It is summer 2002 and I am halfway done with twenty-five. Red numbers on a nearby clock lean past midnight, while a book and I are addressing an insomniac’s request. Outside, another life crosses a threshold. Half the canopy of a pine tree has split from its body and is carried down into the house below. The three main sounds of this moment have lived, as they occurred—together, in their exact order—in regular rotation in the speakers of my mind for over twenty years: the sound of the tree lacerated by lightning, several seconds of muffled wind and heavy rain, and the slam of limbs and branches piercing through the roof. The first-floor impact shook the frame, which carried upstairs to the bedroom, the bed, my book and I and both of our attentions. Fortunately, only the roof was damaged. The house’s frame withstood the impact. Unfortunately, the other half – or, rather, the rest – of the pine tree would be condemned to a shortened life that ended before spring the following year.

In both forms, house and tree, there exists a reaching. For the tree—a loblolly pine (Pinus taeda)—it had sought to, as its designs compelled it to, reach across and into the earth with its cones, spores, and catkins, in the hopes of ensuring tomorrows for its kin. Trees are nothing if not axes of time. Monuments to the past, to potential futures. The house might also be understood as an arrow aiming towards tomorrow, albeit in the interest not of itself but its occupant(s). It is a conduit through which futures pass through. Furthermore, the house reaches out again. This second stretch, unlike the sentient yearning of the tree or even the house’s live-in lifeforms, is lifeless, static, and controlled. It is the reach beyond creation, beyond the transmutation of raw materials, that, if successful, arrives at utility. That is, they become technology.

Although the arc of plants has traveled long before the days of “human” utility (by a factor of hundreds of millions of years), technology has existed long before it came to wear this name. Before its Ancient Greek root, technē, first found form from soundwaves, themselves formed through synapses shaped by mental-lexical associations. Before the stories and days of fertile crescents, bread baskets, cradles of terrestrial beginnings. Before the embryonic landmass we call Africa possessed the syllables to hold such a word against (and into) its geographies. Before its inhabitants called out to it in the first ancestral dreams. Plant technology began as soon as other forms of life established complex relationships with them. From bird nests to sticks as utensils for primates to feed upon ants (New Caledonian crows have been known to do this as well) to the tree-limb-as-scaffolding for the eastern tent caterpillar (Malacosoma americanum), technology is neither uniquely “human” nor limited to our purview or our history. It is tempting to lay our understanding of technology solely on its binary definition: the process of creating objects for use and the objects themselves. However, beyond this surface-level interfacing with technology, there is a psychic relation which lies at the center of its potentialities. Differently put, maker and material converge through a triangulation with process at its center. Three enter and re-emerge as two: wielder and device.

Before moving on, we must make clear our present understanding without exposing an opening for ambiguity to arise. These days, when this word, technology, takes to the air or page, it is overwhelmingly (and myopically) associated with synthetic, digital, and virtual devices. It accumulates near the industrial, the metallic and plastic. But it should be remembered that a world of non-digital, botanically derived items—including books, papers, rope, toothpicks, clothing, canoes, fences, sails, baskets, boxes, desks, tables, houses, and pencils—are also technology. This is the type of technology of which this essay speaks. 

In the unspooling of technology in the so-called “human” experience, plants have always played an outsized role. One of the most consequential plant technologies to exist is rope. Travel across terrains that may require ropes (ravines, valleys, mountains) bind the curious to the unexplored. Bridges of rope or vine were (and are still) slung across roads and rivers and gorges. Many will be made from the fibers of Corchorus capsularis or jute, a mallow-like flower endemic to Southern Asia known for living other lives: as garments and upholstery but mostly as burlap, also called gunny or hessian—the cardboard box of yesteryear and contemporary vehicle of rice and coffee beans. Throughout Perú’s Andes Mountains, bundles of ichu grass (Jarava ichu), whose habitat stretches as far north as Mexico and as far south as Chile, is the fiber of choice to be endowed with rope-ness. Other materials, such as hemp, manila (also known as abacá, a relative of bananas endemic to the Philippines), or cotton, are also used.

