The fugitive is not an escape artist. Fugitivity is not escape, not abandonment, and not a convenient transference of an isolated body from one place to another. When I speak and write about fugitivity, I mean to mark the ‘internal’ playfulness of presumptuously resolute structures; the ontological apostasy that teases bodies into new shapes. I mean to name the spillage that devours all claims to fixed names and territories. What I mean is this: everything is in such a state of ecstasy that nothing is fundamentally still and resolved – not even the seemingly cold and snarky sting of the slaver’s whip; not even the angry and weaponized borders of the cotton plantation; not even the pressing burden and crushing weight of a cop’s knee on our necks; not even the precise and geometrically sovereign outlines of a deadening paradigm. The fugitive’s work is not to get from point A to point B: it is to get from point A to point A.
From Bayo Akomolafe’s Facebook.
