(1)
I marveled at a tree with hybrid branches at the farm, on its right side, there were branches of almond blossoms, and on its left, the branches of another fruit. My mother loved to propagate trees, she would graft small branch cuttings on the mother tree to grow alongside each other, was she trying to validate our hybrid identity by doing this?
I adore almonds. They stand out on their own, yet also blend harmoniously with other ingredients, whether paired with other nuts or incorporated into pastries. Given the choice, an almond croissant is always my go-to selection at any coffee shop. I first tried it at a Starbucks in Jeddah, and it was love at first bite, it became my excuse to frequent a café that I otherwise hated. After that, it became the most prominent evaluation criterion for any bakery I visit: the amount of filling in it, the sweetness of the almond butter in it, the tenderness of the almonds on top of the croissant, and the powdered sugar on top. I removed the cafés from my favorites list after an unpleasant experience with almonds, and I also ended the relationship with those allergic to almonds, as I thought it was an indicator of disharmony that would only worsen.
Cracking open almonds was a prominent ritual during family gatherings, often accompanying cozy winter evenings. The only thing missing to complete the scene was a steaming cup of ginger milk. Almonds were more of a joyful ritual than a therapeutic cure, as was the case with the Iranian writer Azar Nafisi, who treats them as an influential addition of the ‘trouble-dealing meal.’ In her memoir about the Iranian revolution, Reading Lolita in Tehran, Nafisi described her method for coping with exhaustion. Whenever she felt completely worn out, she would go straight to the refrigerator, scoop out some coffee ice cream, and pour a bit of iced coffee over it. Then, she would crush some almonds with her teeth and scatter the pieces over the unusual concoction before sitting down to eat.
The almond trees on our farm were sporadic and few in number. We could not do as did Al-Mu’tamid ibn Abbad, the prince of Al-Andalus. When his consort, E’etemad Al-Rumaikiyya, expressed her fondness for the snowy landscape on a winter day and wished she could see it more often, Al-Mu’tamid ordered his men to plant entire groves of almond trees with their white blossoms on Mount Cordoba. The idea was that when the flowers bloomed in abundance, the sight from afar would resemble a snow-covered mountain, delighting his beloved’s eyes.
(2)
Throughout the ages, talks about nature have been one of the repetitive themes of poetry and philosophy, and with our excessive talks of trees and drawing inspiration from them regarding the cycles of life, trees remain standing tall and giving for as long as they exist, and what remains are those who contemplate and admire them. When it comes to describing them, Mahmoud Darwish has an opinion that may not apply to the rest of nature, but it certainly applies to what I am talking about now, he sees that “To describe an almond blossom no encyclopedia of flowers is any help to me, no dictionary.” Why do you think so, Mahmoud? It is because “Words carry me off to snares of rhetoric that wound the sense and praise the wound they have made. Like a man telling a woman her own feeling.” And with that, the question remains: “How can the almond blossom shine in my own language, when I am but an echo?”
And yet, he continues with his attempts, describing the almond’s beaming blossoms as:
“It is translucent, like liquid laughter that has sprouted
on boughs out of the shy dew . . .
light as a musical phrase. . .
weak as the glance of a thought that peeks out from our fingers
as in vain we write it . . .
dense as a line of verse not arranged alphabetically.”
Mahmoud Darwish is aware of the difficulty of capturing almond trees and their luminous blossoms in words, but I was puzzled by his hesitation towards the means he deemed most appropriate for the task, in his printed Diwan (collection of poems) we find his need to visit the state of unconsciousness, and when he recited his poem, he used butterflies for the task, to trace them all the way to the almond blossoms:
“To describe an almond blossom,
I (butterflies) need to make visits to the unconscious,
which guides me to affectionate names
hanging on trees.”
The whiteness of almond blossom in its perfect purity is the ideal that white aspires to and the best place to embody the color: “passions of whiteness in a description of the almond blossom.”
Writing, with its linguistic and cognitive features, cannot describe the beauty of almond blossoms because they are the epitome of whiteness. Mahmoud points with some irony to the rigid rhetorical templates and the familiar analogies that compare the white flowers with snow and cotton: “Neither snow nor cotton / One wonders / how it rises above things and names.
The poet’s questions in this poem express the sublime reality of almond blossoms, as he realizes, despite his experience, that almond blossoms always keep their secrets, which are far from being revealed.
Mahmoud did not describe the almond flowers accurately and kept going in circles around them in this poem: ‘To Describe an Almond Blossom’ and the title of the book Almond Blossoms and Beyond closely resembled it. Yet, the trees remain waiting for someone to pay attention to them and give them their deserved admiration.