Rope also possesses the vernacular of holding. It is itself possessed by this holding, held without being beheld, a captive which also captures. A technology of the enclosure, binding the intimate and the inimical. Stripped beyond the tacit recognition of their botanical makeup, the fibers of rope also become tethered to “human” reason—the site of distinction and disavowal—and, as such, become charged with logics of control. It becomes a technology imbued with hegemonic intent. Enslavement, imprisonment, and punishment are as much a reality for the rope as it is its wielder and, most profoundly, who receives their intent. The procuring of these fibers, too—colonial and mercantile roots alike—oscillate within them with each use.

Take cotton. Every field may entertain an echo but one full of cotton, especially in the southern colonies of the Western Hemisphere, steeps in cacophony. Cotton cannot escape its tenures: that it was once used to unseam the world, before being used to stitch anew a monstrous social sphere. Its intimacy with rope, as a material and accomplice to enslavement, is as unparalleled as it is devastating.

Then, there is paper. The entanglement of pulp and substance. The manacles of mind let loose, into manifestation, a pressing of symbols glued to sound onto sheets, made indelible in act if not always in terms of execution or endurance. How we are condemned and freed by our disclosure on the page. How edicts and bills and contracts and writs and scripts and pamphlets and every book binds us between the imaged and imagined world. Arriving by ink or crayon or pencil signifying, over planes of pulp, anything from a name to a law or a lane or a narrative, to the tallying of stolen people. What is an archive if not the sequestering of layers from the phenomenal world? What of the marks that claim pieces of the earth, claim so-called peace, while compacting bones between their letters, or mandates that a living thing must be no longer—often offered as an example to others. Perhaps, always so. Paper, then, is a kind of holding of what was once leaved and looming but is now limiting and low.

But it is paper’s parent, wood, that wears the greatest weight upon its frame. On the one hand, trees such as maple, larch, ash, and cherry were and continue to be used to create shelter. They shield us from the elements (and, in the case of waterwheels, allowed us to harness their energies) and make survival more comfortable. Paper consists mostly of members of the Populus (poplar) genus, which is also used to make chopsticks, drum bodies, and as plywood. On the other hand, trees such as oak, chestnut, and cedar were used, in addition to architecture, as the chief materials for slave ships. The wood of these ships are stained in human ink—sweat, tears, blood—and the fingerprints of cruelty.

Turning towards the trees themselves, we see that when they are taken by and to hands who fashion them into anything from toothpicks to spears or stocks, the beauty of their knots and burrs, splits and fissures are unraveled, ravished, vanished, lathed, lathered in varnish, bereft of future years written into their inner rings. They arrive in other, tighter hands, ready for velocity, laceration, decision, aftermath. As means of condemnation, assertion, coercion, retribution or protection, the empowered objects they comprise—from paper to palanquin to pike—cannot escape the charge of their perversion.

Despite this, the alchemy of life is not lost in the transformation of the botanical into the utilitarian. Objects made from trees retain their warmth. Matter, to borrow from Jane Bennett, is vibrant¹. Whether in a grove or an office, they pay their debt to entropic decay. Just as the blood from fingers pierced by cotton barbs will return its constituents, its elements, to what we label time, so too will the wind-stripped sail,  the house frame skinned in brick or plaster, return. Until they—until we—make that return, we must contend with the schisms technology enacts, the splits that turn between into or and with into against. We must instead contend with the otherwise: that we, organisms, landmasses, and forces, are of a self-suturing cosmogony, one not so easily separated as half a canopy from a shattered pine but equally as vulnerable to its aftermath.

Notes:

1. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: a political ecology of things (Duke University Press, 2010).

“Who is we?”

