Mana
non/fiction by Fatima Measham
My father has been planting lawaan seedlings. A few years ago, he retired from seafaring, a career that took him overseas for months at a time. So it amuses me a bit, the idea of him setting down literal roots.
He takes pictures of delicate-looking plants encased in plastic tubes, and posts them to the family group chat on Messenger. Here he is, inspecting a batch. There they are, in tight rows on the bed of his pick-up truck. Then: a lime-green valley cradled by a mountain range, backdrop to a selfie. He is surrounded by palm, fern and grass, an akubra sitting low on his head.
‘Lawaan’ or ‘lauan’ refers to a genus of tree endemic to the Philippines and parts of South-East Asia. It is sometimes called ‘Philippine mahogany’ in the timber trade, though this is not considered the botanical classification. It is a tropical rainforest hardwood that grows high and straight, bearing a crown of soft, ovate leaves. The wood blushes red under pale, rough bark.
“My plan is to plant 3000pcs mahogany + fruits trees,” one message reads. “Hoping we can help a little the global warming problem.” He was always optimistic to a fault. I wonder if that is from more than 40 years of navigating oceans without losing cargo.
The seedlings are being planted upland, on a couple of hectares that have been in his family for five generations. The word ‘plantation’ conjures all sorts of things, but in this case it is simply an area left wild, where my lolo (grandfather) had first planted trees decades ago. The site is a half-hour drive from the house Dad grew up in, in a remote coastal town at the southern tip of one of many Philippine islands.
That is where he was when the pandemic struck. The relative isolation has been protective, but it prevents him from returning home to the house that he and my mother built, in a city ten hours away—six hours overland and nearly four hours by ferry. He is in his mid-70s, diabetic, hard of hearing and having issues with a retina. In the months since his sister was repatriated to Germany, he has been living on his own in the house their grandfather built.
I am just relieved that he has something to do. Last year, when he was strapped for cash, he managed to earn some money by arranging for the cutting of some trees, which were sold to a lumber dealer. This extraction is by no means industrial in scale, though it is typical of silviculture in parts of the Philippines, where small lumber holdings are key to a regulated supply.
From a stand of around 50 lawaan trees, 20 were sawn, many of them older than me. Lolo had planted them in 1973, so they are good-sized trees. I worked out that each of them sold for A$279. Afterwards, Dad sat in the space they had occupied, taking in the change in the air as the sun penetrated the forest floor. Makahilak, he told me. He felt like crying.
Now, he is giving back 150 times what he took, one seedling at a time. It harks back to his own father, who would disappear for a week at a time in the highlands to lay plants in the ground. When Dad was a kid, he would be sent there with rice and dried salted fish.
My father is not likely to live long enough to see his lawaan trees mature. The ritualisation in the planting, the new roots that keep the soil from running to the sea, and that ineffable sense of time that comes from having—simultaneously—mortal parents and immortal children: it is a lot for me to take in.
I know he plants with his grandchildren in mind because he tells me. My lolo had probably done the same, both of them laying down a harvest beyond sight.
I have to hope that this will someday mean something to my son: a boy who can only speak with his lolo in English, who has been to the Philippines only twice in his 13 years and who will never feel in his body the country that I still carry in mine.
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I wonder what happens at the cellular level after switching coordinates. How do the molecules that make up our bodies respond to changes in relative position to the sea and the magnetic field, the angle at which the sun hits the skin, the nitrogen atoms in the air?
When the time comes, would it be as if I had lived two lives, buried once?
I grew up in a small, provincial city on the coast of Macajalar Bay in northern Mindanao, where my parents met. The first house I lived in stood on the same patch of land on which my mother and her six siblings grew up.
The house caught fire when I was a baby. We moved to a duplex, renting for ten years before moving again, to a split-level house my parents built. I lived there for only four years before moving again to Manila for university and work, where I lived in the campus dormitory.
Six years later, I moved to Melbourne, got married and rented for five years before taking out a mortgage for a cookie-cutter suburban house, on what used to be pastoral land that was prime hunting and fishing ground for Wadawurrung people for thousands of years. Long before hoofstock arrived, this was a site for food production and fibres: murrnong (yam daisy), chocolate lily, featherheads, kangaroo grass, native tussock and so on. I have lived here for 15 years now.
I am mapping this out as I consider the ways in which concepts of land and home anchor our sense of time, and the way ideas of inheritance implicate and compromise us.
After moving countries, I would get asked: Kanus-a ka sunod muuli? (“When will you be home next?”) A question like this throws you off-kilter when you are in the middle of making a home. Every return flight bound for Melbourne, that splintering feeling. It does not make sense to head home from home.
