By Tal Shutkin
Pawpaw trees in Columbus, OH
The pawpaw, Ohio’s tropical fruit tree, grows in the understory along the Olentangy River, but feels out of place. Its broad leaves hide fist-sized fruits, like little green mangos that camouflage at the tops of flimsy trunks. The best way to find them is to give the trees a gentle shake. If a fruit falls out, it’s ready to eat. Otherwise, move on. Back home, slicing open a pawpaw presents a wonderful surprise. Instead of a single pit as one might expect, the sweet yellow pulp yields two neat rows of brown seeds resembling fava beans. It tastes like a pineapple banana smoothie with a gamey twist. In exchange for this early autumn harvest, timed conveniently to add a touch of doikayt—Yiddish for here-ness—to the fruit-filled Rosh Hashana festival, I like to plant the seeds. I keep them in a cool and moist hibernation for the winter, then wake them in the spring with a warm bath and bury them in soil: a few in deep pots on my porch, a few gifted to friends, and one or two scattered in the woods.
I feel an affinity for this strange tree, Magnoliales Annonaceae Asimina triloba, the only member of the Annonaceae family to exist outside of the tropics. It has thrived here in its temperate diaspora thanks to a multispecies network of communities beginning tens of thousands of years ago before the last glacial period when mastodons, giant sloths, and other now extinct megafauna carried the pawpaw’s oblong seeds in their bellies. Like many other species, pawpaw survived the glacial freeze in what biogeographers have called glacial refugia, areas sheltered enough to support viable habitat when much of the continent was covered by ice 1. But a major shift occurred about 11,000 years ago and the Holocene epoch brought markedly new conditions. As the climate became more temperate and stable and the glaciers retreated northward, animal and human newcomers helped to spread the isolated pawpaw throughout its modern range. As Donna Haraway writes, “the Holocene was the long period when refugia, places of refuge, still existed…to sustain reworlding in rich cultural and biological diversity.”2 A new world was forming, characterized by an interplay of culture and nature that left its impression on the landscape. To this day, one can still find an abundance of pawpaw groves around the mounds and structures left by Ohio’s first peoples.
In our current era of rapid change, this concept of refugia gains relevance beyond natural history. As political and climatic instability make life increasingly precarious, Haraway argues that “our job is…to cultivate with each other…epochs to come that can replenish refuge.” But writing from my Jewish perspective in the summer of 2024, I sense a warning. I watch as narratives concerning my own purported place of refuge are exposed in their contradictions and used nonetheless to justify the displacement and murder of countless Palestinians. I insist that an alternative, a replenishing of collective refuge, is not only possible, but imperative. Whether for a species being outpaced by shifting climatic biomes or for a stateless people, identifying and cultivating the conditions that uplift life in its rich difference is a fundamental challenge of our increasingly troubled times. Thankfully, we have examples to follow. This essay is my attempt to learn something about refuge from pawpaw.
The idea of doikayt, the here-ness I’d like to cultivate in part through engaging with pawpaw, offers an alternative to the nationalist narrative that pits my own safety and cultural development against others’. Originally put to practice by the Jewish Labor Bund, a popular diasporist movement that emerged in eastern Europe during the turn of the 20th century, doikayt posits that through solidarity with local liberatory struggles, Jews can achieve safety to flourish wherever they live. Daniel Boyarin borrows this Bundist expression to define diaspora, proposing it “as a kind of cultural situation in which a group of people…are doubly located in their doikayt—here and now—but also culturally and affectively bound to similar collectives that are in other places, and perhaps other times as well.” The concept and practice of doikayt is therefore more concerned with making home than it is with claiming a homeland. Instead of asking where, it emphasizes the question of how one ought to live alongside neighbors, echoing what Grace Lee Boggs describes as the radical potential of simply “staying put.”
Credit: Years of Radical Dreaming: Jewish Calendar Project
Incorporating pawpaw into my annual calendar has helped me cultivate a sense of doikayt in Ohio. But while pawpaw has contributed to my own diasporic consciousness, I’ve learned that it is enmeshed in numerous other diasporas that bridge both time and space. Following advice from Anishinaabe author Patty Krawek, considering the pawpaw’s name helps to illuminate these ties3. While the word pawpaw emerged first among settlers who confused the fruit with papaya, the Latin name, Asimina, derives fromha’siminikiisfwa, the name given by the Shawnee and Myaamia people of what is now Ohio and Indiana. Displaced from these homelands after the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Shawnee diaspora, now centered in Oklahoma, retains a connection to pawpaw despite the fruit’s reluctance to grow in the local soil and climate4. Indeed, the month on the Shawnee calendar roughly corresponding to September shares a name with this traditional autumn fruit, offering an annual reminder of a distant home.
Simultaneously, pawpaw’s strangeness to central Ohio suggests a more ancient diaspora. Out of place and isolated from its tropical cousins, pawpaw has always depended on strange and indeterminate encounters, networks of kin which make life possible far from home and generate continuous surprise, like bringing a tropical seed from the belly of a mastodon to my kitchen table. Pawpaw exists in a world entirely strange to its clade but has found refuge, made home, and established itself in an ambiguous space between guest and host. Their tropical physiology tells us that they don’t belong, but their seasonal phenology assures that they’ve committed to their new home. Exemplifying the spatiotemporal tension described by Boyarin, pawpaw resembles a diasporic culture and seems to model doikayt in practice.
