Autobiography as Ecofeminist Manifesto” by Gauri Yadav | Cha
August 16, 2025 by t
[EXCLUSIVE] “Sumana Roy’s 𝐻𝑜𝑤 𝐼 𝐵𝑒𝑐𝑎𝑚𝑒 𝑎 𝑇𝑟𝑒𝑒: Autobiography as Ecofeminist Manifesto” by Gauri Yadav
RETURN TO FIRST IMPRESSIONS
RETURN TO CHA REVIEW OF BOOKS AND FILMS
Editor’s note: Gauri Yadav’s review essay explores Sumana Roy’s How I Became a Tree as an ecofeminist, genre-defying work that reimagines autobiography through plant life. Blending personal narrative, political critique, and literary analysis, Roy challenges patriarchal norms, human exceptionalism, and literary tradition, proposing a radical, nonhuman form of subjectivity rooted in ecological consciousness.
Sumana Roy, How I Became a Tree, Aleph Book Company, 2017. 244 pgs.
I have come here to learn a foreign language—
plants must have a mother tongue?
—”The Afterlife of Trees and Their Lovers”, Out Of Syllabus (2019), Sumana Roy.
A verdant spring was unfurling outside the pale classroom of St Stephen’s College in Delhi, where we had gathered to attend a lecture on “Shapes of Trees and Hidden Knowledge Systems” by Sumana Roy, the arguments of which were eventually elaborated upon in her latest book, Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal. The Poetry Society was in the midst of its festival, and this was one in a series of talks given by poets, scholars, and thinkers, among them Akhil Katyal and Arundhathi Subramaniam. Our bachelor’s degree in literature was drawing to a close, and this fortnight of poetry was perhaps the last glimmer of hope—spring would soon yield to an unforgiving May heat, accompanied by the looming pressure of examinations.
“Breaking, Bending, Branching: Shapes of Trees and Hidden Knowledge Systems”, lecture by Sumana Roy.
Roy began her talk with a provocation that has since shaped my understanding of literary form. To be “I” is to be a straight line—upright and proper. Her phenomenological engagement with plant life involved shedding a critical light on literary form and the human body alike. If human form and social convention compel us to remain taut and vertical, trees offer another lesson—embracing asymmetry, growing in divergent directions, curves, and angles. By relinquishing “the dictatorship of the ‘I'” in her writing, Roy forges an autobiographical form in service of a hybrid human–tree subjectivity. In this essay, I will demonstrate how the literary form in How I Became a Tree destabilises the first-person, or authorial “I”, in order to craft a mode of writing that renders a nonhuman ideology subjective.
Understanding Ecofeminism
◯
Sumana Roy’s 2017 book, How I Became a Tree, tells the story of a woman estranged from human existence, who contemplates life instead as a tree. Rooted in a distinct ideology of nonhuman-ness, the text offers a critique of the patriarchal institutions that govern human social life. Roy explains that her desire to emulate “tree-life” arises from a profound frustration with the violence inherent in human societies. Although she does not employ the term “ecofeminist” to describe her ideas or actions, in the section titled “Women as Flowers” she interrogates how women are exploited, dominated, and controlled through gender norms, while the plant world, to her, appears devoid of such gendered violence. Trees do not wear makeup, they do not worry about age, and—most importantly—they do not enter marriages that render them someone’s husband or wife.
Ecofeminists have long argued that men have dominated women and the natural world in parallel, and that advocating for gender equality necessarily entails a critique of industrial capitalism and the liberal economy, which have devastated ecosystems for centuries. Ecofeminism emerged as a school of thought in political theory in 1974 with the publication of Feminism or Death by Françoise d’Eaubonne. The book contends that we are living in a time of “extreme ecological peril”, with human life and systems on the brink of collapse. This condition, she argues, results from the immense strain placed on finite natural resources through overpopulation, increasing pollution, and excessive carbon emissions—forces that together accelerate global warming and render air, water, and land increasingly inhospitable.
