Photo by George Hodan on Public Domain Pictures
Trees do not Hurry Up
Sumana Roy on a Plant-Awakened Way of Living
Trees Do Not Hurry Up
"So, when I look back at the reasons for my disaffection with being human, and my desire to become a tree, I can see that at root lay the feeling that I was being bulldozed by time. As I removed my watch from my wrist, and clocks from my walls, I realized that all my flaws—and this I now discover I share with many others—came from my failure to be a good slave to time. I began envying the tree, its disobedience to human time. All around me were estate developers sending their fleets of workers to construct skyscrapers to tight schedules.The trees they planted in the gated communities annoyed them—they would grow at their natural pace. It was impossible to rush plants, to tell a tree to “hurry up.” In envy, in admiration and with ambition, I began to call that pace 'tree time.'"
— Sumana Roy, Indian essayist, novelist, poet, literary critic and teacher, in How I Became a Tree
A Way of Life outside the Emotional Economy of Humans
"As I began to feel a kind of sadness and emotional detachment from the human social world, I began to think of ways to survive because I did not want to die. I was looking for a way of life outside the emotional economy of humans. I think my consciousness came to rest on trees. I wanted to live like a tree. I wanted to become a tree."
— Sumana Roy, Indian essayist, novelist, poet, literary critic and teacher, in interview on the New Books Network, discussing her book Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal.
How I Became a Tree
Sumana Roy's first book How I Became a Tree (Aleph, 2017) is impossible to classify. Part-philosophical tract, part-memoir and part-literary criticism, the book is a record of her explorations in "tree-time." Intrigued by the balance, contentment and rootedness of trees, Roy begins to delve into a corpus of human knowledge devoted to understanding the mysteries of plant life.
Effortless and eclectic, she engages with the work of Buddha, Rabindranath Tagore, D.H. Lawrence, the photographs of Beth Moon, the art of Nandalal Bose, Indian folklore, Greek myths, the scientist Jagadish C. Bose's pioneering work on plant stimuli,
Deleuze and Guattari, Bengali novelist Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyaya, O'Henry and Shakespeare alongside autobiographical vignettes about her own gradual awareness of the plant world's mysteries.
Our conversation ranged from the rigidity of scholarly prose and what it inevitably precludes, writing with all five senses, "research" as a search for answers both existential and intellectual, and the importance of cultivating a sensibility over mere scholarship. An essayist, novelist and poet, Roy is currently a Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany. Her novel Missing was published in April 2018, and her poems and essays have appeared in Granta, Guernica, Los Angeles Review of Books, Drunken Boat, Prairie Schooner, Berfrois and The Common. She lives in Siliguri, India.
Effortless and eclectic, she engages with the work of Buddha, Rabindranath Tagore, D.H. Lawrence, the photographs of Beth Moon, the art of Nandalal Bose, Indian folklore, Greek myths, the scientist Jagadish C. Bose's pioneering work on plant stimuli,
Deleuze and Guattari, Bengali novelist Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyaya, O'Henry and Shakespeare alongside autobiographical vignettes about her own gradual awareness of the plant world's mysteries.
Our conversation ranged from the rigidity of scholarly prose and what it inevitably precludes, writing with all five senses, "research" as a search for answers both existential and intellectual, and the importance of cultivating a sensibility over mere scholarship. An essayist, novelist and poet, Roy is currently a Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany. Her novel Missing was published in April 2018, and her poems and essays have appeared in Granta, Guernica, Los Angeles Review of Books, Drunken Boat, Prairie Schooner, Berfrois and The Common. She lives in Siliguri, India.
Interview with Sumana Roy
Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal
Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal (Oxford UP, 2024) by Sumana Roy takes an unexpected cast of writers and artists and, in studying their work as ‘plant thinkers’, looks at how their stories and songs, art and films, and, of course, the idiomatic affected Bengali life and thought. Forest and garden, grass and root, weeds and magical plants—supported by a foliage of thought that allowed them to see beyond the botanical, Rabindranath Tagore, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Jibanananda Das, Shakti Chattopadhyay, Satyajit Ray, and others derived their worldview, their poetics and politics, from the plant world.
Jagadish Chandra Bose’s scientific experiments, his research and the philosophy that propelled it, religions and rituals that involved an affective relationship with the natural world, a subterranean invocation of plant philosophy in actions and words, in living and in creative practice, and the political possibilities beyond the nation state that such thinking generated give this book its sap and flow.
What might we take from these plant thinkers to rehabilitate our consciousness today?
Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University
Interview with Sumana Roy
Sumana Roy
Sumana Roy is an Indian essayist, novelist, poet, and literary critic whose work explores the relationships between humans, plants, animals, place, and consciousness. She is one of the leading voices in the emerging field of the environmental humanities, particularly what is now called the plant humanities. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Ashoka University in India and is affiliated with its Indian Plant Humanities project.
Her books include:
How I Became a Tree (2017; Yale University Press edition, 2021), a lyrical work of creative nonfiction in which she asks what humans might learn by living more like trees—slower, quieter, less driven by competition and social recognition. It is philosophical memoir rather than environmental advocacy in the ordinary sense.
Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal (2024), which argues that major Bengali writers, artists, and scientists—including Jagadish Chandra Bose, Rabindranath Tagore, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Jibanananda Das, and Satyajit Ray—developed ways of thinking deeply informed by plant life.
Provincials, a work of nonfiction about life outside India's metropolitan centers.
Missing, a novel.
My Mother's Lover and Other Stories, a short-story collection.
VIP: Very Important Plant and Out of Syllabus, poetry collections.
How I Became a Tree (2017; Yale University Press edition, 2021), a lyrical work of creative nonfiction in which she asks what humans might learn by living more like trees—slower, quieter, less driven by competition and social recognition. It is philosophical memoir rather than environmental advocacy in the ordinary sense.
Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal (2024), which argues that major Bengali writers, artists, and scientists—including Jagadish Chandra Bose, Rabindranath Tagore, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Jibanananda Das, and Satyajit Ray—developed ways of thinking deeply informed by plant life.
Provincials, a work of nonfiction about life outside India's metropolitan centers.
Missing, a novel.
My Mother's Lover and Other Stories, a short-story collection.
VIP: Very Important Plant and Out of Syllabus, poetry collections.
|
|
|
The Indian Plant Humanities Project
The Indian Plant Humanities project aims to create a living archive of writing and art on plant life, the first of its kind anywhere in the world. This project is led by Sumana Roy, Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing, with the support of the Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability (3CS) at Ashoka University. Professor Roy has recently been awarded the Omega Resilience Awards (ORA Fellowship) for her project titled: “Shaping the discipline of Plant Humanities in India to rekindle the relationships between communities and their botanical worlds”. Click here for more.