Blood Run Beech Read: Human–Plant Grafting in Kim de l’Horizon’s Blutbuch

1 Blutbuch

The autofiction performs the gender fluidity of its first-person narrator Kim in a language that moves fluidly between Swiss German, specifically Bernese, and Standard German, and ends with a chapter in English. To put it differently, the narrative mimics and counters the violent effects of the normative gender dichotomy on its nonbinary narrator by disrupting each idiom with several others. Style, structure, and content of the novel cut across the confines of many categories. Our focus here will be on the mutual non-exclusivity of the fluid and the broken, and the vegetal and the human.

According to the biographical information supplied by the publishing house, Kim de l’Horizon was born in 2666 on Gethen. The pen name – anagram of the birth name Dominik Holzer – has assumed a resounding reality and one can only hope that a birth on Gethen, the planet of Ursula Le Guin’s science fiction novel “The Left Hand of Darkness,” in 2666 (the title of Roberto Bolaño last novel), will have had similar effects on the author’s early life in Ostermundigen near Bern, Switzerland, since 1992. De l’Horizon writes poetry, prose, and plays. For the theater, they adapted Bolaño’s short story “Murdering Whores” and were invited to the 2023 festival of contemporary theater in Berlin with the climate play “Hänsel & Greta & The Big Bad Witch.” They contribute as a columnist to several newspapers and coedit the literary magazine Delirium.

Their debut novel Blutbuch is composed of five uneven parts plus a ten-page prologue. The first four parts present searches (for memory, for childhood, for an origin, and for the grand/m/other Rosmary), while the last part provides closure with an opening or a shift in the eternal repetition of the same: it is titled not “coming full circle” but “Coming full spiral.”

Without preparation, the prologue introduces the themes of (non-)binary genders, the politics of language, family secrets, the grandmother’s dementia, and the first-person narrator’s desire to know more about their family and its legacy of violence. As they put it, “I want to know how this shit got into our veins”^[7]. The prologue also situates the narrator/author at their writing desk in Zurich during a late winter evening at 26 years old.

The first two parts gather memories of childhood like flotsam that washes up on the shore of consciousness (Schwemmgut, p. 19). The first part focuses on the narrator’s grandmother: her home, her things, her body, and her conduct. The narrative here is at times written in the first person, at others in the third person about the child and its grandmother, and then, again it is addressed to the grandmother. The second part, written as a stream of consciousness, presents the child’s inner life in the family context. The very short, often incomplete sentences here mimic the child’s speech, who, as we learn, feels spellbound to use no more than seven words at a time. The narration also includes direct speech from the mother and grandmother and introduces the child’s special relation to the blood-colored beech in the ancestors’ garden. The third part intertwines self-critical reflections about the writing process and the narrator’s sexual life during that time with reflections about the role of the red beech tree in the family garden and research into the biological and cultural characteristics of the beech and its blood-colored mutation. The language is casual and peppered with slang, despite some very long sentences. It is vivid, highly hypotypotic, and sometimes uses the lingo of filmmaking. The next and longest part is titled “In Search for Rosemary,” and treats the current life of the now demented grandmother as well as the attempts of both her grandchild (the narrator) and her daughter (the narrator’s mother) to come to terms with her gradual passing and to tell her story. The last and shortest part consists of letters from a writing retreat with two friends in the Southern Swiss Alps, most of them to grandmother and one to mother, all written in English, i.e. in a language these two “don’t really understand” (267). The letters contain a substantial amount of poetological reflections, as well as other reflections (about embodied life, feelings, transformation, and symbiosis), descriptions of social, intellectual, and sexual interactions during the retreat (including modern shamanism and witchery), and further memories of family relations (now interpreted with the cognizance of family trauma and patriarchal violence).

