– diary entries of a tree and a person
Words and Visuals by Jia Xuan Chok
In my reality, trees and people both have their own ways of documenting life. I decided to take a third-person perspective and peek into their diary entries (don’t ever do that in real life), weaving their stories into a reflective interspecies dialogue that explores how they entangle with one another beyond the grounds of proximity. Identity is formed and changed throughout the process as they mix up.
“Precarity is the condition of being vulnerable to others. Unpredictable encounters transform us; we are not in control, even of ourselves.”
– Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Tree, 18th of July 2021
Have you ever taken a moment to observe your surroundings, or perhaps lend us an ear or feel us around? What everyday dramas are unfolding within your neighborhood ecosystem? The duration of which I’ve stood here has eluded my memory, but today is just another day standing here, in the backyard of a fellow human’s house, amidst a bustling community of squirrels, bees, Malay civets, Black-naped Orioles, a family of sparrows, fungi, ferns and an assortment of greens. Today is another day continuing our polyphonic assemblage that makes diverse lifeways. Each of us have our own way of living, nurturing nature under our unique way of caring. Apart from self-subsistence, a healthy micro ecosystem takes from the individual function of each organism. For example, I’m in charge of regulating the temperature, the bees work on pollination, the squirrels in fertilization and planting seeds, and the ferns in providing microhabitats as well as air filtering. All of this happens under the frequent surveillance of this person, who we have come to believe to be the daughter of the house owners.
This person spends most of her time sitting by the window-side desk on the second floor, and she is staring at me again. For how long, I couldn’t remember, but I just let her stare because it’s not like I can leave, and I think everytime she does that, something is going on inside her head.
Person, (date undocumented)
Drenched in the evening glow of this day, the green mangoes reflected a golden hue that captivated my mind, and it felt like an invitation to write about it.
The green mango tree outside of my bedroom window has gone virtually unnoticed for the past years; not to my dad though – he has been patiently waiting for the many forces of nature to co-produce the being of this tree. So, when it started dropping mango bombs on the roof of my verandah, it landed a sonorous crash inside my mind as well. All of a sudden, its presence turned into a prominent statement, as if yelling, “HEY!” – a thread that ties a tree and a girl to a journey of collaborative identity construction.
I find myself observing the tree more and more, woven into their history at the same time theirs woven into mine – a human-nonhuman conversation unspoken yet palpably alive, birthing a quiet metamorphosis from an ignorant consumer to a careful conservationist.
Very often, I stare at the tree with tangled thoughts, spouting rhetorical questions. Little did I realize, the season my dad and I started planning ways to harvest the unreachable mangoes in the tree before they make holes on our verandah roof, was the day I unconsciously self-enrolled in the school of multispecies entangling art. Now and then, I think about the mango tree that sprouted from the seed discarded through a nonchalant swing of an arm, buried by elusive squirrels, nurtured by the efforts of all forces; the mango tree now missing from my vicinity as I reminisce the rustling of its leaves far away from home in Japan, where I study abroad.
I still remember how back home in Malaysia, retired individuals often sit under a tree in the late afternoon to catch up on the latest village gossip while children pillow their forehead with an arm against the trunk of a tree as they close their eyes and count to ten during a game of hide-and-seek. Village gatherings almost always happen near the presence of towering trees. People bond through fun, laughter, and food, oftentimes forgetting these nonhumans – the taken-for-granted creators of social landscapes – that brought them together. It is under the shade of a decades-year-old tree that stories are passed on.
You see, trees might not go places, but they are secretly threading history and transforming hearts – they bring conversations to places and exist as an indispensable part of conservation dialogues. It doesn’t matter if they’re clad to the ground because even so, they travel with time and imaginaries. They become the root of inspiration for many globally circulating stories of climate action and initiatives. “We must fight against deforestation or else we’ll be doomed!” rallied environmental activists around the globe. A symphony of tangible life – trees, clean air, animals – joins with the intangible essence of our identities, yearnings, fears, and hope for the morrows. Amidst this unruly interplay, conservation finds its defiant dance.
Tree, 2nd of January 2023
The self-awareness as a lone tree beckons the question of whether my presence speaks of substance. How the eco-emergency puts me constantly in anxiety and elicits frequently the urge to do something, even as I’m already straining against the tethers of my own limitations. There’s only so much I can contribute as one tree in a grand cosmic drama, and so I think about the trees who are weaving stories in the world’s biggest forests and whose existence collectively affects the global climate, landscapes, and oceans. It’s hard to imagine removing a pebble from the shore of a still body of water without making the water around it move; the same way it’s hard and terrifying to imagine what kind of effect the disappearance of one thing on the surface of earth can have on all dwellers because we’re all somehow more interconnected as you think. Hence, I often imagine what would happen if I, a small mango tree in somebody’s backyard, were cut down or died… Would it even matter?
What significance do I, a single tree, have on the biosphere? And then I spiral into a burrow of frustration; acceptance, even worse.
Person, 24th of July 2023
So often, we trivialize the power we have in morphing the system that instigate changes on our natural landscapes and fail to recognize the interconnectedness of our own world-making projects and those of the others. We live in a continuum where nature shapes us and vice versa. A lot of people don’t see that there is this world alongside theirs, only visible if they slacken their pace and feel around with their senses and sensibilities. It’s vast, slow, colorful, interconnected, creative, vulnerable, and contaminated.
I must say it’s challenging to stay afloat with tragic allegories weighing you down, but the thing about being young is having the passion to romanticize a hopeful future amidst an emergency-yet-to-turn-absolute-catastrophe. The famous Japanese matsutake’s survival skills serve as a testimony for signs of hope at the end of the world. I saw how nature is both vulnerable and resilient – a vessel of possibility and hope that allows me the courage to dream a green fantasy.
Tree, 22nd of August 2023
When the fruits in my hair began to ripen once more, the person stuck a thingamajig – two broomsticks connected with a green net tied at the end of the second stick – out of her window until it reached a good bunch of mangoes. She pulled and pulled and pulled and the mangoes submitted to the embrace of the green net.
Person, 22nd of August 2023
“Thank you for the fruits, Mango Tree,” I expressed my gratitude quietly in my heart. A silly thought surfaced in my head, and I half-shouted, “Thank you for the fruits, Mango Tree!”
From then on, that is, when I developed the habit of speaking to inanimate objects, I started to notice that it was more than simply the fruits that I care about now. I hear them speaking and caring for each other in a polyphonic ensemble, and I think, maybe they can hear me.
Tree, 2nd of September 2023
A few months after I questioned my identity, two saplings crept up from the ground on both sides of me! I became aware of my ability to, in part, nurture the growth of other beings, as well as my growth owing to the nurture belonging to theirs, hence becoming is always becoming with something else. Existing with the becomings and becoming-withs of all beings, I venture into a hopeful future of multispecies co-existence and collaborative survival.
References:
Powers, R. (2018). The Overstory. William Heinemann.
Robbert, A., & Mickey, S. (2013). Cosmopolitics: An Ongoing Question. The Center for Process Studies, Claremont, CA Political Theory and Entanglement: Politics at the Overlap of Race, Class, and Gender October 25, 2013.
Tsing, A. L. (2005). Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Amsterdam University Press.
Tsing, A. L. (2021). The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press.
The Polyphony 