D’Eaubonne places responsibility for this state of affairs on male systems of power, which have, for centuries, controlled women’s bodies. Women, she observes, have not possessed absolute freedom in determining their sexual lives or reproductive destinies. Decisions concerning childbirth, sexual practice, virginity, and motherhood have historically been made by men. This has contributed to the overpopulation of the planet. If women had possessed the agency to determine their reproductive futures, humanity’s population would never have expanded so explosively. The future, she asserts, must involve universal access to abortion and contraception, alongside absolute sexual freedom for women, as a means of addressing overpopulation.
She further argues that masculine systems of power—whether socialist or capitalist—have failed to create a liveable world because they are inherently sexist and violent towards both women and nature (p. 145). The future of humanity, therefore, lies in a radical transformation: a new humanism in which women irreversibly dismantle patriarchy and establish systems committed to ecological renewal and prosperity (d’Eaubonne 2022, p. 27).
Hybrid Genres
in Autobiographical Writing
◯
Roy adopts the form of autobiography and transforms it into an ecological manifesto—a meditation on a life lived in harmony with the plant world. Within the tradition of women’s autobiographical writing in India, the form has been mobilised in diverse ways: as a tool of resistance (Kandasamy, 2017); to bring the domestic into the realm of the literary (Halder, 2002); to expose the violence of patriarchy (Amara Shaikh, 2016); and, in the case of anti-caste biographies and autobiographies by Dalit writers, to speak out against systemic injustice (Moon et al., 2002; Valmiki, 2007). In Roy’s hands, the autobiographical “I” speaks to what Vandana Shiva calls the “twin dominations” of woman and plant by human life (Shiva, p. 5). This doubleness of language unfolds throughout the text, emerging in the form of questions or attempts to articulate the political, historical, and social motivations of trees.
Disillusioned with nationalistic territorial discourse in both pre- and post-Independence India, Roy wonders—if forests had nationalities (p. 155). Both the nation and the forest, she notes, share tendencies and aspirations towards expansion. Forests, like kingdoms or militaries bent on annexation, can grow unchecked (p. 155). Invoking Michael Marder’s philosophy of “vegetal democracy”, she asks whether any lesson might be drawn from the military ethic of the forest. Marder suggests that the way out of fascist political thought is to envision the state as a plant society, in which each community or citizen is not subordinate to a centralised totality but instead participates in an “anarchic proliferation of multiplicities”, where units—like branches and twigs—retain semi-independence from the state or forest (p. 166). She even asks whether the Maoist rebellion against the Indian state’s violence towards forests and forest-dwelling communities might represent a form of vegetal politics (p. 165).
Alienated in her practice of tree-life, Roy seeks others who have forged connections between human and nonhuman worlds. She turns to a method of literary analysis called “creative criticism”, interpreting stories, novels, and films in ways that intertwine with her own life. For instance, she devotes several chapters to an analysis of Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay’s Aranyak, drawing upon biographical details of his life, his other works, and relevant theoretical frameworks. Her criticism is informed not only by scholarship but also by lived experience—reading Aranyak while residing for several days in a forest. Bandopadhyay’s years in the forests of North Bihar inspired the novel, and Roy imagines him in the forests of Bhagalpur as the narrative unfolds, her own body slowly acclimatising to tree-life.
In “Part IV” of How I Became a Tree, Roy turns her attention to the Tagore family, particularly Rabindranath’s commitment to plant life and tree plantation at Santiniketan. As a child, she read his tree-poems, which possess a fluidity between human and arboreal characters. “Suppose I Became a Champa Flower” is written from the perspective of a child who metamorphoses into a blossom and wonders if his mother would recognise him as he hangs from a tree branch. While Roy writes in the tradition of earlier Bengali authors preoccupied with plant life, she extends this lineage by advancing a radical critique of blood ties, caste, sexuality, and gender roles—concerns absent from the works of either Tagore or Bandopadhyay.
