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Fellowship Wanini Kimemiah
Wingi wa Mti si_ni Maiti
Forest Address
by Alexis G. Teyie
As a form of cosmic redress, I have taken an impressionist’s brush to all my linguistic foibles. For example, I find it telling that I am unable to spell strength in English (no issue with length, mysteriously). Pertinently, I daren’t broach the motherlode of my early grammar lessons with even the most generous of psychoanalysts. Among several—perhaps congenital—idiosyncrasies kwa elimu ya sarufi, I could not, for many years, parse the wordstem of mtu na mti. Is the root of the word, -tu (a morpheme analogous with the English “we”?), with -ti the result of some linguistic operation? Mtu, Mti. Human, [au / na] Tree. Mtu—like mwanafunzi, mpenzi, and mganga—is in the noun class M-WA. Ergo, the plural of mtu is watu. Bizarrely, mwembe in multiple is miembe, and the singular mti becomes miti. Ngeli ya M-MI. A mango tree is not a witch is not a student is not a lover? Why is mtu not mitu— as msitu is misitu? A plurality of people is apparently not equivalent to manifold trees, regardless of the absolute number. A crowd of humans is not a forest? Could mti be wati in any mtihani, please? Yes, mtu is related to utu, humanness, and denotes our mytho-genealogical chain as Sons of Adam (Bin Adamu). However, there is also a literal tree called mtua (it is medicinal), and a choir of them are mitua. Granted, Kiswahili has become an agglomeration of exceptions; so perhaps mti is in fact special. The tree might very well be an exceptional noun in this system of ours. Could it be like: neno, jina, jicho? Simply prefix ma- to create multiplicity. As I discovered from my Standard 2 teacher, you would be (“so foolishly!”) wrong to extrapolate as such. No, tree is not like name, not tooth, not word, not eye. Similarly, mti is not to mamti as pipa is to mapipa (incidentally, the fruits are mapera but the trees are resolutely mipera). And no again: garbage dumps and trees couldn’t share a nominal umbrella!
In Kiswahili, alas, plants and humans are separated into distinct classes. In this language of mine, plants—and several animals—are believed inanimate: “viumbe visivyo na uhai.” I am yet to determine which of the two classes is the relegated one. Whatever the case, I am reluctant to be grouped with any mwanasiasa and mlungula in lieu of a wondrous affiliation to acacia, elephant grasses, and jamna. In Standard 3, I began to ask if perhaps plants graduated into another class (where they were permitted to write with Pelikan ink, not just pencil); or might animals perhaps be promoted to tree? Waswahili consider mche uliokomaa “mti.” Mche is chipukizi: a bud, a sprout, a sapling. Here too, mche pluralizes to miche not wache; and yes, kijana aliyebaleghe is still in the same noun class as anayenyonya. Neither innocence nor maturity, utility nor frivolity, admits any plant into that hallowed first noun class of living beings. No saintliness nor sadism, no guide nor even grimoire could usher animals into the supposedly inert and insensate grade of plants.
So much unites us within our categories; but no matter the contiguity and promiscuity of borderland nouns, plants are not animals, and animals are absolutely not plants. Animals are living (not necessarily alive), and this is an inviolable fact. Plants are definitionally in opposition, within our grammar. So, plants exist in what status exactly? Not dead, not always— this I know. In Standard 4 (while climbing trees to escape nuns with canes), I learn that the plural of mti is also not maiti. Maiti is an altogether remarkable word, and which sounds, even to an irascible P1 teacher in Mumias, like a plural noun. As if there is a companion who joins you at the point of emergency exit. (Kiswahili does not prescribe direction, simply names “mlango wa dharura” as if one might choose to dash back and forth planes.) Maiti is [a] corpse: mfu, mwili wa mtu aliyekufa. Wanasarufi (grammarians?) continue to quibble over the classification of this noun. Note that here again, humans attempt to assert primacy. A human corpse is ‘maiti’; but an animal’s corpse is referred to as “mzoga.” English’s ‘carcass’ sounds insidiously cavalier. There is no word for a dead plant body. Back to the debate:[4] some consider maiti to be in the class I-ZI (kwa mfano, dini, dawa), while others prefer A-WA (same as for a living human, like say, mchawi). A YouTube commenter reasons: “Maiti ni ngeli ya A-WA kwa sababu mtu akifa hatakuwa kitu bado atabaki kuwa mtu.” [Maiti is in the noun class A-WA because if a person dies they do not turn into a thing; they remain a person.] I notice no one suggests ngeli ya YA-YA: isn’t maiti like marashi in that corpses and cologne share a cloying and imperial ambition? Maji, mate, mamlaka pia. Another commenter insists that maiti is not even a Kiswahili word.
