M y Garden (book): (London: Vintage, 1999) is a collection of essays that Jamaica Kincaid wrote for her gardening column in the New Yorker and for magazines such as Architectural Digest and Travel and Leisure.1 In this chronicle of Kincaid’s gardening practice, she meditates upon the pleasure she derives from it while also dispensing some of the practical information that gardeners are interested in, from her purchases of tools and seeds to her trips to various nurseries and gardens. Thus, the essays fit in and rewrite a heterogeneous tradition of garden writing that includes “numerous classic guides to planting and tending gardens, essays about the joys of gardening, plant catalogues, and discussions about the principles of botany.”2 This tradition is characterized by a small-scale kind of learning and, to the extent that it modestly keeps the scope of their knowledge within the confines of the domestic, has been particularly legitimate for women to pursue. At the same time, it has been implicated in the fashioning of a Western cultivated self who finds fulfillment in the tending of its private property and the metaphorical exploration of its own interiority.
Yet from its empirical beginnings in a series of unskilled experiments with seeds, Kincaid’s passion also has a larger scope:
As she comes across familiar flowers in her readings about colonization, Kincaid starts considering the embeddedness of gardening in a variety of discourses and practices of power: history, botany, the aesthetic; transplantation, hybridization, naming; the eradication of a traditional relation to the environment and the transformation of the West Indian landscape through the development of the plantations. She questions the nature of the enjoyment she experiences in her magnificent garden and underscores the ways in which her own passion for plants is compromised by history: “I have joined the conquering class: who else could afford this garden—a garden in which I grow things that it would be much cheaper to buy at the store? (92).”
While this affiliates Kincaid’s texts with public genres such as the journalistic essay or the moral pamphlet, the title of the collection evokes the diary-like genre of the garden book and its careful recording of the most disparate aspects of the everyday. Kincaid radicalizes this conventional domesticity by exploring its continuity with personal memories and emotions connected with trauma, sexuality, and the body. The constitution of an autonomous sphere of the domestic historically had to do with the institution of a rational economy that disciplined the female body and abstracted its materiality into language.4 By contrast, Kincaid’s displacement of the domestic through the intimate redefines the house as a realm of excess, of disorderly materiality and shattering emotions. The intimate thus emerges as that which undermines the closure of the domestic. Kincaid more precisely approaches it as a conflictual, traumatic node that also fissures the global as a sphere with totalizing claims and transforms the conventional discourse of the complementarity of the home and the world. Her always incomplete, open-ended exercises in horticultural creativity and garden writing turn out to be, I will argue, so many instances of a practical politics of the intimate.
The essays subversively develop this politics from within the materialism and superficiality of opulent domesticity. Critics have been rather dismissive of this aspect of Kincaid’s garden writing, of her dwelling on the time she has for leisure or on the small worries associated with her hobby. Marie-Hélène Laforest objects to Kincaid’s individualism and her reproduction of a Western ideology of achievement (which includes having a large house, a husband, and two kids), both of which entail a “lack of racial solidarity” and a certain rejection of Caribbean culture.5 Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert is similarly ambivalent: “A number of [these essays]…, particularly those on the subject of seed catalogues and the differences between the services provided by the various nurseries, seem self-indulgently tedious.… There is evidence in [them] of a struggle between those themes that are close to Kincaid’s heart—genocide, colonialism, cultural erasure, history—and a garden-writing tradition that is in many ways a closed, self-absorbed world.”6 Here the critic constructs an opposition between Kincaid’s intimate political concerns and feelings, the value of which she acknowledges, and her recourse to materialist details and an alien form. This gesture, however, reproduces a dichotomy of authentic inside and inauthentic outside that also structures domesticity as an ideological construction.
I would claim that Kincaid’s performance of domestic consumerism and discursive self-referentiality is not parasitical to her politics but critical and self-conscious.7 A central aspect of her postmodern writing, it makes it difficult to construct the intimate as the unmediated source of a more authentic, unambiguous personal politics. If Kincaid looks for ways of turning the house into a site of resistant practice, it certainly is in full awareness of the feminist critiques that define it as a space of alienation, commodified existence, or middle-class privilege.8 Contrasting with the one-sidedness of such critiques, however, her politics of the intimate involves a complex acknowledgment of ambivalence. Conventional domestic life in her essays harbors powerful emotional and bodily political energies that result from conflictual positionings and traumatic woundings. Domesticity also screens the overwhelming affects connected with them, translating them into surface concerns at the risk of deflating them. Kincaid demonstrates a gardener’s awareness that it takes some practical know-how and refusal of dogma to safely unravel their political potential.
