Futures of Lushness

This chapter works together with TRMEGA, a nongovernmental organization in northern Tanzania, to address the ways that chronic disease falls unevenly. Their work decenters the imperial pharmakon and invites a reformulation of toxicity as an extreme attenuation of relations that surfaces as barrenness, chronicity, and stigma. TRMEGA builds on the remnants of women’s empowerment projects, peasant organizations, and AIDS support groups, as well as indigenous traditions of planting. Their plant(ing) remedies intervene in the injury and alienation embodied in the compacted earth of small, often rented, plots in the margins of East African capitalism. Through the extension of gardens full of therapeutic foods and nourishing medicines, the nongovernmental organization draws people closer to the soil and to each other. By sharing seeds and cuttings, tending to compost, and building communities of multispecies support, they redefine healing as land relations and conceptualize health as a quality of lushness in everyday life.