No one is telling me how, or what to call a dead tree.
Usupaosupao ndio mmea’ Is there a plant that flowers without being shaken?
Image credit: Jonathan Fraser, A Deluxe Space-Time Event IV, 2023, pencil on paper.
Usupaosupao ndio mmea.
I did not return to this knot until many years later when I found myself adrift in a leafy suburb as a toddler-in-a-teenage-form. I fashioned a talisman: “Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.”[5] This was the closest I would allow myself to articulate my true desire: I wished to be promoted to the noun class of the not-living. Before I was 16, I had not realised that I thought and dreamed entirely in Kiswahili. Apart-amongst others who did not immediately know mabuyu, who met me only in English, I noticed my notebooks pluralizing mti as one would a corpse. English entered and refused to leave me—rafikiye maiti.
By the time I am an undergraduate, I wish to study bioethics (“Are plants undead? Do they have rights?”), but mine remains a linguistic malaise. Guilty of the usual pretensions, I bemoan the ontological distress and epistemic ruptures of this grammatological (and ethical) oddity in pluralizing treepeople in my “mother tongue.” I learn words I would never translate to Kiswahili. I sit under trees which could never grow by the Equator. It is here I am made to remember ‘mweusi ti ti ti.’ Ti: -enye weusi usiokuwa wa kawaida (“unnaturally black”); -eusi sana (“very black”). Ti is not inextricably linked to Tu; Ti is uncommonly—perhaps unnaturally—black. I am irredeemable—unlike all fungi, unlike euglena—but if I knew what it was to be free, would I live as the blackest tree?
Elsewhere, I am drawn in by the Hare Krishna set. They feed us, freely, and they care for the earth. They promise their tree-planting is as prolific as their publishing. I am told to be glad, but not proud, that I incarnated as a human—not an animal, or those unmoving minerals and plants. I cannot acquiesce. I see mti and kiti (chair, singular) as related now. I see mtu and kutu (rust, pervasive) as related.
I repeat out loud to a love, “one can be wounded even by a petal.”[6] We blame the rotting at the centre of my trunk (uti, spine), and its colonising tendency. My pace is closer to that of moss now—favouring the knee, the ankles, shoulder, wrists, the clavicles. Is this sessility? I wonder if I am becoming, at last, permanent. I shift out of human timescales. Crip time[7] is of a botanical cadence. No one can tell how old I am, such is my treeness—but were you to slice… Could I have slowed down so severely as to slip into immortality? The sons of Adam pass me by: unbeknownst to most, the Kingdom of the Sick[8] is a vassal state in the Empire of Plants. We are all night-side, all night-shade. “Who hasn’t asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be human?”[9]
My leaves change colour, and I shed them. Pain, like planthood, is read as inchoate, as outside of language. If anyone were to learn to love the foibles of our grammar, perhaps we might find ourselves in neighbouring semantic villages. Few visit our territories. I grow many branches, and the fruiting diagnoses eventually weigh my stock closer towards the earth. I bow. I am made low. The human in humiliation bows to me too. There is still no word for a dead plant body, so I do not die. We are taught that sanitization and safety do not include us: nary a pot of lemongrass, nor even the benedictions of turmeric in the wards we sicklings are stowed in. Hospitals, too, fail at biomimicry. Is this their sanctity, dispensed as sterilized waters pitted against the profanity of Soil-wishing-to-return-to-soil? I repeat quiet consolations to myself about “crown shyness.”[10] I swat away this un-botanical isolation, but I am beginning to associate woga (cowardice, pervasive), kukoga (to bathe, to baptize?), and mzoga (dead animal).
More dreams of masses, kutakaswa, under tree canopies bloom in the subconscious. Everyone’s prayers are for me to be steadfast, eti nisimame wima, nisitingizike. (Kusema kweli, wengine waliniuliza sanda.) But I must. I must wither, I must shake, I must bend, I might even be lucky to dissipate. This is the genius of a natural thing. In a linguistic tree, we allow for attrition; that there are turns of phrase which we know will fade. We accept it. Only the organic is privileged to die. Could we celebrate this flow, this old song?
