Banana Republic جمهورية الموز

My uncle looks so strange, almost fully reclined on the marble table top in the middle of his outdoor kitchen. His arm is twisted under his chest to support him and, with his little paunch and fiendish little grin, he looks like one of those little baby angels on an Italian marble fountain. He is careful to perch his wineglass on the table in front of him, but in his excitement he threatens to bump into the bowl of fruit behind him as he wriggles over the marble surface.

Trying to tamp down his giddiness, he tells Rama immigrants deserve to be jailed because they committed a crime, that it would have been better if they had stayed in their countries and tried to improve their homeland instead of sneaking into this country in order to take advantage and live off of what we built. He tells her that they do not share our values, that they want a free offering and, in a gesture of direct incitement, he implies that they carry diseases.

But Rama is the one who is actually calm. She never interrupts my uncle, even when he begins to repeat himself, because she knows that trying to  interrupt him would constitute an emotional reaction. Rhetorical weakness. Instead, she lets him get carried away. So much so that everytime he says something truly vile, he  deflects by saying that he appreciated that she has a sense of humor. You know your generation can’t take a joke anymore, but you know I’m mostly joking. Mostly.

As for me, I’ve retreated into the rhetorical corner. Partially overwhelmed by the enjoyment of getting drunk for the second time, this time on something that tastes good, and partially unsure how to navigate between two people who, honestly, I don’t know very well. I can’t believe I thought it would be a good idea to bring Rama to stay in the house of my dad’s even more cretinous sibling. What a weird thing to do. Rama said we’d stay with her great aunt in San Juan, I thought, I have relatives too, I didn’t emerge out of a cocoon.

The sun has set and the pool has turned into an illuminated white box and casts an upside-down shadow on our faces, making all of our facial expressions indecipherable. My uncle is smiling and talking about a tv news segment he saw about migrant caravans and Rama is frowning and matter of factly calling him gullible. They’re both being increasingly direct, and increasingly vicious. I’m becoming increasingly quiet. But I’m the one who started it.

It all started with my naive question. I had sort of half expected a boring, civil evening. Rama and I had both had an understanding that we would be nice and listen to him talk about all of his possessions and trips to Europe, but that we wouldn’t give my uncle what he really wanted, a chance to spar with his ideological enemies. Everyday I’m sure he spends hours watching cable television, the pundits riling him up as they argue out loud with themselves, showing again and again how to win in an argument against the democrats and the feminists and the cultural Marxists with cool disdain. Facts over feelings. What he really wants, but can’t buy. There are no cultural Marxists at the pool club. Instead, he gets my out of the blue request for me and Rama to stay with him, and now I know why he was so welcoming, he is hoping to goad us after a few bottles of wine into talking about politics.

I could see that Rama loved the challenge, peaking out despite that look of hers when the conversation is beneath her intelligence, she assumed it would be easy to play the game. And she would keep her cool because There were no stakes in convincing some rich guy out in the suburbs of anything. Not like a grad student was going to barge in and use her skills leading seminar sections to overcome a lifetime of experience of corporate media and privilege. But I think she underestimated what it would be like to have an argument on two completely separate wavelengths.

I watched it happen slowly, through the empathetic clarity of my own drunkenness. The last time they spoke the same language was in his above ground wine cave, perusing the stacks. My uncle asked if we preferred red or white, and Rama said it depended on what the red was and what the white was, he laughed and mentioned some different French and Italian words (names of grapes? Names of places?) and she knew what each of them meant. They leaned into this shared vocabulary. But I could see the look of frustration for the first time on  her face when she asked which of the wines were natural, and he answered well they were all natural. It was all downhill from there.

My uncle poured each of us a fish bowl of red wine, and we clinked our glasses together. Here’s to a respectful conversation, he said with a grin, like announcing the start of a wrestling match. He immediately began by asking sooo, were we were mad that the primary was rigged against our candidate. I looked at Rama. I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. Our candidate? Rama didn’t know either, or maybe she just didn’t let on. She was very clear to me about being above electoralism. That was a share for my uncle, because his concept of politics was informed entirely  from watching cable news. The presidential election was all a ruling class distraction. To Rama the election was the only thing that was in fact unpolitical. It was instead everything else, highway construction and housing tax credits and the public financing of golf courses, that was political.

So she didn’t mind spending most of the first bottle of wine having the Iowa Caucus explained to her. To be honest, she just hadn’t been following closely. I had been busy for the last month thinking only of Rama. Our candidate was doing great, but they were going to steal it from him. Our candidate? My uncle clarified that he meant Bernie,  we were going to vote for Bernie weren’t we, your generation loves Bernie right? We both agreed that we probably would.

My uncle’s eyes lit up, he had found his in. Off he went on his prepared speech, asking us how we could vote for a socialist when communism has failed everywhere it’s been tried. Socialism is evil, and even more than that it’s stupid. It only works until you run out of other people’s money. Human nature is inherently selfish, trying to go against human nature leads to the gulag. You of all people should know that, he said pointing to me. Rama looked at me mildly confused, but didn’t say anything back. My uncle asked us how we’d like having to share all of our possessions with the state? To this Rama gave a simple, unsatisfying shrug.

My uncle realized he was striking too early, and did a tactical retreat by offering us another bottle of wine, apparently something really good and expensive this time based on how Rama squeezed my leg under the table.  Instead of proceeding, right back into politics, he asked me how I liked life as a farmer. I laughed obligingly and told him it was going well. It was more of a teaching job, showing kids where their food comes from. We were going to get the beds ready soon, but we weren’t planting anything at the moment, it’s much colder up in the big city than here, no growing citrus up there, but that I was looking forward to a school group project in the spring, teaching students about incorporating local fruits and vegetables, things they could even grow at home.

Rather than ask about any of that he used it as another opportunity to ask why, if I was so interested in biology, I hadn’t become a doctor. You’re so bright, you could have gotten into a great school, your dad was so disappointed. I used Rama’s same deflective shrug.

There was a pause. We used it to each take a thoughtful sip from our fish bowls. This next bottle of wine tasted expensive, well did it? I don’t have any idea. All I know is I wanted to slosh it around in my mouth longer before swallowing, I felt its complex flavor on my tongue once I had swallowed it, certainly an improvement from the SEXUAL ALLIGATOR. Rama asked about who the winemaker was, but my uncle answered by instead telling us how many cases he had bought of it. Even unable to see her facial expression, illuminated by upside down pool light, I could tell how much that annoyed her.

I stood up to feign admiring the pool area and looked out again at the golf course to look for any birds perched for the night, or any nocturnal animals that might be wandering around. My uncle said they had recently caught and killed an alligator in the golf course pond. I said that was terrible. He agreed, he said it made it dangerous to golf. I meant that it was terrible for the alligator, killed in his own home. Rama said I should tell my uncle all about the plans for the Florida Wildlife Corridor, the one I had just been enthusiastically telling her all about in the car. Now she was the one trying to goad me.

It’s great really, environmental institutions are trying to link up conserved land to create a contiguous belt of conserved land. Once they get the last land purchased and conserved, it should be possible for a Florida Panther to walk uninterrupted from the Florida Keys to Pensacola without being stopped by cars.

No more alligators killed in their own homes, Rama says, trying to rile up my uncle.  It ended up riling only me up. I finished my fishbowl and poured myself another. I am not good at pouring and leave a ring of blood traced by the bottle on the table. I think about the vultures, their freedom, I want to be like them, I am no longer talking to my shithead uncle, Im no longer being judged by him, I’m talking to the animals. Think of it, shut down a few sugar cane farms, stop one or two tract home developments, and we could have 1.7 million contiguous acres of high-priority conservation, and the need for new acquisitions to combat the arrival of between 900 and 1,000 people in Florida each day. Every new car, every surface, and irrigated lawn represents a new barrier against the genetic diversity and survival of 131 endangered animals and 567 endangered plants. Save the beauty of Florida from the squalor of sprawl and scatterization. I realize where I’m getting this attitude from.

