How to make mpondu
Memories of the Congolese rainforest.
Weeping spruce is beautiful in a disrepaired way: like a mother who never ties her shoelaces, never combs her hair. I’ve been reading Suzanne Simard’s studies of how firs and birches exchange carbon through the seasons via fungi, a giving and a taking. Simard doesn’t write about the tropics.
My family struggled with fungi in our gardens in Congo. You’d turn over a clump of clay-soil and see white threads magically veining through it towards the uneasy roots of lettuce. The lettuce always succumbed. It’s funny, in a way, how hard it is to grow things in a rainforest: lettuce, sweet tomatoes, onions, peppers, even cabbage. It all developed a black mold. We blamed it on the fungi. Maybe the forest, trained on decomposing trees, swallowed our small plants the way they say giant whales eat fish.
When I interviewed artist Phil Irish, he described being on a glacier: “the wind coming off it . . . the breath of a glacier. The sounds. We saw a calving – a block of ice, big as an apartment complex, falling in, shooting back out.” The awe in his voice made me think, immediately, of the rainforest in the Congo Basin. It’s where pretenses of imported logic fall away under palm trees and lightning. New knowledge becomes essential.
Once, I asked my Congolese friend to tell me stories she had heard from her grandmother. They were a force of nature – everything hits at once and certainty disappears in poison & women turned to snakes & horrifying deaths at the water. Maybe that is itself the plot line – everything, all at once. In some places, landscape undoes beginnings. Consumes, with a ferocious appetite, the life it nurtures.
I was in awe of the forest, how it never stood still. How beautiful it was, like a woman dancing, head tipped back in the rain, slow & measured defiance. How the ground became a song, but not for the night. And the night became a mother, but not for us.
Since the forest, I’ve never truly believed a story that promises only one ending. The rainforest is her own story. Some fools approximate her shadows in language and I am the biggest fool of all, having spent only a few years in her wake. But what years. What a place to learn to be a woman.
There’s a brand of fierce pride that Congolese people have for their country that I can’t explain, except to say that there’s a way palm oil sits thick on your tongue after eating it. For years after leaving the forest I gathered with my sisters and friends to steam & smash & boil cassava leaves in thick palm oil, the work of a day. We told well-worn stories – all that can grow in the deep forest are these leaves, these palm fruits, what lack; and we laughed, yes, at how absurd it all is, and all the while we starved for a taste of what we once had daily – hot mpondu, the white roots of the forest invading our hearts. •
The woman in this painting is inspired by a self-portrait by Celia Paul, “Painter at Home, 2023”. In an interview she gave Border Crossings she said: “I wanted to make a whole art form out of my life.”
Celia Paul is an Indian-born British painter who paints intense portraits. (My three-year-old nephew wandered in a few times as I worked on this painting and said, “Why is the woman so sad? Can you make her less sad?”) Instead I painted a face that has two emotions, two sides, at once.
Celia’s self-portrait is a much brighter one than her decade earlier portrait of the same name (“Painter at Home, 2012”). It is, her interviewer said, a shift in portraiture where the woman is seeing the world more than she is being seen. Celia said: “I want to struggle against the heaviness that was in my earlier work, which was important and gave it that particular quality, but if I’d not struggled towards a lightening, both in spirit and actual lightness of palette, it could have buried me alive.”
Do you love this painting? The original is for sale, $70 plus $20 shipping. It’s 16 inch by 20 inch paintings on canvas paper. If you struggle to mentally transform measurements into actual size, like me, here’s the painting with an apple tree for scale:
If you’re interested, shoot me a message or reply to this email.
Thank you for reading today. It’s a joy to take you to Congo two weeks in a row in lyric essays! That rainforest is still the hardest place for me to write – and that’s today’s writing prompt:
What is a place that held wonder for you? What do you still not understand about it? What new knowledge did you gain from that place, and what did it taste like, smell like, sound like? The place could be as big as a forest or as small as your hideaway under the stairs (I did write about the holiness of a deserted toilet, after all).
Yes! The lettuce always succumbs. You blamed it on the fungi.... I always blame it on heavy rain leading to depleted soil. The lettuce isn't getting what it needs to grow in that environment. But yes definitely also the decay from decomposition. Such a fight! And yes I'm feeling all these things in a much deeper way than just talking about plants.
Such beautiful words!