What Forests Teach Us
- Human beings are not the center of reality. Forests challenge human exceptionalism by reminding us that we share the world with many other forms of life, agency, and intelligence.
- Forests are intelligent spaces with minds of their own. In acting on us physically and in our imaginations, forests remind us that human beings are not the only actors in reality and that other forms of intelligence and influence are at work in the world.
- Reality is richer and stranger than we often imagine. Forests are threshold spaces where familiar assumptions can be suspended and new possibilities can emerge.
- Identity is fluid rather than fixed. Forests invite us to reimagine ourselves beyond the roles and labels that ordinarily define us.
- Fragmentation and renewal belong together. Forests teach that new forms of life often arise through processes of breakdown, loss, and transformation.
- Other worlds are possible. Forests are laboratories of possibility, enabling us to dismantle inherited ways of seeing and imagine more life-giving ways of inhabiting the Earth.
Forests as Co-Authors of
the Human Imagination
Responding to the New Books Network Interview
with Ainehi Edoro on her book Forest Imaginaries
Scroll down for interview
Above you find six lessons from forests, understood as intelligent spaces that shape our imaginations. I borrow the phrase "intelligent spaces" from Ainehi Edoro, author of Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think (Columbia University Press, 2026). What follows is a response to her interview in the New Books Network about her book. She is a Mellon-Morgridge Assistant Professor of English and African cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is also the founding editor of Brittle Paper, a leading platform for African literary culture.
*
As she explains in her interview, Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think (Columbia University Press, 2026) is about the ways forests function as co-authors in certain contemporary African novels of different genres: indigenous narratives and science fiction, for example.
According to Edoro, forests in these novels are "intelligent spaces" that possess agency of their own. They are not merely settings or contexts within which stories unfold; they participate in the telling of the stories. They influence events, shape destinies, and affect the personalities and actions of characters. They can exert pressures, offer possibilities, conceal truths, reveal realities, and shape the direction of the story. They are goal-directed.
Edoro explains how attending to the agency of forests allows readers to approach African novels on their own indigenous terms rather than primarily through colonial or postcolonial frameworks. In indigenous traditions forests played prominent roles in the lives of people; it was colonialism that brought a new emphasis on urban settings as normative. and rural settings as 'primitive.' She aims to free her readers of such assumptions. And yet, as she emphasizes, her focus on reclaiming indigeneity should not suggest that recognizing the agendy of forests is somehow premodern, or that recognizing their agency is simply a return to inherited ways of thinking. It is also, and perhaps even more deeply, about futurity and world-building.
In this context she discusses kinds of forests that play a role in African novels. In African science fiction for example, many of the forests are imaginative and futuristic rather than biologically palpable. Forests can be virtual as well as actual, imagined not inherited, fractal not physical, oriented toward what can be rather than what is. As both inheritances and future possibilities, forests can have a transformative power in human life, as they do in much African fiction. What do they teach us?
Among other things, forests are invitations to new worlds. They are intelligent spaces where different rules apply. Animals may speak. Time may slow down, speed up, or stop altogether. Boundaries become porous. The forest world is not necessarily chaotic, but it is organized according to a logic different from the one that governs everyday life. Forests reveal dimensions of reality that remain hidden in more familiar settings.
In African novels, the explains, forests are also invitations to reimagine ourselves beyond the identities we habitually inhabit and sometimes mistake for who we truly are. In the forest, people become aware of themselves as outsiders entering a world that belongs primarily to plants, animals, spirits, and forces larger than themselves. The forest decenters the human perspective and undercuts human exceptionalism. It reminds us that there are other ways of inhabiting reality and other forms of intelligence at work in the world. The forest occupies a space that can accommodate uncertainty, fragmentation, and transformation - and lead humans to do the same.
Fragmentation is itself one of the lessons of the forest. In forests we encounter life and death, predator and prey, decay and renewal. We witness the breaking down of existing forms of life and the emergence of new ones. Edoro notes that fragmentation is a recurring theme in African folklore. The forest teaches that creation and destruction are not opposites but companions. For new forms of life to arise, older forms must often break apart.
Whether we welcome it or not, generation and dissolution go together. Forests make us honest about this dimension of existence, reminding us that becoming is inseparable from loss and that renewal is often born from fragmentation. The forest becomes a laboratory of possibility—a place where the world can be dismantled and rebuilt in the imagination. The identities that organize everyday life—parent, teacher, scholar, citizen, professional—can loosen their hold. New possibilities for self-understanding emerge. The forest becomes a place of reimagining, a space where one can discover different ways of being human and different ways of belonging within a larger, more-than-human world.
In our time, there is a profound need on the part of many people around the world, especially urban dwellers, to discover and learn from forests, understood as agents and not merely as settings. Actual forests are, of course, beautiful in their own right and deserve our respect. But forests, actual and imagined, are also our teachers. They enable us to re-wild—or perhaps wild for the first time—our imaginations.