My uncle sets down his glass and coughs. This could have been the start of an epic fight, a screaming match over land use, degrowth, industrial agriculture, but none of that was legible as politics to my uncle. After coughing he just said he hoped there’d still be places to golf. Rama has A big upside shadow of a frown. She tries out her own provocation. Golf courses are pesticide-poisoned status symbols for the privileged. She too sounds like the field guide. But she said it with a slightly teasing voice, plausible ironic deniability, like she was also coming around to the idea that a good-spirited fight with my uncle might in fact be fun. He laughed, undisturbed. You’re right, golf is a status symbol, it takes a lot of pesticides to make the grass look good, what’s your point?

My point, she said, is that the land would be better used as literally anything else: a library, public housing, restored habitat for pumas.

My uncle asked her who should get to decide how the land should be used.

Rama said it should be determined democratically.

My uncle said he remembered voting for mayor and city council and that he was pretty sure they decided who got to build the golf course.

At this point She was stuck . Rama couldn’t counter this without being critical of what was meant by democracy, how limited and impoverished his conception of it was, an explanation which for her would most certainly require her to use the term ‘bourgeois democracy,’ which would be dismissed, fairly, as silly. They were at a standstill.

Looks like we could use another bottle. By my count, that would work out to each of us having drank an entire bottle ourselves. My uncle gets up and Rama follows him. Rama tried out teasing my uncle again, saying what she actually meant but pretending it was a joke. She told him she could come along to supervise, she couldn’t trust his taste. He replied by saying I’m sure there’s nothing in here you wouldn’t end up drinking. That is supposed to be an insult, but it doesn’t quite make sense, it actually sounds kind of lecherous, but he laughs loudly over our trying to make sense of it. I also get up to supervise their interaction, which is quickly becoming hazardous. I don’t know what I can actually do. They stand in the wine room talking about wine, now using obscure adjectives rather than foreign names. They seem to be having fun again, but I stand just outside in the hallway trying to keep my ears on them. My eyes fall on an enormous triptych painting, abstract, hanging in an adjacent room. It’s beautiful. The way  certain pattern of color repeats in complementary colors, how a terse arrangement of angles works itself out to a generous synthetic loop by the third panel, I sip the dregs of my glass, and sigh in pleasure, it’s like an abstraction of history itself, a landscape over time, modes of production.

Rama comes out with a bottle under each arm, looks up at me and winks. I have no idea what the wink is in reference to. My uncle comes out next, he also winks at me. There sure is a lot of winking going one.

Are you okay?

Yes, I just, these paintings, I’m overcome, they’re so beautiful, who made them?

Which paintings?

I point into the other room.

Oh, he stares along with me with a look of unfamiliarity.

You know I have no idea, the designer put those up. He pats me on the shoulder and walks back out to the patio.

When I make it back outside he is showing Rama the grilling station and the second refrigerator for his outdoor kitchen, and I asked him if it had to work twice as hard keeping food cold when it spent all day out here in the Florida sun. He opened it up and waved his hand around inside as if to show that it was nice and cold. This is where he mainly kept his breakfast stuff anyways, he liked to have his breakfast milkshake each morning outdoors. I peered into the fridge, and it was a wall of milk jugs on the bottom and thickly packed bananas on the top. America’s pathological predilection for hoarding.

As he hoists himself awkwardly up on the outdoor kitchen counter, I asked why he had both whole milk and skim milk. Which is for the milkshake?

Both!

It turns out he mixed him together to get the right consistency. Rama covers the laughter coming out of her mouth with her hand. Like he’s telling me a business secret, my uncle explains how he pours one half of each jug down the drain and then combines the two half empty jugs. I look down to see a trashcan filled with empty milk jugs. Jesus.

Reclining on the marble, sliding his wine glass in front of him, he admits that he usually didn’t get through a whole jug of that either. But that’s okay, it was all going to support the dairy farmers! And I even recycle them!

This makes me notice another black trashcan. It is filled with uneaten, blackened bananas.

The bananas? Don’t worry about the bananas, my uncle says trying to console me. They’re so cheap, you can get them in 3lb bunches for $1.50 at Costco. And you know, helping out the farmers.

I was genuinely surprised. Wow, how are bananas so cheap?

Rama perked up from her stool on the outside bar. Well it’s certainly not the Latin American farmers getting any of that money.

My uncle loudly scoffs, here we go.

Rama scoffs right back. Do you think there are family farms somewhere down in South America earnestly making these bananas? I bet you have some fantasy in your mind of a family farm, a dairy cow and a pig pen just like some old Looney Toon cartoon. It’s an illusion you no doubt hold onto because it justifies your wasteful lifestyle. This all sounds genuinely aggressive, no covering laugh, no scoff.

But she doesn’t want to miss this opportunity. Instead, she sets down her glass and takes on another tone, one I’m more familiar with but which would not serve her rhetorically.

She says that Bananas were a cash crop at the moment they were introduced, rural communities in Central America had their land bought up, and they become ruthlessly exploited by the American fruit magnates in a state of near-slavery!

No irony, no detachment, She can’t  help herself. She just knew too much about the topic and was going to go for it. She was going to try to bridge the gap between his conception of politics and hers. She was going to try to talk about the political economy.

And she was well prepared for this moment. She had taken a history of the American Overseas Empire in Grad School as part of her research on Tiki Bars and the United Fruit Co. played a leading role. She had all of the most specific and accurate facts to draw on from memory: statistics, dates, names of Gilded Aged Fruit barons and congressional tariff  laws, export volumes. My uncle took sips of his wine, practically lying down on the marbletop, giving  a coy smile as Rama went on triumphantly about hurricanes and fungus, rusting equipment and the moving of production between the Atlantic and Pacific coast, stranded assets and babies born with birth defects. She never raised her voice, having come into possession of a confident and even pace of speaking. My uncle nodded along, as if receptively, as she quoted verses from early 20th century Parnassian poetry, makes reference from a Miguel Ángel Asturias novel,  and is merciless in pulling up her phone and reading a long selection from the memoir of Dartmouth-educated and genocidal madman Victor M. Cater’s term “banana farming and negro management.”

My uncle seems tense, his even tempered release of fake laughter was trailing off as Rama becomes increasingly confident that she has cornered my uncle, playing on his field of facts over feelings. She has so many facts. But her deeply researched analysis of the global banana supply chain was only useful for the conversation she wished she was having. Because once she had finished making a point about how industrial agriculture methods had exhausted the soils and led to waves of migration away from ancestral lands, my uncle finally responded to the one word he picked out for which he had a script.

He says that immigrants don’t know how to take good care of their land, ruin their own farms, and then sneak into this country to do the same here?

Wiggling around on the marble counter, he says well, that just sounds like smart business practice. Maybe if some of these Central American companies had a little more sense and ran good businesses like the people who made this country, like those people,who went to Dartmouth and learned business management instead of being lazy and waiting around in the jungle waiting for handouts. But those people prefer to breed like rabbits. Bad breeding.

My uncle pauses and a glint of anger flashes across his cherubic face. A show of aggression to back up his revelation, admitting that ultimately, despite the corporate media spin, racism hasn’t changed since the gilded age.

