Kawal Coming Back Home

Reflections on Migration, Indigeneity, and the Plants We Carry With Us

On Main Street, near the intersection with Dodd’s, are the now tattered remnants of one of the older community gardens of Chattanooga, Neema Taking Root Community Garden. Tattered not from neglect but due to the fact that the garden’s days are numbered: the land on which it stands was acquired by a developer and will by this time next year probably already be prepped for some new mixed-used development building, part of a wave of new development in this part of town. The garden was built up over the last decade and a half by the slow patient addition of concrete blocks, dirt, and compost, plus all the odds and ends that go into a community growing space: rain water catchment, potting stations, tool sheds, and so on. It was a harsh environment to start with, most of the space underlain by asphalt, the former location of a television station, its building now long gone. Today, as we slowly reverse the process and haul the block and soil out to new growing spaces around town, leaving some beds for one final growing season, the lingering uncultivated beds have filled with wild and feral plants of all sorts. Bees and other insects buzz happily in the flowers. I spooked a skink the other morning while digging out some compost. Mockingbirds nested in the big sprawling fig tree at one end. Life goes on, for another season at least, not knowing or caring about the coming pulse of “progress.”

The majority of the gardeners over the years here have been Sudanese migrants, part of a larger community here in Chattanooga of refugees from the maelstrom of war and unrest that has gripped the country over the past twenty years. They were organized by a local Episcopal priest, Fr. Peter, himself of West African origin. As is often the case the most vigorous and productive urban growing spaces in Chattanooga almost always belong to migrants from peasant or peasant-adjacent backgrounds, and our Sudanese gardeners are no exception. For years now they have carefully tended these concrete block beds growing foods that are often hard, if not impossible, to source from grocery stores in Tennessee. The traces of that cultivation can be seen in the volunteer plants coming up in the margins and untended beds, plants both well-known to North American gardeners as well as less familiar things.

One of these had caught my eye—an obvious legume, resembling a peanut but without the “nuts” or curiously any nodules at all. I’d transplanted some to another garden, with the intention of figuring out what it was, but honestly kind of forgot about it until Monday, when I stopped by to salvage some more plants that had sown themselves in unused beds. Two of the Sudanese gardeners were there working some beds, word have gotten out I think that the developer is not making his move this season, the final wrap-up not coming until this fall, giving one more growing season for cultivation. I chatted with them for a bit, and in the course of our conversation I asked one of the gardeners, Wanda, about this curious legume. She explained that in Sudan it is called kawal—a word she hastened to add is also used as a pejorative slang term in other contexts, in case I’m ever in Sudan and it comes up in conversation!—and that they use it as a cooked green, a meat substitute in fact, especially in times of scarcity. She then described the process of preparing kawal, which involves pounding and then fermenting the leaves before they can be cooked.¹ Sudanese community gardeners brought seeds over or otherwise acquired them and started growing them here since they were unavailable in grocery stores. A robust and hardy plant, it has naturalized itself in the garden space.

Or, as it turns out, renaturalized itself: as I researched this curious plant I discovered much to my surprise that it is a native of the Americas, including, as far as anyone can tell, to this very part of the Americas, and possibly points north, though those might be human introductions. Which means that in bringing Senna obtusifolia, the scientific name for kawal (known evidently in English as American sicklepod but also, confusingly, as Chinese senna due to its spread and use in East Asia as well), our migrant gardeners were in fact bringing kawal back home, in a manner of speaking.

It’s possible I’ve encountered S. obtusifolia in the wild before and just didn’t notice it. But rather remarkably—almost akin to a providential sign, though of what I’m not sure—I came across a wild S. obtusifolia this morning while looking at plants on the lower flank of Pigeon Mountain, a massif that projects off of Lookout Mountain south of Chattanooga. I’m not sure how I noticed the lone plant amid many other similar looking wild legumes, but sure enough, there it was.

I do not know how Senna obtusifolia made its way from the Americas to East Africa (or anywhere else along its now global trajectory). None of the literature I reviewed for this essay had any suggestions, and indeed I am not sure that all of the authors were aware that S. obtusifolia was not native to Sudan. As is so often the case with “traditional” foods of the world—the majority of which only took their current form at some point after the Columbian Exchange of early modernity, and not in some distant gauzy past—we do not have any real record of how people discovered and adapted new plants of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The people who did most of the exchanging were ordinary people, ranging from slaves being forced across the Middle Passage to porters carrying goods into the heart of Eurasia to countless peasant farmers learning to grow new crops or to make use of new plants that made their way in the company of those crops’ foundational seeds. These were rarely literate people, much less the sorts of people who left meticulous accounts of their daily lives, or of their lives at all. And so plants like kawal moved anonymously, under the radar of written history, but leaving enduring traces.

