Letter to the Editor 20-11-2014 The demise of the mango tree Dear Editor, Mango season is here again. This afternoon I am reminded that all along the roadside around Mahé there are mang blan trees laden with ripening fruit. The clusters dangle tantalisingly from branches that protrude overhead, almost half-way across the road in one or two places. As the wipers swish-swash across the windscreen, I imagine the raindrops hitting the dark elongated leaves, percolating onto the branches and bunches of fruit, dripping hesitantly at first, then accelerating down the waxy yellow roundedness of the mangoes. I describe what I see in my mind’s eye to my friend Xavier, who is driving. “Like tears in rain,” I add, mechanically quoting the famous lines at the end of the film Blade Runner. “Don’t get so depressed just because not everyone shares yours perspective of what’s right in matters of landscaping and historical conservation,” Xavier scolds me gently. He stops the car so that we can admire one particularly spectacular rain-glazed tree in fruit. Late in the night I listen to the gleeful flapping and screeching of the bats as they gorge themselves on mang mezon. Every now and then there is a resounding thud as a mango lands on the corrugated iron roof. Some of them will be half-eaten fruits discarded or perhaps accidentally dropped by the bats, others intact ones that are shaken from the bunches or knocked down as the sousouri go about their happy rampage. I drift in and out of sleep, clinging to bits and pieces of mango lore I have picked up in my reading of the past two days. Mango trees are long-lived and can be expected to survive as mature trees for over 100 years. By 1840, “the king of fruits” was being grown not only on Mahé but on Praslin and Silhouette as well. Mangoes featured prominently in Marianne North’s still-life Fruit grown in the Seychelles painted in 1883, as well as in Alexis Preller’s surrealistic tableau Mangoes on a beach of 1948.In my state of semi-sleep they mingle with what I saw in the Sir Selwyn Selwyn-Clarke market in Victoria yesterday. How right one newspaper was to call it “the landmark mango tree in the centre of the market”. All those guidebooks that one sees the tourists clutching as they go about the islands seem to refer to it, as do the blogs the same tourists keep. “The market is a nondescript open-sided iron-roofed place, shaded by an enormous sugar mango tree,” says Douglas Alexander in Holiday in Seychelles published back in 1972 (though I’m not too sure about the “sugar” in that sentence). More recent reviews include: - The market surrounds an eighty-year-old mango tree… (1997) - Le marché: il a lieu tous les jours, autour d’un manguier géant… (2001) - An enormous mango tree shades the central square… (2012) - À l’ombre d’un gigantesque manguier… (2013) - Laid out in the shade of a mango tree… (2013) - De l’aube jusqu’au couchant, les commerçants installent leurs étals à l’ombre d’un majestueux manguier… (2013) Gigantic and majestic no more. When I went there on Saturday afternoon, having heard the bad news on breakfast TV, some vendors were sweeping and scrubbing after the market had closed. A forked stump a couple of metres high stood between a green-red-blue and yellow umbrella and a blue-green tent. A broken white plastic chair had been left at the foot of the tree. I reached out and touched the rugged bark. The first time I had done that was nearly half a century earlier. My grandfather had explained the significance of that fork: this was a special tree because one variety of mango had been grafted onto another, one branch of the fork producing elongated mang sab while the other gave a more rounded variety of the fruit. I recalled seeing both types, still green, on the tree during the Jeux des Iles de l’Océan Indien in August 2011. Only one guide book, the Petit Futé, has that: Sous l’énorme manguier (qui a la particularité de produire deux variétés de mangues fort succulentes)… Ces madanm paton, au même titre que le manguier et le bassin d’eau, font partie du décor éternel de ce joli petit marché des plus authentiques… Éternel? The amputation process would have begun at the top of the tree, the branches shivering, sagging, before finally falling. I imagined the chromium-plated steel teeth of the chainsaw running at 20 metres per second, ripping into the bark, slicing through the phloem carrying sap from the leaves to the lower trunk and the roots, rupturing the growth layer in the cambium beneath, severing the xylem pipelines carrying water and minerals up the tree, and finally tearing onto the heartwood, cleaving it asunder, in a flurry of sawdust, a plume of resin vapour, the chemistry of a century of seasons in the sun, lingering over the nearby plastic sunshades and awnings. To think that only a week or so earlier, on Saturday 25th October, a Francophone visitor had blogged: “ … on fait plusieurs fois le tour des boutiques d’artisanat et de paréos, puis on déjeune à la terrasse face à un manguier géant…” “I know how you feel”, Xavier says, “but to be fair this was no callous act of arbitrary arboricide. They thought it would create more space and brighten up the place. You saw what that article in the paper said.” I tell him that it also said something about “bringing more cleanliness” in the market. Then, for no reason at all, I think of the roots of that mango tree. I visualize them as the subterranean mirror image of all those branches, all that foliage that was once spread out overhead to catch the sun and welcome the madanm paton. They must be everywhere beneath the market itself, laid out with ever smaller roots and rootlets along their lengths according to the principles of fractal geometry. We shall walk over them for a long time to come. In my quest for closure, I turn to the other mango tree, the one in Benezet Street, opposite where work started last February on a new Chinese pagoda. Perhaps this one will be spared, I say to myself, and La complainte du manguier by the Senegalese writer Marouba Fall churns over in my head: Je suis l’arbre debout au milieu de vous J’enfonce mes racines au cœur de la terre J’ouvre mes bras au bleu du ciel Pourquoi usez-vous de couteaux pour écorcher mon tronc …Pourtant je vous offre mon ombre Pourtant je vous offre mes fruits Pat Matyot
Posted on: Fri, 21 Nov 2014 06:00:41 +0000
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