In “Part VI: One Tree is Equal to Ten Sons”, Roy asserts that the plants she cultivates in her home are her children. While friends and family have sought to impose upon her the expectation of biological motherhood, she has remained steadfast in her conviction. She tends her plants with the same seriousness and dedication one might devote to a child. Yet when her beliefs are dismissed on the grounds that only blood relations “count”, she questions why interspecies adoption should be so difficult to accept. Any relationship with the nonhuman, she notes, entails a mutation in the human gene pool—chlorophyll does not mix with blood. In an overpopulated world, where resources are rapidly depleting, she asks what alternatives to conventional child-rearing might be imagined.
Moreover, Roy dismantles the expectation of the supreme self within autobiography. The autobiographical form is often traced back to Saint Augustine’s Confessions, widely regarded as the first Western autobiography. Feminist literary criticism of the 1970s and 1980s—particularly feminist autobiography theory—rejected the Western model, rooted in Enlightenment sensibilities that championed individual freedom (Brodzki & Schenck, 1989, p. 1). Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck have argued that autobiographical subjects such as Augustine, Henry Adams, and Walt Whitman were able to claim universality and centrality in their works because of their fixed, privileged positions in society. Autobiography, in this tradition, was conceived as a mirror to society or as a voice for the community, presupposing that the writer was an assimilated member of an ethnic or cultural group and entitled to speak on its behalf. Subsequent developments in autobiography theory have revealed fissures in this canon—it excluded non-Western texts from indigenous and ethnically diverse communities, as well as narratives by women and sexual minorities. Furthermore, it exposed the autobiographical form as rigid, resistant to formal experimentation (pp. 1–7).
Paul Preciado’s Testo Junkie (2008) rejects the logics of both genre and gender, experimenting with prose in a work of “auto-theory”—using personal anecdote to theorise contemporary performances of gender, while narrating the displacement of gender through hormonal experimentation on his own body. Yet, as Rowland cautions, the gendered implications of “transness” in any argument for genre mixing risk an oversimplification, wherein trans bodies become metaphors for crossing boundaries (2023, p. 48). Instead, she contends, Preciado’s success lies in demonstrating the reciprocal implications of gender on genre, and vice versa, in the production of subjectivity within any self-narrative.
The framework of auto-theory, therefore, offers a means of understanding the formal promiscuity between autobiography and manifesto in How I Became a Tree, producing a hybrid genre. As a feminist practice, auto-theory emerges from a critique of “theory” as the armchair prophecy of narcissists, as well as of the cultural capital accrued by theory as a disciplinary field—capital that has historically excluded those without access to its intellectual language or institutional branding (Fournier, 2021). Particularly rooted in visual and performative forms such as conceptual art, film, and video art, auto-theory reveals the entanglement of a creator’s living conditions and experiences with what they write, research, and produce.
In Roy’s text, her lived experience—as a woman weary and disillusioned by the violence surrounding her—is essential to theorising the affinities between plants and humans, and to exposing how systems such as the state, the economy, and patriarchy conspire to produce violence against minority groups and nonhuman forms. As Terry Eagleton observes, a writer’s choice in selecting—or, in this case, generating—a form is always ideologically circumscribed, in service of the work’s content.
He may combine and transmute forms available to him from a literary tradition, but these forms themselves, as well as his permutation of them, are ideologically significant. The languages and devices a writer finds to hand are already saturated with certain ideological modes of perception, certain codified ways of interpreting reality; and the extent to which he can modify or remake those languages depends on more than his personal genius. It depends on whether at that point in history, ‘ideology’ is such that they must and can be changed. (1976, p. 25)
Roy’s text occupies an intersection of the creative, the autobiographical, and the critical. She employs the autobiographical mode to articulate her ideology of human–nonhuman equality. The first-person narrative is privileged in feminist writing because it generates a distinctive effect from its situated standpoint (Warren, 1990). When one produces the world from the margins they inhabit, it prompts shifts in dominant cultures that could not have emerged from other perspectives. Roy adopts the colonial form of autobiography, yet disrupts and reformulates it in service of her thematic concerns. Many stable literary genres cannot accommodate writing that is inherently decolonial, subversive, and inventive. To live free from the oppression of masculine systems—patriarchal family structures, corporate power, and religious orthodoxies—requires a reconfiguration of human life. The impetus for ecological conservation, the subversive desire to become tree, and the severing of ties with institutions of violence and patriarchy, are brought to fruition in this work of auto-eco-biography.
