Book Review: Sensuous Knowledge by Minna Salami

The Beginning of the End of the World. 

Written by: Rebecca Emiru

I am so tired of waiting, 
Aren’t you, 
For the world to become good
And beautiful and kind? 
Let us take a knife
And cut the world in two – 
And see what worms are eating
At the rind. 

– Langston Hughes, “Tired”

What can I do?
One must begin somewhere. 
Begin what? 
The only thing in the world worth beginning: 
The End of the world of course.

Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land

Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone is the first book by Minna Salami, feminist critic, essayist and founder of the award-winning blog MsAfropolitan. In Sensuous Knowledge, Salami covers universal subjects like knowledge, power, decolonization, Blackness and beauty through an African-centered Black feminist perspective. She does this not to argue for the validity of her perspectives but simply because they are hers. Salami explores how concepts that we perceive as knowledge change “when you think about them with women’s ways of knowing, Black feminist theory, and African knowledge systems at the center.”

The result is an exciting series of essays packed into a small-but-rich book full of nuance and interdisciplinary connections — Salami touches on the Yoruba concepts of intellectual and emotional intelligence in ogbon-ori and obon-inu; an extended discussion of Lauryn Hill’s Unplugged album and encompasses the journeys of the rivers Yangtze, Thames and Niger.

Salami is interested in how the narrative of a story produces the structure, rather than the structure itself. While the book is full of images and anecdotes, it dwells on concepts. Discussing narrative and structure, Salami says, “The two are, of course, closely tied; the structural and political systems of white supremacy, capitalism, neoliberalism and imperialism are the raison d’être of Europatriarchal Knowledge. The point of labeling it this way is, however, to distinguish the narrative from the structures that it creates so that we can, hopefully, explore if a different narrative would consequently produce a different structure. Basically, to change the structure, we first need to change the story about the structure.”

Sensuous Knowledge follows a Black and diasporic tradition of liberation through transformation, in this case by transforming the story. How can we see clearly the worms that are eating away at the rind of this world as Hughes wrote? How can we end this world to build the new one as Césaire’s character asked? What fundamental changes are needed and how? Salami’s answer is this: “The more we understand that knowledge is an ecosystem that reflects interbeing, and that flourishes when our relationships flourish, whether they are relationships with facts, with nature, or with people, the more our world expands.” 

The book was released four days after the WHO declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic, and two days after Breonna Taylor was killed by police in Louisville, Kentucky. The gaping holes in our political, economic, cultural and social systems are once again exposed. But it can be overwhelming to imagine a better world. Salami’s book offers a positive and actionable alternative, a vision of an attainable and beautiful future.