Even the Wound Bears Fruit

Even the wound bears fruit

When you bring water and salt to clean the debris of injury

When a repeated cycle of infection is interrupted by revived instincts

When you become the medicine. 

The wound is not in the way. I know it. Clear as the shine of a window polished with last week’s newspaper. No smudges and no streaks. The grit of sorrow as fine as a grain of sand, smooth to the touch even. Love shining through. Not that it’s easy, grief is laborious work but grants those who are willing to break sweat for its cause rare splendour.

How is your breathing?

My breath escapes the hostage of a world under siege with proceeding legacies of dispossession and unrepentant violence. I forget that I’ve locked it in my chest and when it flees I gasp for air. I think of my surrogate mother, the land of South Africa where I was raised. How she clothed me, how she instructed me on relations, and how even in great kilometres of distance, she still provides me with guidance. 

The tree remembers what the axe forgets. 

Acacia trees of the Sub-Saharan grasslands are endowed with specks of fragrant flowers, agile thorns and suffused speech. They are compelling orators. 

When a giraffe gnaws on a plucked leaf of the acacia, it responds by exuding ethylene gas, which the acacia entrusts with the wind to deliver to its kin about impending harm. 

The giraffe is well versed in this communication tactic and makes use of taut air to swiftly gain ground before the wind can reach the surrounding acacia so that it can continue to indulge in its bounty. 

If the breath of the wind spreads wide and far, the other acacia trees inhale the truth of what has happened. With this knowledge streaming through their limbs, they transport high doses of tannin into their leaves which ignite illness and even death in herbivores. 

With the rising number of the displaced reaching over 100 million lives globally. We must remember what the axe forgets. Liberation is an interdependent endeavour. Our freedom is contingent on each other’s breath. We can renew our commitment to the bond of our belonging and steward a forgotten future into being. The word is in the wind. Are you listening?

“When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool.” - Chinua Achebe

Soul work cannot begin without a practice of remembrance and that will mean that we will be called to grieve. Memory and mourning are finely braided together. The heart of the earth is in sync with our own and knows of our suffering. It is long overdue since you kissed the ground and anointed it with your tears. I know too the longing for measurements, eager for straight lines and well-mapped destinations but the place that we are headed is one without coordinates.

As M. Jacqui Alexander reminds us “We were hunting and gathering, that's what we were doing, and we were doing that in the forest. That’s where we developed our sensibilities; how to read, how to read tracks, markings on the ground; how to develop respectful relationship with animals. That’s where we learned about plants. That's how we knew what was “poisonous” and what was not “poisonous.” That's how we developed the cure and the antidote. That's how we came to know that it resided in the same place. That in the forest, the poisonous plant and its antidote lived next to each other.”

I continue to contemplate Alexander’s words as I travel to the heaven below. It is only here that you can meet rooted elders, who speak on behalf of Ngai (the creator) who were ordained long before you took your first breath. I sit at their feet and breathe in the wisdom of the earth that I am, that we are, as I prepare myself for the long night to come.

The apparatus of a wound is not accidental

it is an opening with the intended function to call forth fire

now and again

which is inflamed by a swelling of light 

that clarifies an 

opaque recklessness 

until it is 

no more.

To object to the accountability of repair and recovery of the Wound is to face our back to a bleeding world. Encouraging the rapturous proliferation of harm to ourselves and others and thereby progressing its long-life reenactment.

The neglect of this famished responsibility demands that we lend our ears to its cries which rattle existing choreographies and manufactured rhythms. The steps ahead of us necessitate a skilled sense of improvisation and a willingness to blunder the dance and then try again.

“I have learned to dance. I just didn’t know how basic it is for maintaining balance. That Africans are always dancing (in their ceremonies and rituals) shows an awareness of this. Hard times require furious dancing. Each of us is proof.” - Alice Walker

Offer the wound; running water, eyes that bear witness, cooling winds, salt from your mother’s kitchen (if out of reach, use salt from the ocean), warm shea butter, grassroot movement and spirit-touched hands.

Don’t stop dancing.

Sources

Achebe, Chinua (1986). Arrow of God. Heinemann.

Alexander, M. J. (2005). Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Duke University Press.

Grant, R. (2021, September 15). Do trees talk to each other? Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-whispering-trees-180968084/

Walker, Alice (2010). Hard Times Require Furious Dancing. New World Library.