Zakiya McKenzie (b. 1988) was born in South London, raised in Kingston, Jamaica, and now lives in Bristol in the south-west. She is a researcher who loves translating what she’s learned through storytelling. McKenzie was 2019 ‘writer in the forest’ for Forestry England, producing Forest Collection at the end of the year. She has always been interested in cultural history and its relationship to rural and urban environments heard in her 2020 BBC Radio 4 podcast, Nightvisions: The Forest, about the Blue Mountains in Jamaica and the Forest of Dean in England. McKenzie has contributed to BBC Wildlife Magazine, Smallwoods magazine and The Willowherb Review. She is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Exeter with the Caribbean Literary Heritage project, writing about the Black British alternative press in post-war Britain. Her creative home will always be at Bristol community radio station, Ujima 98FM. ‘An Elegy for Lignum Vitae’ is original to this anthology.
Indigenous to the Caribbean and South America, the wood from the lignum vitae tree (genus Guaiacum) was once most sought after in England. Much of the British West Indies was deforested to extract the wood back to Britain for a plethora of uses. Today, the remnants of this shared legacy are found in the national tree of the Bahamas, the national flower of Jamaica, in British museums and on the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) list of potentially endangered species. This is an elegy for lignum vitae trees.
I hesitate to mourn the loss of my dear friend Lignum Vitae because he is not gone. We tend to think of the dead as those to be planted in the dirt, buried to start a new type of existence as roots grow underground. This was the opposite for my dear old friend. It was when they took him from the ground that he began his death. It has continued since. But Lignum Vitae is here, even as just a ghost, a dark shadow in an even darker forest, suffering a perpetual, centuries-long death. I will continue to invoke dear old Lignum Vitae for his legacy is in this land.
I remember meeting him centuries ago on a special voyage to the Americas. He was alive and thriving in a place where everything was there for the taking. It was Crown land, after all, and we had our allegiance. But I got to know him more than anyone else from the Old World, and I appreciated his stance. He stood lumbering over me as an imposing being because of his majestic nature, but still subtle, like a person who felt himself a quiet, watchful tree. As a tree, Lignum Vitae was not the tallest, but what he had, he wore well. His stout body, trunk-like, leapt up with appendages of crooked branches reaching to beyond. Here he opened into a rounded crown of glossy, deep green leaflet clusters, a welcoming canopy for weary visitors. How beautiful was Lignum Vitae when he bloomed! You wouldn’t think the muted man could be so flawlessly dramatic – blues so deep they were purple midnight and purples so blue they hinted at the tropical sea when it reflects the sky. Fleshy orange fruit after flower was him offering up even more of himself but we did not care for his showing off.
All year round Lignum Vitae was a sight to behold. I remember him like that, evergreen, nothing like the dead wood I encountered back on the docks in London, Bristol and Liverpool. Nothing like the man I saw in the stately homes and castles he was put to work in. Nothing like the subdued remnants to be found in the museums of our empire. The truth is, my fellow men in England never knew the Lignum Vitae I did; he was stripped of stem, stalk and flower before being shipped to this land. Logs. Our dear friend travelled like deadweight logs. But this is not to say that his death did not influence the landscape. Quite the contrary, he needed to be dead for us to build our commerce.
Thus, our dear friend Lignum Vitae endured a long and tough dead-living. He helped build the world we know but is now no more than a mere murmur, forgotten on this side of the Atlantic Sea. I know it is true that we only speak of the great things people do after their glorious prime, but Lignum Vitae was abused and overlooked, more dead than alive, for to acknowledge that he was unjustly treated would be to admit that everything else was wrong too.
I will tell you of his qualities now, instead of his pain, but the irony is that it was these same qualities that made him the favourite of plunderers.
