24

AWALEH

THE TREE OF NIGHT grows in secret. It sees its shadow getting longer or shorter and swallows the day and the night in one gulp. The traveler tree relieves man from the scorching heat of summer—a veritable open-air hammam. The tree of the monsoon turns itself into a vaporizer, an atomizer; the spirits of the ancestors weave hosannas for it to add to its laurels. The palm tree of the city gives a bit of shade to the white uniforms staggering around Place Menelik at noon. Happy today as it was yesterday, the mangrove tree takes under its wing mud crabs, leeches, and knotty eels. The ocean tree protects madrepores, sponges beneath the swell, and moving corals—a whole maritime orchestra. Here, the earth, too, writes history, with its aftershakes, its down-strokes and up-strokes, and its bubbling slaver. The madrepore reefs are the tales told by the sea and by an omniscient sun. The mountain tree, you'll find it farther north. The tree of the dried-up wadi lashes your face. The tree of the stony field flecks the flint-colored landscape with touches of green. The tree of the wind, pilgrim of the hills, turns right, turns left. The tree of the sands will smile under your soles if you're willing to pay attention to it. We use the dung of cows and the earth of anthills to fertilize the fields, and the song of the moon trees rises from them, did you know that, my boy? The dwarf tree of the undergrowth saved the life of the mythical Accompong, the runaway Jamaican slave still alive in the heart of the Rastafarians. (Are you a slave? No, I am an Ethiopian. Down with Babylon! Hail Haile Selassie!—a Rasta with super-thick hair and a mellifluous voice, a dubber, as you hummed to me only yesterday, my seraphic grandson. I was wondering where you get all that stuff.) The generation tree par excellence, more than the lantana, is the banyan, of course. The tree of your placenta, the womb of your being, the embryo of your future history, is safely buried in the courtyard of the house. And the little tree of memory, can you guess? The cactus. That's you, my little cactus.