MANGUE, MANGIFERA
Nam Ou River Near Muang Ngoni Neua, Laos, 4x7”. Stephan Giannini, 2021.
Once upon a time a prized bark stood amongst a field of acrisols, it was lonely, furrowed yet serene. At its juvenile, the surrounded soils all grew into a small jungle, settled aside an upland village. The tree grew older and wiser as the habitants comes and goes. Half a decade until mature, drips of fruition were seen in oval—soft fleshes, glowing, partly chartreuse, partly bright, everyone would gather to share their year-round efforts. Before naga, the half-serpent water spirit, they were told to be blessed by lianas and the forest—life, wisdom, power, with prosperous harvesting seasons. Once the drupe was fully ripe, children of the households would run into the jungle and fight for a share of its delicious meat. This tradition has continued for almost a fully century, where the people and landscapes have all enjoyed their unbreakable tranquility.
One day when the children casually walk along their treks, they were welcomed by an unusual spread of new pavements. It wasn’t déjà vu. The foreign well-structured paths were uncanny, surrounded by trunks hung full of unreadable signs, everyone was surprised by a refurbished environment. There was a giant metal fence encircling in front of their way, along the periphery, the structural ring has bounded the area from reaching inward to the great giant tree. Our blessings were taken.
In mere sights over the buttresses, a few lotus-eaters were seen smoking joints of chandu. The children were raging for their deserved ransom, too soon, the eaters were annoyed by their series of ferocious yells. It was a giant guttural bark, two tendered dobermann growls along its way towards the outskirt, rooted with the same amount of anger, warily staring at their water eyes. Not too soon, the eaters were satisfied by their quality break time of narcotine, began reproving the children from approaching the zone.
“Get out” they say. “This tree belongs to us.”
“This tree belongs to everyone” the children replied. “Everyone can have the fruit!”
“On a count of three, if you don’t leave from my area, I promise I will shoot you down.”
“3…2…1”. The children fearfully escaped from the jungle, immediately bursts into tears, bidding an inevitable adieu to a place where they no longer belong.
About half millennium after Fa Ngum founded the empire, a landlocked country bounded between Siam and Vietnam, Mekong’s east territory was annexed as a little extension to the French Indochina.[1] The land however was never materialized, it is only of great interest for it serves as an in-between connection for trade with China, and a strategic positioning for French’s influence on Siam,[2] where the lotus-eaters call it a mise en valeur. What aside could the French do, apart from intense trading, with Chinese merchants (on both sides of the river), Bangkok’s Cardamom, sticklac and benzoin, western Europe’s cheap goods, in return with massive paddy fields of rice and buffaloes; other than growing Mangifera indicas? In all trades and exploitation, Mangue was never part of Laos’ prominent land deals, however, is mysteriously important to the criticism of development through its entirety of colonial folk culture.
Poster of French Indochina Asia, Indochine Francais.
Serra Ouro-Branco, province of Minas Geraës (after Rugendas). 9.84 x 14”. Wilhelm Friedrich Ludwig Freiherr von König-Wawrthausen, 1829.
Take a look at its neighboring Bangladesh, who crowned it as king. Mangue was their national fruit that had been widely cultivated over thousands of years, along with many others in SEA, that blooms from december onwards to growing drupe fully through the entire tropical summer. It was Mangue, at the time where the people would call it Naghza Tarin Mewa Hindustan (the fairest fruit of Hindustan), that made Babur so fond of conquering ancient India. By the time Mughal Empire was so influential in the southern, Mangue was known as Bananganapalli. The legacy of fruit obsession was influential throughout legacies and became an apparatus account for concessions and conflicts, or occasionally peace—Lakhi Bagh, near the border of currently Nepals and Bangladesh, was built for planting 100 thousands of its tree; sons of emperors were accused and arrested for fruit greed and stealing; Balkan and Aurangzeb would agree on a peace treaty based on 200 camel loads of dry fruits and Bananganapali.[3] The fruit was already known in every neighborhood of the empires for its social economical purposes. But to the 30 million something people in the region, there is a more important memoire to serve:
Shiva, Parvati, Ganesh and Karttikeya. 9.6 x 7.8”. 1760.
