Explaining Pictures to a Red Poinsettia

(a Christmas play)

(It is Christmas Eve. A sparely furnished apartment. A man walks in with a potted poinsettia in his hands. He places it on a table and sits across it, looking at it intently. After a few seconds of silence, he starts speaking to it).

My aunt Elena had a green thumb. Under her care, all plants would grow big, lush and healthy. It was a special gift she had. One day I thought I discovered her secret: I overheard her in the balcony of my grandmother’s apartment, while watering their plants, talking to each of them as if they were old friends. “Look at you! What’s up with you? What are you doing? And you, you look so much better today.”

You might be interested in knowing that in the early 1900s, the Bengali polymath Sir Jadadish Chandra Bose held that plants could respond to external stimuli, including speech. He was never able to prove it, but he was one of the first scientists to consider the way in which we could, or should communicate with the natural world. I also heard of an Australian ecologist, Monica Gagliano, who studies plant intelligence, sought to show that corn plants emit sounds.

I am not only an inept green thumb (rather, I am what some people would call brown thumb), who can barely keep a cactus alive. I also can’t bring myself to speak to a plant, but I am attempting to do that with you today. I do think we communicate nonverbally with things and places. I converse with my neighborhood daily by walking around it. It is important to remember that words are only artificial attempts to describe things, and many times those names are only remotely, if not accidentally, attached to them.

For example, my neighborhood in Brooklyn, Carroll Gardens, which I trek around daily, is named after Charles Carroll, who was one of the signers of the US Declaration of Independence on behalf of Maryland. He helped defend the area during the battle of Long Island during the Revolutionary War. One of my friends told me that 20 years ago or so when she was about to move to New York and was looking for an apartment, a close friend named Carol recommended her to move to downtown Brooklyn; she took the F train and got off at the Carroll stop because of her friend’s name; to this day she still lives a few blocks away from that stop, thanks only to that spur-of-the moment word association. These days the neighborhood is decorated with Christmas decorations everywhere, with some of the Italian homes particularly ornamented in baroque excess of lights, inflatable Santas and Rudolfs, and of course Christmas trees. Should he be here to see them, Charles Carroll would be perplexed to see this collection of blocks named after him. The words Carroll and carol (thinking of that other Charles who wrote A Christmas Carol) merge in a Christmas medley.

I happen to love distant connections between words and things. For the longest time I associated Tartar sauce with the Tartars, imagining that the sauce was not just a mayonnaise-type condiment but a secret recipe invented in the mythical empire of Central Asia. Less mythical, and more actual, is the relationship that you have with your own name, and the fact that both you and I happen to come from the same place, each with their untransmittable self.

You probably know that your original name is cuetlaxōchitl, from the Nahuatl. It is not a particularly dignified name, because it literally means “poop flower”, as the Aztecs observed that your kind would grow from “residues or soil”, such as areas where there were a lot of bird droppings. You happen to be associated with a lot of urban legends: in 1919, a 2-year-old reportedly died after eating one of your leaves; thus, the incorrect notion that you were toxic to animals and humans spread around the world (you can still make a cat sick should it ingest you, but you can rest assured that you can’t kill it on your own). In fact, the Aztecs used you as traditional medicine to reduce fever and to treat inflammation and some skin conditions, and even for breast milk stimulation.

The association between you and Christmas dates back to a legend involving a poor girl named Pepita who, on one Christmas Eve, brought an offering to church to baby Jesus consisting in a few weeds and herbs she had gathered. During mass, the bouquet miraculously flourished into the bright red flowers that you are known for; thus, it received the name for which we still know you in Mexico, Nochebuena.

