Landscapes Lost and Found - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 17

Everything is a story, everything a repository of stories, spiders, the wind, a leaf, a
tree, the moon, silence, a glance, a mysterious old man, an owl at midnight, a sign,
a white stone on a branch, a single yellow bird of omen, an inexplicable death,
unprompted laughter, an egg by the river, are all impregnated with stories. In Africa,
things are stories, they store stories, and they yield stories at the right moment of
dreaming, when we are open to the secret side of objects and moods. 31
I have my own African stories, also having been born in Nigeria, and then
spending my formative childhood years there. Thinking about that time,
I realize that many of my most vivid early memories are of encounters
with animals. Perhaps it is that way with all children, or perhaps it was
the place. I recall meeting a snake in the bathroom, chancing on a lion
while walking in the bush, being chased by a scorpion in a long-empty
swimming pool. I remember huge rats downed with a shot gun, and tail
to jaw as long as I was tall, and a ferocious serval cat prowling on the roof
until it, too, was shot. There were songbirds in the aviary, large dogs,
monkeys as pets, itinerant donkeys, and great silent fruit bats at dusk.
Some of these memories could be no more than childhood constructions,
though flickering reels of super-8 film still testify to many truths.
Whether Africa has more stories than another place, or even too many,
as Okri hints, matters less than the fact that industrialized landscapes have
lost many of their stories. We no longer see the deep significance; we no
longer know the old ways. Many of these are dark and well worth
forgetting. But the stories we have written on the industrialized landscape
in recent decades have been bad, perhaps much worse. There is meaning
in the landscape, and as Oliver Rackham has put it: 'I am especially concerned
with the loss of memory. The landscape is a record of our roots and the growth of
civilisation' . 32
Many writers have suggested that we are in between ages, on the point
of discovery or rediscovery. We have forgotten so much about human
linkages with the rest of nature, and about our fundamental dependencies.
David Suzuki says:
We feel ourselves to have escaped the limits of nature. . . Food is often highly processed
and comes in packages, revealing little of its origins in the soil or tell-tale signs of
blemishes, blood, feathers or scales. We forget the source of our water and energy,
the destination of our garbage or our sewage. We forget.
Here is something vital. When we forget these truths, we come easily to
believe another story - that we have the Earth under our control. Suzuki
says: 'we must find a new story' . 33 This has been Thomas Berry's mission, too.
He says: ' It's all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we do not have