Thursday in residence
Like Spores Scattered to the Four Winds

In recent years, botanical decolonization has been propelling a review of Western “reading of trees”, starting with the very imposition of names on plants by the colonizers as though people who had for centuries been sharing space and time with trees had not already used their own language to define, name and understand them. 

Names not only designate natural beings or objects, but they are also linked to those beings and objects by an essential relationship within the very context they arise from, and so the process of reconsidering names is intended here not to undo the so-called rational nomenclature used for economic exploitation but to give these trees back their inner holiness. Similar processes of divergent readings and understandings can be observed wherever Indigenous peoples have been subjected to colonial violence, particularly in the case of predominantly oral languages such as Somali.

Echoing the concept of “métaspora”, formed by the Haitian-born Quebecois poet Joël Des Rosiers, the botanical metaphor of germination illuminates the condition of migrant populations: scattered to the four winds like spores, they are reborn in unexpected places, generating new lives in their environments, reviving not only themselves but also the new worlds in which they take root.

A resident at the Foundation, Ubah Cristina Ali Farah, accompanied by her French translator François-Michel Durazzo, is currently writing a book focusing on exiled traditional medicine women and the challenges they face with regards to names in new environments. In this Thursday in Residence, she will discuss the project and research.