Every weed is a rebeld being

GL: What does the naming of plants reveals us about the colonial imaginary, full of prejudice and how does this nomenclature subscribes in the long term?

GB: In the midst of colonization, botanics institutionalizes as a technology of power. The scientific nomenclature consecrates kings, queens and prejudices in its process of domination of nature. Next to the cataloguing of the world, follows the collection of specimens that will feed the plantations. Colonization expropriates not only land, but also the plant from the integrality of life. Its ambience, its medicinal and religious functions are submitted to the symbolic ritual of erasure by the name of things. The jatobá [in English, courbaril], for instance, is no longer the tree of hard fruits, sacred to the native peoples because of its healing powers, to become Hymenaea courbaril, referencing the female hymen, because of the rigidity of its bark.

Taxonomy anthropomorphizes the vegetal world. It makes of plants a mirror of men. Dissected, compartmentalized and ranked in European botanical gardens, the universe of plants is converted to an allegedly neutral space, in which patriarcal, racial and religious prejudices are projected. The principles of progressive evolution and natural selection contaminate the economy to the imaginary and vice versa.  Prejudice gains laboratorial backing and roots deep in the collective imaginary.

Many are the plants with popular names that approach the woman from a male chauvinist viewpoint, such as maria-sem-vergonha [small-flowered touch-me-not, in Portuguese, ‘shameless-Maria’], beijo-de-puta [girlfriend kiss, in Portuguese, ‘whore’s kiss’] and peito-de-moça [habanero-type pepper, in Portuguese, ‘girl’s breast’]. But this also occurs in scientific nomenclature, in which there are many plants whose scientific names remind of Greek nymphs, beautiful semi-goddesses that never got old and provided everything to men and nature, and christen the gender of Nymphaeas that enchanted the painter Monet.

Black people are a target to many types of prejudice, expressed in popular names, but also in scientific ones. Plants which contain the word kaffir or cafrum in their names are highly offensive. Term derived from the Arabic to ‘unfaithful’, caffir became a generic synonym of black to the English European colonizers; and cafre, ‘merchandise’, in Portuguese, expanding the racist notion that identified black men and women as objects. The word is considered today in sub-Saharan African countries as an equivalent to the repudiated word ‘nigger’, that today is conventional as ‘N-word’, for the racial violence contained in it.

The prejudiced denominations are also revealed in the projection of white European culture in the form of plants, conjugated to offensive terms to the native peoples, which are defined as índios [‘Indians’, in Portuguese]. This is the manner Cristóvão Colombo, who believed having arrived in India, called the native inhabitants of the Americas. Many are the plants in English known as Indian + some element of white culture, such as Indian mocassin and Indian hemp. Invasive plants are called gypsy, an adjective related to cheating. The ethnic group is rom, sinti or caló.

In the case of jews, the antisemitism focuses on physical and cultural characteristics, such as religious men beards, and adheres to milenar myths, such as the crown of thorns of Jesus Christ and the evil legend of the ‘wandering jew’, that names the plant Tradescantia zebrina, and species of the same genre, in many languages. The legend circulates from the XIII century in Europe and is part of the oral narrative of the Holy Week. It portraits the penitence of a people that would have been cursed to wander the world restless, immortal, until the end of time. This legend was a key-part of Nazi propaganda, that has expanded it creating the image of the parasite jew, millionaire, agent of an international conspiracy to dominate the world.

GL: Published recently in Brazil, the books of Stefano Mancuso propose new manners of seeing/thinking the vegetal universe in dialogue with technology, ecology and political systems. Does your work dialogue with these investigations? Which authors have you taken as reference?

GB: Stefano Mancuso is a fundamental author in the current debate. Emmanuele Coccia (The Life of Plants) as well. But I have read many authors that discuss the relations of colonialism and botanics in the XVIII and XIX century, such as the pioneer studies of historian Warren Dean, and the soon-to-be-released in Brazil A Decolonial Ecology, by the Martinican Malcom Ferdinand. A whole bibliography dedicated to the study of botanical misogyny was very important, such as Sex, Botany and Empire: The Story of Carl Linnaeus and Joseph Banks, by the historian Patricia Fara. Finally, the studies on race and science by Lilia Schwarcz, and the ones by my father, Bernardo Beiguelman, consecrated geneticist, but botanical by studies, on eugenics, crossed the reflection from end to end.

This diversified set, that includes also a wide historical literature, from Linnaeus to Galton, going through Samuel Morton and other racists, that allowed me to scrutinize the AI by other angles and suggest experiments that bet on a field beyond dichotomies between nature and culture, the field of a possible extra-nature, less centered on the man and in interlocution with technologies oriented to the transformation of life.

In synthesis, Botannica Tirannica proposes an ecosystem of an erratic science, that only transits through supposedly reading errors, where hybrid, nameless, rootless beings flourish. A mutatis mutandis flora, or that lives “changing what needs to be changed”.