Why Not A Language of Plants?
◯
The narrator in How I Became a Tree strives to change form and to learn the language of trees. Paraphrasing and translating from one of Jagdish Chandra Bose’s essays in Bangla, she writes: “There are so many countries, and so many languages—why not a language of plants, then?” (Roy, 2017, p. 135). The perceived need for trees to have their own language, or the capacity to communicate, arises from a human conditioning of speech as a reciprocal act. Roy shows that any attempt to know plants and their histories inevitably results in partial, incomplete knowledge (p. 136). She speaks from a humbling awareness of human limitations—our inability fully to comprehend other forms of life. This imaginative human–tree genome remains uncreated. The narrator can only suggest a possible afterlife solution: mixing human ashes with tree seeds, so that the human body may grow into a tree.
In the hands of the novelist Han Kang, the predicament of life as a tree is realised in practice. The protagonist of The Vegetarian one day ceases to eat meat and subsists almost entirely on water. Over the months, her body changes: she loses fat, her menstrual bleeding stops, and her husband abandons her, declaring her no longer a “viable” partner, possessing neither flesh nor fertility. Towards the close of the novel, after repeated violent attempts to force her to eat, she is confined to a psychiatric hospital. One day, she is discovered at the far end of a corridor performing a handstand—her hair falling towards the ground, her palms pressing firmly into the earth. “Look, sister, I’m doing a handstand; leaves are growing out of my body, roots are sprouting out of my hands.” (127) Han Kang’s protagonist dreams of becoming a tree. She gazes upon them with the yearning of a lover, and—in the novel’s sole scene of consensual intimacy—makes love to a man whose body is painted with flowers, believing him to be an actual plant.
In nonfiction, this dream is nurtured, historicised, politicised, and romanticised; in fiction, it reaches a radical fruition. The official diagnosis of the protagonist’s behaviour is schizophrenia, yet Han Kang’s investment in the narrative lies elsewhere. She is concerned with the tertiary question: what does a body, relegated to “sickness”, think, believe, and do? While the two books ask different questions—about non-humanness, illness, transformation, and ecological care—both explore the fluidities of language and body, extending the responsibilities of literary engagement.
Bibliography
▚ Amara Shaikh, M. (2016). I Want to Destroy Myself: A Memoir (J. Pinto, Trans.). Speaking Tiger.
▚ Brodzki, B. & Schenck, C. (Eds.). (1989). Life/Lines: Theorizing Women’s Autobiography. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
▚ D’Eaubonne, F. (2022) Feminism or Death Verso. Translated by R. Hottell.
▚ Eagleton, T. (2003) Marxism and Literary Criticism. Taylor and Francis.
▚ Fournier, L. (2021). Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism. Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press.
▚ Halder, B. (2002). A Life Less Ordinary (U. Butalia, Trans.). Zubaan Books.
▚ Han Kang. (2015). The Vegetarian. Granta Publications, Translated by Deborah Smith.
▚ Kandasamy, M. (2017). When I Hit you. Atlantic Books.
▚ Moon, V., Omvedt, G., & Zelliot, E. (2002). Growing up untouchable in India: A Dalit Autobiography. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
▚ Preciado, P.B. (2013). Testo Junkie Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. Feminist Press at CUNY.
▚ Rowlands, L.O. (2023) ‘Paul B. Preciado and the Contamination of Genre’ Paragraph 46(1) [online], pp. 46–64 Edinburgh University Press Available at: www.euppublishing.com/para
▚ Roy, S. (2017). How I Became a Tree. New Delhi, Aleph Book Company.
▚ Shiva, V. (1988). Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Survival in India. Zed Books
▚ Smith, S., & Watson, J. (2016). Life Writing in the Long Run: A Smith & Watson Autobiography Studies Reader. Michigan Publishing.