At some point American sicklepod became kawal—perhaps in relation to the slave trade, a known vector of plant distribution globally. I could not find even attempts at estimating a date, but I think it’s safe to say that it has been a long time, long enough that kawal would become a part of traditional Sudanese—especially in Darfur, only spreading to the rest of Sudan over the last century—cooking. Did people in Darfur discover the plant by chance? Was it introduced deliberately somehow from the distant new world lands? How did people come up with the fermentation process? And in more recent times, how and why did Sudanese migrants fleeing war and destruction in their native land bring seeds of kawal (back) to America? I would hazard a guess on the last one: like many other semi-wild plants utilized by humans, kawal is an “insurance” plant, food that will be available should other sources fail or prove too expensive. It will grow in all kinds of settings, so it makes sense to bring it to a new home and try and get it growing, just in case, and, even should it not become strictly necessary, as a taste, literally, of one’s former home.

Is kawal a “native” plant? Is it different from American sicklepod, or are all instances of Senna obtusifolia the same regardless of where they grow? No doubt a study of the plant’s genetics would reveal the strictly objective answer to that question, but it is the subjective aspect, the realm of human value and appraisal, that interests me. What, and who, counts as native, as indigenous, is a fraught question in our world, one that animates right and left politics albeit in different ways. Those politics and debates spill over into the ways we talk about and make use of non-native species, and I while I am not going to get into all that here in depth, I do think the story of Senna obtusifolia/kawal/Amercican sicklepod/Chinese senna (still mostly untold, what I’ve written here is surely only a snippet of what could be told) provides a good entry point.

What our Sudanese migrant gardeners have realized is a type of belong to their little corner of the land of the American South, working and planting it and carefully tending the soil and the growing things therein, bringing in new—old—components to make it flourish. More than that: they have had to build up a whole agroecological landscape, building the very soil in which they can then plant. This is a type of indigeneity that many, most in fact, "native-born” residents have yet to cultivate, even though in many cases they are materially better placed to do so. At the same time, it is striking that the very plants they have brought with them are themselves former migrants from America, part of the great early modern transformation of ecologies and human communities and traditions. That process, and the even more massive material transformations of the modern age, was often one of loss, displacement, and dispossession. Indeed it is possible that the culinary use of kawal was driven by loss and displacement: it is a meat substitute, a plant that can keep people alive and relatively healthy in bad times, of which modern Sudan has had plenty. At the same time, the vast circulation of people and plants and everything also led to gains, to smallholders finding new sources of stability, of deepened and expanded ecologies, and the articulation of new forms of food, growing into traditions that now seem older and more venerable than they actually are chronologically.

What goes around, comes around. Senna obtusifolia is growing in urban Chattanooga again from Sudanese stocks, even as its still wild cousins pop up over in the nearby mountains. The fluidity of industrial modernity, in which everything solid—from ancient traditions to entire species of living things—melts into thin air, also ends up closing some unexpected circles, and being met by unexpected stops, new materialities and cultures and cultivation. Gardeners in a new land work the soil even if it means making the soil themselves, becoming native against the odds.

I dug up and will transplant some of the American sicklepod plants from Neema, as did the ladies on Monday, taking them to other beds they and their friends have been preparing as fall-back locations once the garden is gone. We’re working on finding new locations in the neighborhood, and have already started to move some block and soil to new gardens or just to store them until new spaces open up. The dialectic of dispposession, forced mobility, and loss swings into gear again, even as we throw up the barricades that slow it down, that lead to unexpected transformations and convergences. Across oceans and through war and migration and everything life continues, coming up through the cracks like the self-seeded kawal plants, ready for us to see and to build upon, towards a world as yet unimagined but waiting for us to cultivate, together.

1. A thorough enthographic description of the process, from a journal article describing kawal: “Kawal fermentation was carried out by the usual procedure used by the Fur people of western Sudan. A woman, experienced in kawal making, supervised the process. Leaves were collected at the flowering and fruiting stage. They were then cleaned of all impurities, such as flower petals and leaves of other plants. All worms, insects, or insect-damaged leaves were removed. The leaves were then pounded in a wooden mortar until they formed a paste, without loss ofjuice. The leaf paste was packed tightly, with the hands, in an earthenware jug (capacity 30 liters) previously buried in a pit in the ground in a cool, shaded place. Only the neck of the jug was above ground level. The surface of the packed leaf paste was covered with a pile of twisted green sorghum leaves, weighted down with clean stones. The jug (called zeer) was then covered with a suitable lid and sealed with mud. Every 3 days the zeer was opened, the now dried sorghum leaves removed and the fermenting paste hand-mixed, crushing the material between the fingers. The leaf paste was then repacked, fresh green sorghum leaves used to replace the old yellow ones and the zeer resealed. Samples for pH determination were taken at the time of mixing. After an incubation period of 15 days, the kawal matured and was taken out, cut into small irregular balls and was sundried on a raised shelf or platform for 5 days. The dried kawal balls were then ready fo consumption as food in the form of stew.” Hamid A. Dirar, “Kawal, Meat Substitute from Fermented Cassia obtusifolia Leaves,” in Economic Botany, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1984).