The suspicion that Kincaid’s taste for plants may ultimately lead her away from politics does not, therefore, take seriously enough the writer’s own statements concerning the intrinsic relation of gardens to the larger world that surrounds them. Contrary to Voltaire’s Candide, whose decision to cultivate his own garden signified a retreat from public affairs, Kincaid does not dissociate her gardening from an engagement with the world:
Kincaid captivates her postcolonial readership when she brings to light some of the details of colonial history, when, for instance, she recounts how the dahlias of her own middle-class garden, far from being indigenous, were introduced in the West as a result of conquest. Similarly, she efficiently disrupts readers’ ideas of nature by telling them the story of how these flowers were hybridized and renamed. But the petty details that make up the dimension of the personal will remain suspect of a compromise with middle-class values unless they are immediately translated into a discourse of world-historical significance such as the master narrative of imperialism. The continuing efficacy of a hierarchy that implicitly subordinates the personal to a sphere of the political defined in terms foreign to it thus underlies the critics’ unease. According to this partial interpretation of the feminist motto “the personal is political,” the personal may offer access to the political, but it cannot redefine it.
I will show that Kincaid’s skilled exploration of gardening as a counterpractice of memory effectively resists from inside the consumerist, amnesic reification of the intimate. In their explorations of the personal and mythic longings associated with the garden and the house, the essays particularly perform and rewrite Kincaid’s nostalgia for home and a space of her own. But they simultaneously break the closed and circular, potentially regressive temporal structure of nostalgia in favor of an open orientation toward the “to come.” Although it has lost its innocence, Kincaid’s garden thus remains a utopian space for creativity and personal integrity.
SUBVERSIONS OF PROPERTY
The hybridity and digressiveness of Kincaid’s garden writing have been much remarked upon. Subverting the hierarchies that depoliticize gardening (either negatively, by treating it as an insignificant hobby, or positively, by mobilizing the higher category of the aesthetic), she organizes a series of disruptive encounters between high and low literature, autobiography, gossip, art history, commercial seed catalogs and learned gardening treatises, and the aesthetics of the English garden, but also colonial history, the science of horticulture and the history of botany (as a branch of modern science with universalist claims). These subversions of discursive property are continuous with Kincaid’s revisions of domestic property, of the domestic as a closed and compartmentalized space. As she deessentializes the Western house and the values associated with it, she turns categories such as the inside and the outside upside-down: “But I do not believe that I know how to live in a house. I grew up outside.… When we started to do things together inside our house, things other than sleeping, it was a sign of some pretension (28).” She also questions the tidiness and order often associated with the inside: “The inside of my house looks like my yard; it is smudged with dirt, it is disorderly for an inside of a house, though it would look wonderful and memorable if it were the outside of the house I grew up in” (31).
The intimate is that personal-historical-bodily dimension that resists and exceeds the opposition between the inside and the outside, the private and the public, the individual and the collective, the body and discourse. The private often depends upon a territorial drawing of boundaries and upon a juridical, thus stable, definition of property. The intimate, by contrast, suggests an inner core that is most immediately experienced as one’s own and yet essentially emerges in a conflict over what is proper or as a potentially subversive contestation of property. When Kincaid uses an empty box of sanitary pads to steal, as she claims all gardeners do, some seeds from Monet’s garden in Giverny, the intimate is implicated on two levels: it plays a central role in a transgression of property that symbolically reverses the stealing of black women’s “seeds” and the appropriation of their fertility in slavery; and it becomes part of a process of transplantation that ensures that the garden is caught in a global circulation of an alternative sort (59).
The intimate is idealized in Western culture, where it is closely bound up with the home and is protected by privacy. Kincaid, however, constructs it as the sphere of the untidy, as the realm of an improper, unruly bodiliness, capable of resisting the various authorities bent on disciplining it. Female sexuality—and those sexual dimensions of the female body, such as menstruation, that cannot be idealized in terms of the sublimating language of the aesthetic—is an aspect of this bodily unruliness. At the same time, Kincaid’s prosaic recycling of her box of sanitary pads acknowledges the commodification of the female body and precludes any hasty identification of this metonymically evoked sexual unruliness with “nature.”
