's I'm here now. You can tick me on the ledger. I'm here.
But you see, every time the bell creates something, every time a mark is created, it also creates the not mark. Do you understand? Right? Because if you create an exit, you've created an entrance in the same gesture. Right?
Every time they marked the script, every time the ledger made an imperial signature, every time the mark was created, the bell tolled, it created a gap. And in that gap, they created songs. And in the song, they created jazz. And jazz became hip-hop. And hip-hop became reggae. And reggae became the blues. I'm not saying there's a causal link. Right? It didn't exactly happen that way. But all those things came from the gaps between the times. They came from the spaces, the intervals between the times. The bell tolling created all these musical genres that we celebrate today.
And the third thing that I want to speak about, but not at length, is two papers that were released 3 days ago. This one came out May 3rd. And the first one, I read two of them. I don't quite understand them. They're in quantum physics. It takes some expertise to read through the math of it, and I'm still digesting it. But, two of those papers say the same thing.
That time is not settled. That the more accurate our precision measuring instruments are, the more we come to the fatal realization that time is speculative. That time is a superposition.
And let me explain what a superposition is. A superposition is when something is here and there at the same time. Right? It's strange to contemplate in classical imagination. It's here and there, and it's creating two different things at the same time, like Taiwo and Kehinde. Right?
And yet, these papers suggest that time is not the one thing. The closer we come to what time is, the more we recoil because time is speculative. Time is not fully realized. Time is fundamentally undecided. And this is what these black scholars have been suggesting. That it's not that coloniality can stake its claims to our bodies in a final way. It's that time itself is jiggly and wobbly and shaking and twerking. Right? It's doing things it's not supposed to do, and the clock covers that. The clock masquerades the dancing that has always been happening.
So, these stories from quantum physics and from the Black Atlantic tell me that we are in such a time when we have to revisit our claims to mastery. Our claims to mastering time or mastering the clock. We're being invited to stay in the spaces of excess where our bodies can do other kinds of things. The invitation is to open ourselves up to time's own syncopation.
That is the invitation of our time, not to produce and mass produce other kinds of alternative clocks, which is one thing to do, but we always run the risk of repeating the logic where we purport to create an alternative. Instead, notice that the clock itself is masquerading its incompleteness. The clock has never been complete. You were never locked into the plantation. The temporal disciplines that make us good, pretty subjects of the nation-state are fugitive and doing crazy things at night. If you watch Toy Story, you know what I'm talking about.
And that is the invitation of our times. That is the stunning invitation of our times to stay still with the idea that the clock has a lot going on between its tick and its tock. There's an interval in every second, and that excessiveness is enlisting our bodies to do other things. To feel other things.
Now, I want to make a critical claim here. And that is to suggest that we live in a thing that I call an accommodation. And I'll explain what I mean by an accommodation. An accommodation is like a house. It's like a field. It's where bodies gain legibility. It's where we become visible. It's where we take on a shape.
The accommodation of modernity is a machinic operation. It hates cracks. It hates anything that is not complete. Modernity works on categoricity. I'll explain what that means. It works on the categorical, the categoric. It wants to finalize what you are and nail you down and say I figured this out and I'm done with it because that's modern power.
If it can figure you out, then you're archivable, you're surveillable, you're incarceratable. I can lock you up if I know what you are. If I can draw a steady line around your boundaries. That's modern power and that's the accommodating force that we're in as a species right now. Right?
But something lies in a sense beneath this accommodating force. I call it the paraterranean. Don't worry about it. We'll talk about it later. I call it the paraterranean. The paraterranean is like the underbelly that is never quite resolved. And notice how I do my fingers. I'm not sure why I'm doing it that way, but it's like the thing that tickles the marblesque stones of the accommodation and reminding it you're not quite done yet. Right? You're not full and complete. You're not resolved yet.