There is a certain prosaic and urban mindset that can obstruct our capacity to think like forests. It regards forests merely as environments, as places that may surround human beings but serve only as a backdrop for human endeavors. This mindset - I will call it the "mechanistic" worldview - may further presume that forests consist of entities, from the microscopic to the macroscopic, from the animate to the inanimate, that are ultimately reducible to inert matter in motion, lacking agency of their own. This is the scientific materialism of which Whitehead was so critical in Science and the Modern World. A materialism he believed out of sync with the dynamic and sentient nature of living matter.
As is well known, process philosophy explicitly repudiates the notion of inert, mechanistic matter. It sees the world as alive with varying forms of agency, whether in individual organisms, animals, plants, or in networks of interconnected beings exhibiting what might be called distributed agency. From a process perspective, forests are not merely collections of objects. They are living communities of activity, relationship, and influence.
Even so, process philosophy by no means enough for helping us re-wild our imaginations and reclaim an enchanted world. There is also a need for living traditions whose members are already disposed to feel and experience the world in these terms—to think, in a sense, like forests. And there is a need for the arts to present forest-thinking in ways that are intellectually illuminating and emotionally compelling.
Enter the African novel as described by Edoro. Forests may indeed be intelligent spaces with agencies and purposes of their own. Even imagined forests - fractal not actual - have their kind of agency. They are examples of what Whitehead calls propositions or proposals: lures for feeling.
But forests also need ambassadors—storytellers, artists, and visionaries who can represent them to our imaginations in vivid and transformative ways. This is one of the many gifts of African novels as described by Ainehi Edoro in her interview on the New Books Network, offered below. After the interview, the next and important step is to read and then, of course, to forest our own lives and imaginations so that we might live more lightly and gently with one another, and with respect and a sense of kinship with the more-than-human world; its animals, its plants, its rivers, its mountains, its forests, its magic.
- Jay McDaniel
*
As she explains in her interview, Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think (Columbia University Press, 2026) is about the ways forests function as co-authors in certain contemporary African novels of different genres: indigenous narratives and science fiction, for example.
According to Edoro, forests in these novels are "intelligent spaces" that possess agency of their own. They are not merely settings or contexts within which stories unfold; they participate in the telling of the stories. They influence events, shape destinies, and affect the personalities and actions of characters. They can exert pressures, offer possibilities, conceal truths, reveal realities, and shape the direction of the story. They are goal-directed.
Edoro explains how attending to the agency of forests allows readers to approach African novels on their own indigenous terms rather than primarily through colonial or postcolonial frameworks. In indigenous traditions forests played prominent roles in the lives of people; it was colonialism that brought a new emphasis on urban settings as normative. and rural settings as 'primitive.' She aims to free her readers of such assumptions. And yet, as she emphasizes, her focus on reclaiming indigeneity should not suggest that recognizing the agendy of forests is somehow premodern, or that recognizing their agency is simply a return to inherited ways of thinking. It is also, and perhaps even more deeply, about futurity and world-building.
In this context she discusses kinds of forests that play a role in African novels. In African science fiction for example, many of the forests are imaginative and futuristic rather than biologically palpable. Forests can be virtual as well as actual, imagined not inherited, fractal not physical, oriented toward what can be rather than what is. As both inheritances and future possibilities, forests can have a transformative power in human life, as they do in much African fiction. What do they teach us?
Among other things, forests are invitations to new worlds. They are intelligent spaces where different rules apply. Animals may speak. Time may slow down, speed up, or stop altogether. Boundaries become porous. The forest world is not necessarily chaotic, but it is organized according to a logic different from the one that governs everyday life. Forests reveal dimensions of reality that remain hidden in more familiar settings.
In African novels, the explains, forests are also invitations to reimagine ourselves beyond the identities we habitually inhabit and sometimes mistake for who we truly are. In the forest, people become aware of themselves as outsiders entering a world that belongs primarily to plants, animals, spirits, and forces larger than themselves. The forest decenters the human perspective and undercuts human exceptionalism. It reminds us that there are other ways of inhabiting reality and other forms of intelligence at work in the world. The forest occupies a space that can accommodate uncertainty, fragmentation, and transformation - and lead humans to do the same.
Fragmentation is itself one of the lessons of the forest. In forests we encounter life and death, predator and prey, decay and renewal. We witness the breaking down of existing forms of life and the emergence of new ones. Edoro notes that fragmentation is a recurring theme in African folklore. The forest teaches that creation and destruction are not opposites but companions. For new forms of life to arise, older forms must often break apart.
Whether we welcome it or not, generation and dissolution go together. Forests make us honest about this dimension of existence, reminding us that becoming is inseparable from loss and that renewal is often born from fragmentation. The forest becomes a laboratory of possibility—a place where the world can be dismantled and rebuilt in the imagination. The identities that organize everyday life—parent, teacher, scholar, citizen, professional—can loosen their hold. New possibilities for self-understanding emerge. The forest becomes a place of reimagining, a space where one can discover different ways of being human and different ways of belonging within a larger, more-than-human world.
