Around two years ago, a close friend of mine took me on one of our usual drives around the city to look at new developments and projects that were heavily influencing the urban landscape and which he knew I’d have a strong opinion about. This came to be a habit while I was studying abroad since so much would change every time I’d come back for a visit. Sure enough I’d get the regular call on an early Saturday morning, and after a dip at the beach and a cup of coffee, the update tour was underway.
On one of those trips we visited a newly built hotel and an island that was under construction. The entrance to that island was rigged out with a sleek roundabout entrance which fed lanes coming in and out of the main road, the hotel, and the island. I remember him stopping the car at what was then a lot for construction equipment and pointing at the two trees which were the center pieces of the roundabout. Now I don’t remember the exact price that he cited, but I remember that it was a few million dollars. Baobab trees those were. Imported from south central Africa.
I was sure that they grew in Sudan, in fact the Sudanese are known to prepare a well known drink from the fruit, but bragging about the cost of each tree and how miraculous it is for them to be standing along the coast of a gulf state, all that came to my mind was the recent trend at the time of how popular baobab was in hip and modern lifestyles in global cities. Stocked in department stores, capitalized upon and sold, and marketed as an ethnic and exotic remedy of the orient. All that aside, that story remained in the corners of my mind along with everything that annoys me about the culture of neoliberal capitalism and its creative destruction of narratives of identity.
In October of 2018, I went on a short trip to Dhofar, on the very edge of the Empty Quarter, a region of the Sultunate of Oman which harbors the Indian Ocean and quite a site for poor old sore eyes. I rarely visit Dhofar off season, ie; July - September , but a visit off season had removed the veil of mist off the mountain scape and sure enough there they were. Baobab trees in the Arabian Peninsula. They may not look very similar to those in Africa, they may as well be younger in age, but sure enough there they were, and they have always been there.
The moral of this story is to point out our ignorance of our own region and the beauty it beholds. Globalization and commodification teaches us to always look at and take from the “other” without truly understanding what can be provided by the “self”. That we need our treatments to come from the elixirs that we buy rather than the internal harmonies within our bodies. As a lost and alienated generation from our own identities, we are also alienated from our environments and that is a dilemma that only we can fix.
This post was written in a hurry and was not and probably will not be proof read. My job is not to write stories, but to tell them in pictures. I hope I got my message across.