But the accommodation does a lot to keep its shape. One thing that it does is to include. Right? It includes things that it doesn't understand. Modernity is the history of the pathologization of monsters. The history of modernity is the history of the pathologization of monsters. Anything that modernity doesn't understand, it will either include and say, "I will give you a seat on my throne." Right? So that you can be known. I'll give you a seat at the table so that you can be celebrated. So that you can be seen.
What's that apocryphal Chinese curse? Do you know it? Three of them. Does anyone know them? It's apocryphal, so there's no empirical evidence that this is actually real, but it's apocryphal. The first one is, "May you live in interesting times." It's a curse. "May you live in interesting times." The second one is, "May you be seen by the emperor." Speaking truth to power, I want to be seen. Yeah, "May you be seen by the emperor." And the third curse is the cursiest of all curses. It's, "May you get what you want." What you're striving for, "May you get what you want." And that's a curse, right?
So, the accommodation plays its game by offering you what you want, because you believe that what you want actually comes from your own self, and is not actually ecologically engendered within the accommodation, right? And then you name it freedom. You say, "I have the choice to choose between Pepsi and Coke. I'm free." Right? But there's some kind of ecological ventriloquism happening here. Even when you speak truth to power, your legibility is exactly how the accommodation gets on. How it reminds itself that it's worth it.
And so, back to the point, the accommodation has different ways of covering up the untimely. It tells you that you're either late or you're not punctual, or that you should do more time management. Right?
We in Africa are perpetually late. We have African time. Right? We tell ourselves that we will never quite meet up with the West, right? Not only civilizationally, but even in gatherings, we tell ourselves, "Ah, we're starting late again." You know, we should do more time management. Right?
But the problem is, I think something in our bodies resists the punctuality of colonization. Something in our bodies is not available for imperialism. We just don't know how to notice it, but the accommodation that we're in helps us pathologize that. It says that's the thing you should get rid of.
So, the accommodation has many dynamics for creating a field where you misname the thing that wants to work with you to create new kinds of futures. And that's what accommodations do well. But every time it sweeps, every time it sweeps and clears the stage, every time it renews itself, it always creates something in excess of itself.
So, in these days, we're becoming more precise in our technologies, as we're becoming more endangered in the ways we live our lives, as we become more technologically sophisticated in creating genocide across the world. As we do all of these things, the untimely, the cracks are showing up everywhere, and we are feeling it in our bones, I think. We're feeling the wafting, sweltering movements of something that doesn't fit the clock, but is off the clock.
We're feeling it in our bones. We're feeling grief, grief that is not even our own. That's part of the untimeliness of these moments. We're feeling a sense that agency is not enough. Solutions are not enough. Justice on our necks. So, it's not enough just to cry out for justice. We need something else.
And I think that is a politics. That is an invitation. That is something to stay with. I call it the parapolitics of the untimely. Not the politics. Politics is about being seen. When I say parapolitics, I'm speaking in the cadence of Du Bois. I'm speaking in the voice of Fred Moten and Nahum Chandler and Saidiya Hartman.
I'm thinking along with them that the ways that we have been cradled by modernity is too violent. Something else in excess of ontology, in excess of the world, wants to meet us in our most vulnerable places. And that's my sense of the untimely. Not the time counting, not a future that we know, but staying with uncertainty, staying with failure, staying with that which doesn't fit is the invitation of our moments.
I will end with a story that comes from my people as well. It's also a part that I left out when I was telling you about Edum. Because the Yoruba people suggest that Eshu, how many of you know who this guy is? Eshu, just raise your hands if you know Eshu. Eshu is the trickster in our cosmology. He's the one who straddles worlds. He's the one that lives at the crossroads.
You probably have seen Eshu before in many forms, in many guises. For instance, if you've been to Washington, D.C., there's a phallic structure. And that in our stories is the erect penis of Eshu. And I'm not even kidding. Right? Speaking about go back to Africa, the dude is here.
Right? If you've watched the movie The Alien from Ridley Scott, I think, from the 1980s, the very first one, right? And the other ones that came afterwards, there is a monster there called a xenomorph, right? The thing, right? The alien thing, that's Eshu. The person who designed that monster modeled the monster after Eshu.
