Meeting Sun Wukong at the crossroads of Heaven, a creative decolonial riff inspired by Bayo Akómoláfé

There is a move Bayo Akómoláfé makes with Èṣù that I keep returning to. He does not use the trickster to entertain us. He uses the trickster to loosen the bolts on reality, so the whole room can breathe again. Èṣù, in this telling, is the one who “breaks the binaries” and opens up a third way, a way that refuses the tidy comfort of completion. Bayo Akomolafe

Now let us do a careful, respectful experiment.

Not a swap, not a claim that Yoruba cosmology and Chinese cosmology are the same, and not a flattening of sacred lineages into one blended soup. Just a creative translation exercise, a way of asking, if we walked toward similar questions using Chinese mythic scripts, who might meet us there.

I think Sun Wukong would.

1) The celestial bureaucracy is a crossroads, just made of paperwork

In Journey to the West, Sun Wukong is born from stone, cultivates power through Daoist practice, masters transformation, rebels against Heaven’s order, and earns the title Great Sage Equal to Heaven.

In a modern decolonial lens, Heaven here is not “the divine” in a sweet, glowing sense. It is the celestial bureaucracy, the administrative machine that decides rank, worth, legitimacy, whose voice counts, whose body is manageable, whose hunger is inappropriate, whose anger is inconvenient.

Bayo’s crossroads is not only a place where roads meet. It is where our claims to being complete and correct get disciplined, gently, mischievously, sometimes painfully, into humility. Bayo Akomolafe

So here is a new thought, rooted in that spirit: Sun Wukong is a crossroads figure not because he stands at an intersection, but because he turns the entire idea of a fixed hierarchy into an unstable, laughing threshold. Heaven becomes a door that will not stay closed, because a monkey has learned how to pick locks with his own becoming.

2) “Awakened to emptiness” is a refusal practice of certainty

Sun Wukong’s name, given by his teacher, is often read as pointing toward “awakened to emptiness”, a cue that reality is not as solid as it pretends to be.

Bayo’s work returns again and again to indeterminacy, the sense that the world is not fully decided, and that agency is not a solo performance. He writes about a relational world where choices are not purely unilateral, but are shaped by other bodies and other agencies. Bayo Akomolafe+1

So if we read Sun Wukong through that lens, his famous transformations become more than a party trick. They become a practice of refusing one fixed identity long enough to discover what else is possible. Not an escape from responsibility, but a refusal of the colonial demand to be legible, stable, and easily governed.

3) Misnaming is not only harm, it can also be an opening

Bayo writes about “the gift of mispronunciation” as a risky opening, a way of meeting that allows identity to breathe, instead of freezing into correctness and control. Bayo Akomolafe

Now bring that to Sun Wukong, who names himself, renames himself, is renamed by others, and is constantly being interpreted through whatever the empire needs him to be that day. In English he is often collapsed into “Monkey King”, which is catchy, but it can also shrink him into a mascot, a stereotype, a neat export.

Here is the decolonial invitation: notice who benefits from the neat name. Notice what parts of the myth get trimmed off so it can fit into someone else’s story.

Then, very gently, ask the question Bayo keeps asking in different ways: what if being misread is not the end of you. What if it is also a crack where you slip into a different life.

4) The mountain and the golden circlet are a story about constraint and care

After rebelling, Sun Wukong is imprisoned under a mountain by the Buddha, later he is bound by a magical circlet that tightens when the monk chants.

It is tempting to read this as simple punishment. But in a feminist, trauma informed, decolonial frame, it can also be read as a difficult truth: power without restraint and consideration becomes harm, even when the power begins as liberation.

Bayo’s “third way” refuses heroic certainty, including the fantasy that we can fix the world by force of will. “We do not act upon the world, we are the world”, he says, pulling agency out of the lone hero narrative and back into entanglement. Emergence Network

So here is another new idea: the circlet is not just control, it is an argument for relational ethics. Not domination, but the messy work of learning how to travel with others without scorching them with your fire.

5) What Sun Wukong offers women’s healing work, without making him the centre

If you are using this myth creatively in art therapy, especially for women navigating patriarchy, racism, migration stress, and inherited trauma, Sun Wukong can function as a symbolic ally for three practices.

A) Refusing the script that made you “manageable”
Heaven offers Wukong a title that sounds fancy but is actually a low status role. Many women know this script in human form, the promotion that is actually more unpaid labour, the compliment that is a cage to work overtime.

B) Practising multiplicity instead of self betrayal
Transformation becomes permission to be more than one thing, tender and furious, grieving and hilarious, spiritual and sceptical, exhausted and still alive.

C) Meeting the crossroads without demanding closure
This is the heart of the trickster teaching. The goal is not a perfect identity. The goal is a living identity, one that can move. Bayo Akomolafe+1

Three creative prompts you can lift straight into practice

1. The Bureaucracy Scroll
   Paint or collage all the rules you have been given about being a “good woman”. Then tear the scroll and re assemble it into a new map.

2. Under the Mountain
   Make a small sculpture of the mountain that pinned you down. Then add a hidden doorway. Not a grand escape, just one true exit.

3. The Circlet and the Consent Spell
   Draw a circle that represents constraint. Around it, write the words that tighten you. Then write new words that loosen you, boundaries, consent, rest, chosen kin, truth telling.