Essay by Gurleen K. Kulaar
Art by Adri Marcano
“What to do?” asks Jamaica Kincaid (11). Throughout her autobiographical-botanical text, My Garden (Book):, Kincaid contends with the happiness, vexations, and “series of doubts upon series of doubts” (14-15) she encounters in her garden, grappling with settler colonial legacies as well as personal nostalgias embedded in her gardening practices. Kincaid remembers Thomas Jefferson’s admiration toward English gardens, writing, “what [he] saw then was the English landscape at its most beautiful, its most manipulated, its most contrived, its most convincing; how vexed and disappointed we become with nature for not actually looking this way” (110-111). Kincaid recognizes how nature, especially within settler colonial contexts, is manipulated and controlled to fulfil the gardener’s aesthetic desires; that beauty within such gardens is only found after the occupants of the garden—nature—are shaped against their will. Like Jefferson’s garden, Kincaid’s garden requires extraction and controlled cultivation, and considering Kincaid lives in Vermont, USA, it is important to recognize the settler colonial ties that influence her experience in engaging with her garden and the landscape around her. However, the manipulation of her surrounding landscape equally becomes an effort to reconcile personal histories that have been affected by colonial extraction and control. Kincaid, who is from Antigua, shapes her garden to resemble “the Caribbean and the sea that surrounds it” (8), and throughout My Garden (Book): she contends with external and internal forces that affect the Caribbean in her yard. Kincaid understands nature as an agential subject, thus the meanings of gardens and nature that she ascribes through her gardening become complicated by her own practices. Particularly when snow falls into the Caribbean in her yard, Kincaid is forced to confront nature’s oppressive whitening of the garden and simultaneously reckon with the garden’s neo-coloniality and her own desires to control nature’s animacy and lessen its agency. Her garden thus embodies a subversive position in relation to settler colonial structures and nostalgias that bleed into her space, and identifying the plethora of relations, provocations, memories, and beings in or near the garden is important to both understand Kincaid’s nuanced engagement with the earth and further interrogate different kinds of human and nonhuman relations. So, Kincaid asks, “What to do?”
Before carving out the Caribbean in her yard, Kincaid reads a book by William Prescott about the conquest of Mexico in which marigolds, dahlias, and zinnias appear (6). The mention of these flowers lead Kincaid to mark the correlation between plants, cultivation, and colonization as an undeniable influence on her gardening practices, for after reading Prescott’s text her garden becomes “something else” (6). Uncovering that “something else” (6) guides Kincaid’s exercise of engaging with (settler) colonial histories alongside the personal through the garden space. When she writes, “it dawned on me that the garden I was making (and am still making and will always be making) resembled a map of the Caribbean and the sea that surrounds it” (7-8), she begins to illustrate how by spatially and temporally displacing the Caribbean into her yard she conducts a larger “exercise in memory” (8) that extends beyond herself. Kincaid explains that the garden is “a way of remembering my own immediate past, a way of getting to a past that is my own (the Caribbean Sea) and the past as it is indirectly related to me (the conquest of Mexico and its surroundings)” (8). For Kincaid, gardening is an existential experience of intimating with Earth to recover place-based memories embedded in the land and redefine parts of her identity that had been structured by (settler) colonial systems. However, while Kincaid uses her garden to unravel memories and nostalgias entangled with conquest and colonization, the inherent practice of gardening, as Kincaid exhibits it, adheres to principles fundamental to conquest and colonization. Therefore, the shape of Kincaid’s garden and her practices within it fall into contention with one another.
Kincaid cannot avoid adopting neocolonial rhetoric when constructing her garden as per her desires, complicating the relationship between her garden and the rest of nature. For example, Kincaid hires two workers to fix a “stone wall…that sensibly separates a terrace and a large flower bed from a sudden downward shift of the ground” (67). She makes an active choice to manipulate the movements of plants to maintain her desired aesthetic using the labour of two workers. In observing their labour, she describes “reveling in my delicious position of living comfortably in a place that I am not from” (67). She acknowledges the pleasure in adopting superiority, specifically the pleasure of being the “visitor” (67) and “not-the-native” (67), honing the ability “to make sound judgements about the Other—that is, the two men who were stooped over before me working” (67). Kincaid adopts colonial rhetoric, becoming the “visitor” (colonizer) who dictates the kinds of labour the Other (workers) enacts in the landscape she controls; and to exert this control she must recognize nature as a misbehaving agent that requires sensible structures—desired by her and constructed by the Other—to contain it.
Kincaid’s effort to control nature’s animacy is not indicative of her ignorance toward nature; on the contrary, her acceptance of nature’s animacy exacerbates her desire to control it because she understands nature’s dynamism as a potential threat to the aesthetics of the garden and the desires of the gardener. When remembering her mother’s “agitation” (44) toward their yard in Antigua, Kincaid connects the annoyance her mother felt to the unreliability of the landscape, in that “Nothing behaves, and nothing can be counted to do so” (45). The focus on behaviour in this quote suggests that Kincaid recognizes a wilful misbehaviour in nature. Additionally, she anthropomorphizes her plants throughout the text, referring to her “pansies committing suicide” (113) for example, further exhibiting an awareness of nature’s dynamism. Thus, when Kincaid speaks to the occupying behaviours of snow (59), she acknowledges both the agency of the subject she wishes to control (nature), and the oppressive force it becomes when it enters her garden.