Right? So, Eshu lives in popular culture in ways that we don't even recognize. I know Beyoncé likes Oshun, that's why she wears yellow, but Eshu is the trickster par excellence. Right?
Now, Eshu is called Edu in our stories. We say that Eshu comes after the twins. Right? And I end with this story, a story that I love so much that I learned from my elders about the Middle Passage and transatlantic slave trade. That when the ships came, when they arrived, that Eshu did not fight the clock. He didn't build an alternative to mastery. He invaded mastery from within to seek out the excess within its incarcerating body.
And so, Edu went into the slave ship. Eshu is Edu. He went into the slave ship. And with going into the slave ship, he unpackaged the slave ship. He undid power from within.
That's the kind of operation that we're being invited now to do. Decolonization cannot be about creating another kind of world. Decolonization is about insisting that the world that is upsetting us is not complete. Decolonization is the radical incompleteness of things. Not just proliferating alternatives, which, as I've said over and over again, often repeat the thesis of what we're up against. Right?
But, decolonization is about noticing the cracks in everything. And inhabiting it with experimentation, with cooking together, with reading together, with gathering together in the untimeliness of genocide and loss and suffering and climate change and pandemics and fascism and presidents that insist they're Jesus Christ, all of that. All of that becomes the invitation to stay with the trouble long enough.
So, to the prophets who insist that we're out of time, yes, we are out of time. There's no more time. But there's sanctuary. There's sanctuary. And sanctuary is not something we build based on projects.
It's not a new project that we have to do on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Sanctuary is what the world is conspiring to create with the cracks in our own bodies.
So, it's not something for you to do. I do not consider myself a humanist, like a human-centered speaker that would say, "Okay, you've learned about the untimeliness, go do it." It's not something you go to do. It's not like, "Go do it." Now, "Oh, I'm going to practice bias untimeliness." No. It's not something you practice. It's something that practices you. It's something that enlists you and is already enlisting you.
The sensitivity now is to stay alive to what it's inviting us to do, not to gloss over the cracks and insist that we just want to buy more time. Instead, we stay with the places where sensibility, sensitivity, perception, ancestrality, all those things are being challenged.
I feel like ending properly with a story about my son. And the reason why I call the untimeliness autistic time is because of my son. My son is Kair. He's 8 years old and he doesn't understand time in the ways that we do.
For instance, I said this yesterday, he has this knack for saying Merry Christmas every day. And he did this in 2023, we were living in Germany. He just woke up every day and said, "Merry Christmas." Unironically, just Merry Christmas with the joy, you know, that is required for such a declaration.
Mhm. That Merry Christmas. It got so intense that we had to purchase me a Santa Claus, which I still have. A Santa Claus costume. And I needed to put the beard and the whole thing, and EJ, my wife, would need to decorate the house. It was that severe. In April.
April, right? One day I got fed up and out of exhaustion, I just— He woke up and said, "Dada, Merry Christmas." April. And I said, "Kier, you know it really isn't Christmas, right? Christmas happens one day of the year. Just one day of the year. December 25th." And with tears in his eyes, he said to me, "But it's Christmas." "But it's Christmas."
And something about that wounded me or broke me open. And I carried that wound to a dear brother of mine. You might know his name, Allan Bishop. And I took that to him and we're traveling around the world doing this documentary we call Three Black Men with my other brother, Resmaa Menakem. And we were somewhere in California, and I told Allan this story. And Allan paused for a while, looked down, looked up at me and said, "But why are you gentrifying this boy?
Why are you gentrifying this boy? What if the way he perceives time is radically different from the way your neurotypical mind perceives time? What if the reason why he's perceivably slow to, you know, buckle his shoes and all of that is because his head has to pass through the Milky Way to get to his feet? What if he's in a different time? What if he's participating in different temporality?" Right?
