Words grow like plants

Gerardo Petsaín Sharup, Cosmovisión Wampís

They find a niche where they have a function that allows them to persist. They live from energy drawn from the sun and the ground. On the burnt grounds where the amazon once flourished, the soybean grows and takes its nutrients from the soil. Say it is picked and packed into a refrigerated container, and a plane or perhaps a ship brings it to a different country for processing. It becomes a product. It is packaged again. After a long journey through factories and distribution centres, the soybean product is mediated to you by all the materials and stories woven together in the concept and physical place of a supermarket. Now at last the soybean gets to sublimate itself; fulfil its life’s destiny – albeit not to flower and bear fruit; it passes your lips and makes acquaintance with the grinding power of your molars. 

This is the soybean’s transition ritual into a new society with a logic of its own, or perhaps many logics interacting: the subsistence and desires of each of its cells and particles. Cast into neat rows, the epithelial cells of the intestinal lining function like a port, taking in the imports from far overseas. The delivery from the Amazon forest grounds is sent on its merry way through the body’s distributional infrastructure.  Our soybean is deconstructed into building materials and fuel. Through the red canals of the internal inferno the fuel flows on its way back up to the site of the original transition, where the tongue and lips now propelled by its fire shake and obstruct the air flow coming through the lungs and past the larynx. Fricative then resounding and approximating, a bilabial stop is followed slightly later by a nasal sound: soybean, says the mouth. 

Depending on what mouth and what context, the air vibrations may have different effects. The sound travels into the tables and the teacups as much as it travels into a present ear. In what seems fast to us but an eternity to a mouse, the nerve nodes attached to said receptacle dissect the sound sequence. Soybean? A host of associations are called up. Memory drawers made up of nerve cells full of encoded references for textures, flavours, contexts and historical and geographical understanding are activated, some of the information even pushing its way into the consciousness. We are in luck: this person understands English and they have had tofu before. The sound sequence seems to have successfully transferred a concept from one human body to the next. Although the listener’s experiences with soybeans occurred in rather different settings from where the speaker has encountered them, and although there are many separate but alike entities which are referred to in this way, they both appear to agree about what part of the universe is worthy of this name. And so the word has yet again proved its usefulness at being used as a shorthand for the pulse from the lea of its mother plant.

Just as the plant is one iteration of a tradition with a long history, similar to but not the same as her many ancestors, so the uttered word is one instance of a “family” of very similar utterances which are however each entirely unique in their own right – not just each context being different from the next (each sentence, page, situation) but in spoken language the voice onset, vowel fronting and the shape of the mouth cavity all resulting in something as singularly matchless as a fingerprint. And yet we can understand the word as belonging to a family of such words just as we can recognise a hydrangea as being a hydrangea.