ANIMAL VEGETABLE MINERAL

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by Sihle Sogaula 

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Before there were names, there were textures. Before taxonomy, there was mess. Then, things simply began to gather. Accumulate. Not in rows, but in clumps. Not in categories, but in moods. Hair beside plastic. Fibre beside flesh. Fat beside pigment. A pugilist from the ’50s. A fruit bag stiff with sun and memory. The parquet floor of some unknowable room—part bourgeois fantasy, part imperial leftover—buckling slightly, not from age exactly, but from attention. The way a thing starts to warp once too many people have tried to make meaning of it.

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The first classification may have been a gesture. A finger pointing: that one bleeds. That one is edible. That one can be used. That one must be owned. Then, someone said the word “census” and meant: how many. Someone said “farm” and meant: hold them still. Someone said “map” and meant: stay, belong here, don’t stray. Breed well. Die usefully.

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The body came after. Or perhaps it had always been there, just not yet visible to itself. It moved in both lines and circles. It traced territory with its feet, then forgot. It was mistaken for a tool. Or for meat. It carried what it could not name—memory first, then the days that disappeared without leaving a mark, then skin.

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The oldest archive was hunger. The next one was labour. That ancient density—before inheritance hardened into border. Before the first index. Before the cow was tagged. Before the cactus became a fence. Before the hole in the floor remembered being a floor. Before the shed took shape—when it was still just bone and shadow, a scaffolding of purpose pitched toward enclosure. A future of gates, hooves, fences.

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Or, it began, perhaps, with a fruit. 

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Spiny, vivid. Planted as boundary, left to sprawl. A hedge made of hunger. A lure. A trick. It offered small sweetness, then bit back. You took it into your mouth and it bloomed thorns. Its gift was aftertaste. A violence that lingered. A memory that stained. And then, it returned—green, gleaming, armed. An empire plant. 

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Later, the land was covered. Not protected, not preserved—just covered. With plastic. A bubble thick with looking. The kind that traps heat, the kind that does not breathe. The kind used in haste, in the name of hygiene or efficiency. It clung to the soil like forgetting. Not fatal all at once, but cumulative. Residue, seepage. A slow undoing. Still, the land remembered. Not in documents or declarations, but in the grain of its surface. The pressure left by hoof and boot. The weight of footsteps that came to claim. And then came again. With new names each time. Each one offered as correction. As order. As fact.

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But memory gathers in other ways. Not linear. Not precise. Somewhere, there is a pattern. Not geometric, not random. A rhythm formed by touch. A choreography of decay and insistence - historical wound repeated until it resembled order. A constellation of loss. A symmetry made from cowhide and time. Elsewhere, a stamp pretends it has nothing to do with power. Boxers blur into pixels. Livestock becomes code. Fruit becomes fence. And yet—nothing is only what it seems. Even the smallest gesture is doubled. A print is a portal. A collage of cloth, a ledger. A tag, a verdict.

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And sometimes, what returns is not meaning.
Just texture.
Just a glitch.
A murmur.
A story told sideways.

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What if the animal was not metaphor, but ancestor—stripped of its kinship, drafted into symbol, yet returning still? What if the vegetable was not sustenance, but resistance—growing in fences meant to contain it, bearing fruit where no fruit was asked for? What if the mineral was not the last layer, but the first witness—compressed beneath names, borders, and extractions, yet refusing to be forgotten?

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Maybe it is simpler than that.
Maybe its only allegiance is to the thing that resists language.
The thing that smuggles itself through the cracks.
That sulks in the corners.
That leans toward you with something in its hands—not offering it, not withholding it.
Just showing you.