#hibiscus leaf

[inseventheaven-blog]

Ginkgo🌱 Hibiscus🌺 Weeping Willow🌿

[animalipedia]

Bonobos at the Human Archive Building in the South Congo. Foreground: Hibiscus Baobab. Background: Professors Hibiscus Leaf and Fallen Tree.

[animalipedia]

The Green Band

The Bonobo Ladies' Collective had worked for thirty years to plant the line of acacia tress that stretched across the southward edge of the Sahara. And then their daughters had spent the next thirty in tending it, scraping back sand, carrying water in calabashes, eating the ants that crept along the young trees to cut their leaves. The line is now three thousand miles long and jagged, weaving around areas still too dry to plant. Acacias feed the earth, though, and the land slowly learns how to hold water again. In thirty years, when the soil is less poor, they will advance the line.

Hibiscus Leaf was born on the line, hundreds of miles from her namesake plant. From the earliest age, she believed that she might live and die in the tending of the great green band. Her mother and grandmother already had by the time she was ten. She hauled water and ate ants and collected seeds in preparation for the new push northward. She slept at night under the sparse young canopies of the saplings.

Years later in her offices in the human archives, she'd envy the other professors who hadn't done what she'd done. They'd grown up in rich jungles as near-apex predators. They hadn't had to fear the cold or the thirst, or spend their days walking upright across barren earth with no safety in sight, no tree big enough to climb. She is a little slow compared to them; she learned to read too late, didn't grow up watching old movies in English, still can't figure out how to work the clunky generator.

But then they show her the photographs, the ones taken by the satellite they've managed to crack at last. They knuckle into her office and bring her down the hall to the monitor where the line stands out as bold and clear as a national border on an old map.

"You worked on the green band?" they ask her, and she nods, remembering. She wonders if she should feel pride. Instead, it's another kind of envy, and she feels for a moment the absence of the calabash around her neck, the sand under her fingernails.

[animalipedia]

The Official Decision

When word spread that a tiger was interested in joining the school of philosophy, the current students and faculty gathered for a discussion.

"I think that tigers are dangerous predators and we should deny admission on grounds of safety," said Professor Hibiscus Leaf. "Being killed and eaten certainly has its place in life but would be a distraction in the classroom."

"I believe that the tiger is sincere and could be persuaded not to eat people during discussions," said Professor Fallen Tree. "Our policy has been that all creatures deserve an opportunity to debate life’s questions with us. If history has taught us anything, it is that exclusion is oppression. The denial of knowledge to a student is against the tenets of this scholarly body."

In the following orgy, Professor Fallen Tree’s proposal was voted in 60 to 35, with five abstaining. Professor HIbiscus Leaf proposed the backup plan of holding classes in trees should the tiger prove impulsive, and Professor Fallen Tree, combing Hibiscus’s hair with her fingers, agreed that this seemed fair. The tiger Nnnn (“Hunger”) would be allowed to attend on a trial basis.

[animalipedia]

The Journey Over Land

Nnnn the Tiger walked for a year in her journey, mostly because tigers are a proud people who do not ask for directions even when they are sure they need them. She crossed features that she would later come to name in her career as a scholar, but that at the time she had no names for: the ruins of a human city nearly pulverized into dust and whose soil made her feet tingle painfully; a salt sea that nearly killed her as she walked along its shores and sipped its bitter water, and on the far side of that, a slender river teeming with a narrow band of life, which she followed backward up into the foothills. Then there was the desert, vast and seemingly endless, before she came once again to something she could recognize: in the shade of a mountain range, a verdant thick jungle.

Nnnn spotted it a long way off, the dark rich green of the Sundarbans of her birth. She felt a sense of enormous relief, and had to stop herself from running full tilt down the mountain slope toward the trees. She picked her way down into the basin a little at a time, slipped into the tree cover, and promptly fell asleep in the grass. She woke surrounded by apes.

She had seen monkeys before, had talked to them, had occasionally eaten them. They squinted at her. They were strange bulky apes, with matted little toupees of hair on their heads. She thought at first that they might be what her mother's mother's mother had called men.

One of them gave a little half-growl; a hello, but badly pronounced. The others eased back, grabbing branches. Nnnn wanted to tell them it was fine, she was too tired to feed, but she had no way to express that in her language. All tigers said was hello and goodbye, come in or get out.

"Macaque?" she ventured.

"Oh!" said the one who had growled. "Greetings to you and your team! Forage well and with great morale!"

"No team," she said in her broken macaque. "Just me. School of philosophy?"

She felt hazy then. She had pushed herself harder than she had meant to, and she couldn't remember the last time she'd had water that wasn't salty or tinged with the metallic taste of radiation. As she slipped out of consciousness, the creature said, "My god--she wants to enroll."

[animalipedia]

The South Congo School of Philosophy

The Human Archive, in its early days, was just a bunker in the Congo, a concrete building that had been hermetically sealed at one point but was now starting to leak. The bonobos had patched it up and rigged up the dehumidifier to protect the films (and later, books) they kept there, but they mostly continued to live outdoors, preferring nests in the trees to the drafty dry air of the archives.

Bonobos who worked closely with the archive lived in the trees near the bunker at first, but as more and more people (some other apes, too) became interested in study, the area became overpopulated. New schools sprang up in different areas. The study of philosophy was far from the archive building, since it relied mostly on arguing, which for bonobos, meant discussion, followed by dispute, followed by sex. The school of philosophy was one of the largest and fastest-growing.

Eventually, through sheer numbers, the school of philosophy lent its name to the entire sprawling network of classes, extending all the way from the Human Archive in the north to the Cape of Good Hope and out into the Indian Ocean, where distance learning students relayed broadcasts like "Professor Hibiscus Leaf says finitude is both the first and last lesson" in series of clicks and chirps that resonated for miles in calm water.