This unruliness of the female body also finds in the illegitimacy of gossip, the private-public discourse that circulates the intimate for consumption, a fit vehicle. Kincaid is thus happy to find in Gertrude Jekyll’s all-too-decent biography a passage explaining how this celebrated British designer of gardens (1843–1932) was not, as a child, allowed to pick up dandelions, which she was told were called “Nasty Things.” Wondering, gossip-like, whether Jekyll ever had sex, Kincaid relates the normativity of her discourse about gardens to the sexual repression that may have shaped her supposedly disembodied aesthetic judgment: “What better way to divert attention from herself than to make pronouncements about correctness and beauty in the garden. What a perfect example of making a virtue of your own neuroses!” (68–69).
The unruliness of the intimate has the potential to dislocate the domestic, the very sphere that both harbors and domesticates it. It is conceptualized as that which is most “inside,” yet its “interiority” cannot be dissociated from the externality of the world-historical processes that construct it. It is not simply “contained” by the domestic and is not the graspable (in)side of a comfortable, totalizing sphere of the global. Instead, it has a reopening power that interrogates from inside all closed and enclosing structures that have to do with (self-)possession or property. Kincaid closely relates the intimate to a material dimension of the body that has traditionally been associated with the abject: “All small events are domestic events, and domestic events are those events that can occur in any area in which it seems quite right to expel saliva. If I were asked to make a definition of domestic space, I would say that domestic space is any space in which anyone might feel comfortable expelling any bodily fluid (23).” The abject, the revulsion with which the self responds to the calling into question of its separation from the world, is not a relevant experience here precisely because the intimate is that “comfortable” sphere in which the rules of proper behavior that repress the materiality of the body and protect the frontier between inside and outside do not prevail.12
The garden similarly is a sphere in which the materiality of the body and sexuality reasserts itself. This materiality, for instance, disrupts the cozy, domesticating discourse of gardeners, who apprehend plants in terms of a familiar, stable world: when a catalog describes the “unique carrot shape” of a beet called Formanova, Kincaid does not resist adding that “this beet isn’t shaped like a carrot at all, it is shaped like a penis, and I always refer to it that way; I call it the penis-shaped beet (64).” This determination to return a composed discourse to the low sphere of the body may signal an investment in the regenerative function of the carnivalesque and in a temporality that has affinities with processes of growth. This does not involve any nostalgic return to the organic, however: Kincaid disrupts from the start any view of the naturality of the body with her description of her neighbor Chet, who “could breathe properly only while attached to canisters filled with oxygen,” who would smoke while tending his vegetables, and who “did not worry about poisonous toxins leaching out of the materials from which his house was built into the soil in which his tomatoes were grown (xi–xii).” Chet’s mutilated bodiliness, a hybrid of body and machine, is a living testimony to the violence that world industrial powers exercise on bodies, while his smoking derisorily defies the health authorities that insist on disciplining them. It is from that untenable position, from the excess of that bodiliness, of those unresolved contradictions and painful mutilation, that his gardening paradoxically functions as a resistant assertion of personal integrity—something quite different from making a virtue of one’s own neuroses.13
THE UNHOMELY
Kincaid’s longing for fulfillment and perfection, which is so important to her politics of nostalgia, is asserted from within a similar sense of mutilation. It finds a self-consciously trivialized expression in some of her most blatantly apolitical feelings, such as the “emotional devastation” she experiences when the latest issue of a favorite potato catalog does not live up to her expectations. Gossip, too, is of the utmost value to her, and she defers important intellectual endeavors to enjoy readings such as “the entire six volumes of the Mapp and Lucia saga written by E. F. Benson.” But self-parodic trivialization is not to be dissociated from seriousness and poignancy here: “The grimness of winter for this gardener can be eased only by such things. On my night table now is a large stack of books and all of them concern the Atlantic slave trade and how the world in which I live sprang from it. The days will have to grow longer, warmer, and softer before I can pick one of them up (44–45).” This way of ironically giving the most trivial everyday priority over the tragedy of history paradoxically makes a statement about the emotional weight of that history: about the necessity to keep it at a distance while also having it near, on the night table. In that last sense, a politics of the intimate involves entangled ambivalent feelings that are perhaps less easily objectifiable than a knowledge of the political history of the dahlia.
