Palma Africana

Michael Taussig

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780226516271
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

"It is the contemporary elixir from which all manner of being emerges, the metamorphic sublime, an alchemist's dream." So begins Palma Africana, the latest attempt by anthropologist Michael Taussig to make sense of the contemporary moment. But to what elixir does he refer?
 
Palm oil. Saturating everything from potato chips to nail polish, palm oil has made its way into half of the packaged goods in our supermarkets. By 2020, world production will be double what it was in 2000. In Colombia, palm oil plantations are covering over one-time cornucopias of animal, bird, and plant life. Over time, they threaten indigenous livelihoods and give rise to abusive labor conditions and major human rights violations. The list of entwined horrors—climatic, biological, social—is long. But Taussig takes no comfort in our usual labels: "habitat loss, " "human rights abuses, " "climate change." The shock of these words has passed; nowadays it is all a blur. Hence, Taussig's keen attention to words and writing throughout this work. He takes cues from precursors' ruminations: Roland Barthes's suggestion that trees form an alphabet in which the palm tree is the loveliest; William Burroughs's retort to critics that for him words are alive like animals and don't like to be kept in pages—cut them and the words are let free.
 
Steeped in a lifetime of philosophical and ethnographic exploration, Palma Africana undercuts the banality of the destruction taking place all around us and offers a penetrating vision of the global condition. Richly illustrated and written with experimental verve, this book is Taussig's Tristes Tropiques for the twenty-first century. 

As of this writing my artist-colleague Simryn Gill is becoming a palm oil tree on the Straits of Malacca

Next step, bio-diesel

This is Big News

Or is it?

Such metamorphoses from human to tree or tree to human are maybe not that miraculous this day and age. Something strange is afoot. All mixed up and confusing. Used to be like the Cold War. Us here. Them there. Subjects knew their place and, as for objects, they were meek and would never dare trespass

But now? Objects! You have nothing to lose but your chains

Palm oil is already in half the packaged goods in your supermarket. By 2020 world production of it will double from what it was in 2000. Not only Simryn but you and I are becoming palm trees

Like the human stem cell capable of spawning all cells, palm oil is an elixir from which all manner of being emerges. The metamorphic sublime. An alchemist’s dream; finally

To think that the peninsula of Malaya was one of the world’s cornucopias of animal, bird, and plant life!

But today? Where has all that bio gone?

Not to worry. Things tell stories too and how much more is this the case with our supernatural palm of the metamorphoric sublime as you shall hear in the pages that follow

I see Simryn or what was her now bedecked in a flurry of palm leaves like a giant ostrich feather

A blur

The head has gone

Oh! Oh! Here she is again, clutching a bunch of African palm nuts to her midriff as if she is pregnant. And why not? Stranger hybrids have happened, especially when you live by a palm plantation as does she1

The animals may have departed but others have taken their place. For example, there are the morbid pig pens, low and dark of mien where all the pigs died recently. All. End of that little experiment. And then there are the strange houses, if that’s the term. Some are one hundred feet high. They have no windows but tiny port-holes. These are the “bird hotels” as Simryn calls them, built throughout the plantation in the hope that birds will come and nest inside and at the end of a year some poor Bangladeshi temporary migrant will have to get in there (which truly boggles the imagination, crawling around in that fetid darkness) and take out the nests from which birds’ nest soup shall be made of the mucus and whatever else that hold the feathers and twigs together

A blur

The head has gone

The forest has gone

And the animals? Where have they gone?

“Cut-ups? But of course,” writes William Burroughs in defense of his and Brion Gysin’s cut-up method. “I have been a cut-up for years and why not? Words know where they belong better than you do. I think of words as being alive like animals. They don’t like to be kept in pages. Cut the pages and let the words out.”2

Here we go

I

She is inside, in Malaysia, becoming palm.

I am outside in a village of 144 houses built on sandy soil on an island in the swamplands of northern Colombia.

Here the great rivers of Colombia converge on their way north to the Caribbean.

Every six months it floods.

Few of the villagers have title to land. They practice an increasingly meager cultivation. Some hunt and fish seasonally according to the flood. The better off (for there are certainly economic differences) may have one or more head of cattle which they pasture on or close to the swamps which are in theory baldios or unused state lands.