To consider this question in the context of a gathering of people is to attempt to understand what might be meant by interpersonal community. The thresholds of such so-called communities, based on geography as much as identity, station, or ideology, are imprecise. They suffer from a fatal slippage that, with one hand perpetuates borders—their innumerable edges designed to shrink within and wound beyond themselves—and with the other denies such borders, reaching for and consolidating around the individual. We, in this sense, fails to be necessarily insular and expansive, chimeric and collaborative, solidary and seeking to destroy the violent boundary of nation and the policing of spaces, including the ripening/decaying terrains of body and mind. As such, to ask “who is we?” here is to suggest, if not impress upon, a needless parity.

I instead want to turn this question outwards, to a greater otherwise, another oblique but no less firm angle of being-in-the-world; the arrows of conjunction pointed not between peoples but between people and plants. In this linking, the question “who is we?” has a definitive and inalienable answer. Plants have had millennia to form deep, highly integrated assemblages of being with themselves and pre-human life, while their recently emergent cohabitant—us—have yet to have even one-millionth of a percent of the time to do the same. What people have “achieved” is, one might say, more than mere assemblage. It would be fair to label many aspects of such advancement, particularly in industrial spheres, as monstrous, with little beyond willful ignorance or avoidance to shield the evidence of its lacerations from our attention. In this time, however, our twisted human time, botanical life has (fortunately) been stalwart, the largest and most consequential catalyst of our survival.

The life of plants beside us means the lives of plants around and within us. No conversations of agency—no conversation at all—would occur without the trees and flowers transpiring, breathing out oxygen that, mixed with nitrogen, enables us to breathe, speak, sing, or grieve. In our vehicles, our addresses, our hands, vegetal fibers persist. Draped over shoulders, knees, against the waist, around the feet. Between and beyond our teeth, they fill our bellies, yield to our digestion, our arteries and organs and tissues and cellular structures. Combusting into clouds, they reach the lungs, moved onward, upward, past the blood-brain barrier. In water, milk, or alcohol, they are brewed, steeped, or tinctured, yielding quickened movement, calm or lull or sleep, wield the social oil that compromise perceptions, inhibitions, decisions, or balance. Plant test our consciousness, our discernment, our taste. Beyond this, no concept or state of relation or partition would exist without our cellulose-based interlocutors. What dimension could Édouard Glissant’s opacité inhabit given anoxic atmospheres other than the ultimate opacity—oblivion?

But let us think smaller. Think of the smallest thing you can hold in your hands: a memory. For me, I think of bergamot orange oil in my mother’s pomade. Her wicker basket full of rubber thimbles, a wedge of tailor’s chalk the size of a razorblade, wrapped in papyrus. Two cork-centered pincushions, tomato-shaped and sleeved in pleated linen. Every cotton sundress that she wore, which bore the echoes of her semirural youth. The cinnamon-scented heather broom in the corner of the living room. Every meal, from sandwich to supper to snack snuck in past my bedtime.

Vegetal-visceral entanglement is as overarching as it is particular and quotidian. Hunger is the question of every unfed threshold and every source of food—no matter its form, be it animal or insect, inside an egg or shell or threshed from grain—derives from plants. Think about the first of us for whom over their tongue’s papillae passed sweetness or tang or grassiness or bitter vegetal matter. Through their sensory tissues, sensed heat, pith, sting, grit, cloy, crunch. How desire before desire, before will, must have oscillated in their neural response.

Beyond the clothing and feeding of people, plant entanglement also includes the therapeutic dimension. How the concoction, the pill, the tisane or patch or poultice sent swelling or inflammation or covert pain slipping beneath the hours. As maladies melt either until immemorial or merely attenuated. For every known botanical aid, there are curare and cures and chemistries of care that human eyes and hands have yet to name. Alkaloids and terpenes and esters and antioxidants and purgatives and entheogens beyond our grasp and likely our imagination. Survival is as much about fuel as it is about healing and maintenance.