The relationship between poetry and almonds is not a relationship of description and fleeting presence, but it is more firmly established. The French poet Aloysius Bertand, who published the first ever collection of prose poetry says that “Poetry is like an almond tree: its leaves are fragrant, and its fruits are bitter.” However, if pens, poems, and words fail to describe an almond blossom as Mahmoud Darwish argues, let us go to brushes, colors, and paintings, for they might succeed to do what words failed to do.
(3)
After living in Paris, and getting exposed to art schools, as well as the influence of the impressionist movement and Japanese art, the Dutch artist, Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) went to live in the south of France where he was welcomed by the lush orchards at the beginning of their spring blooming, which made him “in a fury of work as the trees are in blossom and I wanted to do [paint] a Provence orchard of tremendous gaiety,” in his own words, written in a letter to his brother, Theo.
Out of many trees, Almond trees were the most striking to Van Gogh. In them, he saw what he did not see in other trees, which prompted him to take an almond tree branch, and put it inside the house that he could not leave often because of the falling snow. In the house, he began to admire it and paint it in two small paintings: Sprig of Flowering Almond in a Glass and Blossoming Almond Branch in a Glass with a Book.
Did he start with the lighter-colored painting, with the red line in its center, a reminder to Van Gogh of his limits, or a sign of the financial hardships that he must not forget relying on Theo? Or did he start with the painting of the book, with its content unknown to us, and was the book a daily accompaniment to him, or was it only used as an artistic element? Or was he painting the blossoming almond branches in search of hope and solace in his dire times of loneliness and estrangement?
The delicate brush strokes in both paintings, and the pastel shades of the flowering almonds reflected the early signs of spring. After the blossoms flowered, Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo: “The weather here is changeable, often windy with turbulent skies, but the almond trees are beginning to flower everywhere.”
Two years after he settled down in the south, far away from his brother, he received the news of the birth of his nephew, and the decision to make him his namesake, so Van Gogh decided to paint him something in celebration. In a letter to his brother, he wrote: “How glad I was when the news came… I should have greatly preferred him to call the boy after Father, of whom I have been thinking so much these days, instead of after me; but seeing it has now been done, I started right away to make a picture for him, to hang in their bedroom, big branches of white almond blossom against a blue sky.”
This painting was unlike any of Van Gogh’s other paintings. The big branches from the almond tree floating against the blue sky filled the canvas, extending past the painting’s frame, like he was wishing for his nephew to have a long and limitless life.
Van Gogh was clearly influenced by the Japanese’s floral arrangement designs, and that is evident in his almond tree paintings. The Japanese do not care about the abundance of flowers in their arrangements as much as they care for its elegance, the emptiness and blank spaces only add to the beauty of what is present, which is something we learn from the branches of almond blossom buds and blooming flowers; a still life that resembles the art of Japanese floral arrangements in its simplicity and hopefulness, as well as in its use of negative spaces. We find this influence in the painting that was gifted to Theo through the dark lines outlining the branches, which is a feature that Van Gogh admired in Japanese floral studies that sometimes depict a part of a bamboo stalk in an empty space.
Almond blossoms celebrate life, and the beautiful insignificant moments, which is what prompted Van Gogh to pay the utmost attention care while painting almond blossoms and his attention to details that you can notice upon close inspection and admiration, while it celebrates life as a whole, and the limitless freedom that does not restrict the tree’s branches from stretching and growing wherever they may.
Van Gogh’s Almond Blossoms reflects his great aspiration, as he continues to reach for the sky, in his dedication to mastering his work, which is what we find from the angle that the painting was depicted, not from the front, but rather from the point of view of somebody lying in the shade of the almond tree and admiring its appearance against the sky, a blend of white and the blue sky, like a blend of hope and purity.
(4)
Within the French borders, another artist fond of almonds was born, the French artist Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947), who, after studying law at the Sorbonne according to his father’s wishes, joined the Académie Julien private art school, and then apprenticed at the Paris School of Fine Arts until his name was written among the most important artists in France.
Sixty years after Gogh, Bonnard concluded his artwork collection with an almond tree painting. The lives of the artists could not have been more different. Van Gogh endured a wretched and impoverished existence, reliant on his brother’s support and largely unrecognized during his lifetime. In stark contrast, Bonnard enjoyed the privilege of international travels and the joys of marriage and artistic acclaim. Yet, both artists met tragic ends – Van Gogh died by suicide, while Bonnard’s lover took her own life upon learning of his marriage to another woman. Despite these divergent life experiences, the two shared several artistic commonalities. Both were drawn to painting nature, the color yellow, and, most significantly, the almond tree. Remarkably, however, the almond tree paintings of Van Gogh and Bonnard have not received the same recognition and attention from critics as their other acclaimed works, despite the paintings’ profound significance within the artists’ respective oeuvres.
