‘[S]uburban indigenous’: Ivan Vladislavić’s The Near North and ‘the World’s Largest Man-Made Forest’

Towards the beginning of Ivan Vladislavić’s The Near North, the absentee landlord of the neighbouring apartment block instructs his gardener to chop down the exotic trees along the boundary wall. The gardener is no tree feller and he precipitates the trees into the narrator’s building with catastrophic effects: windows are shattered, gutters and drainpipes sheared off, a wall flattened. It took many decades for these beautiful trees to grow; they are killed in minutes. Vlad the narrator realizes from this episode he calls ‘the war of the trees’ (17) that ‘there are people everywhere for whom a tree is either a nuisance or firewood waiting to happen’ (17). He discovers the extent of urbanite alienation from nature via this episode of wanton tree-felling. Whilst no Vladislavić publication can be described as an advocacy text, I argue that this novel attempts to counter this alienation from nature by raising awareness of the value of ‘the world’s largest man-made urban forest’ in Johannesburg, which includes flora that has become indigenized.