What the trees said
By Akinmoju Busayo
“How could you say the trees spoke to you?”
Because they did.
Before the trees spoke, they were in eternal silence. Then God sighed through them — deep into their roots — and in response, they heaved a mist. They were the trees of creation. They lived in the swamp where creation had ended or paused for their sake. For the sake of a child they had been promised at the beginning of everything. So, when the mist rose, they woke.
The time had come for the birth of their promise. A westward tree began labour pangs. Somehow, the mist had known the tree with the image of its unborn etched in its bark; it had known the one cast off by age and shame. It was less spectacular than the first time they sang at the birth of creation but it had come. The trees gathered to see their offspring. A child vomited from the hollowness of a tree that had never known the weight of fruit.
She was as frail and silent as the mist that brought her. Her eyes were closed, and before she tore out her roots from the ground, the trees were reminded of their solitude, all they had known, and returned solemnly to it.
*
The first time the trees met with their child after her birth, she did not consider the grace with which they swam with their roots through land to get to her. It was their size that mattered to her — they got bigger the closer they got, and she felt like a pale line at the sight of the council of trees. As she stood on the steps in front of the place she lived, they overran them with tiny beads of green grass, as if they were reaching to her, claiming her before they had even said anything.
“Child,” they said and sat, their roots sinking with a thud.
The air became like evening, as if they had brought dusk to settle around them. The trees had come to set up council.
A child born from promise has ideas and memories from the time before common knowledge, before creation had taken root. In one of them, she stood shoulder-level with treetops. She saw the rough heads that formed a canopy of variegate green, that sunlight bounced through, bounced through and back into her mind so that beyond all that clean green and sky she saw a world melting too soon from her grasp.
With the trees in front of her, she saw as she had seen many times, how the eternal wisdom and solitude of creation’s choir closed them off from anything beyond their own selves, and the magnitude of their presence in front of her, calling her child.
Before she could reply, the trees started to speak among themselves.
“Is this the child? Our child?”
“She seems yet frail.”
“She should have grown by now. It’s almost time for the fulfilment.”
“I think we gave fair time –”
Then their voices became a chorus of questions.
The child had to ask hers: “Time for what?”
They stopped. Stopped as if they were newly startled by her presence.
“How dare you?” one voice asked for all. One tree grew loomed large in the eyes of the child and the rest receded, becoming like shadows behind it.
“Do you know who we are? “
“Yes,” she said, almost afraid. “You’re my parents.”
A new kind of silence grew in their leaves.
“She must be the one then!” One tree said. “How else could she know?”
“Yes, it seems so,” the largest tree said. “Do you know your mother?” It asked. They waited.
She remembered a quiet tree with the kind of foldings that closed it off in ways very different from the rest of the trees.
“No…” she said. “I’m not sure.”
“Then,” the tree said, “do you know who you are?”
In the first image the child had seen, the one that told of a time before the trees had sunk into the silence they had been subjected to — and had chosen — she stood looking up at a mother; at a being whose branches flayed proud and open, holding leaves that dangled purple like silken cobwebs in sunset. Then the image began to close on itself as a promise was being made: branches became folded arms, leaves turned to drooping heads and music to silence, only an image etched into the tree’s side by dust was left.
And in that image, an unborn promise that solitude would turn to confession, and death to labour pangs. The rest of creation hadn’t known of it, yet they formed weapons to fell creation’s midwives and form them into things for their own use.
So that before her birth in the swamps, there was no music or wind or whispers, instead groanings that were almost enough to break the silence.
“Is that what I am?” the child asked
“That is why we were created. We have been waiting for you.”
“We must leave now,” the trees behind said. The song and whispers returned to their leaves and they left as though they were being pulled out of her view one by one until she was alone again but in a new kind of silence.
*
So if God sighed through trees so that they heaved a mist from their roots, if a giant’s palm slapped the earth, so that the dust rose like a gasp, sharp enough to eat through bark, why can’t trees speak?
“The trees spoke because they did,” a mother answered her child. They were in a garden tilling dark soil and placing vegetables in a basket. The mother smiled at her child. Hers was one with unending questions, as is only proper for a child.
“Tell me another story! Please,” the child said.
“Which one do you want?”
“I want a new one.”
“What if I don’t have a new one?”
“You always have a new one mummy, that’s why you’re my mummy.”
Mother laughed.
“I’ll tell you one if you can remember the poem I said at the beginning of the story”
“Why?”
“That’s because this one too is about trees and you’ll have to know it to understand this one.”
“Okay, let’s do it.”
*
A girl was sitting in a vehicle going on a journey to a place with more concrete than she had ever known because she had made a decision. She watched the landscape flit past on the side of the road and briefly saw a group of trees arranged in a circle like they were a council of sorts. Back home, there might be a meeting going on about her behavior. Someone would say something about the calamity of having a child after waiting for so long only for her to never bear any fruit.
Her mother would be silent and distant, not shedding a tear. Her fathers, uncles and aunts would speak in whispers and in parables. They would talk about a far-off thing like the seed that had been brought to seek out the lost of creation not heeding to its purpose.
They were the sort of people to speak in stories and they loved comparing her to fruit or seed, implying with those stories that she was a fulfillment of their dreams. She was to restore what had been lost to them. They’d ask their own questions, didn’t she care about her mother’s shame? Or about their collective shame of having everyone else around them move through life while they were held still and laughed at for their choice to wait on her.
If she could tell her own story, there would be no trees describing or defining her. Nothing about a seed that was to find the lost of creation for a reason she could not understand. Her own question would be, what if the seed was just as lost as the rest of creation? What about no trees, or seeds? What if there was a girl that had chosen to live her own life?
So the story of creation would be fictionalized into folklore to be told by runaway mothers who taught their children to grow without displacement or persecution. Children who in their privilege mock the silence of trees, asking if it were possible for them to speak.
About the author: Busayo is a person who likes wonder and ideas and exploring them through storytelling and other forms of writing. She likes to read, listen to music and such.