These are extremely hard to define. In theory such land today is open to anyone, with an upper limit as to the amount that can be fenced off. Sometimes title of ownership is granted, other times just the use-rights. The whole thing is a terrible mess, a hazy morass of words that work through lies and subterfuge to the benefit of the large landowners throughout Colombia which, so it is claimed, has the most extreme maldistribution of land in all of Latin America. “Terrible mess” is perhaps a misnomer. Charade seems more accurate, meaning deliberate falsification on the part of large landowners, corporations, state officials, and armies of lawyers. When you stand back and look at this, it comes across as theater and a sort of magic act in which the actors indulge in make-believe in a vast public secret which nobody knows and everyone knows.

This is the same logic of camouflage used by the paramilitaries, purveyors of terror, who more often than not are called in by the large landowners to enforce their spurious claims, especially nowadays with regard to oil palm plantations—what I call the “new sugar,” meaning that just as sugar, especially in the Caribbean, was to colonialism, so oil palm is the postcolonial equivalent in terms of economic, social, and ecological impact, with one huge difference: that while sugar in the colony required armies of workers, meaning slaves from Africa, oil palm plantations require only a very small labor force, thanks to modern technology.

Political theorists take note: The “hazy morass” of the baldios brings to the fore fundamental features of the nation-state. Huge swathes of Colombia whether swamp or dry exist as this ill-defined no-man’s land on which law and territory are founded and founder. What the turbidity of the swamp does is reveal the state-swamp nexus as the basis of the biopolitical where Machiavellian statecraft and sleight of hand engage with life and matter. Swamplands are what make the state a state (read on).

These past forty years have been rough. The swamp-dwellers have been harassed by wealthy cattlemen, then cattlemen-drugmen, then guerrilla, then throat-cutting paramilitaries, and now by (X)paramilitaries working for oil palm plantations expanding across the island, (X) as in ex but not really ex (read on).

I keep looking at this list, this past forty years’ list. It is a terrible chronology.

There are other forces to contend with as well, far from what we think of as natural but now become so. I refer to the world of Franz Kafka that floods the island with endless lawsuits brought by NGOs in support of the peasants and countersuits brought by the plantations and then by the Council of State weighing in on these rival claims. In 2012 the courts found that the land forcibly appropriated by the large landowners belongs to the state and could be (not should be) returned to the displaced peasants. Since 2013, starting four years ago, the Council of State has been holding preliminary hearings. Given the ability of the law firms working for the plantations to raise objections every inch of the way, it looks like these preliminary hearings will be forever. By means of a separate suit two key (X)paramilitary leaders of the Bloque Central Bolívar working for the plantation have been arrested and imprisoned, a highly unusual event.

Small as it is, the village over the past forty years has become iconic in the annals of violence. Throughout Colombia people’s eyes light up at the sound of Las Pavas. This name refers not to the village itself but to the land around it, a flash point in the media since armed cattlemen claimed the several thousand hectares of land close to the village and called it hacienda Las Pavas.

At first blush a name (such as Las Pavas) unifies and makes something fictitious seem real. That is how we use and understand names and that is how names use us. But on even superficial examination the unity disintegrates into moving parts each with a mind and history of its own.

Over the years the struggle has gone back and forth. But since 2007 something basic has changed. This is the spread of oil palm (called palma africana) plantations. Through the building of drainage networks as well as dykes against flooding, the aim of the plantations is to convert the swamp into an (X)swamp. One thing is the war against the peasant. The other is the war against nature.

But the peasants had another name for this disputed land which to them is the best land on the island for cultivation because it is the highest (by one or two feet only) and less susceptible to flooding. Indeed at times of extra high flooding they would leave the village and camp out there until the waters subsided. To them its name is, or was, El Rastrojo, which means the cleared field.

Archaeological remains of native Americans are abundant at this point, including a raised field presumably for cultivation, probably made long before the Spanish invasion of the New World.

At this site the oil palm company has a dark green building by the side of which, cheek by jowl the displaced peasants return, when it’s not dangerous, to occupy a makeshift camp of black plastic tents contesting the company’s claim to possession. At least that’s how it was on my three visits to the region in 2011 and 2015.

Was the company building haunted? I never saw anyone there. Once there were strong lights on all night and the grinding of a generator making it hard for us to sleep. Once I saw a large backhoe parked there, crouching like a prehistoric animal. The building had a square wooden tower which gave it the look of a fortress and some people such as Pedro and Efraín (on whom more, later) were positive that the building picked up on their conversations and even, so I gathered, picked up on their thoughts. They avoided the “fortress” as much as possible and would scuttle past it alert and fearful for all the world like hunted animals. Grown men, at that. The haunted and the hunted.

