In the beginning, there had been life. Then death. Then murder. And finally, slavery.
Beneath a tree’s wide branches, men gathered to sell other men like cattle and goats. The tree stood as a witness while a girl cried out under the torment of bondage. Her lips were sealed with violence and her body scarred by a foreigner’s hatred. Her eyes closed against the darkness that engulfed her life, crying tears thick as blood. When the tears seeped into the earth around the tree’s roots, the tree drank them unknowingly, mistaking them for a blessing from the sky.
The tree choked on the salt of the tears. Her grief burned through the trunk like poison.
**
In the darkest moment of the night, he rustled his leaves and asked the enslaved girl why she sought to kill him. She looked away as more tears fell from her eyes. Her lips brushed against the soil beneath them as she whispered, “If I can’t have my freedom, why should I allow you to flaunt yours?”
In the morning, she was whipped, tied and dragged away with the others. As her feet pulled her deeper into the miombo woodland beneath the hill, the tree called out to her, begging her to speak an antidote for the pain. Her shuffling gait carried her farther still. She refused to look back.
The tree sought healing as trees do. He took in air and sunlight to sweeten his sapwood. At nightfall, he drew in the moonlight mist to revive and to cleanse his heartwood, but nothing could ease the pain. The changing skies could not dilute the poison.
At night, he witnessed another exchange, in which humans were traded for gunpowder and cloth. One of the men receiving the cloth had a grotesque swelling on his right arm, the skin shining bluish-red in the mwenge torchlight.
“That’s a nasty swelling on your hand,” the trader said.
The man quickly pulled his arm back. “A coral snake bit me last night.”
“Rubor, calor, tumor, dolor, et functio laesa,” the trader murmured.
The man looked up at him, puzzled by the foreign words.
“I travelled from the north with a missionary, a medicine man,” the trader said. “He taught me about the human body in a language called Latin.”
“What do those words mean?”
“They are the signs of inflammation.” He pointed at the arm. “ There will be redness, heat, swelling, pain, and soon you may not be able to use your hand. Treat it, or you may lose the whole of it.”
As the trader spoke, the tree felt a strange heat beneath his bark, and a swelling spread through every part of him. Fever came in sudden rushes, flush after flush rising through his trunk. A bulge strained against his hard, crusted bark. Then a deep, crippling pain stirred in his branches, like the ache of a limb severed long ago. Nothing within him would ever feel the same
There was a sudden beat deep inside his hollow core.
Then another thump. And another.
He turned and sensed a rush of wind.
“Something is happening to me,” he cried.
The wind whirled around the tree and asked, “What do you feel?”
“I feel a drum beating within my bark.”
“Where is it coming from?” She whistled.
“Beneath my roots.”
“Are you sitting on it?”
“No,” the tree gulped. “It feels like a part of me.”
The wind blew around the tree, startling the traders and slaves resting beneath him. She rose into the sky and gazed at the clouds. They were still floating far apart from each other. She grew stronger and rammed their grey bodies against each other. Together, they released a thunderous roar, and the sword of lightning fell from them. The wind caught it and turned it towards the centre of the tree, but the sword struck with greater force than she had intended.
It tore away his largest branch. The branch crashed upon the enslaved people sleeping below. Screams and panic rose beneath him. Their pain rushed through the tree alongside his own, and the beating beneath his roots grew louder.
She moved around him like a dark fog horrified by her mistake, “I intended to strike you in the middle, I did not mean to kill the humans.”
The tree felt her sorrow settle on him. A cry escaped his crown as her presence ripped another branch from him.
“Do you wish to kill me because I asked for help?”
The wind shook with her strength. “Never. I intended to see what lies within.”
The wind stared down at the broken tree. He was indeed cursed.
“What do your invisible eyes see?” He asked
“You have the curse of a few trees that I have met on islands and on this continent.”
“Is it bad?”
You have a curse I have rarely encountered among trees on these islands and across this continent.”
“Is it bad?”
“It is terrible. I have travelled the world and seen a great many things. I saw the land of Kamehameha the Second; his trees did not bear this curse. I blew over the Zanzibar archipelago, and there stood a tree, cursed and alone. Grass refused to grow around her.”
“Tell me. What is my curse?”
“You have developed a heart within your roots. You will feel the pain and record the anguish of every human who dies near you.”
“What is the cure?”
“There is none.”
“Then how will I live?”
“By accepting what you have become. You are no longer who you used to be, and fighting it will only deepen your suffering.”
The tree closed his leaves and mentally drifted from her presence. The wind moved away slowly, and when she looked back, she saw droplets falling from his branches, not tears, but blood.
Somewhere in the future, the tree will look up into the sky, remembering when he pleaded for the transformation rising through his roots to stop. He will bask in the sun, nourishing his beating heart while exhaling vital air from his pores. His trunk will expand like a trachea, his branches like lungs, holding a leafy gravestone each season for those who fall beside him.
There will be a leaf for Chinyimba, a brave warrior turned slave, bound by his chief’s lust for his wife; a leaf for Mwala, a slave girl stolen from her village; a leaf for Chima, a miner who will be tragically buried in a mudslide, whose skin will not be light enough to save him from a bleak fate beneath the roots of the tree; a leaf for Khondwani, a young boy who will be attacked by a pack of dogs owned by white teenage boys, amused by his dying cries for God to help him; a leaf for Njavwani, a passionate soul destined to be shot dead while standing his ground against the oppressive police forces of a colonial regime; a leaf for Pembani, a brave individual mercilessly beaten to death by the secret police for the alleged crime of speaking out against a president’s tyranny; a leaf for Taonga, a young woman who will face the horror of being raped and strangled by a man who takes her on a date; a leaf for Cholwe, a political cadre who will lie dying with his hand tightly clasped around a ring for his bride.
The tree will tower majestically over an expanding city. He will sway in the wind, Drawing the eyes of all who pass by to admire him but never to question the source of his beauty. Among the people he will be known as the “slave tree,” a name too heavy for any dendron to carry.
It is a price that the innocent sentinel of wood and leaf will pay for the enslaved girl’s sorrow, sorrow which will tattoo itself in the crust of his bark as he continues to stand rooted and silent.
The ever-unwilling tree-witness to humanity’s cruelty.
Shirin Abedinirad, House in the Wind, 2017. Land art, Marrakesh, Morocco. Created in collaboration with Nikon and BMW Mini, the work imagines the desert as an open studio where, in the artist’s words, “my studio has no walls, no roof, and no borders.” With sky as ceiling, horizons as walls, and wind, mirrors, clouds, and sand as collaborators, the installation becomes a meditation on nature as partner, sanctuary, and boundless space of belonging. Artwork courtesy of featured artist Shirin Abedinirad.