As might have already become clear, the novel presents no continuous narrative but rather a patchwork of different genres and styles: scraps of narration, reflection, intertexts, and research results. The patchwork character of the book is also rendered typographically. While the (always short) sections of the first two parts have titles, the sections of Part 4 are only numbered, and in Part 3, they are just separated by a blank line or a blank line with an asterisk in the middle; the letters of Part 5 are separated by the address (“Dear Grandma” or “Dear Mum”). The volume features different fonts and paragraph styles, including the typescript of the mother’s matrilineal ancestral story, a facsimile image of a historical document, various lists, correspondence printed in italics, epigraphs in smaller font, footnotes, a Works Cited list, an outline of the book in bold smaller font, as well as the German translation of the last chapter printed upside down and in smaller font. The writing style switches between sincere self-reflection, self-reflective irony, raw descriptions of physical acts, casual language, family language, child language, pop lingo, queer cultural codes, fairy tale phrases, and academic conventions. The only stylistic constant might be its abundant engagement in word plays (often across languages).

2 Trans^* Plant Style

De l’Horizon forgoes the use of an article in the title of their novel. Since in the German language, articles carry information about the grammatical gender, their absence here participates in a common practice of expressing gender fluidity, namely the avoidance of personal pronouns. What is more, it allows the title word to waver between the standard and the dialect and to change its meaning in this oscillation. Depending on whether one reads the title as Swiss German (using the feminine die to form Die Blutbuch) or Standard German (choosing the neuter das for Das Blutbuch), the title will be translated as Copper Beech or Blood Book. Thus, the single title word keeps several meanings in suspension: a specific kind of tree, an object made of trees, a literary work, and the many connotations of blood (including the near-homonymy with the Swiss-German blutt meaning naked). Cutting across the boundaries of gender, language, class,^[8] life forms (vegetal and animal), and orders of culture (material and symbolic), the title anticipates what, I contend, the entire novel performs. It creates a space for a very broad notion of trans: one that allows for a multitude of connections and transformations, especially across the human–plant boundary.

Belying the notion of gender fluidity, the form of the novel is fragmented, disjointed, and even dismembered. In a poetological passage that runs into the issue of bodily comportment, the narrator acknowledges the piecemeal flux of their self-expressions in the context of norms that are experienced as rigid and oppressive:

In the fascistic binary of body languages, my limbs speak a gobbledygook, a chewed up Elfish, a zerbroken insistlish Ginglish, an Inbetween and Therewith that staggers back and forth in confusion.

I don’t know how I could articulate myself otherwise than: I know no language for my body. I can move neither in the mom tongue nor in the dad tongue. I stand in a foreign tongue. Perhaps that is one of the reasons for writing, for this dismembered, crumbling writing. … Perhaps this writing is the search for a foreign tongue in the words that one has at one’s disposal.^[9]

The idea of gender fluidity is exposed here as a euphemism that covers over much struggle, alienation, and existential homelessness – a pain that the final lines of the quote embrace as inseparable from a desire for the transformational potential of defamiliarization: “the search for a foreign tongue in the words that one has at one’s disposal.”

Such “foreign tongue” might be something even more alien than another sociolect, something unheard of yet real. Marder acknowledges the silence of plants, yet contends that “vegetal life expresses itself otherwise, without resorting to vocalization. … [P]lants … articulate themselves spatially” (2013, p. 75). He adds that “in using the word ‘language’ to describe vegetal self-expression in all its spatialized materiality, [he is] not opting for a metaphor” (2013, p. 75). The fragmented writing of this trans* person (“this dismembered, crumbling writing”) enacts, I suggest, experiences of and desires for a rupture of bodily integrity.^[10] Plants serve as privileged objects of identification in this novel, I propose, because they have the ability to turn cuts and breaks into exuberant growth, simultaneously attracting attention to and repairing them. Plants model the healing of psychic wounds without leading into the trap of disavowing those wounds.

To be sure, images and signifiers of liquidity abound in the text. To stay with the same quote, the sentence “I can move neither in the mom tongue nor in the dad tongue” bespeaks perhaps a lack of fluidity in one language but performs once more the flowing into one another of different languages. The phrases “mom tongue” and “dad tongue” only somewhat inadequately translate the original word amalgamations Meersprache and Peersprache. While Sprache is Standard German for language. Meer and Peer are the Bernese German words for mom and dad. In this novel, which tells the story of Kim trying to understand their maternal ancestors, the signifier Meer is used with very high frequency. Depending on what article one decides to put in front of the word – die Meer or das Meer – it can mean mom in Bernese German or sea in Standard German. The story of Kim’s moms comes in waves.

