Book One: The Roots
by Sabrina Tom
Helen Blake, Trip to Heaven, oil on linen, 60 x 48cm, 2019. Photograph courtesy of the artist.
Book One: The Roots
Sabrina Tom / Nov 2021 / Issue 11
With a New Foreword and Translation
by Sabrina Atlas Keawe Tom
Foreword
The first time I read the Roots was on a food pilgrimage in Taitung, a rich agricultural area on the southeast coast of Taiwan. Rice paddies sweep across the low and river plains. Along the hills, tea, lily flower, and roselle bloom. On top of the hill grow oaks, acacia, and maple trees, as well as a stunning variety of fruit, such as pineapples, papaya, longan, lychee, and, my personal favorite, wax apples.
Wax apples are delicate creatures. They're easily damaged due to their thin skin, which varies in color from white to pale green to dark purple. Despite their name, they look and taste nothing like the apples we know from our ABCs. Their flavor is audaciously subtle, something between a watermelon and a pear, with the airy texture of cotton candy. Wax apples are many things, but mostly they exist in contrast to what they are not.
Wax apples were first cultivated in Taiwan during the 17th century; around the same time and place, my instincts tell me, as the creation of the first stories that evolved over many generations before it was codified into a book that for many more generations was handed down without a title, until it became the Roots.
The Chinese character for root combines the radicals wood and mountain. Replace the wood radical and you get a homonym that means with, also, according to, as, like. If language creates relationship, root is an alchemic word that simultaneously conjures a thing, a perspective, a linguistic phenomenology.
The copy I saw belonged to a Paiwan farmer who, with subdued enthusiasm, retrieved the book from their jacket pocket and offered it to me like manna. I was immediately drawn to the humble profile, the punch-colored cover, the semi-transparent pages smudged with fingerprints in every shade of soil. The textual body was formatted into small blocks and printed in ink so black it glowed.
I read the first verse aloud before a floating leaf landed in my throat. The farmer was unfazed. They speak, the farmer said, and slowly turned their palm up and down, up and down. A gesture to the mountain. To the forest. Perhaps to nature entirely. A poetic gesture. A corporeal translation of the loose weave connecting human experience to a text that plants the seed for something most exquisitely still in process.
Dawu Mountain, November 2028
In the beginning
There were trees. Acres upon acres of trees whose million branches linked across the sky so it was never lonely and whose roots gave definition to the soil so it was never lost.
And Goda, whose name means horse, lived with the trees underneath the generous sky, and above the tender soil, and felt things could be better.
So Goda said, let there be twigs. And all the trees stretched mightily, growing thin and resilient twigs which added structure to the branches.
And the twigs were healthy and happy, and the branches thrived with their younger partners, and Goda saw that both were brown and naked, and felt things could be better.
So Goda said, let there be leaves. And all the trees shivered and pulsed, sprouting wide and shiny leaves with delicate serrated edges. And sometimes the leaves fanned dark and light green, and sometimes they flamed orange and red.
The leaves were creative and clever. When it was warm and bright they turned their faces up to sunbathe and drink in the light. When it was cold and a fierce wind blew they fearlessly descended to warmer ground.
And the branches became plump and excited, for the leaves were above all nurturers, and Goda saw this mutual care, and felt things could be better.
So Goda said, let there be flowers. And all the trees, in equal parts protest and obeisance, sucked all the air into their heartwood and let out a transcendent exhale.
The flowers that bloomed were radically united, and as one they licked every branch and twig and leaf with their velvet pink tongues, and the trees released a collective moan.
The pleasure was as intense as the flowers were magnificent, and the trees could not have asked for anything more, and Goda saw that this relationship was lacking higher purpose, and felt things could be better.
So Goda said, let there be fruit. And all the trees suffered through a long and selfish winter until the apples were born. The apples came in many shapes and colors; indeed no two apples were alike.
Every apple was different and exactly what it needed to be, and this delivered upon the trees everlasting gratitude, for they had created something that was everything.
And now the trees were also complete, and Goda could not leave them alone because things could always be better, so Goda decided to mess with language.
Speak, sand, sack, split
In the language of trees there is harmony and blessing and blessing and harmony is the language of trees.
Now there was an area of land where there were no trees. A desert, if you will.
And here Goda made the first person out of sand and filled two small sacks with sand for the first person to carry, and added to these sand sacks a flower from the apple tree, which became the first pronoun, they.
Goda set them, the first person, among the dunes where they were free to wander, for to the innocent the desert is a rich and imaginative land, and Goda said to them, "You may give a name to whatever you come across. But speak to no one, only me."
They wandered the desert and indeed there was a great deal to see and discover:
They found desert plants which they named cactus and animals which they named snake.
They drank water which they named life and held stars which they named inspiration.
They followed the sun which they named energy. At night they wore a nimbus of moonlight which they named mother.
Soon the first person tired. Words were in fact unwieldy and exhausting. So Goda said, "I will find you a companion."
Goda called on the cacti and snakes, the moon and sun and stars, and all the sands of the desert to keep them company.
But none of these could fill their heart, which they named possession.
That night Goda rested beside them until they fell into a deep sleep.
