The Celebration of Mango Dreaming

My partner and I had a restaurant for ten years. Each menu had a theme that celebrated some person, event or feature of the local landscape. This meant that our dishes had some very peculiar names, but people (said they) loved the prose poems on the back of the menu that reflected on the theme. This is one of them.


The Celebration of Mango Dreaming
It was that moment of the day when reptiles and nocturnal mammals are about to change the guard, so to speak, and the landscape’s potential for initiating the unexpected can be felt in the air. Fatima, a child of no more than seven or eight, gazed purposefully up at a mango whose changing colour had, for several days, stoked her desire. But a sudden flapping of wings and clumsy crash landing that unfolded as a flying fox, hanging upside down beside her prize, regarding it with its own anticipation, shot bolts of outrage through the cheated child.

“No!” she shouted. “Go away!”
“What you mad about, girl?” The voice came from behind.
She spun around and saw an old woman holding a rifle. “Oh please!” she begged. “Shoot that flying fox. It’s about to eat my mango!”
“Can’t help you girl,” replied the dark stranger. “I’m Kambi. Flying fox my Dreaming.”
“What do you mean?”
“It would be like killing myself. Everyone who come from here got their Dreaming. Some like me are Flying Fox. Others Fresh Water Cray. Everyone something. Our Dreaming tell us who we are.”
Fatima tidied her hijab and asked, “What’s my dreaming?”
“You come from here?”
“My parents brought me from Lebanon. But I come from here now.”
“Maybe you Mango Dreaming.”
“What do mangoes dream about?”
“Their Dreaming a Journey. Also finding roots. They from somewhere else, but now like they always been here.”
“Does that mean I shouldn’t eat them?”
“Can’t say. You find out.”
“But how?”
“You look out!” shouted the old woman, waving her rifle at the flying fox.
The startled child turned to see the flying fox flapping away – and the mango falling!

Gasping with surprise she leaped forward with cupped hands focusing for what seemed like eternity as the mango tumbled. She manoeuvred to catch it, feeling as though she was guiding it to her hands. Though she had neither the time nor words to think about it, she felt as though the mango had awoken from its dreaming, challenging her to know it with an intimacy she would never otherwise have guessed possible, and, thereby, to know herself in a way that she could never have organised by choice. Though, at first, these two aspects seemed vague and separate, she felt their interdependence grow as the mango came closer. When it reached her fingers she felt her identity with it and the tree it had fallen from; with the soil it was rooted in, and the water that fed it; with the air it exchanged gasses with, and the sun that drove its chemistry – indeed, with the very universe itself.

She bellowed with the power of recognition, and then, trembling with astonishment, she held the mango out in front of her, and gasped in awe: “This is my body!”

Fatima turned to share the moment with the old woman who had said that she was Kambi. But she was nowhere to be seen. She caught sight of the flying fox, far away but circling back, and said: “You are Kambi, aren’t you!” The flying fox replied by spreading its wings so wide that it became the night, and Fatima, the refugee, grew into a mango tree with roots deep in the earth where she had become a mango by entering the Dreaming.