One of these wine glasses is about to be smashed.  I have to step in, but I don’t have any facts to offer myself. We don’t grow bananas on the urban farm, it’s all Mid-Atlantic crops, I’m usually teaching kids about the health benefits of brussel sprouts or blowing their little minds by showing them peanuts grow underground. But if I don’t say something soon Rama might try to shove my uncle into the pool. On the other hand, I can’t cut her off, that would be an even worse defeat, wrangling and silencing my woman, what a predictably paternalistic denouement, my uncle would love that. Or, worse, I could concede any point to my uncle. What’s there to concede that isn’t pure dark fantasy?! Nothing of what he’s saying or referring to exists in the real world, it must be nice to be able to draw an argument from that.

Well, what’s to say I can’t. Rather than contradict him, why don’t I exceed him. I’ll make things up too. My uncle is about to say that the images of immigrant children in cages is fake when I stop him, blurting out something without any idea where it’s going:

Have you  heard of the Mosquito Coast Flotilla.

Both him and Rama look surprised at me, slumped in my patio chair. My uncle sets his wine glass down. He says he hasn’t, looking over at me surprised and annoyed.

I say You haven’t? I’m surprised, it was just on the news. You didn’t see the big sea caravan?

No, he hadn’t, but he immediately sounds concerned.

Some people are saying it’s a large exodus, a boat lift (هروب ماريل الجماعي) like the ones back in the 1980s, but others are calling it an invasion.  We actually saw some of it today from this nature trail observatory we went to.

We did? Rama asks. Yes, remember the farmland we saw planted at those villas, that’s all part of it. Rama thinks I must be drunk or have lost my mind.

We went up to the observation tower today and while we were looking around we saw these villas on the water, but it looked like they were abandoned, they were covered in banana trees and corn plants, they looked more like a farm than someone’s house. So we asked the park ranger about what the deal was and she told us that those houses had been preempted.  (إكتساب بالشفعة)

Preempted, my uncle asks, sitting up straight on the kitchen island.

Preempted I said.  It’s this crazy scheme that someone figured out. There is this guy, I think he’s from Nicaragua, I think anyways he was running a landscaping business for a long time, cutting people’s grass, trimming hedges, and one day he figures out, he must have a nephew or  something in law school or doing Florida history, he tells him about the Swamp Land Premption Act of 1833, which allows settlers to claim the title to swampland if they would agree to drain the land and turn it to productive, agricultural use. The thing is, almost all of the time there were native people’s living there, but it didn’t matter, as long as the land could be considered to be being used unproductively, the government would legally recognize it as the settlers.. As long as the colonist used it to grow crops, it was theirs.

I don’t get it, my uncle says. I can see that Rama is starting to get it though.

Well this landscaper and his nephew look it up, and apparently the law is still on the books. And it’s written vaguely,  the law states that any settler has the right to lay claim to any land originally surveyed as swampland as long is not currently being used for the production of food. So many of those housing developments built on the bay were all originally swamp, so it’s all applicable to this law, because there may be people living there, but they aren’t using the land “productively” so it doesn’t count.

Just as the law intended! Rama chimes in.

It’s crazy, because the way settler is defined in this law, it only refers to someone coming to Florida, not someone already here, so this is something only immigrants can do. And that’s what many of them have been doing. This landscaper gets an old map, finds out which areas of Tampa were originally labeled as swampland, and gets a bunch of his cousins together, and they gets jobs landscaping in these developments, but instead of cutting the grass, once they unload their equipment they get to work digging up the lawn and planting beans and squash and bananas and mango and when the owner gets upset and calls the police, the nephew is there and shows them the law, and not only do they get to keep the yard, they kick the owner out of his house too!

What?! That’s insane, I haven’t heard this, my uncle says.

Well, lots of other people have, in fact, the news has traveled back to Nicaragua. A cousin told a cousin told a cousin, and now they’ve put together this flotilla, and they plan on all landing at the same time so that nobody can do anything about it.

Well, I’m the coast guard will have something to do about it.

No, here’s the genius part, I say as the idea comes to, they’re planning on all coming over right when it coincides with the Gasparilla Parade, they’re going to dress up like pirates and invade Tampa like they’re part of the parade!

My uncle looks at me, red in the face, like he’s going to get up and strangle me, but then he starts laughing. Hysterical, unabating, cherubic laughter. He laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs.

The Devil’s Bargain

 The animals that we saw in those lands were three kinds of deer, rabbits and hares, bears and lions and other wild animals, among which we saw one which carries its young in a pouch on its belly. While they are small they carry them in that manner until they can get their own food. If they happen to be out of the pouch searching for food when people approach, the mother does not flee until she has gathered them all in her pouch. 

We’re getting out far enough from the city center, the margins where the religion gets weirder. Christ bleeding on a billboard, cowboy churches.  I see a sign on the side of the road: Ecclesiastes 4:4 written in marquee letters on the inside of an enormous clam shell.

Whenever we slow down at a light we can again that the yards of rich people have people in them. Gardeners. Almost all immigrants from Central and South America. Holding weed whackers, swaying back and forth with leaf blowers on their backs, armed with enormous scissors shaping topiary that nobody will look at. Yards and gardens nobody will sit in and nobody will stroll through.

Someone is up in a palm tree, wearing a holster around their pelvis, hoisted up on a pulley system. He is cutting free the browned fronds that gather at the base of the canopy. A pair of gardeners stand over a brown patch of bermuda grass, talking about which chemicals to add to it to make it grow back.

Were driving in silence for the first time. I look over at Ramas eyebrows furled underneath her cat eye glasses. I don’t let her see where we’re going, holding the phone with the directions in my lap. Now we’re out here on a highway in the exurbs, and Rama is driving like a madwoman.

Despite our speed, I know that the brown spots on the side of the road are what remains of an animal carcass. Maybe a rodent, definitely a mammal. I consult the Field Guide, which doesn’t show how animals look as roadkill, but does say that the only native species or rodent is the Florida mouse (podomys floridanus). I wonder what they would think of all of the other introduced rodents, the ones that came with us, would they think of them as any less invasive, I bet a Florida mouse would think that norwegian rats were a species more similar to humans than them, living in our walls and crawling spaces and remaking the landscape in their image as well, made indefatigable and immune to the vagaries of weather and the food chain by feasting on the endless bounty of human trash.

I wonder what they think about other species, ones that were once local, but were eventually seduced by the same bounty, the engorged racoons and dumpster diving bears, the flocks of birds which swell from turning their main source of calories to nabbing under table french fries and slicing open black bags of garbage. The devil’s bargain.

I look out at the tree line and I see the black mass on a branch. vulture. I wonder if the population of vultures actually increased when we built all these highways. That is exactly the kind of question my prescient  field guide would be good at answering. Venereal disease, Veterans, Venice of the South, Volcanoes, Vultures.

While the advent of agriculture has been apocalyptic to bird species overall, causing a loss of nearly one quarter of the global bird population has been lost since the advent of agriculture, two avian species that have seemingly benefited from human landscape modifications are turkey vultures (Cathartes aura) and black vultures (Coragyps atratus). At night vultures roost communally on transmission tower in groups exceeding hundreds of birds,  thermal air currents created by paved surfaces make for easy flying, and the wholesale transformation of the landscape into a dense lattice of superhighways has given them a veritable smorgasbord of dependable carrion.  