While recovering from sepsis—I search for homologous states in plants—I transfigure “Usupaosupao ndio mmea” to: Is there a plant that flowers without being shaken? Or, to thrive, a plant must withstand the wind’s agitation. For several years before, this methali was entwined with another proverb: Shoka husahau, mti hausahau (The axe forgets; the tree does not forget). But mean delights are now eating me, the bark of me, and all the birds in my cavities humming humming: MTI, MAITI, MAITI, MITI.
Pasina hodi, kokochi.
It would be remiss not to mention the system of verb conjugation. To a single wordstem, the root of a doing-word like “penda” (love): there are about 16 basic operations, and 25 further motions I might attempt without seducing grammarians into vexation. “Ua” is another Kiswahili noun of great botheration (bughudha?). Ua, is a singular flower. Wingi wake ni maua. Ua, follows the pluralizing logic of pipa (garbage dump). Ua is also “to kill”; in this latter form, it is in the noun class denoting actions preceded by “ku-“. Changamoto: non-native Kiswahili speakers tend to drop some of these prefixes, and suffixes, which simultaneously characterise the filigree and scaffolding of the language. Natural attrition. Luo speakers who come late, unwillingly, or incompletely, to Swahili objectify and humanize nouns shaghalabaghala—per a righteous extravagance. Such a speaker might say: “Wewe nataka ua mimi” as in “Do you mean to kill me?” It arrives not as a frantic question or indignant demand, but instead as the surreal “You Want Flower Me.” (Askance, the Evil Eye might wish to English the same sentence as such: We, us, want kill/flower I, me.) Injecting “z,” into “ua,” there is also potential “to sell” amidst murder and blossom.
Injecting ‘z’, into ‘ua,’ there is also potential ‘to sell’ amidst murder and blossom.
Image credit: Jonathan Fraser, A Deluxe Space-Time Event IV, 2023, pencil on paper.
After I survived the kidneys’ and liver’s dissent—plants are free of such advanced excretory systems—I transfigured “Bila hodi, kokochi”:
A young coconut enters without knocking.
A bud, it sprouts.
Quiet; a bud.
A flower swells out of nothing.
Before a flower, silence.
A flower’s herald: anyone home?
It resists completion; truly, no weed in me could die without seeing something so plainly useless to its end. In this way, I—binaTope, binaMaj—continued to live alongside those of that premier noun class, binaDamu. Then, I found myself in a place of excess and bafflement.
Bushwahili had come to me. Akaniinamia. Akanipandisha toka udongo telezi. (“They raised me from the miry clay.”) Like any self-respecting god, all of Bushwahili’s limbs are contained in each and every: a hearing eye, a tasting foot, a singing ear. Bushwahili is modular, and self-multiplying. Bushwahili suggests that Bushwahili is both forest and savannah. (To the discerning Kiswahili speaker, ‘msitu na nyika’ ni kusema kila mahali.) Bushwahili enters / exi(s)ts only for which-ery: god of the manifold path, of the gratuitous, and by-the-way tickling. Teaches me to harvest mali yetu ya asili, na hazina: not just the solid of stem, but the breath above even the spiniest leaves, and the sap, and mmmm, those globules of moisture within the root system. As illustration: Bushwahili is a nest of nests, in a concentric, occasionally heli(a)cal, forest. This bush, this h/illness, mara dufu: Jannah na Firdaws—even for wa-ngeli ya M-MI. Busu wa Hili = Kiss of The Now, Kiss of The This. Eat (of) the Hill. (Kila kilima kina kaburi.) Am/Bush of Swahili. Bushwahili is the god of Eti?mology.
Bushwahili insists that if you will persist in English, your God must be forest.
Image credit: Jonathan Fraser, A Deluxe Space-Time Event IV, 2023, pencil on paper.
From underneath a desert candle tree, Bushwahili asks: Mola utamtia herufi gani—ubadili vipi shina lake? Mweza yote ni ngeli gani? Mwenye-Enzi utamtaja vipi, akitenda na kutendua? English is a rather untidy language, so it is hard to render Bushwahili. A distant approximation: Of what category is the All? Is your OHMnipotent Nominative? Of what class? How will you call upon—or name—the Supreme, your Sustainer, as They[11] behave and misbehave? Bushwahili insists that if you will persist in English, your God must be forest. (Later, valiant / waiyaki illuminates the berry emerging from one arm: “profitable like a forest.”) Only and Always We—not He, or not only; not even She, or The They—never apart, or entirely outside. I am taken by divine unanimity, by the choral, and certainly this our tending to infinity.