Bonnard died in 1947, and the final words in his journal were: “I hope my paintings will endure without craquelure, I should like to present myself to the young painters of the year 2000 with the wings of a butterfly.” The last painting he painted was a flowering almond tree, as if it were his last breath to the field, his maximum effort, a way of putting out all his energy one final time, in making everything bloom at once, and in leaving without regrets, and without anything left inside of him.
Bonnard’s portrayal of the almond tree was not as precise or detailed as Van Gogh’s, but it was larger, and more flourished. In The Unexpected, the French poet Christian Bobin tells us that there are two ways to deal with death, as well as life: The first is to escape it by immersing ourselves in a professional experience, an idea, or some project. When it comes to the second way, we can accept it by paving the way for it and celebrating its rite of passage. No matter which method you choose, death, as mysterious as it is, will secretly pat us on the back in an isolated room. It will give us a glance, then it will throw us into the light of the world. This is how death is. While we wait for that fateful day, the best we can do is to make the transition easier for him in a way that leaves him with nothing to take with him, for by then we would have already given him everything. The ideal scenario would be for him to find nothing left between his fingers except the delicate petals of almond blossoms, as Bonnard depicted. Almond blossoms are truly beautiful in the eyes of a dying man. They are enchanting in the hands of one facing the end. They can truly touch the very heart of a man nearing his last moments.
Bobin asserts that there is a moment in painting when the painter knows that he has finished his painting. If you ask him why he chose that moment, you will not find any answer. All he would know is that he suddenly no longer wanted to make any changes to the painting, making it complete.
The painter and the painting part ways when they both are unable to offer anything to the other. When the painting becomes unable to feed the painter, the painter cannot feed it. The work of art is complete when the artist stands in front of his work, and suddenly knows that he will return to his loneliness, the eternal stillness of life. Bonnard was always trying to postpone this moment. On his deathbed, a friend suggested that he alter his Almond Tree in Blossom, he told him: there on the left is a condensed greenery that is out of place, cover it with touches of golden yellow. And on the same deathbed, he wrote to another friend about another of his paintings that was displayed in a Parisian gallery far away, he asked him to cover a green bird in the painting with a tan color. The painter stands before his painting, reluctant to make the finishing touches, always thinking of alterations to postpone the loneliness that awaits him.
The branches of an almond tree are thin and delicate. They cannot withstand rough handling or harsh treatment. They need care and consideration in picking their fruits to prevent breaking its branches. To admire this delicateness and fragility, one needs to be silent and tranquil, and that could be the reason that noisy languages fail to describe an almond blossom and why noisy people cannot admire them, and also the success of painting because art is an experience in silence, it does not care about speech, the process of drawing takes place in silence, and studying paintings requires silence.
(5)
Almonds have a big presence in the lives of Palestinians, not only in their cuisine, but in their names as well. It is also present in their writings, and what is documented about them, as well as the titles of their novels and poems, and even in their memoirs and biographies.
Nearing the end of his life, after he was driven to exhaustion after his diagnosis with cancer, he returned to his home, fulfilling his wish to die in the country that he betrayed— according to his words— by leaving. He returned to be among the almond trees, in the shadows of their branches where he spent his childhood, to be buried alongside them.
The Palestinian writer, Hussein Barghouthi wrote his final work and his memoir Among the Almond Trees to tell the story of a man who chose the almonds to be a witness to his struggle with life and its pains, and to be his companion of death and his last breath in poetry. This encounter of art, love, and death in one soul took us to a homeland where his destiny and life were buried, a picturesque mountainous area of Ramallah, where he first opened his eyes to the light at his birth, and where he closed his eyes to light for the last time. The Arabic title of the book translates directly to ‘I’ll be Among the Almonds’ indicating an excitement and haste in rushing towards them, instead of choosing words that indicate slowness and indifference. He chose almonds as a recognition of its eternity, as they represent the whiteness and pureness of the Palestinian spirit.
Mahmoud Darwish refrained from describing the blossoms, whereas Van Gogh considered the almond blossoms as an opening to life and hopefulness, on the contrary, Bonnard used the almonds to represent the end of life, and its message, while Hussein treated them as his eternal companion.
Hussein’s final book is a lengthy poem describing the almond blossoms, succeeding in what Mahmoud Darwish wished for: “If the writer succeeds in writing a passage— describing the almond blossom, the fog would have receded— from the hills, and the entire nation would chant; This is it! This is our national anthem!” He believed that writing creates and unites lands, showing the earth’s beauty and essence.
Hussein Barghouthi was buried among the almond trees according to his wishes, and at his resting place between the almond blossoms, his gravestone is engraved:
“If you visit me, I’ll be among the almonds
I was the distance between the falling rain
And the blossoming flowers
On a green hill under the rainbow
I will leave the depth of earth at night
A marble palm bearing the new moon like a goblet
So, bathe in the rivers
And wait for my return”
T1684