And yet, there is no flow. No easy solution here. If anything, the mixing or flowing into each other of languages and styles produces a suspension. The signifiers of fluidity are apt in this context perhaps only because the sea and other bodies of water carry so much refuse and flotsam – not to say waifs and strays. Plants, specifically the title beech, come into play and figure the overlap of the solid and the liquid, the fragmented and the flowing, or the cut and the sap. The kind of foreign tongue that will be foregrounded with this article, and that runs through the book beginning with its title, inscribing itself in the body of the protagonist is the material language of plants.

3 Monstera

The novel locates monstrosity not in the gender-non-conformity of its narrator, nor in its multilinguality, non-linear narration, or mixed-genre textuality, but in the prehistory of the family: “My grandmother is called Rosemary, and she was a monster” (De l’Horizon, 2022a, p. 30). The largely untold family history is ripe with violations of individual integrity – physical, mental, and emotional – in the form of mutilation, premature death, replacement children, incestuous rape, and the expulsion of a victimized child.^[11]

Rosemary stands in for her older sister of the same name who died as a child. She was born on the birthday of the first Rosemary, 16 years later. As a replacement child, her life is not her own. But then, whose life is? In many different ways the novel grapples with the implicit missions that children receive to execute what others, most often their parents, didn’t manage. Grandmother Rosemary’s younger sister Irma, their father’s favorite, disappeared when she was fifteen – never to be talked about again, except for the fact that grandmother names her daughter, what is Kim’s mother – Irma. It is suggested that the replacement child Rosemary repeats the replacement by using her daughter as a stand-in for herself, transferring her own responsibility as a silent witness of the disappearance. And indeed, the second Irma will confront her great-grandmother with questions (De l’Horizon, 2022a, p. 297). Meanwhile, Kim’s father is barely in the picture, except as stuck on the story of his two childhood friends, whom he did not join one day – who knows why – on their regular climbs in the local Swiss Alps. That was the day when the boys were shredded by a stone avalanche. Family stories – the stories of Meer, Grossmeer, and Peer (mother, grandmother, and father) – are stories of violence and trauma, shaped by dissociation and repetition compulsion.^[12]

The narrator seeks to write their way out of these stories not by turning away from them but by letting the stories penetrate and run through them. In this endeavor, they realize that their mission is not just to record but also to create. Not so much because they have incomplete knowledge of the facts, but because they begin to understand that these moms, their Meers, lived incomplete lives, were largely consigned to a death in life, and that there is a lot of life that can still be given to them. “I break the circle” – Kim writes in English, “of children who kill their parents in order to be free, to become themselves. I don’t kill my parents. I am giving birth to my mothers.” (De l’Horizon, 2022a, p. 280). The queer procreativity of such an inversion of the family line differs significantly from traditional forms of reproduction that pay forward ancestral and personally experienced violence. Kim declares, again in English, “I cannot continue the silence, because I will not have kids. There will be no one to live in my stead. My belly will not fill with life, it is only filled with blood” (De l’Horizon, 2022a, p. 290). While heteronormative reproduction here figures as the compulsion to repeat existing patterns of violence, the homonymy of Standard German for book (Buch) and Swiss German for belly (Buuch) suggests that writing autofiction serves to spiral out of the circle.^[13]

The book embraces the invasion of the psyche by the ghosts of the dead, the disappeared, and the rest with their undigested stories, and celebrates the intense sexual pleasures derived from the penetrability of the body. In this context, I want to consider in more detail now the trans-species porousness or trans-kingdom porousness, to be more precise, between humans and plants.