Huh, well how about that. I say out loud. No reaction from Rama. She has sped up to 90. The silence in the car is getting awkward so I turn on the radio. I bet Rama will think something on AM radio is interesting.  Fizz immigrant tuba music fizz a jingle for a mattress company Fizz a preacher who sounds almost in tears discussing Joshua 14-21.  He is speaking to a live audience, to whom he asks questions and to which they respond. Does God expect faithfulness? YES! Does God forget his promises? NO! I start answering right. Does God still conquers evil and provides rest? YES! I explain. I wonder if they have a horse there in the church. Rama asks me if I’m really already so bored from driving. I scan through the channels and there is a staticky news report. It’s about the proposal to build a wildlife corridor, especially for panthers, and the last puma in the eastern United States.

The panther neared extinction in the early 1970s, dwindling to about 20 animals. State and federal wildlife agencies and private partners helped bring the population back to an estimated 120 to 230 wild adults and sub-adults, according to the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge. Even still, the panthers are limited to a single breeding population in South Florida on less than 5% of their historic range, according to the refuge. The vast majority of panther deaths are due to vehicle collisions, with 26 vehicle deaths in 2018; 23 in 2019

I look over at Rama, she doesn’t react. I stare at her, and stare at the odometer. She finally looks over, without any reaction. The odometer starts to go down.

• نارنجاوات Citrus

It was a nine-day journey from Apalachee to Aute. When we arrived we found all the people of the village gone, the village burned and much corn, squash and beans, all ready to be harvested. 

After another red light, Rama starts to speed up, but about a mile down the road I see two hispanic farmers standing at the back of the truck.  The truck bed looks like it’s holding a motionless bonfire. That’s right, I hadn’t even thought about it, we’re here right at the perfect time, everything is in harvest now, I ask Rama to please stop.

I get out of the car first and greet the men, each in straw hats, who in turn give me the thumbs up.

Buenos Tardes 

They tell me they grow this all themselves in their free time on their own lots, it’s all very fresh. They start to pronounce the english names of the varietals in a thick accent.

Fallglow and Robinson tangerines

Satsumas

Ruby red and flame grapefruit

Orlando tangelo

Key lime

Clementine

Pero nada es mas dulce que tu  

They are looking past me, at Rama whose curiosity has overcome her annoyance. I laugh and she looks at me confused.

guess they think you’re hispanic.

Yeah, I get that a lot. I start sorting through the truck bed and say

cuidado, si pudiera entender lo que uds dijeron sería amarga como un limón.

The men laugh and one whistles. They start picking through as well and hand me over things they think we’ll like. Soon we have two garbage bags full of fruit. Rama picks out a tangelo and starts to peel it. One of the men holds up their fingers, signalling for her to wait. He climbs up into his truck cabin and looks up smiling through the back window. I give him a thumbs up. Rama groans, oh God, this is so good.

Yeah, amazing what a piece of fruit tastes like when it’s in season.

The man in the straw hat comes out smiling with all of his teeth except the one that’s missing, and holds out something for Rama to grab. She opens her palm and in it drops a small green lime.

Para que hagas una limonada 

She says gracias and I say o mas bien una margarita She understands that and we all laugh. They ask her in broken English where she’s from. She tells them exactly, which is more geography than they understand. I tell them in Spanish that she’s from the Holy Land. That they understand. I pull out some cash and pay them, it costs almost nothing for all of this fruit.

We both sit in the front seats of the car waiving in silence out my window at the men in the straw hats.

I don’t get it, she says, breaking her silence.

I tell her working in restaurants for the last ten years you basically learn some spanish by osmosis.

No, not that. I don’t get how you can be so misanthropic and also so nice to people.

Big Bend Station

After resting there for two days, the Governor asked me to go find the coast, which the Indians said was very near. We walked until the hour of vespers, when we reached an inlet where we found many oysters, which greatly pleased the men. And we gave great thanks to God for having brought us there.

We see the smokestacks pouring out smoke over the thicket. All the electricity we’ve been using on this trip was made there, the jukebox at the Tiki Bar, all of the lights my uncle leaves on at his house, the charge of this iPhone. I see a red-tailed hawk flying over the chimney, taking advantage of the heated updraft to climb higher into the sky.

You’re taking me to a power plant? We’ve got one right in Brooklyn.

No, you’ll see.

We see a sign for the parking lot and turn in, but then are stopped immediately by a car idling. The parking lot is full and so we join the line of cars waiting for spots to open up. Rama is immediately impatient and picks up her novel that she’s been keeping in the car door pocket. I can see the park office and the observation deck but we can’t get out until a spot opens up. Everywhere we go we’re imprisoned in this car.

We slowly snake around the parking lot in the line of cars as spots open one by one. Once it’s our turn for a spot we begin idling in front of a woman standing at the opened hatchback of her minivan, deeply engaged in some activity. She doesn’t acknowledge us. We inch forward. She is changing a baby’s diaper as it squirms on the ground of the van.  The back of the woman changing her baby’s nappy begins to bead with sweat, and her shirt becomes bunched up and caught on her bra, and she continues wrestling with the baby to get its diaper on. The one thing she does not do is acknowledge our presence, waiting in anguish to take her parking space. But I guess we’re all really just waiting for the baby to cooperate. I don’t know how much control any of us have in this situation. I don’t know because I’ve never changed anyone’s diaper. I’m about to feel sympathy when all of a sudden the diaper changing is over, the woman throws the baby over her shoulder, closes up the hatchback, and begins walking back to the visitor’s center. Rama and I both groan loudly.

So much of the lives of the people out here are spent like this, driving to and waiting for parking. How do they do it? Rama and I have both almost lost our tempers and it’s only been 10 minutes. She tries reading her novel again but can’t concentrate, she keeps looking up to see if someone is going to give up their spot. I’m getting so claustrophobic, I feel like I’m strapped to a hospital bed, how do people live like this? To try to pass the time, I ask Rama what her book is about. It’s a post-apocalyptic dystopian novel about a super-empathetic prophet who creates her own religion. This should buy some time.

When I finally spot an old couple hobbling towards the enormous truck parked right in front of us, Rama is describing what she means by hyper-empathy, the condition that the protagonist in the novel has, the uncontrollable ability to feel the sensations she witnesses in others, particularly the abundant pain in her world. The man unlocks the car with his keys and the bumper lights blink. This is it. The man opens up the rear passenger door of the truck and pulls out a stepping stool. He walks around to the other side of the truck and puts it at the feet of the old woman. I nod at what Rama is saying. The old woman steps up one by one, holds onto the handle next to the door, and with great strain, pulls herself into the truck. Rama is talking about empathy more generally and about her friends who describe themselves as “empaths.” The man picks the stepping stool back up, walks around the back of the truck, slides it on the ground of the back seat of the truck, closes the door, and climbs up into the drivers seat. I have no empathy.

Finally out the car, We cross the parking lot, and now people who haven’t parked yet watch our every movement from their car windows. A man lowers his window to ask if we’re leaving, and I shake my head. He insults me as the window lifts back up. I don’t blame him. We cross the street between the parking lot and the visitor center office on the comically small crosswalk they have built to protect pedestrians. The office is a visitor center made up of mobile buildings on stilts next to a platform overlooking an industrial canal which separates the tourists from the enormous rusting power plant on the opposite shore. At the base of the plant are the square exhaust ports which rush out hot exhaust water into the canal. Rama asks if I want to go ito the visitor center, they have a nature exhibit all about mangroves. But I am caught looking at the power plant, entranced. It looks terrifying, its pipes and tanks resembles a rib cage, and its spewing smoke and dumping discharge straight into the canal, and somewhere deep in the innards of this evil metallic whale carcass is a blazing furnace of coal. But you can’t smell anything and the plant is completely silent.

