The Jacaranda tree
This is part of a series on Kenya titled 'One Day I Will Write About This Place' inspired by Binyawanga Wainaina's memoir. The poems were written in 2023 and 2024.
How do you grieve for a jacaranda tree?
Yesterday, a group of men came to our house. Asking with an acquiescent smile, “We need to prune the branches can you please move the car aside?” Little did we know, what would follow. the hacking, the drilling, the tearing, the grilling. As the sounds rose, Gautier’s face began to contort. It was his arms being pulled apart, and not the 100-year-old branches of the purple-flowered Jacaranda. I put on a straight face. Keep. it. together. Suhani is watching. We have friends here. This. will. soon. be. over. A few minutes but was it years? I turned around and peered to find out, What?? half of the tree, Gone! Stripped and dead, there was no doubt. Men on top of it, others with ropes to pull it down. They were going for the whole tree, Gautier was right; they were here to clamp down. I ran out, “Stop this madness. The branches are pruned, please leave now”. The big boss from Nairobi Council stepped forward menacingly. “Orders from above, move aside, We are replanting the whole street with the exotic kind.” He switched to Kiswahili, provocatively. I stepped back, replied in English. He sneered, spit on the ground. The message was clear, I did not belong here. Why? Oh, why? Did my mothers from Chipko not fill me with force? Oh, Wangari Mathai! I should have hugged that tree, now let it turn into mere logs. In place of that majestic Jacaranda is a monstrous silence. A vide, an emptiness, Re-lent-less. To cope, I look away from that part of the house. It’s too difficult not to remember the purple flowers on the grass in October. I can still feel the roots of the jacaranda under the grounds when I walk. Is there still water flowing, Is there sap to be found?
A year ago, the Jacaranda was hacked on the road in front of our house. We gaped, gasped, open-mouthed and helpless, as the long branches came down. For weeks, Gautier and I could not talk. We had let things slip by. Our belief in ourselves, the faith to act, to do, all uprooted like the tree that no longer stood by. We would try to look away, as our car would pass, our inaction, a testimony, in the space forlornly decried.
Only the mama came back with her wares and things to sell, sitting beside the half-cut trunk, a stump, to sit or to lie. Then, a few months later, Something curious unfurled. A little stalk quietly shot up! I looked at the green, coming from the brown wood, wondering what was creeping out? The stalks kept shooting up, right, left and center, look, how they branch forward, charge out! And they leap up, out and out, reaching the sky, Oh, I wish you were here, a splendid sight! Today, it stands, Almost half its size Life seeping out from the massacre, what might! I do not know whether the flowers will bloom. Will it become what it was before? All I know is that we all come back, Life is a stream that flows.
I know this is a poem but you had me on the edge of my seat, in tears, devastated and defeated and then whooping with joy - all in my head but for the length of this gorgeous poem, I felt it all. 💜
Your poems reminded me of an essay by Erica Berry - The Fault of Time (https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/the-fault-of-time/) on the impermanence of landscape and her relationship to it.
Jacarandas have a special place in my heart. This love poem to it is a song to life.