The attention Kincaid pays to the sphere of the body—to its sexuality and the traumatic memory it encloses—precisely allows her to define on her own terms the conditions of her participation in the exchanges that make up the so-called global world. As the partly autobiographical episode of the daffodils makes clear, her violent interpellation by the impersonal structures of imperialism would entail her psychic annihilation—a prerequisite for her cultural assimilation or cooptation: “The night after I had recited the poem, I dreamt, continuously it seemed, that I was being chased down a narrow cobbled street by bunches and bunches of those same daffodils that I had vowed to forget, and when finally I fell down from exhaustion they all piled on top of me, until I was buried deep underneath them and was never seen again.”17 Yet it is her turning of such a destructive interpellation back upon itself—her mobilization of trauma as that which is most personal to her and yet most historical—that allows for a mode of resistance that is coterminous with the deployment of an unrestrained creativity. Resistance, in other terms, does not arise from any preserved territory of the self, but from an expropriated intimacy that is inextricably implicated in the historical processes that have constructed today’s world and go on shaping it. The body here is the site of an unmediated experience of power: not as a sphere of innocence that could be redeemed from devastation, but as the keeper of a record that has yet to be written because it partakes of both language/discourse and what resists it.
A COUNTERPRACTICE OF MEMORY
Kincaid’s habit of providing the kind of trivial detail that only gardeners will want to know, such as where she bought her set of hand tools, also valorizes what is irreducibly particular, what resists being integrated into a prescriptive, general script. To her, all discourse concerning a gardener’s good taste or “inherent feeling for design and good color combinations” is “bullying,” and she writes ironically about Jekyll’s comments on “between” plants, which have the subordinated function of enhancing their neighbors (58–59). In response to Jekyll’s view that the capacity “to apprehend gardening as a fine art” hinges on the ability to make the difference between a garden and a collection, Kincaid asks: “But what if all the flowers I love and want very much to grow are, when seen together, all wrong, all jarring and displeasing?”(66). This is no rhetorical question: Kincaid’s practical ethics of gardening, which leads her to think of each flower “by itself, isolated, disregarding how it might fit into the garden as a whole” (67), entails a release of control over the overall outcome: “I don’t know how this will look. It may not only violate established rules, but also not please me in the end at all” (67).
Kincaid here mimes the voice of the experienced amateur who has developed a certain idiosyncratic style of performing the most functional tasks. Her relation to the garden, far from being characterized by the detachment of the aesthete, is thick with personal reminiscences. The traditional links of garden writing to autobiography,19 a sign of the implication of gardening in the fashioning of the Western private, cultivated self I mentioned in my introduction to this essay, acquire a new significance here. The radical potential of a practice of writing that would allow the irreducibly personal to assert itself as a counterpoint to the most specialized discourses and areas of knowledge is retrieved.
When Kincaid starts her first garden and her flower beds acquire the most unlikely shapes, it is only after the fact and as a result of practice that she realizes what she has been doing:
Here Kincaid describes the workings of a bodily memory that does not rely upon any conscious processes. The past becomes the product of a practice that creates and invents, in an ongoing process, what it remembers. The result is a personal “map” that counteracts the objectifying function of cartography, an imperial science that abstracts the land from people’s embodied experience of it. In it, the dimension of bodily practice and the dimension of discourse are inextricably linked.
EXPERIENCING LOSS: THE POLITICS OF NOSTALGIA
Trauma is triggered by a historical violence that reaches far into the self. It is connected with a pain that has not reached closure, that still deploys its incapacitating effects. That pain still demands to be rehearsed and returned to because something, in the event that caused it, eludes the possibility of once and for all naming it and putting it at a distance:22 “What to call the thing that happened to me and all that look like me? Should I call it history? And if so, what should history mean to someone who looks like me? Should it be an idea; should it be an open wound, each breath I take in and expel healing and opening the wound again, over and over, or is it a long moment that begins anew each day since 1492 (124–25)?” Here trauma appears to partake of both discourse (history, an idea) and body (an open wound). “The thing that happened to me” is an illocalized event that only discontinuously reveals itself. Kincaid’s breathing—perhaps as painful as Chet’s, the man with the canisters of oxygen—crosses and recrosses the boundary between the inside and the outside of her body, between intelligible idea and unintelligible pain. It articulates the inextricability of violence and healing as the two moments of a bodily rhythm. Contrasting sharply with the linear temporality of history, this specific scansion is not unrelated to the rhythm of gardening as a practice that experiences the materiality of the body, of plants, or even of books in its unresolved connection with and separation from the intelligibility of discourse and reading. Through gardening, Kincaid incorporates pain, loss, and their overcoming into the ongoing rhythms of practice, rehearsing them without reaching any definitive closure.
