let my initial resistance to the second chapter in akomolafe’s essay be a testament to how deeply entrenched i am in the environment built by the queen’s english. akomolafe suggests that hope, like all other things, can’t be the one true way. that to have hope (in this case that by 2030 we’ll have completed all the checkmarks designated by human minds that are required for continued planetary thriving) is to project the colonial belief that we can have whatever we want as long as we try hard enough. but isn’t that true? the voice inside me pleads. if it isn’t what else is there to live for? perhaps everything – the vastness of everything else when we aren’t preoccupied by the weight of the world. because isn’t it hope in the first place that leads to expansion, invention, corralling, domesticating? is all endurance, all effort, holy terrain simply because it was wanted badly enough? how much pain and death came upon the hopes of empires, dictators, enslavers, demagogues? how many of these hopes were vindicated as righteous merely because they were realized?
each day i write, i do so with the hope that i’ll impress myself. this is a bit of a paradox, in that being impressed requires expectations to be lower than what is received. some of my best writing has come upon me being broken down, wrung dry, depleted, so low on ego that i couldn’t dare to even hope that something beautiful could come from my lack of inspiration.
i don’t know what this all means – i know that dr. bayo’s message isn’t that we stop moving toward justice, liberation, life. but to move toward those things do not mean – and perhaps do mean not – a rebuilding of the old systems that got us here and barred us from other portals of possibility. i begin 2021 with an unfamiliar lack of motivation, direction, agenda. and it feels freeing.