All of this is not to say that the relationship is one-sided—but it is asymmetrical in weight and consequence. Any rate of cultivation on our part is outstripped by deforestation, desertification, pollution, and nutrient stripping of the soil. Not only does this change our relationships with the plants we desire, but it also encourages other plant species society deem surplus to requirements or detrimental (see: “weeds”) to populate areas they were prevented from. The conversation of agency re-emerges here, particularly with regards to “conservation” and its colonialist/imperialist dimensions, affecting peoples and their relationships with the flora and fauna of their locales, their cultures, their lives and livelihoods. [To explore this further, I would highly recommend reading Dr. Aby L. Sène’s “Against Wildlife Republics.”]

https://republic.com.ng/october-november-2022/conservation-and-imperialist-expansion-in-africa

“Who is we?” will always melt away from our grasp when it comes to interpersonal gatherings. People are too oceanic to congeal into a composite being. But between plants and people, we is the only being that can exist, lest the former finalize their severance from the world, for which the latter will be surely close behind.

For the Bakongo people of Central Africa, and many across the diaspora, the cosmogram represents the movement of all things through space and time. The multifaceted diagram illustrates how everything that exists travels along a cyclical path of being. It consists (in most depictions) of a cross-divided circle, with each division a different color, and counterclockwise arrows. These divisions represent the “four positions of the sun”—conception, birth, maturity, and death. By the time the first humans started their feet beyond conception, the first position, and into the world, about 200,000 years ago, plants had already endured lifetimes. Estimates say the first plant arose around 850 million years ago, when an alga swallowed cyanobacteria and the resulting composite being gained the ability to store sunlight as energy¹.

Given their approximate age, this means that plants have lived through every Ice Age; witnessed every extinction event; seen every ancient civilization rise at dawn and turn to dust; seen huts, yurts, adobes, camps, shacks, houses, pavilions, pagodas, skyscrapers, palaces and places of faith or power rise, desiccate, crumble, and join the aggregates of dunes and windward storms; watched every season pass through at the latitudes and altitudes in which they found themselves able to acclimate; seen mass migrations of all animals, wars of one kind of animal, that same animal’s burials, children’s games, children’s burials, feasts, dancing, famines, people in love, people in pain, in lust, in loss, becoming lost, losing themselves, losing their breaths—some for a moment, some a stretch, but all of them, eventually, forever; seen the atmosphere burn, freeze, shimmer, swelter; watched landscapes bloom, burn, burst, fracture, fall away; have been stripped and scattered by wind, lacerated by sand, saturated in rain, in mist or fog, choking in smog, exhaust, several billion signatures of hydrocarbon smoke and trillions more in emissive chemical reactions not seen before the rise of people; seen themselves expand into organisms the size of large cities or cut down in swaths far larger for the benefit of those large cities; watched as mountains rose, collapsed; earthquakes sheared and shattered, swallowing themselves; seen continents fracture, form, drift, and collide; watched the sea returning, again and again, bleaching the shore; tsunamis and typhoons returning, again and again; infernos, cyclones, blizzards, monsoons—and people—returning, again and again.

The story of plants is also the story of people. We are grafted to one another. But who is the rootstock and who is the scion? Who provides the stable base, the roots and stem? Who, the fruit, leaves, seeds, and flowers? While humans have learned how to cultivate plants, the focus of this series casts its gaze upon plants as the chief agent of entanglement, responsible for uniting, dividing, and complicating the relationships between themselves, other beings, including us, and geographies over time. This includes how we interweave plants into our culture, our myths and nightmares, and how their embrace is just as palpable. It is also about how plants are ceaseless witnesses and catalysts of our lives, whether around us, beside us, on or inside (and through) us. On this basis, plants are presented here as the rootstock and we, their scion. They are far older than we are, and without them in the world there would be no us, if indeed any life at all. Omnivore, carnivore, herbivore, insectivore, fructivore, pescatarian, vegetarian, vegan—none would survive without the vegetal world. The half of a graft which has no root will quickly perish on its own. Of course, while this applies to humans as well, it is also true that we are scions to other kinds of graft. We, in our all-too-aware cleverness, import the graft of grift; of gripping, hoarding, cultivating, curating, stockpiling, piling up, hiding, lingering about, culling, dividing, divining, cherishing, discarding, or tearing asunder. This cleverness has, over the centuries, given birth to life-extending (and for some, enriching) technologies with one hand, and disrupted the balance between plants and people and planet, increasingly with devastating, even irreversible, consequences, with the other. Yet before this outsized reach of bipedal mammals with enduringly complex brains tested (and breached beyond) our boundaries, plants had long since entangled the world within their lengths. When Wattieza, a fernlike tree—considered the first of its kind—first released spores into the atmosphere, the only continents were Laurussia (now most of so-called North America and Europe) and Gondwana (the landmass of present-day South America, Africa, India, Asia, Australia, Antarctica, and smaller parts of North America). This was ~380 million years ago².