The belated functioning of traumatic memory disrupts the logic of the once
and for all, a logic that leaves no room for the unexpected and for what resists
the imposition of a rational order. Kincaid thus contrasts the idea of an estate
being a part of the national heritage with
something crucial [that] had been lost over time: the sense of the place not as some sort of national park but as a piece of land a man arranged out of who knows what psychological impulses.… I was in a country whose inhabitants… do not know how to live in the present and cannot imagine living in the future, they can live only in the past, because it, the past, has a clear outcome, a winning outcome. A subdued nature is part of this worldview in which everything looks beautiful (82–83).
Just as the garden taken as a fine art valorizes a certain aesthetic closure (we can also think of the etymological link of the garden with an enclosure here), the garden as national monument turns history into something that is over, that has already happened. It leaves no room for the event or for the “impulses” that may determine, beyond any planning, the arrangements one makes. Plants disrupt such closure, just as practice always encounters the resistance that the otherness of the (natural) world offers to our schemes. Kincaid does not, therefore, only miss the garden/the Caribbean in the nostalgic sense of the term: she also misses it in the sense of a deliberate staging of failure rather than mastery. When she realizes that the untidy sprouts that are spoiling her lawn are peonies planted by the previous owner, the discovery entails a form of dispossession, the realization that places have a kind of stubborn memory that cannot simply be suppressed by the new owner. This is the opposite of the erasure that the colonial appropriation and reshaping of her native landscape involved (100–101, 119). Kincaid’s own relation to her house is mediated by the emotions of a young man who has grown up in it and by his most intimate memories. Plants again are channels for the uncommunicable, which is conveyed across the dispossession the young man is now experiencing: “When he sees the trees and when he speaks of the trees, he is speaking of things that he is perhaps conscious of, perhaps not, but that are not being communicated clearly, and should not be communicated clearly” (21).
Forced closure is, I would argue, a problematic way of dealing with the pain of nostalgia, with the longing for what has been lost. Nostalgia looks back to what was and longs to restore it in its completeness, to repossess it, to heal it. An implicit awareness of the complicity between nostalgia and the desire for possession is expressed when Kincaid relates the Europeans’ transplantation of the dahlia to their “longing” for it: “Who first saw it and longed for it so deeply that it was removed from the place where it had always been, and transformed (hybridized) and renamed?” (88). A specific form of longing, the desire for permanence and perfection (in the sense of something that has been perfected, that is finished) underlies colonial knowledge and the aesthetics that corresponds to it. The fruits and flowers of blown glass exhibited at the Museum of Natural History at Harvard trigger the following comment:
Against that aesthetic permanence, which associates the passion for possession to the production of an incorruptible materiality, Kincaid asserts the value of a different, less transcendent materiality. Taking her books with her in the garden, she allows the materiality of gardening, of mud, bad weather, and the physicality of the body, to contaminate them: “I read my books, but I also use them; that is, sometimes the reading is almost a physical act” (57). She also expresses the deferral of satisfaction in gardening in terms that are suggestive of utopian expectations rather than regret: “An integral part of a gardener’s personality—indeed, a substantial amount of a gardener’s world—is made up of the sentiment expressed by the two words ‘To Come’” (61).
A myth of lost enclosure, self-containment, and perfection, that of the Garden of Eden, gives a nostalgic turn to both the colonial relation to exotic lands and the Western practice of gardening. As John Prest has demonstrated, the history of the botanical garden, which involved the appropriation and transplantation of numerous species of plants, was not just a scientific venture, but was underlain by the mythic desire to recreate Eden.23 Kincaid presents Carol Linnaeus, naming plants in a glasshouse and inventing modern plant nomenclature, as being “Adamlike (112, 124).” Her own concern for naming trauma, which I discussed earlier, makes her Eve-like as she critically questions, in the name of a pain incommensurable with any “universal standard,” the desire and intimate motivations underlying the production of such nomenclatures.
24
The Eden of botanical gardens also is a perversion: as part of a quest for rationality that she questions, botanists “emptied worlds of their names; they emptied the worlds of things animal, vegetable, and mineral of their names and replaced these names with names pleasing to them” (120).25 Kincaid positively describes the botanical garden of her childhood, where she used to sit with her father, as “an enormous expanse of land, Edenic, in my memory” (106). Yet she also associates Eden’s perfection with the patriarchal authority of the first Gardener. Acknowledging her longing for “the garden I have in my mind,” she asserts that she will never have it, yet makes desire—longing as Eve’s original sin?—the principle presiding over its continued creation: “A garden, no matter how good it is, must never completely satisfy. The world as we know it, after all, began in a very good garden, a completely satisfying garden—Paradise—but after a while the owner and the occupants wanted more” (169–70).
