Watering the Ground for Oleander

A Rumination

I sat as my son and father-in-law watered the ground, planting oleander. The soil was hard and rocky, packed tight and baked by the desert sun. The water accumulates on the surface, refusing to be absorbed into the unaccommodating ground. From where it lands on the place to be dug up, or spills over the lip of an already prepared hole, the water begins to meander in little rivulets among the rocks and dust, pushing through and around the dry yellow grass, cleared months ago, its remains a fine debris strewn along the back incline of the yard.

The water made the soil easier to break into. Though, in their zeal and carefree way, there was probably too much water flowing into the holes. The excess water made the them muddy and the clay-heavy ground clung to the spade. But it loosened the rocks, which were mostly fist-sized or smaller and plentiful, unevenly distributed through the dirt and mud.

It is my understanding that oleander is a Mediterranean plant, from northwest Africa and the Iberian to the Arabian peninsulas, on to Yunnan and south Asia. The plant’s scientific name, Nirium, is a Latinized form of Greek. There is something appropriate about a plant that is spread around the northwest hemisphere by the movement of predominantly European people having a Greek name passing as Latin, since it is through Rome that Europe, and therefore the United States, attaches itself to Ancient Greece.

Perhaps this is part of the reason why we are all still settlers, though I have never felt settled. Still breaking ground to plant non-native species. We should hardly be surprised that oleander is toxic. Horses are its primary victims, though small children are sometimes made sick by the leaves, which are terribly bitter and unpalatable. Even still, I don’t think solidarity is impossible.

I did not ask to move to Arizona, though the desert has been remade to be ready for me, for the way of life into which I was raised.

Just 25 miles away is the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, home to both the Onk Akimel O’odham (Pima) and the Xalychidom Piipaash (Maricopa). Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation Reservation is a little less than 40 miles east. About 50 miles south is the Ak-chin Indian community of Pima and Papago. The Gila River Indian Community is no more than 60 miles southeast. The Tonto Apache Tribe occupy the smallest land-based reservation in Arizona, with 85 acres about 95 miles northeast of Phoenix.

These are some of the names of the indiginous peoples that have been displaced so we could plant oleander. They too have been remade. If I understand Fanon, the process began already with the invocation of “native,” a christening from which there is no turning back. Before, there was no native. To be native, one must have already come into contact with something from the outside. There is not nativity without the difference between autochthony and non-indigeneity.

Before, there was just the “Akimel Au-authm,” River People, or, “Xalychidom Pipaash,” People who live toward the water. The people and the places they lived.

This is why I understand, though do not endorse, the not-so-old Romanticism that surrounds native peoples when viewed from the perspective of supposedly sympathetic white people. Settlers who feel unsettled. The racist image of the noble savage, afraid to admit that people might have faults like all people do to avoid the appearance that one believes indigenous life is fundamentally faulted while still denying a “civilized” society. Still skirting reality by way of an inhuman idealism.

Whatever its errors, I can understand the seduction of this image, because it presents a scene for which people who feel unsettled can long. It is an image of nostalgia. Ironic, of course, that the image must be of the other and so the longed for life is really the life of another, rendered as an image that could be adapted, appropriated, extracted to make the settler whole, to give them a place.

What is really desired, but what cannot be extracted, is someplace that does not need settling, but that has grown with us, that has shaped and been shaped by us until we are nothing without it. Modernity is alienation, after all.

So, we want what we cannot have, what has been erroded and stripped and fenced — the Colorado no longer reaches the sea. Just a river, a bit of water by which to be.