And I've never left that. I've held that close. That there's something else. There's an Idowu. There's an excessiveness to this moment that we as good modern citizens are being separated from because we have to go through the motions. We have to pay the bills, which is important to do. Please pay your bills.
But the discipline of citizenry, the discipline of subjectivity blinds us to the ways that the world is in excess of all our imaginations of it. Blinds us to the idea that the world has never been in short supply of enchantment. And that there's something more, not something else per se that we can create, but something more. The things that we see, all material life is speculation. That the things that are seemingly solid and resolved are quite undecided and unsettled.
And so my son walks around in circles. He often does that, you know, just walks around in circles. And one day I challenged him. I said, "Why do you walk around in circles?" And he said, "Dad, there things I have to do that you know nothing about."
And that's the untimely. The untimely is something to do that we know nothing about. It's not a blueprint. It's not a project. It's not a plan. It's not a foundation. It's something to do that we know nothing about, and yet we are being enlisted into doing of it.
The bodies that were taken across the Atlantic didn't have a plan, right? It wasn't an economy flight, right? It wasn't a GPS system. As Édouard Glissant says, they were being dragged into the mist, but that taking away, that's being spirited away blessed them strangely with new kinds of sensibilities, and I think us as a species at the thresholds of modernity, we're also being spirited away by untimely ships that have gathered to take us.
And we're being taken away into grief, into different notions of ancestrality, into recapitulations of trauma, into stories of twins that haven't quite left us, into new ideas of the future.
Our work is to stay with it, to travel with it, to listen to it. And I think if we do so, and if we gather again and again in this intergenerational work that none of us will figure out in one fell swoop, but if we stay here together, we'll be met by something greater than ourselves. I will know that care and promise, that promise of care that there's something to do, something untimely to do that you know nothing about. And that's it. Thank you.
I'll just throw out a couple things and see what lands, what sticks, what inspires. But you spoke a lot tonight about the excess of time, the spillage, the things we know nothing about, the spaces in between the ticks and the tocks. Thinking about the book that we worked on together, your latest book Selah, you speak about a number of different concepts. One of them that I think might be productive as a way deeper into this concept of the untimely, and I'm curious if you feel the same way, is how you relate to and speak about grace. Grace? Grace. Uh-huh. And the monstrousness— Right. —of grace and the opportunity afforded when grace appears on one's doorstep, and how that's different than the beautiful, smooth, more complete vision of grace that many people cultivate. So I was wondering if you'd be able to share a little bit of how you relate to the concept of grace and how that might speak to this concept of the untimely.
Everyone knows here the song Amazing Grace, right? Amazing Grace. I think of grace as awkward, not amazing. It's awkward grace. And I'll tell you why.
There's a book and an author, one of my favorite authors, his name is Fyodor Dostoevsky. And I read his Brothers Karamazov. Anyone fans of— Okay. Okay. Wow, okay. Good. I read this a long time ago. And there's a parable in that novel that is the parable of the returning Christ.
And if I recall correctly, it's about the Christ returns to the church. And you know, as all returning Messiahs do, you expect a grand welcome. You expect the committee has done their work well to accept your second coming. But the church did not bring out the red carpet. They did not pull out all the stops. They actually did the opposite. They incarcerated the Christ. They locked him up. And when the Christ is like, "I mean, it's right there in the book. The second coming, you know, I'm expected at this time." The church basically leans into him eating and say, "Well, you're disturbing too much. You're spoiling our business, right? You're not supposed to be here. You're ruining too much."
And I think that is a powerful, potent exemplification of grace. That grace is not the commonly beautiful thing we usually depict it to be. Grace is monstrous in its appearing. Right? And by monstrous, I don't mean the Disney-esque, pathological, criminalized idea of the monster that we're used to. I mean it in the folkloric, cultural, indigenous sense. The monster is that which reworks time, reworks bodies. It's right there in the etymology of monster. It means to rework, demonstrum, to work again, right? It's right there. So, the monster is not a good thing or a bad thing. It's the one that reworks the middle. The reworks the binary. Okay? So, grace is a reworking. It's the thing that shows up when we're desensitized to movement. When we're desensitized to agency.