Kincaid’s exertion of control thus becomes both a conscious effort to oppress resistive forces in the garden as well as a mechanism to defend her garden space from whitening processes that hinder possibilities to holistically intimate with the landscape. Returning to the workers in her garden, immediately after Kincaid revels in her adopted neocolonial superiority, one of the workers, who is white, shares his own covert racist biases and shares how “his father did not like colored people” (68). Kincaid immediately regrets allowing him into her domestic spaces, expressing how “sorry” (68) she felt about sharing “organic cashews [and] a nice glass of cold spring water to drink after the cashew nuts” (68). Her garden and her “exercise in memory” (8) are disrupted by attitudes directly sprouted from the same (settler) colonial structures that drive Kincaid to create her garden in the first place. When the worker later brings Kincaid flower bulbs, she throws them away “in the rubbish bin, not the compost heap” (69). He and his bulbs have no place in her garden that is the Caribbean Sea nor do they have space in ecological systems, like composting. Who Kincaid had earlier defined as the Other only is such in her garden, so to uphold her superiority in her garden space she expels opposing agents to ensure that the site of her memories and histories is protected.
The tension between the garden and nature, and the constant subversion of either’s role in Kincaid’s yard, is notably manifested when winter arrives in Vermont. Kincaid writes, “I do not like winter or anything that represents it (snow, the bare branches of trees, the earth seeming to hold its breath), and so I disliked the ground being covered with this soft substance (sticky and at the same time not so)” (59). Her focus on snow of all the representations of winter draws attention to snow’s distinct behaviour in relation to her garden. Kincaid concentrates on the whiteness of snow, calling it “a colour so definite” (59) that one cannot ignore its presence. She connects the particular whiteness of snow to colonizing action, writing that “snow will occupy all the space you know, the space above the ground, the space below the ground, and if you try to turn inward, as long as it is in front of you, it will occupy that space too” (59-60). Her use of “occupy” emphasizes snow’s offensive nature, in that it enmeshes itself into the systems of the space and dictates how human and nonhuman beings are permitted to exist. When it snows in Vermont, Kincaid’s “garden does not exist” (69); the Caribbean Sea in her yard is erased by a whitening agent of nature, and consequently, nature becomes the representative of settler colonial desires.
When Kincaid’s garden is occupied by snow, her ability to engage with her past and nurture an existential experience with the landscape is constrained. Kincaid describes “the whiteness” as “an eraser” (69). Compared to other representations of winter that Kincaid notes, like “the bare branches of trees” (59) that emphasize the lack of “breath” (59) within the garden, snow oppresses everything in the garden, including the garden’s “breath” (59). Where the garden begins and ends, and whether it remains underneath the heaps of snow, is indiscernible. Kincaid’s disdain for winter and snow exemplifies that her opposition toward nature stems from the threat it poses to her “exercise in memory” (8). By realizing snow’s subjecthood, its behaviour and desire to occupy makes the whitening of the Caribbean Sea in her yard all the more literal. Though nonhuman, snow’s existence in her garden strains her relationship with the plants and other nonhuman occupants in her garden. The location of plants, the shape of the garden, the presence of animals, is unidentifiable and the landscape assimilates into the cover of whiteness. The threat of assimilation, occupation, and invasion within Kincaid’s garden—whether embodied by the worker or snow—calls for her defense of the structures she cultivated and constructed against said forces.
In her confrontation of oppressive whitening processes and other colonial legacies enmeshed in her gardening space and practices, Kincaid outlines how her garden is the site of contention, reclamation, oppression, and restoration. The garden(er) is in a permanent state of production, working through complicated memories and meanings heavily structured by forces outside of the garden(er)’s time and space. Kincaid asks, “What to call the thing that happened to me and all who look like me? Should I call it history? And if so, what should history mean to someone who looks like me?” (166). History, while temporally based, is not temporally bound. History affects Kincaid’s present; it affects how she relates to earth, how she navigates structures that both help fulfil her gardening desires and oppress the landscape she gardens on; how she engages with nature and how she conducts and controls events in her garden are affected by histories, memories, and nostalgias that predate her all the way to the conquest of Mexico and beyond. Kincaid’s connection with memory, history, and nostalgia through nature and her garden unveil the kinds of steps necessary to holistically comprehend human and nonhuman beings’ relations. Near the end of the text, Kincaid writes that “a garden…is partly an attempt…to bring in from the wild as many things as can be appreciated, as many things as it is possible for a gardener to give meaning to, as many things as it is possible for the gardener to understand” (226). When the garden is constantly evolving, the possibilities for the gardener to appreciate, define, and understand the landscape surrounding them are endless. Complex relationships between gardens and nature—their imposed separations, their inevitable intertwinement, their catalogue of histories buried within—offer modes of thinking that stray from binary notions of past and present, memory and reality, and ultimately Kincaid, through her practice and endless questioning, maps out her relations to said notions.
“What to do?” Jamaica Kincaid poses this question right at the beginning of My Garden (Book): (11), and subsequently thinks about colonial legacies through the relationship between nature and gardens, considering agencies and animacies within her specific location, offering methods to interrogate nature and gardens. Through detailed accounts of the implications of seasonal changes, paid labour, and behaviours identified in nature, Kincaid’s vexations and doubts that ground her activity in the garden are to be expected. Kincaid claims that “A garden, no matter how good it is, must never completely satisfy” (220). She signals towards an endless curiosity and openness necessary to maintain a productive relationship with the lands that have shaped her, raised her, and continue to relate to her. My Garden (Book): investigates the ways in which human and nonhuman connections extend individual knowledge pertaining to the self, and further questions settler expectations regarding configurations of animacy hierarchies in which one group (nonhuman) must always submit to another (human). In questioning these configurations of power and agency through considerations of the land’s past, present, and future, one comes closer to a holistic comprehension of the various intersections between ecological and sociopolitical systems that affect Earth and its peoples.
Works Cited
Kincaid, Jamaica. My Garden (Book):. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.