The ambivalent feelings of nostalgia and longing also play a central role in Kin-caid’s own complex relation to the domestic. The acquisition of her house is presented as a result of longing and reflects a desire for possession: “I longed to live in this house, I wanted to live in this house” (18). She does value the stability of settling down, which she relates to mothering (“for that sort of settling down is an external metaphor for something that should be done inside, a restfulness, so that you can concentrate on that other business, living, bringing up a child” [18]). Yet she also takes her distance from an earlier fascination for the domestic, which was a projection of her nostalgia for a lost home: “When I was young and living away from my family, my life was almost completely empty of domestic routine, and so I made a fetish of the way ordinary people in families lived inside their homes. I read women’s magazines obsessively and would often cook entire meals (involving meat in tins and frozen vegetables) from the recipes I found in them” (64). On the one hand is the temptation of indulging a nostalgia that fetishizes home, suggesting that you can hope to possess it by buying the magazines that provide virtual, consumerist versions of it; on the other hand is Kincaid’s less regressive investment in the domestic, which is linked to the practice of gardening she explores.
Kincaid does accept some of the mystique associated with the idea of “home,” yet she rewrites it as an ethical Utopia without any normative content, one that is entirely hers to invent, since the recipe for it has been lost, leaving only longing in its place:
Oh, how we wish that someone… had given us a recipe for how to make a house a home, a home being the place in which the mystical way of maneuvering through the world in an ethical way, a way universally understood to be honorable and universally understood to be ecstatic and universally understood to be the way we would all want it to be, carefully balanced between our own needs and the needs of other people, people we do not know and may never like and can never like, but people all the same who must be considered with the utmost seriousness, the same seriousness with which we consider our own lives (33).
The ethical praxis described here is “ecstatic”: it is not a withdrawal inside in self-possession, but a going out of oneself into the world. Kincaid’s garden has thus little to do with the nostalgia for a self-contained, integrated sphere of self-possession and being. On the contrary, in her final essay, titled “The Garden in Eden,” the reader discovers that its enclosure has been turned inside out and has become the world: “Is this Eden, that thing that was banished, turned out into the world as I have come to know it—the world of discarding only to reclaim, of rejecting and then claiming again, the world of such longing that its end (death) is a relief?” (171). The garden is the world, inhabited by the traumatic scansions of loss and healing, of possession and dispossession. Kincaid has, at the point of coming to think of this, left the confinement of her own garden and is restlessly walking across the Chinese landscape: “I was in the wild, the garden had become the wild and I was in it (even though all the time I was really in China)” (175). The housebound mother and the cosmopolitan globe-trotter, who travels to China in search of seeds, have merged into a hybrid figure, as further suggested by Kincaid’s Among Flowers, a volume that crucially makes travel writing the counterpart of her garden book. Refusing to be either locked out or locked in, questioning the opposition between the garden and the world, Kincaid may well send us back in an unexpected way to the restless, improvisational Virginia Woolf of A Room of One’s Own and offer a newly subversive, postcolonial version of her explorations of space and quests for knowledge, poetic credos, challenges to authority, and coming to terms with the wounds of history.
A POSTCOLONIAL “ROOM OF ONE’S OWN”
While gardening possesses its own irreducible goals, practical structures, and temporal constraints, it also functions as a metaphor for writing. Kincaid’s essays deal with the politics and aesthetics of planting and weeding, but also the politics and poetics of creativity. In spite of its subversion of existing discourses on gardening and its aesthetics, My Garden (book): still approaches the garden as a privileged space for creativity and experimentation. Kincaid’s postmodern awareness of its complex, shifting discursive makeup (“the garden for me is so bound up with words about the garden, with words themselves, that any set idea of the garden, any set picture, is a provocation to me” [xiii]) does not dissolve its utopian potential. Kincaid’s garden thus is a room of one’s own, that personal space distinct from the family in which women may create and grow.