The indignities regarding your name, however, unfortunately continued. It involved the first US ambassador to Mexico from 1825 to 1830, Robert Poinsett. He aligned himself with the Mexican federalists who argued for a decentralized government, and his meddling in Mexican affairs eventually led to his recall back into the US, not before creating for the first time the image of “Yankee imperialism” and initiating the deterioration of US/Mexico relations that would indirectly lead eventually to the independence of Texas in 1836 and the US/Mexico War. Most don’t know that your American name is given after him, as he introduced you into the United States in the 1820s. So, the benign name of Nochebuena (Christmas Eve) which is really the most important part of the holiday in Mexico because of our dinner, the family gathering, and the misa del gallo at midnight, was replaced by the name of a despised figure that represented US imperialism.

But just as names are insufficient and poor tools, I have to use them to describe three images to you. I will describe them to you as acts, which is how we used to tell jokes in middle school in Mexico: Primer acto, Segundo acto, and tercer acto, then the question, “¿cómo se llamó la obra?” (“how was the play titled?”) which would then bring the punchline.

So here is a play about distant meanings, but without a funny punchline. I asked an AI image generator to make the images for me, based on my descriptions. All of them originate from my childhood Christmas memories in 1980s Mexico City.

The first act is of a large hangar, somewhere between a warehouse and a factory. It is located on a small street in colonia Nápoles in Mexico City, its large metal doors often open. Inside one can see workers soldering, building structures, all day. It would be hard to know what they are doing unless one is able to peek all the way inside the space. There one would find the holiday decorations produced to decorate the city, such as the big wreaths, banners, lights and festive characters that would adorn the city’s large avenues like Reforma as well as the Centro Histórico. One might want to think of the factory’s workers as real-life elves, spending all year round assembling and coloring these decorations, all of them artists in a way and all of them anonymous, to place these objects that would likely be thrown away at the end of the season, only to start a new series of large-scale ornaments again in the new year.

The second act is the one of a dry fruit and nut store during Christmas time. The store has an array of Middle Eastern spices and fruits, from where customers can buy colación (a term generally referred to the candy that would be put inside a piñata for a posada). On offer are colorful Jordan almonds, as well as dry fruit and nuts. The image might feel a bit incongruous for the season, although the Middle East connection to Christmas is obvious due to Biblical narrative, but the idea of fruits, candy and nuts as part of the traditional colación might have to do with the exotic fruits and nuts common to Persia in the 1^st century, which is the region where the Magi ostensibly originated.

The third act is garden at night, at the end of a posada— a traditional Christmas party in a house in Mexico City. The year is circa 1984. Remnants of a piñata can be seen, surrounded with color strings, a few scattered pieces of candy, and the color lights hanging around the ivy-covered walls of the garden. The image can’t capture sounds, but if it did, there would be distant echoes of a party that is winding down. There is a scent of cinnamon in the chilly air, perhaps stemming from the café de olla being served; there is cigarette smell as well as the faint scent of gunpowder, a mixture of potassium nitrate, sulfur and charcoal, used to create the fireworks. Those intertwined sweet and smoky smells are essential to understand this image.

What is the title of the play, you might ask?

The three images are related to each other in that they are representations of representations of representations: that is, my memory of an event, reproduced by a machine, that attempts to describe images of celebrations based on reconstructing things that supposedly happened two thousand years ago, but that we culturally adopt and adapt so that they make sense for us. And those cultural adaptations are themselves in the past, for me, the carrier of those memories, to reconstruct them; a hopeless task.

But there, in that very futility of full reconstruction, lies a unique, bittersweet pleasure. The reconstructed images are not about truth, but about feeling emotionally connected to an ongoing narrative.

We humans are, like you, vessels that carry the memory of their making. I am also aware that the memory images that are important to each of us personally are not important to anyone else. They are just like the present, every day routine, which in general really is not that important nor interesting when it is lived; it is the way in which it might be carried forward and imagined (read: falsely remembered with embellished details) by other nostalgic minds, in an idealized, more colorful version, one that likely will have nothing to do with us. You and I are like that Charles Carroll, unaware of the future fate of our names. Which is all for the better. I am comforted by being part of this continuum and in the possibility of survival in the creative and affective memories of others.