Essere albero e diventare albero: vite in divenire

Abstract

The present contribution is indebted to the philosophical essay by Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking (2013), as well as to the reading of the exceptionally beautiful novel The Overstory (POWERS 2019), and, last but not least, to the convergence of those discourses with the works by biologist Stefano Mancuso (2020). Plant-thinking means both to think of- and to comprehend- trees and plants, with new eyes and mind, and to think like- and with- plants and trees. This anti-metaphysical discourse, or “vegetal-thinking”, is an obligation towards a dialogue and a reciprocity of gaze (ZABALA 2013). It is also an obligation towards the recognition and acknowledgement of trees and plants, that takes us face to face with a bio-logical becoming. Both being a tree and becoming-tree of a human being are forms of “becoming”, a continuous “shape-shifting”. This contribution, therefore, analyzes various narratives in World Literatures, where trees are sentient (VAILLANT 2005), (SHAFAK 2022), (ANTOON 2023); narratives where gender is programmatically connected with the identification with trees as happens in Sumana Roy (How I Became a Tree, 2021) and with Nobel Prize winner Kang Han (The Vegetarian 2015). It also avails itself of the works by Italian-Canadian artists and writers, such as Nino Famà with his Don Gaudenzio (1966). The world of trees is based on principles of “vegetal democracy”, which take into account a collective multiplicity, of conviviality and of sharing, against any agro-capitalist-scientism. Becoming-tree of human beings is a progression towards the vegetal world, which is democratic, cooperative, but above all always in the making.