In the darkest hour, from the windswept sands of the desert, Goda fashioned a second person, a friend, to whom Goda allowed only one part of the flower, the pistil, which became the second pronoun, she.
And now the first person underwent a transformation. A branch grew between their legs from which the sand sacks hung, and in the flower was only the stamen, which became the third most specious pronoun, he.
Words belong to each other
When He woke up and saw that She was sleeping, he nearly perpetrated a crime of possession. He directed himself at the one closest to him, a savage instinct, for that was who he'd become.
Fortunately, just then she reached into his chest and pulsed his heart.
The mutual sighting of two bodies emerging through darkness, which she named interview, was the first spoken word.
Thereafter, their understanding of one another grew. There was respect, transparency, togetherness.
Equally powerful was their desire for personal freedom.
Just when they felt at peace, in would come longing, like sugar dissolving on the tongue, like that layered moment when glorious sunlight passes through a thundercloud, only to retreat again, which was the second spoken word, transition.
It twisted their mood.
They wandered the desert speaking many words between them: day; night; darkness; light; good; evil; hot; cold; man; woman; soft; hard; heaven; hell; never; always; foreign; native; husband; wife; build; destroy; push; pull; young; old; comedy; drama; guilty; innocent; truth; fiction.
Once, she and he looked between their legs and saw more opposition, so they decided to sew leaves onto their skin and lay asters over their eyes. They recalled the language of nature, which had no words for arguing over whose genitals were better.
Just then they heard Goda walking by and hid behind an ancient Joshua Tree.
Goda called to them, "Where are you?"
And he answered, "I heard you walking and I didn't want to see you, so I hid."
Then Goda said, "Who taught you to speak?"
And he answered, "My friend—she and I have been discussing politics."
Then Goda said, "What have you done?"
And they said, "We made a choice."
And Goda said to her, "Because of your corruption, your body will bear children, and the toll of caregiving will be very severe. The more children you have, the coarser your heart will be, and the wilder your mind will grow. At a certain age you will stop having children, and then will you be free, but as a shadow to its host.”
And Goda said to him, “Because you spoke to another after I commanded you to speak to no one but me, cursed is your body to waywardness. Your seed will be as wild as the wind. Your desire will be small and uncontainable—like grains of sand; for sand you are and to sand you will return."
She and he cleaved to one other, considering this turn of events.
Their bodies fit together like two prominent trees, weaving through space. They inhaled a collective breath between them, and from their braided lips unraveled a final spoken word, commune.
Goda was unmoved by the integrity of their union and offered them a choice: They could live together, as they are now; in time they would learn to speak with devotion and intimacy, a holy language; but they would have to follow Goda's commandments.
Or they could live by their own rules, alone.
They laughed at Goda's effort to divide them into parts. Wasn't it obvious that the whole earth was contained in their trunk? That wind and storms lived in the shape of their branches? That past, present, and future repeated in every flower? In the tree there is no distinction between form and story. It was a false tension to separate them, for their life will always be in relationship, symbiotic with the mountains, the waves, the soil, the air, and also the organs, the brain, the body, the light.
The degree to which a society and its institutions remain predictable and reliable
An, the self-named first person, walked the Earth for one thousand years. They bore a child, Wei, who gathered food and told many stories—and had many descendants.
Ru, the self-named second person, walked the Earth for one thousand forty years. They bore a child, Wen, who gathered food and wrote many stories—and had many descendants.
Meanwhile, and then
Babel
From the descendants of Wei and Wen, the children of All people, now the whole world had one language and one common speech.
As the people moved eastward, they found an apple tree forest in the valley of Kuljalo and settled there.
And the people said, "Let's pick the apples, for they will fortify our bodies." From eating the apples their brains and hearts grew giant.
Then the people said, "Let's make baskets for bringing apples home." They wove intricate baskets using their own hair and the community thrived.
Then the people said, "Now let's grow the forest for they will help us make things, and when we tire, they will help us rest in peace."
But Goda, who had been plotting on the sidelines, saw the people seeding and planting and building and said, "If as one people speaking the same language, they can do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them."
So Goda separated the people from the forest and confused the language of the Earth.
This is how most human beings still live.
Sabrina Tom is a writer based in Venice, California. Her work has appeared in The New Orleans Review, Redivider, Hyphen, Contrary Magazine, and is anthologized in The Kartika Review and Overkill. She also co-wrote the screenplay for the short film Moving Into Sunlight.
Helen G. Blake is a painter whose practice focuses on colour; engaging with rhythm and formalism, chance and deliberation. Using a working method where process and contemplation are both allowed guide the evolution of the work, she constructs overtly hand-made paintings which record and examine colour conversations within accumulating pattern structures, embracing accidents, flaws and discrepancies within their rhythms. Blake grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and graduated with an honours degree in Visual Art from Aberystwyth University, Wales. Recent solo shows include: Recent Works, The Molesworth Gallery, Dublin (2021, 2019, 2017); Choir, Limerick Museum (2019); and New Paintings, Fenderesky Gallery, Belfast (2018). She lives and works in County Wicklow, Ireland.