A Leaf Through History: Plantations

On the eve of a nationwide lockdown, my wife and i packed everything we could, including our dog, and left our home in Kuala Lumpur.
Are we leaving for good, or is it temporary? We don’t know.
We chose to stay in the small town of Tangkak. Tangkak originally was a cluster of farms.
After we arrived, Malaysia declared emergency, as an excuse to safe us from the pandemic, but really, it’s just about power.
The lockdown and emergency makes me think of the Second World War.

Malaya was occupied by Japan, it was a time of great hardship.
They kept on printing money.
We called these, banana money, but they were no good to eat.
So people had nothing but tapioca they found in the wild to eat.
Eating too much tapioca made peoples’ legs became swollen like elephants’.
Since coming here, we discovered that there are many stories we can tell in plants, landscapes and plantations.
Not stories of economy or progress, but stories that are buried and related to us.
These plantations feed the hunger of the world, the hunger for more power.
This mindset continues unchanged in our lives despite the current situation now.