We pass a crowd of people as we head into the visitor center. They are surrounding a square pond and all putting their hands in the water. Inside the pond a number of manta rays swimming compulsively in circles. The rays do not react when a child’s little fingers draw lines down their backs, or try to grab their tails. I always try to minimize the idea, whenever it comes to me, that the lived experience of animals and humans are that different. I am fairly certain that  rats and toucans and sharks understand, more or less, what’s going on. And pain must be basically identical. But at the same time I can’t bring myself to imagine myself as one of those Manta Rays right now,  driven insane pacing back and forth in a suspended box of water, all the while being tickled by fingers which continually manifest from the rippled glass ceiling.

I ask the kid next to me what it must be like to be a manta ray and without a beat he says it must suck. We all understand more or less what’s going on.

The exhibition at the visitor center is disappointing. There are no park rangers or guides to teach anything. And the wall-text is paltry. Nothing about the Sabkha, the Fiddler crabs, or the bay estuary ecosystem and its floral-fauna interactions, nothing about plant assemblages. Rama laughs, this is meant for children. Why? These kids aren’t reading anything, this is just a toy store for them. The animals are drawn on the walls as cartoon versions of themselves, and we hear a recorded voice broadcast from a loudspeaker explaining that these special animals’ are extremely sensitive to cold, and so they spend the winter right here, sheltering inside the man-made canal because the hot water that flows out from the power plant after cooling the turbines. See, I tell Rama I thought she’d appreciate the irony.

The recorded voice boasts of the Power Plant company’s actions to preserve the local environment, including the establishment of this park. It then goes on to explain ways we, the visitors, can help protect the environment. Have you tried turning off the running faucet, buying an electric vehicle, or helping out by cutting the rings of six-packs so that they don’t get caught around turtles’ necks? I imitate the voice to Rama, have you ever thought of industrial sabotage? Or self sterilization?

We move along with the crowd of whiny children and retirees towards the outdoor viewing platform. We join an even larger crowd spread out along a boardwalk parallel to the canal. The power plant dwarfs us all. Everyone is milling about until a gray-haired man shouts that he has spotted the couple. We all follow the direction of his finger to a bump in the water, which is hard to spot in the murky water. But there it is, a tiny gray scarred island.

 Salratinate سلرطانات

The manatees don’t move much, content to slowly hover above the seagrass. The water is murky from the turbulence of the power plant exhaust so you can’t see them unless they come up for air. One of their backs will emerge for a minute or two, and then disappear back underwater. I fill in the spaces between their emergence with more Manatee facts. I know what you’re thinking Rama, how can they all be so chubby and not just float on top of the water! Manatee bones are dense and solid which allows them to act as ballast and promote negative buoyancy. Isn’t that fascinating. How about this? The major conservation organization for Manatees was started by none other than Jimmy Buffet! Mr. Margaritaville wasn’t all just drunk piracy, he took Manatee advocacy seriously and is arguably the most important single figure in saving Florida’s manatees. None of this is written anywhere, so a few people start listening to me. Most Florida manatees depend on localized warm-water refuges in the southern two-thirds of Florida to survive winter; about 60% use outfalls from 10 power plants like this one, whereas 15% use 4 natural warm-water springs. But those have become overrun with development and tourism. What’s going to happen to them? A child asks me. Well we have to decide, we need to gradually wean manatees off plant outfalls since we plan on eventually closing these dinosaur carbon-intense power plants, so we need to either do better return the flow of springs now used by manatees and restrict use by humans, which will never happen, so what we’ll probably do is create new thermal basins to retain warm-water pockets able to support overwintering manatees. Like Manatee hot-tubs? Yes, like manatee hot-tubs. An older woman asks me if I work here, she wants to know where there is a diaper changing station.

Rama tries taking a picture of the manatees for social media, but it doesn’t come out well. You can’t tell what you’re supposed to be looking at. The audience on the boardwalk is soon disappointed that this is all we’re going to get, that the Manatees aren’t going to be performing tricks, and it disappoints me to see Ramah lose interest as well. I am failing this test. I don’t think she even thought it was very ironic. Old couples continue their conversations, a few kids are crying or screaming, and the coal smoke continues to pour out of the smokestack. Rama, reluctantly, asks me if I also want to go see the crabs.

We follow a gravel path into the brushy area behind the parking lot, a nature trail built by the electric company on land that was once a palm plantation. The sign at the front claims that the trail will highlight a number of coastal ecosystems and that it will eventually lead to a watchtower. I don’t have high expectations, but on this one little piece of reclaimed land, nature thrives. The trail is surrounded by thick walls and tangles of vegetation. Rama has decided to continue telling me the plot of the Octavia Butler novel, about how in the climate-change induced dystopian world the main character lives in a gated community, and how society outside the community walls has reverted to chaos due to resource scarcity and poverty.  She does not realize that I have stopped walking.

I look intently into the thicket. Rama turns to watch as I remove my field guide from the pocket and begin to thumb through it.

While the Tampa Electric Company may have set aside a paltry lot of land in its environmental PR stunt, it nonetheless excels in preserving a precious and rare ecosystem. Gulf Coast Salt Marshes were once protected from man’s development onslaught by its unproductivity as land and by its insect sentinels the mosquito. But with the invention of DTT, and a merciless campaign of infilling throughout the 1930s and 1940s, much has been lost. That is why this small but mighty coastal habitat trail is so special: it winds eight-tenths of a mile through saltern, coastal high marsh and coastal strand habitats. A patient observer will be treated to the dramatic sweep of the transitional zone from ocean life to terrestrial uplands, beginning with the estuarial mangrove forest and smooth cord grass (Spartina alterniflora) at the water’s edge,  to the irregularly flooded Needlerush (Juncus roemerianus) up to the barren salt flat where Fiddler crabs reign, and finally to the maritime marsh-elder (Iva frutescens ) and upland pines (Pinus palustris). Here is the sensory symphony of biome transitions, each plant assemblages determined by tide, soil content, and the presence of symbiotic faunal relationships rather than the irrational whims of bad horticultural taste and invasive plants that typify our contemporary suburban landscape. 

Yeah!  That’s what I want to see. I want to see everything all together where it belongs.. Rama says she thinks that might be a little hard here. A couple in athleisure wear pass us by on the trail, exercising with little speakers on their belt and power walking. Techno music Doppler effect.

Undissuaded I begin staring out at the landscape. Green, low-lying bramble. I look more closely. I look for details. I see a whole field of familiar inflorescences. Well look what we have here. Rama looks up from her phone.

Rama, you might not recognize them in their native habitat, looking so healthy and well-adapted, but it’s our friend from the airport.

Bryan?

Who?

Your friend Bryan?

No! I mean Iva frutescens. Remember? Jesuit’s Bark? Two curious people stop to see what I’m discovered. They must think i’ve found a fox or a rattlesnake. One of them has a dog which is furiously barking around my knees it sticks at snout into the Bramble, and also tries to find what I’m looking for. Rama tells them that I’m looking at weeds. Confused, they leave.

Oh Rama, look down here at this little succulent. Batis maratima: also known as turtle weed, saltwort, or crabwort.

I thought we were going to look at the crabs.

Yes, sorry one minute, let’s see, oh wow, will you look at that, a succulent shrub that forms dense colonies in salt marshes, brackish marshes, and mangrove swamps, bingo! Right where it belongs.

Oh here Rama, you’ll think this is interesting. Its leaves are sometimes added to salads in Puerto Rico where they are used as an aromatic herb, purée, and pickled food. Its beans can be added to the salad. The seeds are added to salads, and can be roasted or “popped” like corn.

Speaking of, we need to start heading to your uncle’s for dinner.

You’re right.

