Other Sites of Power: Inaugurating a Different World

Other Sites of Power: Inaugurating a Different World

by Nichola Torbett with gratitude to Bayo Akomolafe, 2024 retreat leader at Kirkridge

The following is the transcript of a talk I gave at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Poconos on Sunday, January 26, 2025.

There is a particular type of dream I’ve had just a few times in my life, and every time it leaves me joyful. In the dream, I am living in a house, have been for some time, and suddenly, I discovery a whole part of the structure that I never knew was there. It’s like I discover a door I’ve never noticed before, and that door opens up into comfortable, capacious rooms full of potential for new projects. In the dreams, those spaces are full of couches and daybeds and sumptuous pillows, round tables and white boards and cozy nooks for collaborating.

Dream analysts tell me that houses, in dreams, represent the psyche, or, if we want to avoid the Cartesian mind-body split, the soma, the whole body-mind-spirit coalition that make up a person. If that’s the case, then these dreams are about whole new capacities, as of yet untapped. 

That’s what I want to talk with you about today, one week into the second term of Donald Trump, when it is easy to feel powerless, caught up in fast-running political currents sweeping us toward a terrifying future. With a cabinet packed with loyalists and election-deniers and a Secretary of Defense with ties to theocratic insurgency groups, who wouldn’t even answer the question about whether his troops would open fire on protesters, it can be hard to imagine that we have many moves left.

And that may be true so long as we accept their terms, looking for power only in the usual places, and limiting our imaginations to what we’ve been taught to deem possible. But what if we don’t limit ourselves in this way? What if we stray? What if, in philosopher and activist Bayo Akomolafe’s terms, we go “not forward but awkward,” through openings we’ve never noticed before? What new spaces could open up? What kind of world could we inaugurate if we break free from the assumptions many of us have inherited?

Did you know that the word inaugurate derives from the word augur, which means to discern the will of the gods by observing the flight of birds? That’s old-fashioned, right? Archaic and superstitious, to think the birds could determine the fitness of rulers. 

And yet, I wonder.

I wonder if the technologies—oh, that word—I mean the ancestral whisperings, the wind gusts, the intuitive knowings, the invisible mycelial maps—the ancient new technologies of liberation that we need right now, I wonder if they might lie buried beneath centuries of certainties, here in the west, here especially in the white dominant culture where I am situated, assumptions about what is real and what isn’t, what is civilized and what isn’t, what is sophisticated and what is “primitive.” Those of us steeped in Western dominant culture may need to exercise a little humility about all that, because all our best reasoning, our most sophisticated technologies for “harnessing natural resources,” our individualist assumptions about how to foster innovation have landed us precisely…here, at what feels like a dead end. Here at the bloody juncture of climate collapse and fascism.

Trump is not the problem. You know this, right? Donald Trump is a symptom of a much larger disease. His administration is the logical, loveless outgrowth of a particular view of power, how it is achieved and how it is exercised. The commander-in-chief of a wobbling but still standing American empire—that is one site of power.

Today I want to explore some other sites of power that may challenge dominant perceptions of what is real, or important, or valuable, or desirable, or obvious. In a recent email, Bayo Akomolafe, who is probably about 85% responsible for opening up these new rooms for me, wrote: “I have long been hosted by the possibility that what’s obvious obscures what the world is doing, and that clarity is a political project of training the senses into a particular notion of the real – very often the state-sponsored one.”

Through those lenses, the openings we may need to explore are invisible.

As the state teeters on the verge of collapse, I’m hoping you’ll venture with me through some new doors, into some other possible sites of power.

When I say “other sites of power,” I mean the way starlings murmurate in numbers so large and patterns so unpredictable that their predators, the falcons, fly away confused and afraid. 

Protestors in Hong Kong taught us to “Be water,” adapt and change with changing conditions, make decisions collectively, change course often enough that police can’t keep up. Guard against the concentration of leadership in individuals who can be picked off, incarcerated, or assassinated. Follow the six or seven dissidents in your nearest circle. Organize like water. Murmurate like the starlings. Other sites of power.

Daniel Foor, another of my teachers, talks about how, in the contemporary West, we see a crow, for example, and maybe we think it’s cute, or maybe we think it’s a pest, depending upon our perspective, but rarely do we see it as the contemporary face of some ancient God. What if we did? What rooms might open up in the reverence that would require?

 Did you know that there are whole ecosystems that form in the uppermost branches of redwood trees? Specialized types of ferns grow up there, in the crooks of branches, where they can sequester up to 5,000 gallons of water per acre and sustain incredible varieties of life, including some that have been entirely unknown to human beings until recently. Entirely other worlds far up above the prying eyes of resource-hungry humans. Rooms we never knew existed. How do we organize with the ferns and the salamanders without destroying the world they need to survive?

Or what would it mean to conspire with the buzzards who have been pooping so prolifically on border patrol communications towers that the signals are getting scrambled? Or with the orca whales who appear to be organizing—it’s the mother whales who are teaching them—to smash capitalism on the open sea? Other sites of power.

Did you know that redwood seeds only release when fire arrives, so that the thing that comes to destroy them actually ensures their survival? Other sites of power. “They did not know we were seeds.”

