These Wilds Beyond Our Fences, Bayo Akomolafe
These Wilds Beyond Our Fences, Bayo Akomolafe
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These Wilds Beyond Our Fences
Letters to My Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home

Author: Bayo Akomolafe, Charles Eisenstein

Narrator: Bayo Akomolafe

Unabridged: 16 hr 25 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 01/23/2024

Synopsis

Tackling some of the world’s most profound questions through the intimate lens of fatherhood, Bayo Akomolafe embarks on a journey of discovery as he maps the contours of the spaces between himself and his three-year-old daughter, Alethea. In a narrative that manages to be both intricate and unguarded, he discovers that something as commonplace as becoming a father is a cosmic event of unprecedented proportions. Using this realization as a touchstone, he is led to consider the strangeness of his own soul, contemplate the myths and rituals of modernity, ask questions about food and justice, ponder what it means to be human, evaluate what we can do about climate change, and wonder what our collective yearnings for a better world tell us about ourselves. These Wilds Beyond Our Fences is a passionate attempt to make sense of our disconnection in a world where it is easy to feel untethered and lost. It is a father’s search for meaning, for a place of belonging, and for reassurance that the world will embrace and support our children once we are gone.

About The Author

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

Reviews

Goodreads review by Daniel on September 15, 2021

Your mileage will vary with this book. It is equal parts exquisitely written and pretentious/purple. It is profound and perfunctory, enlightening and overreaching, understated and grandiose. As with all of these types of books - ecocritical/ethical/existential pseudo-memoirs - a lot of it can come a......more

Goodreads review by Yong Feng on September 06, 2020

Listening to Bayo Akomolafe speak is quite something: his words blend philosophical complexity, a playful spirituality and a frenzied urgency to rethink the assumptions that underlie how we live. This book is not quite as vivid an experience, but it compensates by slowly retracing the steps that lea......more

Goodreads review by Michelle on August 08, 2018

dense, but ravishing. i LOVED this book. for the wide view, written in language that maintains it's sense of awe, read this. yum.......more

Goodreads review by Grant on April 26, 2024

This book is like mulch for composting your mind. I couldn't recommend it more highly. I'm definitely going to give it a few more rereads in my life.......more

Goodreads review by Michael on February 02, 2025

A love letter to his daughter that sometimes landed like a lover letter to me, the reader. How does one find or gift a feeling of home? Of belonging? A fantastical exploration into the nature of reality that posits Aristotle/Descartes as thesis and post-modernist theorists of narrative as anti-thesis......more

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