“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.