There are materials whose names outlast the people who named them. Dam al-akhawain (دم الأخوين) is one of these. The blood of the two brothers. The name has been carried in Arabic for over a thousand years. It is the name from which Consanguine takes its Latin. Of the same blood.
The Arabic tradition tells of two brothers of the island, Darsa and Samha, who killed each other on the land. The first tree grew where the blood fell. The two smaller islands closest to Socotra are named after them and known together as al-Akhawain, the brothers. The geography and the material carry the same name.
An older story exists. Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century, records an Indian myth in which a dragon and an elephant fought to the death on Socotra and the first tree grew from the blood they spilled. The European names of the tree come from this story. The Arabic name does not.
The trade is older than both. Socotri locals have been harvesting the resin, grinding it into powder, and selling it to Greek, Arab, and Indian merchants since at least the sixth century BCE. That is over two and a half millennia of continuous traffic in the same ground resin from the same island. When Pliny wrote in the first century, he was documenting a trade already six hundred years old. The Periplus Maris Erythraei, a Greek merchant's guide written in the same century, names Socotra directly as the source.
The tree grows on Socotra and nowhere else. Socotra is Yemen. My roots are Yemeni. The Arabic tradition is the tradition I stand in.
The name Consanguine is Latin. It translates what the Arabic says. The scientific name of the tree, Dracaena cinnabari, is also Latin. Both arrive at the same material by different routes. Both remember blood.
The tree is dying.
The IUCN lists Dracaena cinnabari as vulnerable. Two cyclones in 2015 destroyed roughly thirty percent of Socotra's trees. The trees that remain in the wild are hundreds of years old. Almost no young trees are growing. Goats eat the saplings and drought kills what the goats spare. The mature trees standing today may be the last generation.
On the Firmhin Plateau, where the largest surviving forest stands, downed trees lie where the cyclones dropped them. White trunks split, bare branches rising from the ground. The plateau is part forest, part graveyard.
The tree, when alive, is a water-giver. It draws moisture from fog and passes the water down into the soil. Each tree puts hundreds of litres of water per year into the ground. When the tree dies, the water dies with it. The land without the tree is less inhabitable than it was.
In Diksam, a Socotri man named Keabanni has raised six hundred dragon's blood saplings inside a walled nursery. They grow two and a half centimetres every five years. It will take each sapling more than a century to reach a height where goats cannot eat it. Keabanni knows he will not live to see them planted. His grandchildren might.
The pastoralist culture that kept these trees alive for centuries is disappearing. The young move to the capital. The goats multiply. The old knowledge goes with the old people. The tree is dying partly because the culture that knew how to live with it is dying.
Consanguine is a homage. To the tree that has bled red on Socotra since before any of us had names for it. To the tradition that received the material and called it what it is. To the people who have carried the resin from the trees to the wider world for two and a half thousand years, and to the one who still walks out to a walled nursery every few days to keep the goats off six hundred saplings he will not live to see become trees.
The composition holds the tree whole. The milky texture of the fresh resin when the trunk is first cut. The red it dries to. The smoke of its burning. The florals of the land around it. The mythology the resin carries. The tincture took three months. The scent separated from the colour slowly.
A bottle of Consanguine holds resin harvested from trees that may outlive most of those who will smell it, and may not outlive the century. The perfume carries the material the name refers to, into whatever future comes after.
To wear Consanguine is to carry the trace of a tree that has bled red for as long as anyone has kept records of it. The name will outlast the tree. What the name remembers is held in the bottle.