▚ Valmiki, O. (2008). Joothan: A Dalit’s Life. Columbia University Press, Translated by Arun Prabha Mukherjee
▚ Warren, K.J. (1990) ‘The power and the promise of ecological feminism,’ Environmental Ethics, 12(2), pp. 125–146. https://doi.org/10.5840/enviroethics199012221.
A scan of Gauri Yadav’s notes from the day of the lecture “Shapes of Trees and Hidden Knowledge Systems” at St. Stephen’s College.
How to cite: Yadav, Gauri. “Sumana Roy’s How I Became a Tree: Autobiography as Ecofeminist Manifesto.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 16 Aug. 2025, chajournal.blog/2025/08/16/became-a-tree.
Gauri Yadav is a writer based in New Delhi. She studied literature at Miranda House and creative writing at Dr B. R. Ambedkar University. She currently works as a researcher at the Queer India Archives. Her work has appeared in Muse India, gulmohur quarterly, and Serendipity Arts, and is forthcoming in Writing Women.
August 16, 2025 by t
[EXCLUSIVE] “Sumana Roy’s 𝐻𝑜𝑤 𝐼 𝐵𝑒𝑐𝑎𝑚𝑒 𝑎 𝑇𝑟𝑒𝑒: Autobiography as Ecofeminist Manifesto” by Gauri Yadav
RETURN TO FIRST IMPRESSIONS
RETURN TO CHA REVIEW OF BOOKS AND FILMS
Editor’s note: Gauri Yadav’s review essay explores Sumana Roy’s How I Became a Tree as an ecofeminist, genre-defying work that reimagines autobiography through plant life. Blending personal narrative, political critique, and literary analysis, Roy challenges patriarchal norms, human exceptionalism, and literary tradition, proposing a radical, nonhuman form of subjectivity rooted in ecological consciousness.
Sumana Roy, How I Became a Tree, Aleph Book Company, 2017. 244 pgs.
I have come here to learn a foreign language—
plants must have a mother tongue?
—”The Afterlife of Trees and Their Lovers”, Out Of Syllabus (2019), Sumana Roy.
A verdant spring was unfurling outside the pale classroom of St Stephen’s College in Delhi, where we had gathered to attend a lecture on “Shapes of Trees and Hidden Knowledge Systems” by Sumana Roy, the arguments of which were eventually elaborated upon in her latest book, Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal. The Poetry Society was in the midst of its festival, and this was one in a series of talks given by poets, scholars, and thinkers, among them Akhil Katyal and Arundhathi Subramaniam. Our bachelor’s degree in literature was drawing to a close, and this fortnight of poetry was perhaps the last glimmer of hope—spring would soon yield to an unforgiving May heat, accompanied by the looming pressure of examinations.
“Breaking, Bending, Branching: Shapes of Trees and Hidden Knowledge Systems”, lecture by Sumana Roy.
Roy began her talk with a provocation that has since shaped my understanding of literary form. To be “I” is to be a straight line—upright and proper. Her phenomenological engagement with plant life involved shedding a critical light on literary form and the human body alike. If human form and social convention compel us to remain taut and vertical, trees offer another lesson—embracing asymmetry, growing in divergent directions, curves, and angles. By relinquishing “the dictatorship of the ‘I'” in her writing, Roy forges an autobiographical form in service of a hybrid human–tree subjectivity. In this essay, I will demonstrate how the literary form in How I Became a Tree destabilises the first-person, or authorial “I”, in order to craft a mode of writing that renders a nonhuman ideology subjective.
Understanding Ecofeminism
◯
Sumana Roy’s 2017 book, How I Became a Tree, tells the story of a woman estranged from human existence, who contemplates life instead as a tree. Rooted in a distinct ideology of nonhuman-ness, the text offers a critique of the patriarchal institutions that govern human social life. Roy explains that her desire to emulate “tree-life” arises from a profound frustration with the violence inherent in human societies. Although she does not employ the term “ecofeminist” to describe her ideas or actions, in the section titled “Women as Flowers” she interrogates how women are exploited, dominated, and controlled through gender norms, while the plant world, to her, appears devoid of such gendered violence. Trees do not wear makeup, they do not worry about age, and—most importantly—they do not enter marriages that render them someone’s husband or wife.