I'm going to give an ungentlemanly example if you're ready for it. Is it okay? Is anybody a lady or a gentleman here? Okay. All right. I suspected as much, cuz ladies and gentlemen don't come to my stuff. Okay. Farting. Okay? It's a famous thing we do. Right? It's this thing we do. You know about it.
I've heard of it. Yeah.
Okay. Someone humorously told me farting is feminist art. Right? I digress.
Imagine in this room, as in many plane rides that I've been on, someone just released one. Right? And it just fouled the whole air. I mean, this place up. We wrinkle our nose. We don't know who it's coming from because you never do. We do the stare to throw off and parry the suspicions coming our way. You know that. So you know, we do that, you know. And over time we kind of get used to it because this person is just releasing it and we get used to it. We're desensitized to it. And it's now part of the room. We've accepted it. Our bodies have acclimatized to the new regime.
And then someone enters the room, brother. Someone just comes into the room and squints and wrinkles the nose and says, "What's that foul smell?" Right? The inclination according to most sociologists is that we will point our fingers at this person and name that person the monster, because the monster is that which introduces us to our desensitization. Right? The monster comes in and we say, "How dare you do that?" But it's not the monster bringing the chaos. The monster is introducing us to the chaos we're already in, right?
So, that's what grace is. Grace is the monster showing up at the door reminding us that we're not well put together. And that that's fine. Because if we were final and complete and categorical, then there's nothing else to do. We're stuck in coloniality. Grace for me is the entrance of movement. It is the delimitation of the body. It is the introduction of possibility to a sterile, clinical, carceral, colonial dimension. Amen.
All right. Our time is running out, so I'm going to keep us moving here. I would love to hear you in the context of thinking about time. Early, late, origins, teleologies, all of these are baked into our stories of time in our contemporary society. The word progress comes to mind. What constitutes progress? Who gets to decide? What is progress doing to us? And how does our society's conception of time support or standardize these values or definitions of progress, and to what end?
So, progress is teleological, of course. It is purpose-driven. It is the sterilization, the discretization of life worlds to fit the imperatives of the highway, right? It's how we construct and are constructed by time as an arrow, right? It moves from the past to the present to the future, right? Wasn't it Émile Durkheim? No, it was— I forget the sociologist that basically put all civilizations on a linearity and put the United States and the global north and Europe at the end of the spectrum and put Africa, you know, and Asia on the other side.
And basically the story is that you have a lot to catch up to, right? And so in Africa, we still have the idea of the catch-up imperative, right? The catch-up imperative is the idea that we're not good enough as we are. We need to catch up. We need to look more like California in order to be fully ourselves. And so education becomes education about where we're going. And that's why I learned more about United States presidents than about our own presidents. I learned more about how to speak English approximating the cadence and the accent of a BBC speaker or newscaster than how my grandmother spoke it.
So, there's something about progress that empties the world around you. It empties locality. It makes place space. Mhm. Right? It empties it out. And so it's about traveling forward, right? And there's something that progress needs to get rid of in order to do its work: ancestrality.
Right? But ancestrality has been mistaken as some kind of romanticized past, right? And so I noticed this in the United States especially, there's a heavy originalism that is at work. Let's go back to how it was, or the ancestors are in the past. It's the romanticization of indigenous people or indigenous cosmologies, as if you can pick them up from a shelf and just, you know, apply them, right? Just use them. It's the magical negro in other forms or with other names.
And I think ancestrality is not the past. Ancestrality is the immediacy of other bodies in the room. It's the idea that the world is not empty. One of my favorite psychologists, James Hillman, speaks about how texture and intensity and geometry is a god or spirit or poetry, that the world is replete with life, the anima mundi. Right? This is what progress needs to get rid of in order to travel straight. But we are too crooked to travel straight, aren't we? It's a disability. It's a beautiful disability. Right? That no matter how modernity wants us to walk straight, we must limp. And that limping is our salvation.