Monodora myristica, calabash nutmeg, must have perfumed the air throughout the forests of Benin for generations before those strange and fateful ships began to arrive from across the Bight of Benin at the West African nation’s southern coast in the mid-1700s. Before Audre Lorde would visit and write poems about Dahomey³ (French Dahomey between 1894 and 1958 the Republic of Dahomey until 1975 when the country adopted its current name), before the Dahomey kingdom themselves, all those fires and flags raised before them; millennia before their hominid ancestors arrived from southern lands, laying their eyes upon the first of these specimens. Those first eyes like-but-not-quite-like-ours that met the calabash nutmeg’s wide-lobed foliage, its pendulous orchidlike flowers—a frilled, speckled, bicolor trefoil—and large seeds thrice the size of their Indonesian cousins, Myristica fragrans, arrived when neither tree nor person knew what it was to be owned or said to belong to an imagined place called nation. Rewind the seasons further. Before calabash nutmegs themselves, to their ancestors—ancient lianas—forming in embryonic forests, and which will, over millions of years, develop the ability to produce fruit as a means of reproduction.

Tauraco persa, the Guinea turaco, who regularly stuff their gullets with several fig varieties (Ficus) also growing in the Beninois forests, likely witnessed Monodora’s vast millennia-old habitat shrink in a matter of centuries as human development pushed it back to the edges of the nation’s rivers. Spores and leaves of all kinds had taken to the air long before the turaco’s bright green plumage marked regular transits from Senegal east and southward, down as far as the coasts of northern Angola. The story of plants is the story of birds, too. Both trees—Ficus and Monodora myristica—were eventually poached and taken to the so-called New World, with the fig finding contentment with mainland temperate climates and the calabash nutmeg persisting in the Caribbean. Prior to their seeds crossing the Atlantic in the hair of stolen African women, okra, or Abelmoschus esculentus, were neighbors of the two trees throughout West Africa, but also thrived in parts of East Africa, as well as South Asia and Southeast Asia. By the time I was born in 1976, in the city of my birth, Atlanta, okra had been here for nearly 400 years. Beetle-pollinated cycads, also here, had by then already witnessed the upwellings of magma no less than 300 million years ago, some of which hardened and created Stone Mountain to the east and the Blue Ridge Mountains to the north. But they were not alone. Epiphytic fronds clung to some of the first conifers. Club mosses and Equisetales, horsetails, ran rampant. Nelumbo lutea, the so-called American lotus, rose and set and rose again like floating satellites over the swampy waters of a continent that had no name (or people with words to name it) for ninety-nine percent of its existence. Each of these plants were present and privy to the best and worst of human endeavors. Some became passengers, whether by will or by accident. Some were stowaways, and others, unintended hosts. The entanglement, however, remains the same. The story of plants is—and always will be—the story of people.

Notes:

1. Knauth, L., Kennedy, M. “The late Precambrian greening of the Earth.” Nature 460, 728–732 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature08213

2. Arens, N.C. “Eospermatopteris.” Encyclopedia Britannica, September 21, 2021. https://www.britannica.com/plant/Eospermatopteris.

3. Lorde, Audre. “Dahomey.” In The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde. 239.