On Ndege Means Bird
Every so often, I go through writing in progress: documents with titles, but no additional words; documents I started over 10 years ago; documents from other versions of myself; documents whose urgencies seem much less urgent now; documents I still do not have the emotional capacity to sit with. And—apologies to any who might think these fragments might be useful—I purge them. Not all of them.
Some, I hold on to because whatever I was feeling that I no longer know how to think with was felt, and I want an imprint of that feeling. It’s not, I think, that feelings fade. Become faint echoes. Psychic life does not work like that. The force of feeling retains its cut. What devastates can still devastate, no matter how many tools we develop. And then we need to learn how to breathe again.
Some, I keep as an aid to memory. To remember that something happened. That the thing lodged itself into my practices and habits, changed something about how my body experienced space and time and movement and stillness.
Some, I hold in the faint hope that I might one day have the resources to think a particular way again, that I might be in relations that seed and nurture those particular directions.
I had been invited to write something and agreed when I thought I could, but simply couldn’t. And so I didn’t.
The title was “Ndege means Bird.” Ndege is the generic Swahili term for bird. So it was “Bird means Bird.”
One of the strongest—and truest—complaints about indigenous language loss is that flora and fauna have lost their names. In the 1980s, it was a complaint attached to those of us who grew up in the city, evidence of how far we had fallen from rural ideals. Instead of knowing specific names of birds and animals and flowers and fruits, we used generic names: this bird was a bird and that bird was a bird and that other bird was also a bird. We knew names of domesticated animals, but we did not know what to call the wildlife with which we shared spaces. Or, if we did, we knew it in English. Or Swahili.
I wanted to start that impossible writing there, with the loss of linguistic diversity. But it’s not simply linguistic diversity. It’s the loss of a kind of relation. To know which birds are associated with which kind of insects. Which ones are beneficial. Which ones eat what grains and fruits. Which ones eat snakes and lizards. Which ones announce the changing of the seasons. Which ones greet the mornings. Which ones welcome the ancestors. Which ones usher us into other elsewheres.
It would have been a writing that returned me to my ongoing grappling with taxonomy, with the certitude of scientific classifications, the names we are to know to really know what we know.
“There are too many common names, too many variations by region and use,” so scientific names help to anchor certitude. At least, this is what gardeners on YouTube tell me.
Increasingly, I want to know the local names. The names of relation.
I know the name of one weed: thina. It’s the one weed my mother named for me. Thina. Thina translates directly as trouble. It could be stretched to troublemaker, but that’s a stretch. I like the particularity of this name. It’s trouble. That’s a relation.
When I go to garden centres, I am most often looking for plants with specific functions: plants to fill a sunny spot, plants for shade, plants that mound, plants that grow tall, plants that can handle partial shade, plants that will be groundcovers, plants that reseed, plants that trail, plants that are drought tolerant when established, plants for pollinators. Plants that grow in rich soil. Plants that grow in poor soil. Plants that grow well alongside other plants. Plants that require their own space to spread. Plants that interweave with other plants.
I am not always that focused. Sometimes, stuff simply looks interesting. Or pretty. And I want to try it. To see if I like it. To see if it likes me. Or my soil. Or the soil we might share. Sometimes, a plant is a memory. A gift from a friend. A cutting from a visit. And the name that attaches to it is “that cutting from your mother’s garden” or “that small root your aunt gave me” or “that gorgeousness you brought over” or, most often, “that small piece I begged from you.” These are my mother’s habits. And it makes a walk through plants a web of relations.
(I have multiple variations of this writing across different spaces; I am trying to pay attention to my obsessions.)
It’s not that those of us who grew up in the city did not have relations with birds, choreographies we learned from and with them. At lunch time, kites and crows would fly overhead, cluster to grab whatever food we might drop or throw. The more aggressive kites learned how to dive for food we held in our hands, and we learned how to hold our bodies so the kites could not grab our food. More than a few of us have scars—small ones—from those adventures. If we did not know the specific birds to chase away from ripening millet, because we were not growing it, we knew the birds that lingered around nectar-rich flowers. And, perhaps, the names “bird that snatches lunch” or “bird that is loudest in the morning” or “bird that sips pond water” sound imprecise, but they mark experience and relation. They return us—or keep us—where names circulate as social experiences.
And so taxonomy, with its ostensible certitudes, meets ossified indigeneities, with their experiential demands, in effacing—perhaps effacing is too strong a word—the social experiences that form other kinds of relations.
Let me borrow from my brilliant friend Aleya Kassam’s imagination. During a session we had on naming, she proposed that area names—we were talking about city names—should be named by children, and that the names should be changed every so often, by different groups of children. So imagined, the city assumes new possibilities, new dynamisms from the sensorium of those most attentive to its emergent possibilities.