“Since the hunter has learned to shoot without missing, the bird has learned to fly without perching.”

— Igbo proverb

The bird in flight is the quintessential metaphor for the ahistorical figure.

We often hear the saying, “history repeats itself”. But first, we must ask: what is history? Is it not the epic story written by the most powerful pens?

So what brings about this repetition?
Is it not the identification with the epic stories told?

Identity is a fixation—a locating of self within a linear plot through which time is measured.

The imbrications of past, present, and future are a gimmick of conformity legitimized by identification.

It has been said that time is relative.

If it were so, how come it’s been tamed and tempered into a consensus?

The bird in flight knows this.

For even when the hunter entrapped time into linearity, the bird knew it must learn to fly outside of the confines of history – without perching.

Birds are fascinating creatures.

They fly to often unimaginable distances, some of them as much as circling the entire earth.

They fly across the confines of human-made borders.

These borders too are mechanistic objects of history.

Transdisciplinary disposition is not about a blend of disciplines for the sake of having many eggs 
and correspondingly many baskets to put them.
It is not a strategy of expedience, 
nor an answer to dwindling creative imagination.

It is much more.

Hegel writes about the historical figure as one who advances the course of humanity.

These are often those who, in all sense of the word, embody an unimaginable amount of violence.

He calls them those with the ‘Geist’—the spirit that moves history by force.

And he is right to place these figures within the pivotal point of history,
for history is an epic story of violence.

Yet, history repeats itself.

Then there were those placed outside of history.

“Africa is no historical part of the world; it has no movement or development to exhibit,” says Hegel.

Ever since, we opposed, denounced, called out Hegel – 
clamored to be let into the annals of history!

Even present-day decolonial discourses have not come quite far from that “banging on the door” of history.

But history is a mechanism of conditioning – of conflict, separation, violence – legitimized by epic stories written by those with the loudest pen and most enduring gun-powder weapons.

We made the mistake of mistaking history for truth.

We try to enter it—to be accounted for within its timelines, its logics, its archives.

The call for restitutions of “stolen” artifacts is no different from the appointment of African/Diasporian heads of Western Institutions in that fight for a seat at the table of history.

But we did not see that history, as it was offered to us, was never an innocent mirror.

It was a muzzle.

They say, ‘Don’t shoot the messenger.’ But history is the messenger that shoots — with the message

A training of the mind to see time through conquest, chronology, and causality.

The children of Europe are taught it without rupture.
They inherit its silences as virtues.
They learn to protect, sustain the narrative
because the narrative protects them.

Sustaining and protecting history is to reproduce violence ever anew.

Thus, history repeats itself.
Who repeats it?
Those who clamor to enter its pages, and those protected by it.

But there is another current…

The bird that flies, literally, in the face of history – the ahistorical bird.

It flies without perching because to perch is to be entrapped in the space-time confines of history delineated by the borders of violence dotting the surface of the world.

History operates within the parameters of those borders as identity, and everyone is marked, on the forehead, by the crosshairs of its muzzle.

The ahistorical bird sees this.

There are many who embody, before and in time, the spirit of the ahistorical bird. We are privy to their presence and the footprints they left.

The Transdisciplinary spirit is one of the ahistorical.

It moves like the bird in flight who is aware of the violence of history, and how it fights frantically to repeat itself.

So it stays in flight, not as an escape, but as intention and intervention.

This state of being is one of negation – a stripping away of identification,
for history is repeated only through identification.

The movement of the Transdisciplinary ahistorical state of being does not seek exhibition, validation, nor contest in the grand stage of history.

It is most concerned with the open sky and the seeing-as-action from that view.

This seeing is witnessing.
It is generative, and holds the seeds of possibilities.

We live in times polarized between the historic and the ahistorical.

There are those who continue to latch on, convulsively, through identity for which history repeats itself.

Then there are those who have learned to fly without perching.
To them, the sky is not a destination, 
but a vantage point beyond the impasse of history.