The “Saudade” of the Navel Orange
Edited by Barney Pau
Image by Inês Barracha
In his seminar for The Gramounce, the incredible Gabriel Alonso invited us to rethink our relationship with the Natural. He suggested listening to be an ecological act, to be able to “be the world;” humans and “non-humans” alike, together in harmonious unison.
Together with Gabriel, we deconstructed forms of Nature romanticized by culture. We will no longer visit this Nature on family excursions, because like him, we understand Nature was never external to us.
As a result of the enlightening reflections that Gabriel led in his seminar, I propose a humble imaginary exercise as my authorial proposal for this Journal submission, in which I picture an orange tree as a fictional speculation of a future which is more sensitive to what Gabriel calls the “humanity of plants”.
Time is infinitely bigger than human beings and, as such, we find it difficult to comprehend that all events are connected in multiple directions and cross countless spaces. We believe that the evidence in the geological stratum that marks the great violence of our presence on earth—our so-called Antrhopocene, or Capitalocene—can be “swept under the rug”. We believe in a linear time in which the past has passed, and we bear no responsibility to heal the wounds we have opened, letting them instead become covered by dust.
New Mexican sand is transformed into radioactive Trinitite when “cooked” by the Trinity Atomic Bomb test; or “plastiglomerates” - mutants of organic and artificial matter that “swim” in our seas. Are these the materials that will outlast us to tell our story? Could these materials be the fossils of our time here? What artifacts will be found when we are gone? Will it be possible, in the future, to distinguish the natural from what Humanity has converted into this “new natural”? Is this what we want to leave behind?
Gabriel shows us the skull of a Bulldog, one of the breeds most violently manipulated by man, and gas masks for the animals that “served” us in the war... We use and abuse with an authority that was never given to us. We intoxicate the air we need to breathe, and we destroy the Natural. We continue to forget that the Natural is not beyond us; it is us!
What species has the authority to divide nature into “beings that serve us” and “beings that serve no purpose”? Botanical gardens, and natural history museums; both full of the phantom remains of animals and plants, far from their origins and completely out of context. Classification and Orders are dictated by the violent logic of power and colonialism. Achievements displayed as the trophies of narcissistic victories; The Weirdest People in the World as the title of Joseph Henrich’s 2020 book suggests.
What more evidence do we need to understand that we have become obscene beings; that even though we know the harmful effects it has on our health, we radioactively manipulate crops to create fruits in new colors, or even luminescence!?
It is urgent that we refind our place in the Natural, in this beautiful network of interdependent connections of respect and subsistence. We must see space and time as concepts without linear limits, in which everything influences everything else.
The narratives we are told about what we eat are far removed from these foods' real stories, and disregard the journeys they made to get to us. We no longer even know their true flavor. Without a doubt, the orange is a symbol of Portugal and the Algarve. From spoken stories to written stories, these narratives become stories that govern our concepts and knowledge.
Some countries named the orange after Portugal, such as Romania’s “portocale”, Bulgaria and Turkey’s “portakal”. and Greece’s “portokali”. Similarly, in Arabic and Persian languages the name “Portugal” literally means “orange”!
As humans, we build these stories as an illusion to help us find meaning in what it is we are perceiving, and understand the path we walk. As a human, I built my own. It's the story of the sweet orange, which originally appeared in China and was brought back to Europe by Portuguese colonists.
This sweet orange tree crossed with the sour orange, itself introduced from Southeast Asia to Europe by the Moors and now naturalised throughout the Mediterranean. Despite being far from home, this orange tree found great comfort in Portugal, particularly on the south coast, the Algarve, where the sun shines more than 300 days a year.
Legend has it that a single mutation in an orchard in a monastery in Brazil—at the time a Portuguese colony—produced the navel orange. Despite being very sweet and pleasant, this orange was sterile, without seeds. To date, the only way for it to be reproduced has been with cuttings.
In my fictional speculation, the oldest of these wrinkly oranges cry at the seaside with “saudade”, just as the sailors' wives cried in their absence. ‘Saudade’ is a feeling unique to Portuguese culture, a concept that is difficult to translate into other languages, but which sincerely reflects a mixture of affection and nostalgia.
Cuttings do not allow for the usual selective breeding and, therefore, not only do today's navel oranges have exactly the same genetics as the original tree, but they are also considered the fruits of that single tree that is now centuries old. A beautiful image of a family united in a true family tree.