Properties of Healing

In this chapter, a charismatic banana, kitarasa, reveals the tensions between the economic and the ecological as it is caught up in efforts to heal land and bodies. Not only are bananas a staple crop, but they labor with people to create livable, lively spaces. Dorkia Enterprises, a small business, is working to commercialize kitarasa flour as a “therapeutic” food. Their efforts are animated by connections to international food sovereignty projects striving to reimagine the scalar projects of economy and disrupt the forms of property on which it depends. The chapter moves between (1) Dorkia Enterprises’ work to elaborate kitarasa through partial engagements with the state and the market and (2) an effort to think with kitarasa and the liveliness in its insistent excesses of these logics. As it folds the scales of bodies and lands into one another, kitarasa incites the theorizing of relations among toxicity, healing, and memory.