Early in the book, the narrator addresses their grandmother explaining, “I always knew that you and mom are monsters, in search of a place where you can put your seeds, your seedlings.”^[14] The word choice of “seeds,” and especially “seedlings,” fuses the animal realm (animated movements) with the vegetal realm. The context clarifies that the child derives the certainty of identification (“My grandmother is called Rosemary, and she was a monster.”) from the sound of a word, specifically the name of a plant genus, namely Monstera: “I remember that you had a huge plant in your apartment. […] Her leaves were as big as my head, and they were hands. When I asked mom how this plant was called, she said: ‘Monstera.’”^[15] To the child, grandmother’s plant looks like a monster with its huge fingered leaves: its many hands.^[16] Grandmother’s hands are also very prominent in the narrator’s recollections, since they are always busy touching the child.^[17] The plant name speaks to the child and supports the identification of grandmother with her house plant: “I knew that you melt into the Monstera at night.”^[18]

While the child turns to the image of the monster to express fear and discomfort with intrusive behavior, the fact that the monstrous emerges as so closely linked to the plant realm also allows for a sense of commonality, even sympathy with grandma: “I knew […], that you – like me – come closer to plants than to humans.”^[19] In another instance, it is again a word that facilitates this human–vegetal affinity: “Your name spoke with me, Rosemary, and I hear the rosemary in our garden.”^[20] The child speaks with plants just like it speaks with words. Let’s turn now to its main interlocutor and medium, the blood-colored beech.

4 Blood Beech

This image from John Case’s Compendium Anatomicum (1696) of the end of the seventeenth century is reproduced in Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch, a title that is referenced in Blutbuch several times, once specifically evoking this image.^[21] Federici places the image in the context of her discussion of the mechanization of the human body in the service of capitalism as enabled by the mechanical philosophy of Descartes and others. Her caption reads “In contrast to the “mechanical man” is this image of the “vegetable man” in which the blood vessels are seen as twigs growing out of the human body.”^[22] The flow of blood is here pictured as vegetal growth in the form of leafy twigs and roots. As the final line of de l’Horizon’s novel suggests, rooting and running are not opposed but overlapping physical comportments: “My mother tongue is talking. My father tongue is silence. And my own tongue are tongues, and my tongues are dripping, dropping, blurring, streaming, rooting, flowing.” (298, originally in English).

If blood vessels can turn into leafy twigs, perhaps tree leaves are red because blood runs through them. Such is the logic underlying the botanical imaginary of this book (Buch) titled blood book (Blutbuch). Again, the plant–animal nexus is suggested by the linguistic material. The copper beech – title plant in the Bernese version of the title and additional protagonist of the novel^[23] – is in German called Blutbuche, literally “blood beech.” The plant name thus blends the animal with the vegetal kingdom.

Cultivated extensively in the nineteenth century for parks and gardens, the copper beech was originally a mutation of the common European beech. Seemingly against nature, the variation is produced by nature and not only once: the narrator’s research identifies several original natural occurrences.^[24] The leaves of the copper beech shine in flaming red or purple, as if stubbornly refusing to produce the normative color for plants. This is certainly one reason why Kim is so intensely drawn to the blood-colored beech in the family garden – “I felt a stronger bond with this red beech than with people,” the narrator declares.^[25] In their attempt at cross-kingdom sympoiesis, the tree meets the child halfway with its mutation to the color of blood. In further convergence with animality, its leaves form a second skin for the child – the right kind of skin.^[26] They give womb-like comfort and shelter: “The child sat under its [literally her] red leaves as under a second true skin. When the sun was shining through, the leaves were like a skin from the inside.”^[27] De l’Horizon’s analogy of leaves and skin elaborates on the fusion of animal and vegetal kingdom already provided in the German name for the red variety of beech.

In addition to the physical intimacy, the child “spoke with the blood beech,” thus “affording voice to vibrant materials whose first language is not words,” as Bennett has it.^[28] They also conversed with the raspberries in the garden.^[29] It might be the color of their fruits that turn the raspberry bushes, together with the red beech, into preferred interlocutors. The fact that, like the beech, the raspberries transport family history, provides another source for attraction.^[30] Raspberries and beech assume kinship roles while at the same time providing refuge from the family. The child pleads, “Blood beech. You can simply grow. Nobody defines your form. I want to be like you.”^[31] The tree functions as a role model – a teacher, even: “The child asked for lessons. The blood beech knew so clearly how existing works, how to find a shape of one’s own, how to inhabit a body.”^[32] But the tree is not eager to impart its knowledge: You need to tell your own story, it seems to answer. Still, as soon as the child utters the wish to be like the red beech, something happens as they nervously chew on their fingernails:

The child chews off a piece of fingernail. A lot of nail comes off. There is a hole in the finger. Blood drips from the finger. The child drips from the finger. It drips on the roots of the blood beech. It seeps under the roots. The blood beech drinks the child.