We continue briskly down the pathway and I’m having the time of my life, transitioning from the upland bush to the salt flat.  I try to not be distracted by a man who passes us tethered to two dogs bred to be misshapen,  he holds onto their taut leashes likes he’s water skiing. The salt flat opens up before us and we step onto a boardwalk to avoid walking on the soggy sandy soil. I tell Rama that I hope we’ll get to see a Fiddler crab in its native habitat, but as soon as I say that we come upon them: hundreds of them. An enormous salt flat completely covered in Fiddler crabs. They are small, red and orange, and the male crabs have one arm bigger than the other. They mill about on the flat surface of the salt marsh, an entire crab civilization. They seem completely unphased by us watching from the boardwalk, they are too wrapped up in their own life world. One of them is building his hole, and two of them are fighting. Another group is gathering, as if plotting a conspiracy. Hundreds and hundreds of crabs. They disappear into the mangroves beyond. Rama finally has something to take a picture of.

As Rama looks for the right angle, I ask her to use her super empathy, what must be like to be a Fiddler crab, do they feel a permanent imbalance in their body because of the one bigger claw?

Of course not.

What must it feel like to live in a vast crab society, does it have crab interpersonal drama? Are there crab politics?!

Of course.

The trail ends at a wooden observation tower overlooking the edge of the water. As we go up the stairs Rama finishes telling me about her dystopian novel, or at least as far as she’s gotten. I’m excited for the view, the chance to take in the entire transitional zone at once, but I can’t help but notice once we’re up there that the nature trail area is completely surrounded by private development villas. The field guide is right, the salt marsh is almost all gone. In its place is an endless pattern of housing developments, just like my uncle’s, rows of identical Venetian villas on large, sun-bleached lawns, with their own stupid little docks. America’s pathological predilection for hoarding.

I tell Rama those villa owners are fighting a losing battle with their grass lawns. A rug of Bermuda grass being inundated with salt spray and the Florida sun. No matter how much the landscape guys come, the Mangroves will pop up from the salt water below us. They might try to use pesticide to poison what they call weeds. They’ll call in a landscape design expert to help when a colony of fiddler crabs creates infertile patches in the lawn. But before long they’ll have long lead pine saplings competing for space with their ionic columns,  baccaris halumfloria crowding out their pansies and other English garden plants. I don’t know Rama.

Don’t know what?

The future.

What about the future?

Maybe it won’t all be bad.  It could also be a climate disaster induced paradise.  Just think about how this will look in even just a few hundred years.  It will be so hot and prone to flooding that humans will have given up their investments and moved north, all these villas will be covered in moss and vines. The boat docks will disappear into the tangle of mangrove forest. All the wood rotted and disintegrated turned back into silt, to be fed on by crabs. The manatees will love the heat, they’ll emerge from their hiding place and return to the depths of its bay, now quiet without the incessant roar of boats’ engines. Hawks and vultures strutting over the empty highways. The night sky will be filled with stars and the Milky Way, the amphibians will return to their circadian rhythm and chirp with one voice at dusk.

Rama comes over to my side of the observation deck and gives me an unexpected hug.

I like that.

Like what?

I like when you use your imagination.

We look at each other in the eyes, but then pull apart as we hear a family fighting their way up the stairs. We crowd into a corner and the family scatters out onto the platform. One of the children drops a large drop of chocolate on the railing and puts the rest into his mouth for safe keeping. The mom tells the daughter to get off the railing. They don’t acknowledge us, or acknowledge the landscape. The father looks at his phone. The mom tries to catch her breath. They head right back down the stairs, asking each other about what kinds of pizza they want.

I look at the salt flat one more time, and Rama takes some photos. As we walk towards the stairs I see a caravan of ants that have found the melted chocolate mountain on the railing and are working to carry it back to their home.

Waking up

-Good morning.

I’m about to reply but then she says it again in Arabic. She says it a few different ways. She’s not speaking to me.

My head is throbbing, tropical fruit ooze must be leaking out of my ears. I don’t remember how we got back to my uncle’s house, or if Rama and I slept in the same bed. I don’t remember the question of us sleeping in the same bed even coming up.

I open my eyes to check and she’s gone. I am in an empty bed, maybe she took one of the other bedrooms.  I sit up and see she’s sitting on the huge ottoman in the corner of the room on the phone with her father. She says the whole retinue of goodbyes, pauses, and then says them again. Then she sets down her phone inside her notebook.

-My dad says hi.

I sit up in bed, now I really am confused. But before I have time to think Rama lets me know the plan for the day.

-So!

She holds up her notebook to reveal an illustrated treasure map of Tampa Bay and the remaining artifacts of its tourist traps and roadside oddities. Oh, why didn’t I think of that. She’s obsessed with these places, they have a whole atlas online. On our second date I thought we were on our way out to Flushing Meadows for hot pot but it turned out to be a pilgrimage to see the Whispering Column of Jerash.

-But first! Let’s go see your childhood home.

I give a thumbs up signal but I have no idea what that even means. Does my childhood home mean the one I first lived in, my dad’s house, we wouldn’t be able to get past the security gate in any case. or one of the many places me and my mom moved to when she and my dad got divorced? None of them seem particularly more meaningful than the other.

But I don’t say any of this. I’ll just pick the one I think remember how to get to. we’ve already passed over St. Joes Creek a few times, I should be able to navigate us there. I just need to throw up first.

 Pleistocene

We drive straight south on an avenue flanked by a phone store, and a subway sandwich chain shop, and a gas station, and a pharmacy, and a burrito chain story, and a local surf shop, and while we do that, Rama lists the name of the some of the Florida roadside attractions lost to time:  Bongoland,  Weeki Wachee Spring, the Atomic Tunnel, Citrus Tower, Coral Castle, Midget City, Parrot Jungle, Moonshine Still, Skull Kingdom, Mai-Kai Gardens, Waltzing Waters Aquarama, Marineland. We drive by a perfectly circular lake. We pass by an empty drainage ditch. Rama tells me about diving board horses and elephants on water skies, how the mid-century Florida roadside attraction is a sort of skeleton key for unlocking the political economy of consolidation in the tourism economy since the 1970s.

We pull into a shopping center and Rama goes into the pharmacy to buy some things for the trip that she had forgotten. I sit in the car in the parking lot and feel like I’m going to throw up. I need to distract myself. I look up at the marquee where a fiberglass caveman drags a fiberglass cavewoman by the hair. There were never any cavemen in Florida! Well, I guess that depends on what you mean by Cavemen.

I close my eyes, but all I can see is the wine dark sea, that makes me even more noxious. I look around the car, what is this book Rama put into the car door pocket? Parable of the Sower? She always has a book with her. Oh yeah, I brought a book too. Rama parked the car underneath some sort of oak tree, and I try to identify it. Maybe a willow oak (Quercus phellos), young but doing well stranded here at the edge of a parking lot. What else is there to look at. A bunch of stupid crepe myrtles (Lagerstroemia). Haha, the field guide refers to them as “trees for dullards with no imagination.”

I wonder what it has to say about cavemen in Florida. I sit in the car and look up Pleistocene in the index of my field guide.

Pleistocene geology of Tampa Bay

As you gaze wistfully upon this devastated landscape, its habitable areas filled with sprawl and scatterization, and you try to picture in your mind the Pleistocene Arcadia it must have been prior to ecocidal motorization, you may make the mistake of imagining it centered around more or less the same contours of the Bay as it exists now. But that would be a mistake! When the last ice began to come to an end about 17 thousand years ago, the Gulf coast of west-central Florida would have been about 120 miles west of its current position. By the time of arrival of humans (which can only be approximated by the sudden and precipitous extirpation of megafauna) Tampa Bay was more or less a freshwater savannah-like swamp. When you imagine your ancestors here, on the pitiless hunt for a diverse megafauna that included mastodons, giant armadillos, and saber-toothed cats, you may lament the lost indescribably rich paradise that once was one that was perhaps slightly dryer from the one you reflexively imagine. 