Thinking with pawpaw in this way helps shed the negative connotations surrounding diaspora generally, and Jewish diaspora specifically, that have been pushed by antisemites throughout history and that have become internalized in Zionist ideology. Authors like Boyarin and Avi Shlaim argue that the condition of exile from home, an essential component of Jewish cosmology, is not an historical defect to be “negated” (as is a stated goal of the Zionist movement), but a materially and philosophically potent feature of our existence.5,6 These authors suggest that having weathered episodic tragedy over thousands of years, Jewish culture persisted and evolved not despite, but because of its sprawling and decentralized diaspora. Far from a pathology, diaspora offers a productive and constantly mutating entanglement tethering distant places and times. Haraway compares such entanglements to “string figure” games like cat’s cradle, where new forms emerge through the shifting of nodes and the tensions between them. Forever reconfiguring, string figures afford the possibility to “redo ways of living and dying attuned to still possible finite flourishing…” Diaspora has allowed us this constant redoing, with each iteration enabling new formulations for living well.
Pawpaw trees in Columbus, OH
Through this lens, diaspora transforms from a state of precarity to a state of refuge, a perspective that perhaps was shared by my own Ashkenazi relatives in their eastern European diasporic homes. According to folklore preserved at the Jewish Museum of Poland, during the time of the first Crusades when Yiddish speaking communities travelled east out of central Europe, they came upon a forest and a sign reading “Po-Lin,” which they recognized for the biblical Hebrew words meaning “Here-Rest.” At this point, the Jews stopped moving, and made a home where they would remain for the next 1000 years. Notably, the words announcing their newfound refuge were not interpreted through the vernacular Yiddish, but through the ceremonial language of Hebrew, the one connecting the people to a global diaspora. Even still, the forest of eastern Europe welcomed them like kin.
I wanted to know how others would engage with this concept, so facilitating a workshop with a cohort of Livable Futures graduate students, I offered an icebreaker: Locate yourself in diaspora (loosely defined), what grounds you at home, what ties you to those who are distant in time and space? The group, mostly MFA students, returned various thoughts, but a consistent theme emerged: plants. A plant is a common housewarming gift. It helps us establish roots here, while constantly reminding of the giver, the friend or loved one who might be far away. Foraging, gardening, and participating in local agriculture were also offered as ways that plants have helped members of our group cultivate a sense of home during graduate school, a period of life when it is common to feel isolated and rootless. Taken alongside my ancestors’ mythologized arrival in the forests of Europe, these reflections attest to the latent diasporism of our plant “companion species”. Plants are rooted, of course, but also entwined in vast and complex ecosystems. While teaching us to make a home here, many plants simultaneously and continuously reference a distant there.
The more I research pawpaw, the more I appreciate its fulfillment of this role. Though in many ways a taxonomic guest here in Ohio, pawpaw is bound up with the Indigenous ways of life that characterize this part of the world and has carved out reciprocal relationships with the human, animal, insect, and plant communities that define this land. In place of the homogenizing, terraforming, and possessive relations to land and its inhabitants that seem to dominate American and Israeli cultures and help define them as settler colonial societies, pawpaw—by exemplifying doikayt—offers solidarity and kinship as an alternative strategy for cultivating refuge. I see in pawpaw that it is possible to be a good neighbor, to engage in ways that enrich and deepen complex and varied relations, a process that Krawek calls “becoming kin” and that is guided by what Martiniquan poet Aimé Césaire described as a universalism “rich with all that is particular.”7 I hear Césaire’s words echoing in Haraway’s refugia, places of “reworlding in rich diversity.” No matter where we find ourselves, pawpaw reminds that we are always one of many guests, offering a humbler conception of home as refuge, made richer as it grows in its messiness.
But my goal is not to distract. While I write, bombs continue to fall over Gaza and the remaining glaciers retreat to ever more remote slopes. As Walter Benjamin famously described, history moves onward, hurling a pile of debris at our feet,8 and in the wreckage, we witness a proliferation of refugees—political and ecological, human and otherwise—but too few prospects for refuge.9 Amidst such devastation, as we take to the streets demanding justice and as we work to build the institutions and communities we know are necessary, we can try to learn from plants , from pawpaw, and from our wandering ancestors about nurturing doikayt—collective refuge wherever we find ourselves.
1 Bennett, K. D., and J. Provan. 2008. What do we mean by ‘refugia’? Quaternary Science Reviews 27 (27).
2 Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.
3 Krawek, Patty. 2022. Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future.
4 Koscho, Brian. 2022. Searching for the Pawpaw’s Indigenous Roots. West Virginia Public Broadcasting.
5 Boyarin, Daniel. 2023. The No State Solution: A Jewish Manifesto.
6 Shlaim, Avi. 2023. Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew.
7Wadlow, Rene. 2016. Remembering Aimé Césaire: A Black Orpheus. Toward Freedom.
8Benjamin, Walter. 2019. Theses on the Philosophy of History. In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. H. Arendt, 196–209.
9 Paraphrasing Haraway (2016)
Pawpaw trees in Columbus, OH
