TREELOGY. Arise the Treeman and the Plantwoman

At a workshop in Mumbai last month, where participants ranged from students of Std VI to a retired doctor visiting from the UK, I asked everyone present to imagine, through text or image, superpowers for plants and trees. I’d supplied a background for my enquiry: Why were most superman figures just that, an extra set of skills or fantastic power added to the Homo sapiens template? Why did the superpowers they have — Superman and Spiderman and Antman — come mostly from the animal world, from birds and insects and wolves and so on? Popeye the Sailor might have got his strength from eating spinach, but it wasn’t the medicinal or nutritional value of plants that I meant. Why was the human imagination generically reluctant to imagine Super-Trees?

The participants mentioned the exceptions, of course — examples of super-plants from the Harry Potter books and Game of Thrones . And then their responses — oral, visual and textual — began to energise the discussion.

First the children. Two of them, friends from Std VI, made a list of superpowers, some of which plants already had: They wanted plants to do what they were already doing, but in a more amplified way, convert carbon dioxide to oxygen faster and in greater volume, give us more food to end malnutrition in poor countries, and so on. I reminded them about how self-centred that was, plants serving our greedy needs. Their list, humorous as it was, ended with the desire for money plants to be literally money-producing plants.

Some of the adults in the group, a couple of environmentalists among them, drew trees with special powers — they confessed that they’d borrowed from JK Rowling. As we discussed their responses, a consensus seemed to have been reached. It was an unexpected one — everyone wanted trees and plants to have a more active defence mechanism. An illustration of this came from a woman who’d imagined a jhaapar tree — a slapping tree — a tree which slapped anyone who tried to cut its branches. Another participant had imagined — and drawn — a kind of chastity belt-like device produced by trees that would trap the woodcutter for life. The young man explained that he’d designed this taking inspiration from plant life itself — his model was the Venus flytrap, which trapped insects for food.

Two traits emerged from this — that they were asking for plants to be ‘morally’ unplant-like: There seemed to be an urgent desire to imagine plants as violent. Though it came from a place of affection for plant life, we agreed that it was slightly sad that we should want plants to do what we detest about ourselves as animals.

When we imagined superhumans, we usually imagined them as hybrid creatures — man plus some characteristic denied to man, and so borrowed from the animal world, as in flying like birds or climbing like spiders, and so on. But when asked to imagine what I’d, in an ad hoc manner, called the ‘Super-Tree’, it seemed that the group here, representative in most ways, had the opposite tendency — to supply the plant with a human attribute, and most of these characteristics, it turned out, were negative characteristics of the human.

Since then I’ve been wondering why it should be so. That question reminded me of an artist I’d met a few years ago in Santiniketan. Trained in Kala Bhavana, Ashish Ghosh now teaches in Visva-Bharati’s Silpa Sadana. He’d taken me to Mrittika, his workshop on the bank of the Kopai River. It’d grown evening by the time I’d reached, and there was much I couldn’t see. Strangely, most of the things that caught my eye were either things Ashish, with his commercial artist’s eye called rejects, or objects that had stayed back as remainder from an exhibition. These he gave me as gifts — wooden birds from an installation that he’d created on the bank of the river to recreate the journey of migratory birds that once used to come to the region but had now stopped because of noise and other kinds of pollution. The installation of wooden birds had ‘tricked’ the migratory birds to return again every winter.

My favourite among his conceptual and installation work was the hanging roots, tree bark and tree-like material he’d created and installed on the Visva-Bharati campus to protest the administration’s ‘cleaning mission’ and cutting of trees and their age-related folds and support — all a mark of their history. The difference between the tree’s creation and that of the artist showed, and it was, of course, meant to show, in spite of Ashish using material only from the plant world. This came to me as I thought of Super-Trees — the impossibility of man to become tree the way he’d become bird or insect, imaginatively and also literally. So when Saloni, the organiser of the workshop, asked me at the end how I imagined a Super-Tree, I could only say — by letting it remain just a tree, just as man is most superman-like when he’s merely man.

Sumana Roy is the author of How I Became A Tree;

@SumanaSiliguri

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