Thus, I was led to the forest in me—aflame and never-burning. If you are acquainted with the forest within, in the same way that you could never be lost to that forest of you, then you are a precocious toddler indeed. As a late-blooming toddler, I have found Kiswahili a friend, a fruiting and a flowering, of this body of mine. Somatically sound/ing, sensate, sensational, response-able, and thus the most organic of me. I wish to show you this Most I Am. If the forest of Kiswahili is amenable, we will also show you the many-named, and thus Anonymous, Forest who summoned me as a neighbour in Nairobi. We have lived alongside each other since the second month of 2024. We are exactly at the border of Kiambu and Nairobi, and I hear pale tu ni Kikuyu, and ukivuruta midomo mbele kiasi, is Ngong.
How might you reach this Most I Am-hood of me? There are no doors to this spell I am weaving, and thus there is no need to knock. This forest-language is my body: ukipaswa kupita, ukipenda upishwe, nipapase basi (gusagusa kama mtu asiyeweza kuona). There is a way, yes, to spell—rightly: Njia ni Rafiki (The Path is a Friend / Affinity Rescues). Naomba ufike, Rafiki. Not all shall pass, however, this riddle of my deviousness. Wapi pasipohitaji hodi? Wapi pale utaingia bila hodi? Ukijifungua, umeufumbua wimbo wangu. An equivalent for you other-tongued ones: I have gestured at the whorls made possible from Latin’s “intimus.” A system of aerial roots has volunteered to be our guide; I call this tissue Bushwahili. Bushwahili is the Way, and the Light.
Mambo ni kangaja; huenda yakaja.
Upon approaching this area, the first thing I asked was what name Forest accepted. I am taken by the recent implants’ wish to be known as residents of Karen-End (hyphen optional). I am even more charmed that those whose ancestral homes are on this land indulged that middle*-class affectation. It is both the indulgence of a doting parent, and the forbearance of an occupied population. Clemency of spirit notwithstanding, our language accepts the sweet colour of dis-arrival, of un-agreement. Hence, a delicious malapropism (or Kikuyufication?): we are in Karinde. We are going to Karinde, and coming from it. Kari-ndee? KaReeNdeh? Carry-Nday? I can’t quite get the intonation correctly, and my phone correspondents and I “Ati? Eti?” each other to ecstasy. “Small dress?” “Makende?” Eventually, I hear Forest is referred to as Thogoto Forest (by the carwash youths); Dagoretti Forest (valiant / waiyaki again tells of the Kikuyu etymology); and Ngong Forest (by one who believes these trees run to the end of the world). My abdication from Karenesque status markers—why no car, why Swahili, why no children hata out of wedlock basi—tainted the coins I was prepared to pay for a basic human need. The caretaker and landlady initially seemed sceptical of my viability as a concept, let alone as a CRB-approved tenant. Naturally, I went to see what the family of trees stewarding this land felt on the matter. I heard myself repeating, “For-Rest, Four-Rest.” I was reminded that before hao waovu, their hunting guns and instrumentality in our wooded places, “shoot” must have referred only to the organic, to planetary effusion, to the dar(l)ing green emerging from soft darkness into nourishing sun.
shada: clusters and efflorescence.
Image credit: Jonathan Fraser, A Deluxe Space-Time Event IV, 2023, pencil on paper.
Soon after, I joined a chorus here at this edge of something. When one visits FoRest, one may bring offerings; though I am made to understand our devotion, our leisure, our a-living suffices. Often, I have a Kamusi. These papers that were once of a forest, all the ink of our human toddlering, are divinatory. We slip into the kisses of bibliomancy. I have recently gained tentative induction into the jab(b)a society of Dagoretti-Thogoto-Ngong forest (they are kind enough to bring me Gomba). Tunachana in silence, often a crescent of bodies in varied states of repose. Stripping stems, plucking leaf, chewing chewing green. Our cheeks are swollen with plant. G often points to a herb, a weed, and teaches us what he received from his grand/mother (“Enhe, this yellow one, siuinuse— hainuki kama Colgate? That one is for the mouth, the teeth, koo yako.”) Inevitably, mtu ataulizia shada wachome (in Kiswahili sanifu, this word is synonymous with bouquet!). Everywhere, shada: clusters and efflorescence. Miti look upon us. Sun shifts in sky.