Ecofeminists have long argued that men have dominated women and the natural world in parallel, and that advocating for gender equality necessarily entails a critique of industrial capitalism and the liberal economy, which have devastated ecosystems for centuries. Ecofeminism emerged as a school of thought in political theory in 1974 with the publication of Feminism or Death by Françoise d’Eaubonne. The book contends that we are living in a time of “extreme ecological peril”, with human life and systems on the brink of collapse. This condition, she argues, results from the immense strain placed on finite natural resources through overpopulation, increasing pollution, and excessive carbon emissions—forces that together accelerate global warming and render air, water, and land increasingly inhospitable.
D’Eaubonne places responsibility for this state of affairs on male systems of power, which have, for centuries, controlled women’s bodies. Women, she observes, have not possessed absolute freedom in determining their sexual lives or reproductive destinies. Decisions concerning childbirth, sexual practice, virginity, and motherhood have historically been made by men. This has contributed to the overpopulation of the planet. If women had possessed the agency to determine their reproductive futures, humanity’s population would never have expanded so explosively. The future, she asserts, must involve universal access to abortion and contraception, alongside absolute sexual freedom for women, as a means of addressing overpopulation.
She further argues that masculine systems of power—whether socialist or capitalist—have failed to create a liveable world because they are inherently sexist and violent towards both women and nature (p. 145). The future of humanity, therefore, lies in a radical transformation: a new humanism in which women irreversibly dismantle patriarchy and establish systems committed to ecological renewal and prosperity (d’Eaubonne 2022, p. 27).
Hybrid Genres
in Autobiographical Writing
◯
Roy adopts the form of autobiography and transforms it into an ecological manifesto—a meditation on a life lived in harmony with the plant world. Within the tradition of women’s autobiographical writing in India, the form has been mobilised in diverse ways: as a tool of resistance (Kandasamy, 2017); to bring the domestic into the realm of the literary (Halder, 2002); to expose the violence of patriarchy (Amara Shaikh, 2016); and, in the case of anti-caste biographies and autobiographies by Dalit writers, to speak out against systemic injustice (Moon et al., 2002; Valmiki, 2007). In Roy’s hands, the autobiographical “I” speaks to what Vandana Shiva calls the “twin dominations” of woman and plant by human life (Shiva, p. 5). This doubleness of language unfolds throughout the text, emerging in the form of questions or attempts to articulate the political, historical, and social motivations of trees.
Disillusioned with nationalistic territorial discourse in both pre- and post-Independence India, Roy wonders—if forests had nationalities (p. 155). Both the nation and the forest, she notes, share tendencies and aspirations towards expansion. Forests, like kingdoms or militaries bent on annexation, can grow unchecked (p. 155). Invoking Michael Marder’s philosophy of “vegetal democracy”, she asks whether any lesson might be drawn from the military ethic of the forest. Marder suggests that the way out of fascist political thought is to envision the state as a plant society, in which each community or citizen is not subordinate to a centralised totality but instead participates in an “anarchic proliferation of multiplicities”, where units—like branches and twigs—retain semi-independence from the state or forest (p. 166). She even asks whether the Maoist rebellion against the Indian state’s violence towards forests and forest-dwelling communities might represent a form of vegetal politics (p. 165).
Alienated in her practice of tree-life, Roy seeks others who have forged connections between human and nonhuman worlds. She turns to a method of literary analysis called “creative criticism”, interpreting stories, novels, and films in ways that intertwine with her own life. For instance, she devotes several chapters to an analysis of Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay’s Aranyak, drawing upon biographical details of his life, his other works, and relevant theoretical frameworks. Her criticism is informed not only by scholarship but also by lived experience—reading Aranyak while residing for several days in a forest. Bandopadhyay’s years in the forests of North Bihar inspired the novel, and Roy imagines him in the forests of Bhagalpur as the narrative unfolds, her own body slowly acclimatising to tree-life.
