Plants have become the protagonists of a new publishing phenomenon. Essays, novels and poems bring the importance of vegetation into the cultural debate. We could call it a kind of plant literature. Efrén Giraldo (Medellín, 49 years old) has joined this phenomenon with an essay that delves into the role of plants in our lives and their power of resilience: Summary of unofficial plants (Elefanta Editorial), which has won the Independent Latin American Non-Fiction Award and these days is presenting in Mexico on a tour of several cities. It is also a compendium of memories, because the author starts from the nostalgia generated by the stories of his grandmother, his parents, about plants, including fruits from his childhood that have disappeared. The book is full of references to scientific, botanical and historical studies. He talks about the relationship between painting and popular culture with plants and how literature has “appropriated” nature, “because plants provide us with the best symbolic elements to understand many things about ourselves.” Giraldo proposes a new relationship with nature, learning from the capacity of plants to resist and adapt.
Ask. “Blessed is the tree that is barely sensitive,” wrote the poet. You state in your book that perhaps every plant speaks a language that we do not understand. Have humans despised the plant world?
Answer. Yes. There is a contempt that we see in the anthropocentric attitude that we have and it seems that towards plants and fungi it is expressed in a stronger way. I think we have thought that we are closer to animals and the blindness towards plants is greater.
P. What are the reasons for this contempt?
R. It may be the popular perspective that plants do not move. The anthropocentric and zoocentric paradigm values the conventional idea of movement, of displacement. It would seem that being tied to a place, as plants apparently are, means being a minority of sorts.
P. It also talks about resilience. The trees that survived the horror of Hiroshima, for example. Here in Mexico there is a Tule tree that is more than 4,000 years old. It’s fascinating to think about everything that tree has seen happen. What do plants teach us?
R. The first thing to assume is that you have really seen that tree. They have very strong perceptual elements and great sensitivity and it is probable, without us knowing it yet, that they have some type of possibility of preserving many of the things they have seen. Plants teach us to resist, to remain, to inhabit the earth, improving it, to live in it without destroying it. In addition to many other things that they taught us, because they invented them, such as breathing, sexual reproduction, they invented beauty. Plants mark an existential path, they define what a route for the future could be. You have to see them and follow them, because they probably know where to go.
P. There is also violence. We have demonized plants like the poppy. This in your country has left a story of horror and death. It is an example of how humans can transform something beautiful into a nightmare.
R. What I see in the case of some plants is that they enhance, in good and bad ways, many of the capacities that we humans have. I am particularly interested in the symbology that negativizes the plant. The idea of bad plants, the idea of weeds, of illicit cultivation, seems very interesting to me to understand that problematic relationship that we can have with the environment. There are plants that in Colombia have been considered cursed, that are demonized and that very well expose our inability to harm ourselves in many ways.
P. This book talks about transplants. Plants that are exotic to us have come to America under what crazy trip and others of ours have been transferred to Europe. Mentions the story of the pineapple, which dazzled Fernández de Oviedo. It can also be a metaphor for our current world, a world of migration and at the same time of wonder and fear of the other.
R. That condition of mobility that plants have is very interesting. What the book tries to do is explain that plants use culture, they use human relationships, representation processes to move. In particular, I am very interested in plants that migrate for aesthetic reasons. Plants that are taken because they are very beautiful, such as decorative ones, that reach another system and become invasive plants. Migration seems to be linked to an idea of precariousness and that is how we see the plants, precarious, weak, but I think that behind the idea of being able to migrate, stay, reside in another place there is a sign of that capacity for installation that they have, because the Plants are extremely adaptable, they are flexible and that is what has allowed neurobiological research to discuss the possibility that they have some type of consciousness, subjectivity, and that they are capable of feeling.
P. The book tells this beautiful story from the herbarium of an Emily Dickinson. And it refers to a work that points out that at least a third of the writer’s poems are related to the mystery of flowers. We destroy nature and at the same time we are passionate about it.
R. There is an idea that is not very comfortable: Just like industry, art and literature have behaved towards nature in an extractive way, because plants provide us with the best symbolic elements to understand many things about ourselves. Think how many classic authors of Philosophy have used the metaphor of the tree, of the flowering, of the root. But despite that symbolic presence we have not accepted the place they have at our side. There are works that have gone far beyond the idea that plants are a symbol or that they are part of the decoration, as Emily Dickinson has done. In essays and poetry is where the possibility of human beings being like a plant or walking in the company of plants has been most developed.
P. What should our relationship with plants be like?
R. We need to abandon all the prejudices we have towards them. We must study them, get to know them and walk with them, learn from their rhythms, understand that their dynamics are much more useful to understand what we should do. We must learn from them a model of relationship with what exists.