I guess I haven’t imagined it at all. Florida, Paradise, without the people. The Milky Way reflected across a shallow lagoon, a flock of birds settling onto the canopy of long pine, the brushing sounds of enormous creatures migrating through the grass.

Rama seems to be taking a while. There is nothing left in the parking lot to identify so I read more about the bay.

Anthropogenic Changes to the Bay and its Watershed

But we can also mourn the Bay as you may have initially imagined it. As environmentally destructive as the native genocide of the megafauna and the 19th century dredging of wetlands for sugar cultivation may have been, nothing could compare to the changes that the Tampa Bay watershed would begin to see starting in the late 1940s and early 1950s. To support rapid post-war coastal urban development, dredge-and-fill techniques removed sediment from shallow parts of the bay, depositing them on-land to create an artificially well-defined shoreline. Onland, regional urbanization has also affected the ecological and hydrologic characteristics of the watershed, through the removal of natural upland and wetland habitats and their associated plant and animal species, and the construction of roads, parking lots, sidewalks, rooftops, and other impervious surfaces. As the watershed as it existed as a system of natural filtration and stormwater channeling has now essentially been destroyed, water now falls over a toxic and impervious urban landscape, soaking up a cocktail of petrochemical products and microplastics and spraying them out over the now sterilized and scarred bottom of the bay, creating a thick sludge layer in which will serve as the only record of our wasteful era preserved in the sediment.    

Rama gets back in the car and hands me a bottle of iced coffee and a single packet of Tylenol for the headache. That’s nice of her. Then she hands me a bottle of sunscreen.

-Here, this will help.

I open up the vanity mirror to see my face bright like a tangelo.

-Shit.

She tells me that while she was bored waiting in line she was reading about Webb City, “the world’s most unusual drug store.” where the owner James Earl “Doc” Webb, a patent medicine man, used to sell dollar bills for ninety-five cents and shot the Flying Zacchinis out of a cannon in the parking lot.

-Can we go visit it?

Rama sighs, no, it’s long gone.

As we pull out from the dappled shade of the oak tree I tell her she shouldn’t feel so melancholy about mid-century America, it hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s all still here and will be forever encased in the fossil record.

childhood home – منبت

After crossing a few bridges, we are in the part of the city that feels familiar. My sense of orientation kicks in and I can remember how to get home. I recognize a shopping center whose identical box stores are arranged in the specific order that makes it my local shopping center. I see the Publix we used to shop at, the Burger King where I went to several birthday parties.

Rama drives while holding her cell phone on speaker, speaking to her father again. Cornhole, Gusanos, Coozies, Parrothead.  Because of the words she is unable to easily translate I can tell she is recounting last night’s adventure.  Or she’ll say the word, and then translate it piece by piece. She has to resort to switching between English and Arabic, she keeps asking for my help. A foam sleeve for keeping your beverages cool. A game where you throw a small cotton bag of rice into a slightly inclined board with a 6” hole in it. Man, when you describe it like that, it sounds so strange.

She has a harder time trying to describe parrothead. Sometimes you can’t describe a subculture, you just have to see it. And even the name, those with the heads of a parrothead? No it’s more like metalhead, deadhead is like a fan of a type of music. Deadhead? Yeah, like the Grateful Dead. So parrotheads are like tropical deadheads. She just continues to just say Parrotheads.

It’s surprising whenever a gap appears in Rama’s seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of American culture. The rare moment when she pronounces a word in English incorrectly. She once said aluminum as though she’s only ever seen it written. Her imported cultural memory, Her turing test English.

هر تورنغ تيست انكلش

We exit the highway and turn onto a wide car avenue, five lanes of traffic in either direction. We come to a red light. I see a lot where I used to explore and build forts out of old sheets of discarded metal and wood, hidden and remote in the bramble. The lot has now all been mowed down and half of it converted into a long-term RV parking lot. We cross over an irrigation ditch and I recognize it immediately, it is St. Joes Creek. The house must be right around here.

The  neighborhood is smaller and closer to the ground than I remember it, seriesa  of low-slung ranch style houses separated by ornament strewn lawns. Everyone gets their own ugly little sculpture park. Sports team flags, religious wind vanes, concrete dolphins and manatees and metal wire herons and all the other animals that were pushed out to build these houses.

But We pull up to an enormous thicket. Vines crawl up big heaps of broken branches gathered in piles, young pine trees act as tent poles holding up sheets of leaves. I look across the street to confirm, and I see the enormous Salt Life Shrine our neighbor built. Yes, this is where my house used to be. We step out of the car and I stand in front of the tangled wall of vegetation.

They look familiar, they’re the plants I grew up with, familiar but nameless leaf shapes and textures. I pull out the field guide.  The ground is covered in a patch of Largeleaf Pennywort (Hydrocotyle bonariensis). the Australian Tuckeroo tree (Cupaniopsis anacardioides) my mom planted a long time ago has gone feral, clusters of red and yellow fruit rotting on the branch.  a beautiful patch of Spanish needles (Bidens Abla), an escaped Lantana. It’s botanical chaos.

And a bog cheeto! I say crouching down next to a puddle. I remember these. I pull out my loupe and examine the orange flower, which is really a bouquet of even smaller little flowers. They sparkle like a piñata.

-Bog Cheeto? That doesn’t sound very appetizing

-That’s the common name, I flip to the color-coded flower chart. Orange. you know what’s cool about these? This is a type of Milkwort and is maybe the only plant in this whole neighborhood that actually belongs here, its native habitat is pine-barren depressions and swamps in coastal areas of the southern and eastern United States.

I stand up.

-That’s what this all used to be. I only ever used to see them in abandoned lots and drainage ditches. Bog Cheetos. I wonder what the actual scientific name is. It’s called a Polygala lutea.

– How come you care so much about the Latin names for things?

-How come you care so much about the Arabic translation for things?

Ha.

-Naming things makes them richer, you remember them like friends and then you recognize them in the wild.

Looking into the darkness, holding the entire knotted structure up,  I can see our old Live Oak (Quercus Virginians) buried alive. It used to spread its wide, curling branches across this entire yard, the Spanish Moss that draped down, making the whole yard look like it was inside of a Green circus tent. The neighbors hated it for some reason, thought it looked unkept.

Rama stands next to me and puts a consoling hand on my shoulder.

-I’m sorry about this, I wonder why the new owners abandoned the place, so sad.

-Sad? Are you kidding, this is the best thing that could have happened!