I wouldn’t choose it , but I did live through a time when it was not safe to be an out queer person, and I remember how we found our ways to one another through casually dropped cultural references and nods and hankies worn this way or that. I wouldn’t choose it—I think it was particularly terrifying for those who could not pass—but there was a kind of power there in the covert gestures that united us. There was power in needing each other so much. 

Sometimes the thing that comes to destroy us actually ensures our survival, because part of what privilege does—a sense of relative safety and security—is that it strips us of one another. It makes it seem possible that we could make it on our own, self-made queers to match the self-made straights, but I think if we fall for it we forsake a certain kind of power, trading it for the promise of fitting into a power structure that is now showing itself to be bankrupt. There are other sites of power.

I am becoming more and more convinced that the vision we are looking for, the liberating power we seek, is going to come from outside the United States. Most likely it will come from the places Donald Trump famously called “shitholes” during his last term. Unexpected sources of power in places where people have had to learn resilience, resistance, fugitivity in ways that those of us in these rooms have not had to imagine.

Did you know that whole communities of African-descended people survived the era of enslavement in America by living in swamps and sinkholes? These are not my stories to tell, but I mention them because they remind me that there have always been people who have survived attempted annihilation. Will we seek out the wisdom of communities who know how to resist even if it doesn’t match dominant frameworks for how we understand the world? Will we listen? Listening beyond what we can easily comprehend, not to master it, not to colonize it, but to let it play over us, grow over our certainties like vines over an abandoned city—full of grief and loss and memory of the illusions we once believed in, but yes, another site of power.

Grieving—I mean really getting in there and wailing, keening, snotting all over the place—another site of power. 

To return to Bayo’s advice to us: 

“If you have looked hard at the manner of things, if you have surveyed the troubles of our time, and cannot discover a way forward, do not despair. Do better. Grieve: mount an altar to the sensuous feelings of loss that swim through you. In the stinging fumes that redden the eyes, you might partly recover a clear vision of where to go. You might come to see that forward movement is no longer possible in these moments, and that the way to go was never forward anyway – but awk-ward: into the blackness of catacombs, into the shadows of sanctuary, into the riven cracks signed with the pen of the trickster, into the heat of compost, into the position of a prostrated man who knows that when the storm roars the thing to do is to be still. In that stillness, entire worlds churn.” Other sites of power. There are doorways there.

Conflict is, I think, another doorway—not the passive-aggressive triangulation thing, nor the CYA bending of the truth in order to come out smelling sweet—but really having it out with one another, staying in the struggle—as the scripture says—until the conflict yields its blessing, opening up whole new rooms that maybe neither of you knew existed. Another site of power.

And you might remember, when Jacob wrestled with that angel, he left with a limp. The way into a new world may be with a limp. Disability justice is another doorway. I read a story recently about a disability care collective where folks help each other get dressed, shower, get on and off the toilet, and in the process have a fantastic time laughing and carrying on right in the midst of life’s messiness and funkiness. I was socialized to be ashamed of anything having to do with the body; in my family, we referred to sweating as “glistening,” okay? But the euphemism obscures the reality that life is sweaty and sometimes stinky. Maybe we can get a little less prissy about all that. I think the willingness to be in the funk together is another site of power.  And we have so much to learn from disability community. Whole other rooms, the doors to which have maybe been apparent, but we have not wanted or needed to walk through. The vulnerability we need to do so is another source of power.

Now, I can hear someone thinking, “Uh huh, this is all well and good, but none of these things seem very important. I’m not sure they are scalable. None of these are going to save our country.” But the thing is: When you discover whole new parts of the house, it changes the shape of the house. 

Maybe saving our country is not the highest goal. Maybe if we enter fully enough into collaboration with these other sites of power, something far more beautiful than a nation state will emerge. Can we imagine together another shape?

I’ll close with the words, again, of Bayo Akomolafe:

“I am quite confident that even as the oceans boil, and the hurricanes beat violently against our once safe shores, and the air sweats with the heat of impending doom, and our fists protest the denial of…justice, that there is a path to take that has nothing to do with victory or defeat: a place we do not yet know the coordinates to; a question we do not yet know how to ask. The point of the departed arrow is not merely to pierce the bullseye and carry the trophy: the point of the arrow is to sing the wind and remake the world in the brevity of flight. There are things we must do, sayings we must say, thoughts we must think, that look nothing like the images of success that have so thoroughly possessed our visions of justice.

“May this [time] be remembered as the [time] of the strange path, of the third way, of the broken binary, of the traversal disruption, the kairotic moment, the posthuman movement for emancipation, the gift of disorientation that opened up new places of power, and of slow limbs. May this decade bring more than just solutions, more than just a future – may it bring words we don’t know yet, and temporalities we have not yet inhabited. May we be slower than speed could calculate, and swifter than the pull of the gravity of words can incarcerate. And may we be visited so thoroughly, and met in wild places so overwhelmingly, that we are left undone. Ready for composting. Ready for the impossible.

“Welcome to the [time] of the fugitive.”

Amen

Share this post