Many thanks, little child. Do you really want to become like me?, the blood beech asks.

The child nods. A root of the beech twists upward. It is a thick, bulging root. The root thrusts itself into the open finger of the child. The blood beech skeets under the skin of the child.^[33]

Hovering somewhere between fairy tale, magical realism, and speculative fiction, the scene has strong undertones of a penetrative sexual act. With its exchange of bodily fluids, it might describe the childlike budding of the adult narrator’s sexual practice of barebacking, which Jiang foregrounds in his discussion of Blutbuch (2023, pp. 305–308). It can also be read as the celebration of blood brotherhood – per se an interesting form of kinship with the potential to queer blood relations. Generally, the ceremony of the blood oath performs a symbolic graft, furnishing the idea that each person’s blood flows in the veins of the other. Since there is a tree involved here, I want to go a step further and read this scene as a literal grafting rather than a symbolic gesture.^[34] This act of grafting provides the first lesson in the material ways of plants. Among trees and bushes, grafts can happen spontaneously. Plants exhibit the “(vague, protean, ahuman) tendency for bodies to lean, make connections, and form attachments” that Bennett proposes “can be harnessed on behalf of a more generous, egalitarian, and ecological public culture” (2020, pp. xix–xx). The roots of different individuals grow together to communicate, share nutrients, and protect each other. Smaller plants can graft themselves onto trees and sap them. Meanwhile, it is not always easy to parse out whether the symbiotic relationship is mutually beneficial or parasitic. Spontaneous grafting is also practiced among members of different life forms, such as plants and fungi. Fungal filaments merge with the root tips of trees by the millions to exchange nourishment and information. Emulating the cross-kingdom intimacy of fungi and plants, de l’Horizon’s witchery conjures up oddkin, making it possible for a plant to graft with a human animal.^[35] From here on, the child feels the blood beech inside their body.

And yet, like the various languages that run through Kim and that wash up the refuse of an incomplete and unending past, the tree, with which the child is in such intimate relation, turns out not to be their own. “That is my tree,”^[36] says grandma with endearment when the child tells her of their favorite tree. The garden is a family inheritance. Grandmother’s father, Kim’s great-grandfather built it, and it sustained the family with food while demanding a lot of care work. Additionally, the trees were meant as companion species. Rosemary’s father planted the red beech when she was born. He planted one for each of his many children. One tree, a weeping one – Irma’s tree – does not exist anymore; a hollow in the ground still betrays its place – which is more than can be said for Irma, who seems to have vanished without a trace. Actually, the copper beech is not grandma’s tree either. It is left undetermined whether it was Kim’s or grandmother Rosemary’s psychic need that altered the story, but documentation is later produced that the tree was bought in 1919, the birth year of the first Rosemary.

After all, Kim’s blood beech is a family tree. As such it is vulnerable to being read as symbolizing a bloodline. Violence runs in the blood of the family. The blood family demands sacrifice. In Kim’s case, this sacrifice seems to materialize as self-castration. – But the text also invites us to listen for a different story below the din of the same old. Let us turn to the last paragraph of the chapter titled “The Search for Childhood.” The section is called “Last Story,” and its last paragraph follows the child’s announcement that it now wants to be (considered as) an adult. This attempt at a self-designation is answered by the mother declaring, “but you are a boy.”^[37] A double slap. According to mom, they are not only not an adult but also gendered male. This is the first time in the text that the child is gendered. The child enjoys the potential to be or become anything, but the (one who wants to be) adult is subjected to identification. Adulthood thus sets in with the erasure of non-gendered childhood.^[38]

Only the blood beech can help in this predicament:

“The boy goes into the garden. He feels the blood beech inside. He feels her like fingers in his feet, like delicate long claws, like spider roots. They break through the soles of the feet. The boy stands underneath the blood beech. The shoots drive and reach through the skin into the soil. They begin to grow the boy attached. It roots at him. It roots him to the ground. [Here follows much of the story of Irma, of father-daughter incest, of her pregnancy at fifteen, of her being sent to the women’s prison, and her mother having the weeping tree felled the next day.] The boy drops pants and underpants. He applies the bag knife and cuts, with a jerk. He runs raspberry-red into the ground. The blood beech drinks the boy.”^[39]

Adulthood sets in with the recognition of gender-based violence: the one now identified as boy suddenly understands what happened to Irma. Gender and violence are inextricable. Gendering itself is an intrusion that begets violence.^[40] So much can be generalized. Yet here the accounts of gender violence are entangled with stories of iterative transitioning. And this is the novel’s most important and original contribution: it develops and cultivates the capacity to transform trauma – to turn generative without denying wounds.^[41]

Psychically, everything happens at once in this moment. Assailed by an epiphany, the boy stops dead in his track (“he stops as if rooted to the ground,” so the literal translation of the German version of this idiom (wie angewurzelt stehen bleiben)) and finally begins to tell the story that the blood beech had demanded earlier: their own story – but it turns out as Irma’s story.^[42] Self-birthing and giving birth cannot be neatly separated.^[43] At some point, the child was inside the blood beech, like in a womb. Now, he feels the blood beech inside his body. The inversion undoes the usual hierarchy and sprouts a cascade of transformations. The upper body collapses into the lower body: fingers inside feet. They become animal claws, stretching out thin like spider legs – or spidery roots. Human animal, non-human animal, and plant merge inside the boy’s feet. They can be neither separated nor contained and shoot through the skin of his soles. The boy’s drives grow and reach into the ground, and they gain traction.^[44] The boy drops his pants. Finally, he has gained a foothold and stands rooted. The original phrasing “Es wurzelt ihn an,” translated above as “It roots at him. It roots him to the ground” messes with the usual order of language. Anwurzeln means “to take root” and, just like the English phrase, it functions as an intransitive verb. But here, in this grammatical construction, the boy is not the originator of his foothold. He is not autonomous. He does not father his position. Rather, an impersonal agency – es – roots him to the ground. Hence my translation – “It roots at him” – which expresses the relational character of the rooting and its process character (the preposition “at” suggests that the movement toward him is not completed). My translation “They (the shoots, the drives) begin to grow the boy attached” replicates the same procedure, of rendering transitive an intransitive verb, in an adjacent sentence. “The alchemical magic of language … that … animates humans, animals, and things in between,” which Chen recuperates, relies, among other structures, on in/transitive verbs to objectify or endow with agency respectively, both with ideological impact (2012, pp. 23 and 25). Playing with syntactical structures can inform a new mindset. Thus translation participates in the transforming of language. Trans*lation: proposing transitionings.

Then, with a jerk, he cuts off the jerk and runs to meet his companion raspberries, raspberry-red into the ground, with the blood beech drunk on the boy. Again, as in the incident with the chewed-off bit of finger, the blood beech drinks (of) the child/boy. The cut renders fluid. The rooting and running, the cutting and drinking forge the overlap of fixity and liquidity observed earlier in what I called the piecemeal flux of de l’Horizon’s writing.

“He applies the bagknife and cuts.” Instead of the Standard German word for pocketknife (Taschenmesser), de l’Horizon uses the Swiss German term Sackmesser, to be translated literally as bagknife. To German speakers who are not familiar with Swiss German, this word, especially in this context, evokes the ballbag or scrotum. Does that simply redouble the phallic valence of the knife? The nexus of violence and male sexuality – in the name of love and paternal protection from the ways of the world – is strongly reinforced in the story of Irma.^[45] Still, I contend that the narrator begins to twist out of this logic here. “He applies the bagknife and cuts, with a jerk.” The suggested self-castration is performed with another part of the organ that is cut – or, at least, with something that maintains a connection with another part of the organ that is suggested to be cut. Ballbag, bagknife, jerk, unnamed body part. A continuity enables and is maintained through the cut. No othering or instrumentalizing. Below the din of castration, a transitioning takes place. In this bending back on itself, the child and the tree can grow together as oddkin.