I would land at Tullamarine Airport, drive on the freeway past a built-up landscape and wonder what it might have looked like before. The distance between the squatter and me is not that long; we are living on stolen homes.
In my first several years on the continent, I could not imagine being buried here. Maybe I still had the tropics in my hair, other things carried in the body from life on a different latitude. This (imagined dead) body felt called to a different earth; certainly, I thought I would have more mourners there.
I suspect that the distance laid by migration makes migrants think of death in peculiar ways. Soon, I will have been here longer than I was there. My child was born here; he is growing up here. That makes the question of where my body belongs—or to whom—perhaps more straightforward but not much easier.
But the prospect of not being present when parents pass, or having our parents outlive us where we left them—this was made acute during the pandemic. It has always hung over us. Gravity pulls on time, just as it draws everything back to the earth.
Is this how distance takes on the property of weight? It makes a bridge of us despite ourselves, even in the absence of traffic. Memories, language and movement reside in our bodies: molecules that link our children to an ancestral past. Bodies do not last long, though.
My father is planting trees on land that has been in his family for five generations.
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A few years ago, my husband and I considered moving away from the suburbs. We would look up bush blocks for sale, hop in the car and check them out, half on a lark. A more remote life becomes appealing when the neighbours yell at all hours of the day and have kids who make a habit of vandalising the shared fence.
I dream of proximity to wildlife and locking up a hectare or two of habitat for native fauna, in the hope that the land will never be developed. We have seen the pace at which concrete has been laid over temperate grasslands on the western outskirts of Melbourne. We benefit from it.
Our son burst into tears when we raised the idea of relocating. After all, this is the house to which he was brought after being born, the only one he has ever known. The streets and the creek, the shops and bus stops—these form the cartography of his childhood.
We did not end up moving, and lately I have started thinking of the house as something that would be his one day. I know that this implicates us in all sorts of things: privilege, capital, colonisation. When the mortgage expires, he will be 28 years old.
But I can’t bring myself to say mana—inheritance—the way my dad speaks almost reverently of the land that was handed down to him and his siblings, and which he expects to be passed on to his grandchildren. This isn’t mana or even yuta (land or earth), the other word that he uses. It is property.
I think about how my father had felt close to tears, sitting in the absence of shade, counting time in units of trees. Of late, he is worried that adjacent landholders will cave to assorted proposals for development. He says we need trees to breathe.
For now, he can still hear the birds. He posts a photo of a reticulated python resting in the canopy. He tells me a story about how, when the rains didn’t come, people from town had drawn water from a spring nearby.
What memories would I share with my son about the property we call home? How the native parrots and honeyeaters gave way to blackbirds and turtledoves? That at least four cats from around the neighbourhood took over our yard? How we used to see clear to the horizon from our front door and could take in the full blaze of sunset, until houses and roads got in the way? What would he be inheriting, exactly?
I think about economies of inheritance and ecologies of inheritance, and dwell on their fundamental incompatibility. One, a linear mode of shifting generations along strata determined by possession. The other, a circle that encompasses all. I can see how my son is compromised by default.
But I remember how he cried at the first inkling of the impermanence of home. Life happens in place.
Even there, a difference in terms. We get attached to houses—the material analogue of our lives—not the land on which we sit. Houses, like bodies, do not last long.
I reflect on an older mode of shifting generations: that is, in direct relation to beneficent land. Like the way my father keeps mana alive through stories and images and seedlings in the thousands, always in a context larger than himself, as big as the world, his body close to the ground.
Mawala ang ngalan, he says. If people give up their land for money, they will lose their name. I think this might be a reference to land titles, but it invites reflection about erasure, the ways that identity can be land-bound, and how we are still yet to take seriously a deeper inheritance. For all the attachment that Dad has to the land he inherited, the things I glean about our family history and what it means to be a custodian, as well as where my son sits in this story—well, we can only trace mana five generations back.
I think about the Wadawurrung clan who collected water from the creek near our house. How many generations are there in a thousand years? Across several millennia? It makes me reel.
It reinforces how property falls so short of the way humans experience land. My father was moved by the loss of 20 trees, even as exchanging them for money meant he could get through a few more months of the pandemic. He attaches a lot of meaning to the fact that those trees and I are nearly the same in age.
For my part, I try not to dwell too much on the notion that a time may come when my son will stand under the canopy of trees that had been set in place for him by someone no longer with us. I don’t tell Dad that the planet would have likely reached climate tipping points then; he has earned some level of innocence. I have to hope, as he does, that the lawaan trees will survive.
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Fatima Measham is a writer and speaker living west of the Werribee River on Wadawurrung Country. Her recent work focuses on nature, conservation, and the tensions inherent in our claims of love for wildlife. She is also a conservation volunteer.