Beautiful. As time keeps moving along,
We can do African time. We can do African—
Okay. Good. Good. So, you spoke tonight and also last night a bit more about time as a device of accommodation. Right. What would it take or mean for time to be a medium of collaboration? Right. How would it function differently? How would we function differently in relation to time?
Well, there is— Oh, this one I have to be quick with. There is a place called the Great Dismal Swamp. Anyone heard about it? Okay. Just one. You. There. Thank you, sister. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's between one of— Is it between North Carolina and Virginia? My geography is wrong. It's correct. Right. Good.
So, it's not exactly as buoyant, it's a swamp, right? But it's not exactly as expansive and as vast as it once was. Right? It's been drying up. But I mention this because the bodies that were escaping from the plantations in the antebellum South would travel to the Great Dismal Swamp. Not to there. It's not like they had a GPS system and they knew where they were going, but somehow their bodies took them there. Time took them there. Circumstance took them there. And they found themselves hosted by this strange place that was beyond the clock time of the plantation. I mean, the clock time of the plantation was the tick-tock, tick-tock, and that was the downbeat. And this place had a different temporality altogether. So much so that it prohibited the dogs and the masters from entry. It's a fascinating story of how life worlds are built in the cracks, right? And it changed a lot. And I think archaeologists are still digging out the technologies, the things, the tools that they used to live in that very, very hostile and also hospitable place.
So, I think that we are meeting each other in schedules with calendar appointments. And we're showing up in all the ways that modernity tells us to show up. But there are other ways of showing up that are not on the books or in the ledger or on the cards. Those ways are not inscribable or speakable. They can only be uttered with poetry. They can only be said with the words of an autistic boy, you know, who's traveling around in circles. They are invitational, but they don't offer us a blueprint of where to go. Right? Again, the only way to think about the untimely is to use the idea of the slave ship going into the mist, not knowing where it's going. This is with Glissant speaking, right? So, I cannot offer you, like, this is what the untimely is. I don't know. I cannot nail it down and say this is what it is. I refuse to do that, right?
But I can say that something is working with you, your bodies, your ancestralities, your temporalities now, that is not leaving you still and steady and tidy. And you kind of know what that is already. Whether it's a dream that keeps you up at night or something that fails to cohere. Whether it's a critical lack of punctuality and your utter failure at time management classes, but there's something getting
in the way of your being a good citizen. And that thing is the untimely. It's the tentacular reach of the untimely. And maybe that's how we reach each other in compassion for our failures, in holding each other at this place, and hugging each other even though you know it's a stranger you're hugging, and doing stuff like this. That's the untimely.
Beautiful. I have a couple questions from the audience. How do we learn to be friendlier with time instead of fearful?
Friendlier? Mhm. Take a time management class. That is a good way to be friendlier. I don't want to be friendly with time. My body is not quite amenable for those kinds of friendly encounters with time. It's positioned very differently to modern temporality. I'm looking for fugitive spaces. I want out of this arrangement. Right? So, yeah, I'm certainly not the person to ask about that. Yeah, but there's a TEDx person or some motivational speaker that will help. [laughter]
In lieu of money, time as currency, yeah, attention, thoughts?
Say that again. Say that again.
In lieu of money, comma, time as currency, ellipsis, parentheses, attention, thoughts, question mark? [laughter]
You try it, dude. [laughter]
I don't know what this is. In lieu of money, that's a dollar sign, right? Time as currency. Yes. Yes, I mean, let me just speak about time as currency. Yeah. Time… [laughter] We got there.
I don't know what it… whiteness, which, if you know my work, again, I say this is almost like a caveat that I have to utter every time I'm in with my siblings in thought. It's to remind us of the utter inadequacy of reducing whiteness to white bodies. It's critically… and it's pervasive, especially in the United States, right? To reduce whiteness to white bodies.