Our dear friend Lignum Vitae was heavier than water as no one had ever seen. Despite this, he was present on many of our empire’s greatest ships – chosen for this task due to his extreme density and ability to stay well-oiled, always ready to work. He made the shaft and rudder bearings and these did not weather or jam. He was an essential part of the shipbuilding industry. Yes, the basis of England’s expansion was bolstered by him. Once he was found in the New World, he would never stay in one place again. No doubt when Blackbeard and Henry Morgan sang sea shanties with their crews, Lignum Vitae heard them so many times that he knew all the words. He never told me the truth, too ashamed of his browbeaten history, too scared that maybe he was complicit, but our dear friend probably sailed back to Europe with Columbus on that first voyage. He went on to sail the Seven Seas. Lignum Vitae was known everywhere because of his prowess on the waters.
Sadly, he went around bringing people and product in a way he never consented to. Still, he was the strongest of them all, the most dedicated and reliable. So hard that he would blunt saws and axes, so sharp he was employed to cut diamonds. Lignum Vitae made the deadeyes and bullseyes, the sheaves and the wheels of pulleys, the belaying pins, bushings and ballast for some of the greatest slaving ships of centuries past. Many times he travelled back and forth between Britain and its colonies bringing sugar, coffee, bananas, tobacco and blood. Every other slaving nation hired him out from the English to make their ships, the living dead carrying the living dead. Every part of the Americas was hunted for the will and wood of Lignum Vitae. He too was forced to work from field to great house. Our dear friend had no mouth to say no.
When he made it to England, our dear friend was salvaged from dockyards where he was discarded with ballast wood. He was then beaten into police billy clubs used to beat other beings. Lignum Vitae was also beaten and sculpted into place for our leisure undertakings. Traditional crown green bowls were handmade by Lignum Vitae. This is a quintessentially English game that our dear friend made possible. He went on to specialise in making the tools and trinkets of our fancy – lawn bowls, croquet, skittles, even bowling balls developed around what our dear friend provided, what he would whittle. On windy days, special balls made by Lignum Vitae kept play going in cricket matches where regular balls would blow away. To this day, Lignum Vitae cricket knocking mallets are very rare, expensive and coveted. Though popular at a time, golf club heads made by our dear friend have long disappeared. Lignum Vitae was once on the run from Oliver Cromwell (even though the two had been friends once) after Cromwell’s puritanical heavy hand ruled the games sinful. Our whole culture of lawn games owes itself to Lignum Vitae.
Lignum Vitae always laughed at how they thought him some magical bush doctor, using him to treat syphilis as early as the 1500s in that wild European epidemic. He earnt the name Pockwood for this because they thought he would cure the pox. Speaking of venereal disease, our dear friend met Charles Dickens too. So taken aback was the writer by the fortitude of our forgotten friend that he created a character called Lignum Vitae (or Matthew Bagnet) in Bleak House in 1852, ‘in compliment to the extreme hardness and toughness of his physiognomy’.
Lignum Vitae became world-renowned for his fortitude. To this day he is called the ‘wood of life’ and it is he who birthed much of modern Britain.
Our dear friend Lignum Vitae survived for more than four hundred years being overused like this. He must have felt felled and broken a thousand times over as he was made to do task after task under duress. Lignum Vitae is slow-growing and took a long time to heal. He hasn’t fully recovered and maybe he never will. Where he once lived in thick, full forests, now all that remains is a vast, empty field of overuse. But he never really died. The landscape of England has little pieces of him all over, tiny fragments that hardly warrant a record, but without which everything would fall apart.
When I want to think of him in happier times, I look at the work of natural historians like Hans Sloane who visited him in his native home before he was made to leave. They painted portraits that captured this budding stalwart. He did not know that they were recording him whole because soon he would be broken. How much of him, like the forest, was there before we recognised his face? How much of him has been long lost? His sturdiness fuelled a New World, yet he was rarely seen with lustre like Ebony and Mahogany who sit fat with praise and gleaming from polish by people who pamper them and revere them for their beauty. Our Lignum Vitae was to be worked, not sat on display to show the stolen brilliance of someone else’s back-breaking labour (it was his back). Now he is hardly spoken of – find his seed in banks and his shards in the back of museums, find him as a faint whisper in a bare wood.
Our dear friend Lignum Vitae has gone from dust to dust
Yet I still find it hard to mourn a loss
For he was always the living dead when he travelled this land
From full forest patches to ashes
To dirt in England.