Banana
Banana plants include several species in the genus Musa known for their long, starchy fruits. Originally from India, Southeast Asia, and Sahul, humans spread them across the world centuries ago. The bland yellow variety known as the Cavendish spread furthest due to its ability to travel well, becoming a major staple across the world in the final centuries of civilization, but nearly all of these trees had the exact same genetic code and required intensive human intervention to propagate. With the collapse of civilization and the intensive techniques used on ancient banana plantations, the familiar Cavendish banana has become much rarer. Instead, bananas in the Fifth World come in a wide variety of shapes, sizes, and colors, from red, pink, purple or black; from soft dessert bananas like the ancient Cavendish to the firmer cooking bananas (sometimes called “plantains”); and an even wider selection of wild varieties.
#Human relationship
People of the Fifth World enjoy dessert bananas raw, as one would any raw fruit. They also use the trees for fiber and the leaves to eat on or to wrap meat in. They sometimes ferment the fruits to make banana wine or (if adding a grain for yeast) banana beer.
People also use the sturdy, water-resistant leaves of the plant for thatching roofs, as ponchos or umbrellas on rainy days, and as plates to eat off of.
As banana peels have anti-fungal and antimicrobial properties, some people in the Fifth World — particularly those living in heavily contaminated areas — dry the peels, grind them up, and use them to filter water. This has particular utility with regard to heavy metal contamination.
#Banana People
To truly focus on their relationship with bananas, a community must commit itself to gardening and the village life that entails. Bananas can shape a community in a number of unique ways, though. Some examples include:
- Growing bananas generally requires swidden cultivation. While not necessarily unsustainable, this technique can easily fall out of balance in a disastrous way. Communities in the Fifth World who use swidden cultivation often have a number of ways in which they strictly control reproduction, including a variety of methods of birth control. These communities place special emphasis on monitoring the health of the forest and ensuring that it properly regenerates. When you find bananas growing wild in the jungle far from any garden, these communities often insist you’ve found the ruins of some village that became too large, burned the forest around it more quickly than it could regenerate, and died off.
- Many communities plant “banana circles,” a guild built around a central banana plant, with a more delicate plant like taro, cassava, or sweet potato growing beneath under the protection of the banana’s leaves, and another plant like lemongrass that keeps away insects. These circles make excellent use of compost. Cultivating these banana circles often becomes a central metaphor for such a community. The use of compost illustrates a larger principle that nothing goes to waste, while the cooperation and relationships between the plants in the guild often provide a rubric for social relationship. Some communities may even form sodalities around each member of the guild. Members of the banana society usually pride themselves on their ability to endure hardship in order to protect or shelter the rest of the community. Members of the society built around the staple root crops beneath — often taro, cassava, or sweet potato — might dedicate themselves to horticulture, home repair, childrearing, or some other understated yet essential practice in supporting the community. Members of the society built around the plant that repels insects (usually lemongrass) often focus on medicine and healing. Sometimes they also take on a magical or apotropaic mission of warding off bad luck, too.
- Banana cultivation often serves as the basis for Big Man economies, with social entrepreneurs offering favors, gifts, and help freely, then collecting on them all at once to gather together a store of bananas that no one person could ever assemble on one’s own and using it to throw an enormous party. The size and scale of these parties become the arena in which these entrepreneurs compete for status. The community often warns these Big Men of the stories of the Banana Republics of old, when presidents and prime ministers would call in favors from across the entire forest, or up and down the whole watershed, and throw parties bigger and more spectacular than anything the Biggest Man today could dream of. Often, the Americans (who appear in these stories like the fickle gods of ancient mythologies) would prop up one of these presidents and help him throw his party, but then they would grow tired of him and cast him down, to his own ruin and the ruin of all those around them. These stories serve as warnings to the aspiring Big Man, that if he grows too powerful, the Americans may come for him, too.
- Across India, and in regions where many Hindu climate refugees settled, the banana has held a place of deep religious significance for centuries. This continues into the Fifth World, with Hindu and Hindu-descended communities worshiping banana trees as their ancestors did. In particular, Bengali people have long worshiped Kola Bou, the Banana Bride, as part of the elaborate Durga Puja festival. As climate change flooded Bangladesh, Bengali climate refugees had an outsized influence on newly-habitable places like Antarctica. They brought bananas with them and, as they cultivated the plants in new lands, taught other climate refugees from elsewhere to honor them as they did. Thus, even communities not descended directly from Bengalis, if they have a close relationship with bananas, may throw festivals suspiciously similar to Durga Puja, or ritually honor a Banana Bride that seems to closely resemble Kola Bou.
- A community descended from or influenced by modern-day Thai, Cambodian, or Lao people could develop a female scout tradition inspired by the Nang Tani, a female spirit who haunts banana trees. This secret society, open only to women, devotes itself to protecting banana trees and avenging women whom men have harmed. The members vow to uphold this responsibility both in life and afterward, making it a sisterhood of the living and the dead.