In “Part IV” of How I Became a Tree, Roy turns her attention to the Tagore family, particularly Rabindranath’s commitment to plant life and tree plantation at Santiniketan. As a child, she read his tree-poems, which possess a fluidity between human and arboreal characters. “Suppose I Became a Champa Flower” is written from the perspective of a child who metamorphoses into a blossom and wonders if his mother would recognise him as he hangs from a tree branch. While Roy writes in the tradition of earlier Bengali authors preoccupied with plant life, she extends this lineage by advancing a radical critique of blood ties, caste, sexuality, and gender roles—concerns absent from the works of either Tagore or Bandopadhyay.
In “Part VI: One Tree is Equal to Ten Sons”, Roy asserts that the plants she cultivates in her home are her children. While friends and family have sought to impose upon her the expectation of biological motherhood, she has remained steadfast in her conviction. She tends her plants with the same seriousness and dedication one might devote to a child. Yet when her beliefs are dismissed on the grounds that only blood relations “count”, she questions why interspecies adoption should be so difficult to accept. Any relationship with the nonhuman, she notes, entails a mutation in the human gene pool—chlorophyll does not mix with blood. In an overpopulated world, where resources are rapidly depleting, she asks what alternatives to conventional child-rearing might be imagined.
Moreover, Roy dismantles the expectation of the supreme self within autobiography. The autobiographical form is often traced back to Saint Augustine’s Confessions, widely regarded as the first Western autobiography. Feminist literary criticism of the 1970s and 1980s—particularly feminist autobiography theory—rejected the Western model, rooted in Enlightenment sensibilities that championed individual freedom (Brodzki & Schenck, 1989, p. 1). Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck have argued that autobiographical subjects such as Augustine, Henry Adams, and Walt Whitman were able to claim universality and centrality in their works because of their fixed, privileged positions in society. Autobiography, in this tradition, was conceived as a mirror to society or as a voice for the community, presupposing that the writer was an assimilated member of an ethnic or cultural group and entitled to speak on its behalf. Subsequent developments in autobiography theory have revealed fissures in this canon—it excluded non-Western texts from indigenous and ethnically diverse communities, as well as narratives by women and sexual minorities. Furthermore, it exposed the autobiographical form as rigid, resistant to formal experimentation (pp. 1–7).
Paul Preciado’s Testo Junkie (2008) rejects the logics of both genre and gender, experimenting with prose in a work of “auto-theory”—using personal anecdote to theorise contemporary performances of gender, while narrating the displacement of gender through hormonal experimentation on his own body. Yet, as Rowland cautions, the gendered implications of “transness” in any argument for genre mixing risk an oversimplification, wherein trans bodies become metaphors for crossing boundaries (2023, p. 48). Instead, she contends, Preciado’s success lies in demonstrating the reciprocal implications of gender on genre, and vice versa, in the production of subjectivity within any self-narrative.
The framework of auto-theory, therefore, offers a means of understanding the formal promiscuity between autobiography and manifesto in How I Became a Tree, producing a hybrid genre. As a feminist practice, auto-theory emerges from a critique of “theory” as the armchair prophecy of narcissists, as well as of the cultural capital accrued by theory as a disciplinary field—capital that has historically excluded those without access to its intellectual language or institutional branding (Fournier, 2021). Particularly rooted in visual and performative forms such as conceptual art, film, and video art, auto-theory reveals the entanglement of a creator’s living conditions and experiences with what they write, research, and produce.
In Roy’s text, her lived experience—as a woman weary and disillusioned by the violence surrounding her—is essential to theorising the affinities between plants and humans, and to exposing how systems such as the state, the economy, and patriarchy conspire to produce violence against minority groups and nonhuman forms. As Terry Eagleton observes, a writer’s choice in selecting—or, in this case, generating—a form is always ideologically circumscribed, in service of the work’s content.