This book had all of the elements to make it an all-time favorite for me. Especially the common refrain about it being the spiritual successor to Yaşar Kemal. And so I was very disappointed when, around 300 pages in, I realized that the novel is quite tedious.
I think for me the main reason is that the parallels with an ecologically-focused epic Yaşar Kemal is that Duman’s actually has very little to say about nature. Sure, there are animals. And we get a chilly passage of ekphrasis in almost every chapter. But the understanding and description of nature is nowhere near the intimacy of, say, Demirciler Çarşısı Cinayeti. I can’t remember Duman naming one actual tree or plant species throughout the entire novel. We get far more descriptions of icicles and wind which are, let’s be clear, meteorological more than ecological elements.
I’m also a stickler for animal narratology, and there are so many sophisticated and novel ways that it is being experimented with in contemporary fiction (see https://academic.oup.com/book/11415). But this novel, instead, uses a muddled mythological elevation of Sus Barbatus to lend us some insight into its being with saying anything of substance about its species being (yes, I think this term is still analytically relevant, but almost exclusively when speaking about actual animals). Sus Barbatus’ consciousness exists even after Kenan kills it: why? What’s the point? What does that tell us about the relationship between humans and non-humans. I didn’t take a single thing from the drawn-out drama of pig consciousness, nary a clunky metaphor.
Many people also comment about the short chapter length, and the novel’s overall length. I don’t have a problem with either by themselves, but again, what purpose did they serve? Oftentimes I felt like having the narrative interrupted every three pages made it so we had to continually be reestablishing the scene, often times by describing the same things over and over again. Tedious.
Perhaps all of these loose narratological threads are pulled together brilliantly if only I were to commit to reading the other two volumes. That is not a benefit of the doubt I am willing to lend after what I’ve read so far.

Depictions of violence against women is so terrible that in fiction it often requires some sort of conceit to make it bearable. I think of, for example, of Fernanda Melchor’s use of gothic horror and skaz in her novels Hurricane Season and Paradais. Likewise, in Kötü Kalp, Aslı Tohumcu frames her gruesome short stories about pedophiles and womanizers and men abusing their power within the plot of a detective novel. But the quality of a novel that uses this strategy shouldn’t be judged merely by how successfully it is able to sustain a confrontation with violence, but by how the adopted genre form is, in turn, changed by its content.

Take, for example, Frankenstein by Baghdad by the Iraqi writer Ahmed Saadawi. Not only does he cleverly use the famous horror story of Frankenstein to depict the horrors of the violence in the wake of the American invasion in 2003, but in the process makes Mary Shelley’s famous monster an allegory for the absurd, undying drives of sectarian violence.  

Unfortunately, while Tohumcu adds a detective story plot to her depictions of violence against women, her novel isn’t carried beyond the simple addition of genre tropes, and doesn’t even make use of a twist or big-reveal (the genres greatest tools!) to say something beyond the simple terrible fact of violence. Simply reversing the usual victim and perpetrator isn’t enough for me!

” لا نحتاج إلى الكثير من الفلسفة لنقول إن لا حياة دون ماء، لكن استحضاره روائيا يعد أحد الأوجه الأصيلة للبيئة العربية، فلا يمكن أن تقرأ عملا أدبيا من الخليج تحديدا دون أن تستشعر وجود الماء، وكأنه صفة لصيقة بالأدب الخليجي. وهذا ما يؤكد أن الرواية الأصيلة هي تلك التي تستنطق بيئتها روائيا بما يتناسب وما يريد الأدب قوله”

في مراجعتها للرواية “تغريبة القافر” تدعي سارة سليم ان ” الرواية الأصيلة هي تلك التي تستنطق بيئتها روائيا.” ولكن اذا قامت هذه الرواية باستنطاق فكان برفق شديد. تلهم شأن الأفلاج في عمان عدد لا يحصى من التساؤلات عن التاريخ والسياسة والبيئة ولكن لا تطرح الرواية اي منها بل تلجأ الى وصف العالم الطبيعي لا يتجاوز عمق الأدب الرعوي التافه.

مع اننا لا نعرف بدقة أصل نظام الافلاج العمانية يمكن الاشارة على أدلة مثيرة بالاهتمام من مجال علم الآثار تدعى انها تسبق وصول العرب الى جبال الحجر. من كانت هذه الامبراطوريات العتيقة ذات القادرة الادارية اللازمة لانشاء مثل هذه القنوات، وكيف تبني وصان هؤلاء المهاجرون العرب هذا النظام الزراعي المتطور بدون المعرفة التي تجيء بخبرة بنائها، وهل يستوعب الذكرى الجماعي تراث العجائب مجهول الأصول، سواء بعزوها إلى عملاق ملك سليمان او الاعتراف بلغزها باستخدام الصفة بأنها مجرد “شيء مبهم”؟ يشبه هذا الرابط بين تراث الحضارات العتيقة والريف المعاصر العلاقة بين الماضي والحاضر في رواية “الجبل” بفتحي غانم التي تسرد حكاية سكان قرية في الريف المصري يزرقون من نبش الآثار الفرعونية وبيعها للأجانب بدون ان يفهمون قيمتها التراثية ومحاولات الحكومة المعاصرة لايقافهم وتهجيرهم لقرية “نموذجي” لكي يساهموا في النشاط الاقتصادي الناتج. ولكن لا تتناول رواية “تغريبة القافر” موضوع هذا الرابط إنما تبتكر حكاية ولد منعم عليه بمهارة شبه ساحرة تمكّنه اكتشاف منابع المياه الخفية في الجبال.   بدلاً من “استنطاق” المجتمعات التقليدية وكيف تعتماد على التراث المبهم فيضرب الكاتب كليشيه ال”مختار” مثل ما نشاهد في حرب النجوم وهاري بوتر.

الزراعة في منطقة جبال الحجر التي تستفيد من الأفلاج هو مبنى على نظام الملك الجماعي الموروث من العصر الكلاسيمي، نظام يوفر مصدر ثامر  للحكايات عن الحياة الاجتماعية. يمكن التخييل نسخة عمانية من رواية عبد الرحمان المنيف “التيه” تسرد حكاية مجتمع تقليدي يهدده فرض علاقات رأسمالية للملكية. ولكن بدلاً من هذا فالصراع الاجتماعي الرئيسي بالرواية يركز في نبذ الولد وتشكيك سكان القرية عنه بسبب مهارته الساحر ة في ايجاد المياه تحت الأرض. وبالاضافة الى ذلك يضيف الكاتب حبكة زوجية من أجل تزيين رواية رعوية بقليل من الغرام.

كل التغطية الصادرة من عمان تخبر ان يتوجه تراثها الثقافية الفريدة من نوعها ازمة وجودية بسبب الاسراف والتلوث واسلوب الاستهلاكية المعاصر غير المستدام.  تصف مقالة محزنة للغاية كيف نظام الافلاج الذي قد استمر لمدة قرون الأن على حد الانهيار التام بسبب الضخ غير المنظم للمياه الذي يكاد استنفاد طبقات المياه الجوفية وبذلك جفاف الافلاج المنتظر. ولكن لا تتناول “تغريبة القافر” شأن السياسة ولا البيئة كما لا تتناول التاريخ. بدلاً من استخدام الرواية الرمزية لكي تعالج مأساة استغلال الإنسان للعالم الطبيعي الذي يزرقه، يقدم الكاتب في عرض ثالث من روايته تطور مفاجئ صعب التصديق حيث الماء هو تهديد حرفي.

سارة سليم على حق عندما تقول انه غير ممكن أن تقرأ عملا أدبيا من الخليج تحديدا دون أن تستشعر وجود الماء، وهذه الرواية ليست استثناء. بالصراحة تستشعر الماء خليجياً، يعني تتجنب القول بأي شيء تحليلي او نقدي بل تعوذ بالكليشيهات الرعوي المطمئنة وبساطة أخلاقية القصص الخرافية

https://www.alquds.co.uk/%D8%AA%D8%BA%D8%B1%D9%8A%D8%A8%D8%A9-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%82%D8%A7%D9%81%D8%B1-%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%A7%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B9%D9%85%D8%A7%D9%86%D9%8A-%D8%B2%D9%87%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86-%D8%A7/

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Production_and_the_Exploitation_of_Resou/4WFqEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=oman+water+divining&pg=PA285&printsec=frontcover

https://e360.yale.edu/features/oasis_at_risk_omans_ancient_water_channels_are_drying_up