How did I ever imagine myself alone?
Mti-ni, Msitu-ni, Nyumba-ni
Image credit: Jonathan Fraser, A Deluxe Space-Time Event IV, 2023, pencil on paper.
Mti-ni, Msitu-ni, Nyumba-ni (in the tree; in the forest; in the home). I am fixated now on that suffix, ni, signifying encirclement, envelopment, homedness (to be within). The KiSwahili “ni” is also read as the English, “is” denoting the present moment. The truth of our presentness is inextricably implicated with our interdependence, all our irremediable unions in this eternal now. These are the intimations of inside-ness, inwardness, secrecy, and a togetherness Bushwahili likes to provoke.
Keep that Holy Mouth on Mine.
A month or two ago, I received a balm upon my tongue. While the construction of the Southern Bypass—and politicians’ infernal hankering— have cannibalised the forest, much of this grassy region—my rented respite included—was once entirely underwater. Our little meadow is part of a massive riverbed. Those trees at the forest’s ‘verandah’ are riverine, and so are those luanda.
I greet our peoplingtrees. I salute the rocks now exposed to the drier climes. I bring my Kamusi, and I offer to read out loud to ourSelf.
From Marehemu F. Johnson’s 1970 Kamusi ya Kiswahili
- Mazao: Yaliyozaliwa, watoto; (2) mavuno; (3) matokeo ya matendo
- Maziga: Kifukizo, chetezo; (2) namna ya kibia
- Mazigazi: Udanganyifu wa macho, kama kuona mto au chemchemi na nyumba jangwani, kumbe, hakuna kitu huko, macho yamedanganywa tu
- Maziko. Tendo la kuweka na kufukia maiti kaburini
- Mazimbwembwe: Giza giza
- Mazingazinga: Mazunguko
From Kamusi Pevu ya Kiswahili, Toleo la Tatu
- Mazingara: ushirikina; hila za uchawi au mazingaombwe (/mazingazi)
- Mazingatio: hali ya kuzingatia au kuwaza kwa makini kuhusu jambo fulani; nadhari
- Mazingira: (1) eneo ambalo linazunguka watu au mahali; enene asilia wanakoishi watu au inapokua mimea (2) jumla ya mambo au hali inaymozungukuka mtu au kukizunguka kitu fulani
- Mazingizi: mambo ya kuzongazonga; mambo ya kutatiza; mambo ya kuzingiza
- Mazishi: utaratibu wote unaohusika na yanayofanywa kuanzia mtu anapofariki hadi anapopozikwa na matanga kumalizika
Keep the link unbroken.
About the Author
Alexis G. Teyie is a co-founder of Enkare Review and currently works with Down River Road, Karara Community Library, and as a research advisor across the Horn and Sahel. The red thread woven throughout Alexis’s diverse roles as a data scientist, poet, curator, and publisher is the question (and answer) of loving regard. Alexis carefully attends to the materials encountered, finding joy in what is revealed, and strives to protect against the wounds of an archival legacy. In moments of necessary pause, Alexis reflects on how to renew a dedication to homage, resurrection, and (comm)Union.
[1] Older guidance often hovered at half this number; for instance Frederick Johnson, Kamusi ya Kiswahili kilichotungwa na Marehemu, (London: The Sheldon Press, 1970) cites 8 classes.
[2] Kem-Laurin Kramer, “Planned Obsolence,” Science Direct
[3] Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class: An economic study of Institutions (London: Macmillan, 1899).
[4] “LONGALONGA | Ngeli sahihi ya maiti,” Citizen TV Kenya, last modified September 28, 2018.
[5] Czesław Miłosh, The Witness of Poetry (Cambridge, Mass. Harvard Univ. Press, 1994).
[6] Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko, “Wounds,” in The Collected Poems, 1952-1990 (New York: Henry Holt, 1991).
[7] Ellen Samuels, “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time,” Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 3 (Summer 2017).
[8] Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978).
[9] Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star (1977; repr., London: Penguin Classics, 2014).
[10] Phil Gates, “Crown Shyness: What It Is and Which Trees It Affects,” BBC Wildlife, September 26, 2022.
[11] Verbs and modifiers are not gendered in Swahili