He may combine and transmute forms available to him from a literary tradition, but these forms themselves, as well as his permutation of them, are ideologically significant. The languages and devices a writer finds to hand are already saturated with certain ideological modes of perception, certain codified ways of interpreting reality; and the extent to which he can modify or remake those languages depends on more than his personal genius. It depends on whether at that point in history, ‘ideology’ is such that they must and can be changed. (1976, p. 25)
Roy’s text occupies an intersection of the creative, the autobiographical, and the critical. She employs the autobiographical mode to articulate her ideology of human–nonhuman equality. The first-person narrative is privileged in feminist writing because it generates a distinctive effect from its situated standpoint (Warren, 1990). When one produces the world from the margins they inhabit, it prompts shifts in dominant cultures that could not have emerged from other perspectives. Roy adopts the colonial form of autobiography, yet disrupts and reformulates it in service of her thematic concerns. Many stable literary genres cannot accommodate writing that is inherently decolonial, subversive, and inventive. To live free from the oppression of masculine systems—patriarchal family structures, corporate power, and religious orthodoxies—requires a reconfiguration of human life. The impetus for ecological conservation, the subversive desire to become tree, and the severing of ties with institutions of violence and patriarchy, are brought to fruition in this work of auto-eco-biography.
Why Not A Language of Plants?
◯
The narrator in How I Became a Tree strives to change form and to learn the language of trees. Paraphrasing and translating from one of Jagdish Chandra Bose’s essays in Bangla, she writes: “There are so many countries, and so many languages—why not a language of plants, then?” (Roy, 2017, p. 135). The perceived need for trees to have their own language, or the capacity to communicate, arises from a human conditioning of speech as a reciprocal act. Roy shows that any attempt to know plants and their histories inevitably results in partial, incomplete knowledge (p. 136). She speaks from a humbling awareness of human limitations—our inability fully to comprehend other forms of life. This imaginative human–tree genome remains uncreated. The narrator can only suggest a possible afterlife solution: mixing human ashes with tree seeds, so that the human body may grow into a tree.
In the hands of the novelist Han Kang, the predicament of life as a tree is realised in practice. The protagonist of The Vegetarian one day ceases to eat meat and subsists almost entirely on water. Over the months, her body changes: she loses fat, her menstrual bleeding stops, and her husband abandons her, declaring her no longer a “viable” partner, possessing neither flesh nor fertility. Towards the close of the novel, after repeated violent attempts to force her to eat, she is confined to a psychiatric hospital. One day, she is discovered at the far end of a corridor performing a handstand—her hair falling towards the ground, her palms pressing firmly into the earth. “Look, sister, I’m doing a handstand; leaves are growing out of my body, roots are sprouting out of my hands.” (127) Han Kang’s protagonist dreams of becoming a tree. She gazes upon them with the yearning of a lover, and—in the novel’s sole scene of consensual intimacy—makes love to a man whose body is painted with flowers, believing him to be an actual plant.
In nonfiction, this dream is nurtured, historicised, politicised, and romanticised; in fiction, it reaches a radical fruition. The official diagnosis of the protagonist’s behaviour is schizophrenia, yet Han Kang’s investment in the narrative lies elsewhere. She is concerned with the tertiary question: what does a body, relegated to “sickness”, think, believe, and do? While the two books ask different questions—about non-humanness, illness, transformation, and ecological care—both explore the fluidities of language and body, extending the responsibilities of literary engagement.
Bibliography
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A scan of Gauri Yadav’s notes from the day of the lecture “Shapes of Trees and Hidden Knowledge Systems” at St. Stephen’s College.
How to cite: Yadav, Gauri. “Sumana Roy’s How I Became a Tree: Autobiography as Ecofeminist Manifesto.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 16 Aug. 2025, chajournal.blog/2025/08/16/became-a-tree.
Gauri Yadav is a writer based in New Delhi. She studied literature at Miranda House and creative writing at Dr B. R. Ambedkar University. She currently works as a researcher at the Queer India Archives. Her work has appeared in Muse India, gulmohur quarterly, and Serendipity Arts, and is forthcoming in Writing Women.