And it's important to mention that that is an operation of whiteness. Whiteness wants you to think of the individual as the field. Right? It wants you to see the atom, the reductionistic, separate and separable, isolated subject as the agential lord of the field. And I refuse to do that as well. So, I don't see white bodies and pathologize white bodies as exemplars of whiteness. They are part of the field of whiteness, but they're not the bodies. They're not the carriers of whiteness.
I come from a country that's the blackest nation on Earth, and we are pretty white. Not because we look white, but because whiteness is a practice. It's not an identity. It's a practice, and I'm not even the one to say that. That's Fred Moten. Whiteness is a practice. We do whiteness. It's not something that we own as identities. Okay? I'm not sure where I was going. Yes, this is where our currency. Time is currency. Time is currency. In lieu of money.
In lieu of money. You're making it worse for me. That's what I'm here for. That's what I'm here.
The currency part is that white modernity arranges value in particular ways that are coterminous with settlement, right? Whiteness needs value to justify settlement. It's like, I've said it elsewhere, it's like frequent flyer miles. You can only spend it within the establishment that created it. There's a thing about value that is spent within white modernity that repeats and reproduces white modernity. And that's one way to think about currency.
Time is also valuable in that sense. It circulates white modernity, and that's why we have phrases like time is money. You know, the more time you have, the more valuable resources you have. It's a way of justifying settlement, right? The point here is not just to notice time as currency. There's nothing utterly or necessarily generative about that. But to notice that what else is this currency doing? What rivulets are created in its circulation? What eddies? In what way is time pooling in some place, misbehaving, going round but not quite completing the circuit. That's interesting.
That's the thing that I want to investigate more and more, how time is autistic. How time misbehaves, how time goes where it doesn't contribute to investment, how philanthropy fails, right? How it becomes like gift instead of as an investment. That's more interesting to me. Yeah.
One final question. It's not really a question. I'll just throw something out, thinking of the untimely, of grace, of Walter Benjamin and the angel of history and the strange answer, or answer as question, of in two time that is the messianic.
Right.
There's a short quote from the Talmud. It says, "Three things come when you're not looking for them: a scorpion bite, a lost object, and the Messiah." And the Messiah. Thoughts? Parentheses, thoughts, question mark, ellipses.
But this idea of the not looking, the not focusing. What's happening when you're not looking? You're working on something. These three things are something that will not occur if you're focused on them. If you're trying to meet them on time, let's say.
Right. Right.
So, I'm trying to stretch out in my work what I call the attentional. In my new writing, I'm exploring the idea that no one actually pays attention. Notice the way that that is phrased, pays. You know, it's something we give. I think that attention is not something we give. Attention is something that is like a weather. It's like weather. It kind of holds our bodies.
For instance, I mean, a sister told me this from Brazil. She said she entered into a room with a PhD. With a white guy, right? And she said some stuff that she considered brilliant. She's a brilliant thinker. She said stuff and no one quite paid attention to what she said. Now, the other dude who was sitting next to her repeated the same thing and everyone gave a round of applause.
Right? And she was thinking about that with me, that why is it that, you know, it's not like the audience is bad. It's that the space, the way attention, the infrastructure of attention is bent towards value. It congregates around value, and value is perceived as the one with the PhD, the white handsome guy, you know, the one who's presentable, the one who has knowledge, right?
The attentional is much more than what we give. It's what we're participating in as if it's a geology. So, I call it the attentional. Right? So, to merely say let's pay attention to this, you know, it obscures too much, right? It takes away from too much. I want to investigate with y'all. I want to investigate how the attentional drags our bodies and magnetizes our bodies like gravity to places that repeats the logic of modernity.
So, I don't want to think about the attention. I'm looking for the cracks in the attentional. Yeah, right? Maybe the Messiah comes through the cracks, not from the sky, but through the cracks. Maybe that's where new futures are buried, in the cracks of attention. And the cracks of attention are not distraction either. But that's the longest story. We'll talk about it another time when you come.
Yeah. Thank you, brother. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, brother. [applause]
I thank you. [applause] Thank you. Thank you.
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