Beeches have a propensity for growing together. Animals, including human animals, less so. Some trees are cut so their body parts can join. Such grafting can produce extraordinary new lives (apples and oranges on one stock) or monotonous plantations. Even the spontaneous grafting of beeches requires wounds: the outer tissue of branches or roots needs to crack so that the core, or cambium, can grow together. Something needs to give so that child and tree can join in sympoiesis. The phallic logic of clean-cut distinctions needs to be given up. The phallic and colonialist logic of identification and classification can be excised. Take this as one response to Haraway’s question “What must be cut and what must be tied if multispecies flourishing on earth, including human and other-than-human beings in kinship, are to have a chance?” (2016, p. 2).

For Kim, the process is not initiated by human agency. To begin with, the tree, the blood beech, assimilated via mutation to the human child or approached the child with a spontaneous body modification. Its color suggests that not chlorophyll but hemoglobin runs in its veins.^[46] Vegetable man. Human plant. Trans*plant.^[47]

5 Queer Plant Procreativity

Plants are named after their perceived passivity: planted and stuck, most profitably in huge plantations that colonize land with homogenized culture. And yet their vitality, as measured in their ability to grow (and to grow in multiple directions) far exceeds that of animals, human or not, in the spatial and temporal dimensions. This competence attracts the child to the tree: “Blood beech. You can simply grow. Nobody defines your form. I want to be like you.” The passage incites its readers to explore whether they can break (with) the logic of classification, scaling, discipline, and norms – or even simply grow out of it. De l’Horizon’s work points to that inherent potential. It shows that the traumatizing regime of language and the creative, liberating possibilities of language intra-act (in Barad’s sense) with one another as well as with un/natural materiality.

Planting is a transitive verb that, according to the current rules of language, is not used intransitively. Can we sense the foreign tongue in the words at our disposal? In the spirit of “allow[ing] natural entities, forces, and processes to inhabit and deform the grammatical place of the doer,” can we be creative and transform the usage of the word so that it may theorize differently (Bennett, 2020, p. xxv)? ^[48] For example: “the plant plants.” In the matching inverse move of Es wurzelt ihn an, where de l’Horizon put an intransitive verb to transitive use, a transitive verb turns intransitive: the plant plants. Such phrasing expresses vegetal activity. The plant plants in the body of other plants, in the living soil, in all sorts of animals and creatures. It grafts or trans*plants.

In a brilliant analysis and moving dialogue with Antony and the Johnsons’ song “Cripple and the Starfish,” Hayward describes self-cutting as a way to invite growth: “To cut off the penis/finger is … to produce the conditions of physical and psychical regrowth. The cut is possibility. For some transsexual women, the cut is … a generative effort … to feel the growth of new margins” (2018, p. 72, emphasis in original). Plants thrive on cuts even more than starfish do. For a plant, a cut can be an impulse to grow abundantly around the cut limb. As if to mark the curtailment with flourishes. This vegetal response is more of a pro-creation than a re-generation.^[49] Exuberant growth.

Like Barad, for whom “ontological indeterminacy is the undoing of a modality of expression which assumes the separability of word and world” (Barad & Gandorfer, 2021, p. 18), Hayward has a strong sense for the enmeshment of matter and language. While Barad counters the idea that language provides representations of facts with the notion of intra-action (Barad & Gandorfer, 2021, pp. 24–26), the related but slightly different target of Hayward’s critique is the assumption of an arbitrary or metaphoric relation between sign and referent. She suggests thinking and living this relation as metonymical, instead. With their scarred regenerative corporeality and their deployment as signifiers, “transsexuals and starfish challenge disembodied metaphors … and propose how we are metonymically stitched to carnal substrates” (Hayward, 2008, p. 76). In that sense, “language emerges from an ontology that is ecological” (Hayward, 2008, p. 78). While “metaphor does not owe any allegiance to the literal object” – an indifference, she argues, that easily slides into objectification, domination, and exploitation –, an understanding and use of language as fundamentally metonymical connects not only words but also their users literally, physically, or in a bodily sense to the bodies signified (Hayward, 2008, p. 74). It foregrounds allegiance, participation, and belonging. Language, so conceived, cannot be transcendent or disembodied. Instead, it needs to be included in our considerations of transcorporeality. i.e. of the fact that „the outline of the human is traversed by substantial material interchanges” (Alaimo, 2018, p. 435).

