On an afternoon stroll along the Ala Wai Canal in Honolulu, Hawaii, I picked up frangipani flowers and put them in my hair. It is their scent that makes them famous – it is the deep, rich smell of the tropics, a fragrant memory of warmth and lush vegetation.
I first met frangipani in the form of incense sticks. Burning them was a ritual in my university dorm in England. I keep the ritual with me to this day. The smell of the incense signals that the weekend is here.
As I walked along the canal, I was surprised that I recognised so many of the trees and flowers. They were the same ones that I knew from Jamaica. Now, Hawaii and Jamaica are on opposite sides of the world, separated by 8,000 kilometres of salt water. So why did they have the same flowers?
The frangipani trees are about 20 metress tall. The flowers can be pink, red or white. The trees were planted in rows on both sides of the Ala Wai Canal, providing shade and beauty. The white flowers had a egg-yoke yellow centre. I paused under one tree to watch a flock of Black-crowned Herons hanging about, some on the banks, some on a branch and some in the water. They ignored me.
When I think of frangipani I think of the hippie trail and south east Asia. The flowers and the incense are so wedded to the region that they are a staple in religious rituals. The hippies – White travellers in search of cheap adventure and bliss via drugs and myths of empire – brought the sticks back to Europe.
Frangipani is Asian in the marketing of the flowers, incense and perfume. The trees are planted outside temples and graveyards. It is a culural symbol of imortality in some countries. And yet, frangapani it is not native to Asia at all. Frangapani is from my part of the world. It is native to the Caribbean and tropical America, from Mexico all the way south.
Frangipani is another window into the legacies of empire and colonialism – this time at the ecological level. This is encoded in the common English name and scientific name of the plant. The English name is derived from that of a French-Italian perfume maker in the 1600s.
The scientific name of the plant is Plumeria. It honours another French man who was a noted plant collector, in the 1700s, specialising in plants from the Caribbean. The imperial plant collectors were not doing it for the beauty of the plants or for the scientific knowledge. Their main concern was how much money they could make from the exotic-to-them species.
Plant collectors were part of the bio-prosepecting of empire and colonialism. In my part of the world, that was twinned with Indigenous genocide and Black enslavement.
Frangipani, a Caribbean plant, spread around the tropical world in the ships of empire. It arrived in Asia via the French, Spanish, British and Dutch colonialism. It is so established there that is is naturalised. The white and yellow frangipani is the national flower of Laos. Frangipani is good example of the global scale of ecological colonialism.
I remembered the frangapani tree in Zambia. At that time, I thought the plant was native to there. It too arrived in Africa via the ships of empire and slavery. I used to collect the deep pink flowers for my room. The heady scent. The taste and touch of our bodies pleasing each other. Along the canal walk in Hawaii, I filled my pockets with frangapani flowers. Back in the hotel I floated them them in a small bowl. The smell evoked childhood memories of Jamaica. And the feel of the one who loved me in Zambia.
© Jacqueline L. Scott. You can support the blog here.
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