The Buddha who, in a previous life, was King Mahājanaka didn’t need to study very much. All he had to do was observe a mango tree. One day as he strolls atop his elephant, around with his ministers, have realized the fruits were ripe fully. Unable to partake some at the time, he passed without knowing his ministers’ aggression to greedily knock down all the pieces into their goods. Upon returning to the grove, the King was so shocked to see a tree that was fully thrashed and destroyed, then, noticed a same tree next to it—fully intact, upright and evergreen. It was the exact same species, except there had no fruit.
It was a tree with no fruit that keeps itself tranquil, free from war, conflicts, attack, or plunders. Similarly, he reminisces the lessons he obtained—if one didn’t become involved in the ways of the world, one would be truly independence, free from worries.[4]
But history taught us the other way around. It was not quite the fruit tree’s culprit that gained attention, nor is it because of its nutrition, taste, or beauty that allures foreigners and greed to take part. People will come anyway, no matter what it looks like. Over a century ago, one would resonate to some stories like this:
It would have required a Turner to do it justice. The slow unveiling of the cliffs revealing each moment long sword-gleams of iron-tinged rock was fascinating […] the great crags seemed to race up to meet us, while the clouds rolled up from the more distant blue hills at the end of the valley. Never have I done anything more exhilarating!
—Mitton, Geraldine. 1907. In Smith, Sean. 2019.[5]
The landscape described was breathless and sensational, thrusting spikes of naked rocks was almost piercing the sky. Mitton depicted Turner’s painting an early pioneer of the picturesque movement, as an ekphrastic scenery that was adventurous yet mysterious. However, it was not any places British, but Burma (now widely known as Myanmar), where the empire would later colonize for over a hundred years.
I was not particularly interested into the discussion of colonial, post-colonial, or postcolonial that had been explored since mid 1950s. However, colonial discourse entails a rather dominant foundation to the production of “Third World” theories and the “need” for development, it is an apparatus that was so effective in the production of knowledge that construe colonized territories on the basis of racial origins to the justification of conquest and new systems. [6]
As premise to investigations in memories, the series of writing will serve as bits and pieces of an attempt to de-colonize the “colonization of reality” (or the colonization of development discourse), and to reconnect what were once alienated and left behind as fallow memories.
Conditions of a frontier land,
1. There are no rules of conduct that bind the strong and the weak alike.
2. All boundaries are temporary, non is impermeable even when uncontested.
3. Freedom of maneuver is the latchkey to success, whereas the commitment to the ground for whatever reason is a recipe for defeat.
4. All effective powers, the powers that count, adapt their skills, armory, and strategy to the conditions of perpetual and irredeemable uncertainty and improvisation.
—Bauman, Zygmunt. (2004). Chapter 5: Living (Occasionally Dying) Together in an Urban World. Cities, War, and Terrorism: Towards an Urban Geopolitics. Blackwell.
[1] The Kingdom of Luang Prabang was turned into a French Protectorate following the Franco-Siamese War in 1893.
[2] Stuart Fox, Martin. The French in Laos, 1887-1945. Modern Asian Studies, Vol 29, No. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1995.
[3] Dash, Madhulika. A complete history of the Mango—From the times of Mauryas to Mughals. Swarajya. 2016.
[4] Rider, Kerry Jane. How the humble mango tree became the source of the Buddhas awakening. Mango Mindfulness. Medium. 2021.
[5] Smith, Sean P. Aestheticising empire: the colonial picturesque as a modality of travel, Studies in Travel Writing, 23:3, 280-297. 2019.
[6] Escobar, Arturo. Encountering Development : the Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2012.