De l’Horizon employs language in a thoroughly metonymical way in Hayward’s sense. Already the title presents, at a minimum, the inseparability of book (a bound collection of written language) and beech tree.^[50] From there we have traced, in the preceding analysis, many metonymical interchanges and have shown how carnal experiences are shaped by words and vice versa. Such a notion of language allows Hayward to claim, “in other words, I’m not like a starfish; I am of a starfish” (Hayward, 2008, p. 76), describing such belonging as “trans-speciation.” While the child of Blutbuch expresses the wish “to be like” the blood beech (“I want to be like you.”), in the process they evidently become what they were from the beginning: of the blood beech.

Hayward still relies on commonality or shared experiences to provide the ground for the possibility of trans-speciation.^[51] Such commonalities are harder to come by when it comes to animal–plant or human animal–plant transmorphing. Trans-kingdom morphing runs into even stronger walls – built in patriarchy, and colonialism – than trans-speciating. The king loves classification and hates those who mess with the categories, but he surely doesn’t permit anybody to fool around with the borders of the territory. “I am of the red beech,” or “I am of this tree,” – while certainly intensely felt by many, including some ecosexuals and some environmental activists who fight deforestation – is thus a sentence that is harder to materially enact. We can dwell in treetops or chain our bodies to trees about to be felled. We can make love with plants (Montano et al., 2021). Or we can allow plants to plant in our flesh; we can graft with plants in transbecoming.

There is great value in moving beyond feeling to materially co-crafting an allegiance (while such material processes can be virtual, fictional, or semiotic). This is important because, in the sentimental imaginary, women or the feminine have been customarily linked to the plant kingdom. The chain has always been a defining and devaluing notion of passivity, and the logic was that of metaphor.^[52] Hence, the wild idea and seemingly extreme practice of grafting strikes me as crucial. It needs a certain violence, a cut, a break with common logic, a “tear in the traditional subject/object formation” (Hayward, 2008, p. 82). We need perversity, wildness (Halberstam, 2020),^[53] vulgarity, and crassness to flip the bird to the metaphor of the beautiful flower that is easily broken.

For de l’Horizon, material allegiance is facilitated by the metonymical nature of language. Because the copper beech is called blood beech in German, the tree can be there for them as the protagonist makes the cut and can absorb the bodily fluid spilling from the wound. Trans*plant intimacy nourished by semiotic materiality. De l’Horizon also shows that plant growth (flourishing around cuts and tears, and planting in bodies) can transform our habits of relating to “self,” “other,” and “environment.” It can fundamentally reconfigure these terms by flipping the common imaginaries of individuality, wholeness, and bodily integrity. Such rearticulation resonates with trans* experiences without the resonance being unique to trans* bodies, as they proffer, according to Colebrook, only “expressions of a more profound transitivity that is the condition for what becomes known as the human” (2015, p. 228). Or, as Hayward puts it with sublime simplicity, “the body (trans or not) is not a pure, coherent, and positive integrity” (2008, p. 73).

Attention to grafting practices contributes to denaturalizing the supposedly natural while foregrounding naturally occurring trans* practices. We need both moves. What is nature? What are its natural tendencies? Barad doesn’t grow tired of showing the perverseness, queerness, and transness of the most basic indeterminately either building blocks or disturbant waves or both of nature. If electrons touch themselves, birthing and devouring all sorts of entities, savoring and breaking all sorts of connections even with the non-contemporaneous, then perhaps a human can go back in time and rip something away so that child and Buch (beech, book, and belly) can join and continue to grow together.^[54] Trans* is not like but already is a different relation to the un/natural in its “transmaterialities” (Barad, 2015): one that dares to forge yet unseen or unintelligible connections, for example, human–vegetal bonds. Some might offer the domesticated version of this account and claim that a child and a beech can join only in a book. If this book teaches us anything, though, it is to run as far as possible from domesticity. Or rather, to run with it and trans*form (it).