In our time, there is a profound need on the part of many people around the world, especially urban dwellers, to discover and learn from forests, understood as agents and not merely as settings. Actual forests are, of course, beautiful in their own right and deserve our respect. But forests, actual and imagined, are also our teachers. They enable us to re-wild—or perhaps wild for the first time—our imaginations.
There is a certain prosaic and urban mindset that can obstruct our capacity to think like forests. It regards forests merely as environments, as places that may surround human beings but serve only as a backdrop for human endeavors. This mindset - I will call it the "mechanistic" worldview - may further presume that forests consist of entities, from the microscopic to the macroscopic, from the animate to the inanimate, that are ultimately reducible to inert matter in motion, lacking agency of their own. This is the scientific materialism of which Whitehead was so critical in Science and the Modern World. A materialism he believed out of sync with the dynamic and sentient nature of living matter.
As is well known, process philosophy explicitly repudiates the notion of inert, mechanistic matter. It sees the world as alive with varying forms of agency, whether in individual organisms, animals, plants, or in networks of interconnected beings exhibiting what might be called distributed agency. From a process perspective, forests are not merely collections of objects. They are living communities of activity, relationship, and influence.
Even so, process philosophy by no means enough for helping us re-wild our imaginations and reclaim an enchanted world. There is also a need for living traditions whose members are already disposed to feel and experience the world in these terms—to think, in a sense, like forests. And there is a need for the arts to present forest-thinking in ways that are intellectually illuminating and emotionally compelling.
Enter the African novel as described by Edoro. Forests may indeed be intelligent spaces with agencies and purposes of their own. Even imagined forests - fractal not actual - have their kind of agency. They are examples of what Whitehead calls propositions or proposals: lures for feeling.
But forests also need ambassadors—storytellers, artists, and visionaries who can represent them to our imaginations in vivid and transformative ways. This is one of the many gifts of African novels as described by Ainehi Edoro in her interview on the New Books Network, offered below. After the interview, the next and important step is to read and then, of course, to forest our own lives and imaginations so that we might live more lightly and gently with one another, and with respect and a sense of kinship with the more-than-human world; its animals, its plants, its rivers, its mountains, its forests, its magic.
- Jay McDaniel
Interview with Ainehi Edoro
Forests in fiction are often understood simply as settings, symbols, or remnants of a premodern past. Yet many African novelists have turned to the forest to experiment with worldbuilding and to imagine new futures. This groundbreaking book explores the life of the forest in African fiction, showing how writers have used it to reinvent the novel’s formal, aesthetic, and political possibilities.
Ainehi Edoro argues in Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think (Columbia UP, 2026) that forests in African fiction are laboratories for unmaking and remaking the world, where writers break apart familiar forms to test alternate forms of life, knowledge, and power. Instead of treating the forest as a backdrop, these writers imagine it as a living structure: a space where politics, history, myth, violence, technology, the magical, and creativity animate fictional worlds. Spanning indigenous African narratives and contemporary science fiction, Forest Imaginaries traces the lineage of forest worlds in African literature: Chinua Achebe’s evil forest, the cosmic forest in Wọle Ṣóyínká’s mythic imagination, Thomas Mofolo’s forest of imperial dreams, Amos Tutuola’s endless fractal forest, and Nnedi Okorafor’s aquatic forest of new ecological futures. This book rethinks African literary history by showing how African writers draw on the forest—and the wealth of Indigenous ideas about time, space, and storytelling it conjures—to transform the novel’s aesthetic, political, and philosophical horizons.
Ainehi Edoro is a Mellon-Morgridge Assistant Professor of English and African cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the founding editor of Brittle Paper, a leading platform for African literary culture.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.
Ainehi Edoro argues in Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think (Columbia UP, 2026) that forests in African fiction are laboratories for unmaking and remaking the world, where writers break apart familiar forms to test alternate forms of life, knowledge, and power. Instead of treating the forest as a backdrop, these writers imagine it as a living structure: a space where politics, history, myth, violence, technology, the magical, and creativity animate fictional worlds. Spanning indigenous African narratives and contemporary science fiction, Forest Imaginaries traces the lineage of forest worlds in African literature: Chinua Achebe’s evil forest, the cosmic forest in Wọle Ṣóyínká’s mythic imagination, Thomas Mofolo’s forest of imperial dreams, Amos Tutuola’s endless fractal forest, and Nnedi Okorafor’s aquatic forest of new ecological futures. This book rethinks African literary history by showing how African writers draw on the forest—and the wealth of Indigenous ideas about time, space, and storytelling it conjures—to transform the novel’s aesthetic, political, and philosophical horizons.
Ainehi Edoro is a Mellon-Morgridge Assistant Professor of English and African cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the founding editor of Brittle Paper, a leading platform for African literary culture.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.