This conjuncture of (1) the ancient Indian raised field, (2) the “fortress” of the palma africana plantation, (3) the black plastic camp of displaced peasants, and (4) the highest point on the island offers us a cross section through history such that I found myself referring to this constellation as “the ceremonial center.” But what was the ceremony? Was it me, the stranger, who froze history, at least for the moment, into a theater-like configuration? Walter Benjamin once suggested that in baroque tragedy (think Shakespeare, think Calderon), history petrified into landscape. Chronology became space. Was the whole island such a theater with its alter-reality surrounded by fast flowing waters?

The change in names from El Rastrojo to Las Pavas corresponds to some extent to what Marx called “primitive accumulation” with the accent on physical violence as a step toward the ultimate goal of capital breeding more of itself. Marx had in mind the violence associated with the silver of Potosi and the African slave trade. But has not nature long been subject to the violence of primitive accumulation before then?

The first generation of the villagers came here almost a century ago in canoes paddling along a tributary of the Magdalena River called the Brazuelo de Papayal when the island was (apparently) uninhabited, rich in hardwoods, wildlife, and the calls of birds. Why did they come? It seems biblical, a flight out of Egypt, a search for freedom from landlords and the state, the search for the land of milk and honey or their New World tropical equivalence. That or something like it is, after all, how Gabriel García Márquez begins his “biblical” novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, set in this very region, although, to tell the truth he is a little vague about the motivation of his characters since he sees such colonists as sui generis, as the beginning of time itself and as the center, the magical center, of the story that becomes history.

And today? There is no primary forest left as far as I know, and as for animals with valuable pelts, I doubt there are any. Even with nothing but a metal axe, a few traps, and an old shotgun, you can pretty much change everything in a couple of decades. When the cattlemen and then the cattlemen-drugmen came in on top of that, and now palma africana with its drains and dykes, the domination of nature seems total.

II

She is inside. I am outside accompanying the lawyer, professor, and anthropologist Juan Felipe García. Since 2009 he represents about half the villagers who in 1998 organized to reclaim what they see as their land and resist the paramilitaries whom, since 2006, spearhead the spread of oil palm plantations threatening their livelihood. The other inhabitants of the village, zealous Protestants for the most part, are indifferent to the plantations or in favor of them, although there are important exceptions.

The island has an endearing name, The Island of the Papaya Grove.

Nature comes with labels. Think of the oil palm here referred to as palma africana, then of the United Fruit Company a.k.a. the octopus (speaking of animals) that introduced oil palm trees into Central and South America, starting with oil palm trees from Sierra Leone first planted in the New World in Guatemala in 1920.3

In the heartland of oil palm land in the Niger Delta I read that palm oil is thousands of years old, found in ancient Egyptian tombs in 3,000 BC, and is today largely grown by peasants in the delta who interplant it as a subsistence crop with other tree crops.4

Let us dwell on these three words for a moment: subsistence, interplanting, and tree crops, a Holy Trinity. Subsistence here signifies household consumption, use-value or largely use-value as opposed to commodity production. Interplanting implies an ecologically sound practice probably of great antiquity. And by tree crops is meant a form of agri/culture radically different to the open-field system of North America and northern Europe. Such practices of subsistence interplanting of tree crops are common in peasant Colombia too. At least they were common until recently.

When I first walked into the peasant farms of the descendants of African slaves in western Colombia in 1969, I thought I was entering a rain forest. Later I realized that it was a replica of such using interplanted trees providing food for domestic consumption or for cash income from trees such as cacao, coffee, oranges, mandarins, mango, zapote, guyabana, citrus, and the basic staple plantain together with yucca and papa china, a great variety of medicinal herbs, flowers, leaves for packing, and firewood. Note all these are perennials. The walls and roofs of the houses were built from adobe from the farm. As opposed to mono-cropping plantation agri/culture, I regard this peasant “system” as one of “mastery of non-mastery” and the plantation agriculture as the radical inversion of that sinuous logic.5

Yet technological modernization driven by agri/business corporations and by a particular view and practice of science has destroyed these fundamental features of the peasant world. Mono-cropping amounts to one of those absolutely fundamental changes in world history comparable to the invention of monogamy and monotheism.

When Ralston-Purina inserted itself into...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Palma Africana
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Index
• Footnotes