Kincaid’s garden was started on Mother’s Day, when she received some seeds and tools from her husband. This would tend to make her gardening continuous with her roles as a wife and mother, an association reinforced by the fact that the essays are dedicated to her children. However, the garden is connected with intellectual and political concerns as well as personal memories and emotions that have little to do with being a mother. We have seen that it takes Kincaid around the world, in a kind of critical rehearsal of the trips undertaken by the botanists of empire. The book’s dedication redefines domestic roles in two opposite ways: on the one hand, it refers to the emotional closeness between mother and children in strong, intimate terms that mime, yet also exceed, the conventional, socially controlled expression of motherly love; on the other hand, it presents the garden as that which introduces some spacing in this intense relationship: “With blind, instinctive, and confused love,/for Annie & for Harold/who from time to time are furiously certain that the only thing standing between them and a perfect union with their mother is the garden, and from time to time, they are correct.” Although a strong tension arises between the two poles that the dedication establishes, they both involve overwhelming passions that destabilize from within the more controlled, socially established realms of which they partake. Kincaid’s personal space does not fit, then, any neat opposition between the alienating demands of the family and the autonomy of a separate space that would allow women to repossess themselves.
Kincaid’s experiments with gardening certainly redefine the room of one’s own in terms of a postcolonial context shaped by a history of diaspora and transplantation rather than rootedness, by dispossession rather than “owning.” But the essays also insist on the materiality of that space and on its connection to the body. The feminist room of one’s own entails something more, then, than the peacefulness, privacy, and concentration necessary for writing to occur: the intimate as a politically significant, disruptive dimension. Kincaid’s room may have to be wrested from the demands of domestic life, but it is deeply in touch with the subversive sphere of the intimate that lies at its core, and it is from that connection and that sense of the relationality of spaces that it interpellates the contemporary world.
The concern for women’s creativity and aesthetic integrity in A Room of One’s Own is related to deep anxieties concerning historical and personal trauma. Woolf resolves them with the myth of the androgynous mind, which is supposed to heal the fissures of the world she is living in. Kincaid’s open, hybrid aesthetics rethinks Woolf’s demand for integrity in terms of the traumas of the contemporary world. Her ways of missing the garden function as a complex response to the traumatic, uprooting dimensions of colonial history. The history of transplantation and loss she deals with defeats, however, any project of a recovered cultural plenitude, self-containment, rootedness, or original completeness. Her ambivalent, conflict-ridden manifesto thus does not promise any forced synthesis, nor are its contradictions resolved in any way. Yet it does propose new ways of thinking together, again and again, the global and the intimate. The room of one’s own is reconceived as a space in the making, the space of our intimacies, that we go on cultivating, encountering trauma and recovering sources of material resistance—always missing the garden, always longing for it.
NOTES
1. I would like to thank Susie O’Brien, Maria Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, and the other anonymous reviewers for their most constructive comments and suggestions.
2. Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Jamaica Kincaid, 45.
3. Kincaid, My Garden (book):, xiii.
4. See Nancy Armstrong’s genealogy of the domestic (Armstrong, “The Rise of the Domestic Woman”).
5. Marie-Hélène Laforest, Diasporic Encounters, 217–22.
6. Paravisini-Gebert, Jamaica Kincaid, 40.
7. The politics of consumerism is clearly an issue when one writes for the New Yorker. For a critical view of Kincaid’s “entangled” relation to the magazine, see Anne Collett, “Gardening in the Tropics.”
8. For a deconstructive discussion of feminist critiques of the domestic, see, e.g., Rachel Bowlby, “Domestication.”
9. Alice Walker, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens.”
10. Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy, 17–19.
11. For an analysis of this “rite of colonial obedience” and a discussion of the erasure of the female body in it, see Helen Tiffin, “‘Replanted in This Arboreal Place.’” Tiffin seems to posit the existence of an autonomous sphere of the body that could be retrieved outside of discourse. My essay is closer to O’Brien and her insistence on the reciprocal implication of discourse and the physical world in Kincaid. For other discussions of the daffodil episode, see Alison Donnell, “Dreaming of Daffodils”; Moira Ferguson, Jamaica Kincaid, 111–13; Jana Evans Braziel, “Daffodils, Rhizomes, Migrations.”
12. On the abject and the question of boundaries, see Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, chapter 1.
13. For a discussion of Kincaid’s critical relation to environmentalism, see Susie O’Brien, “The Garden and the World.” In the present essay I develop, from a different perspective, the implications of two of O’Brien’s points: the idea that Kincaid’s garden writing involves an “aesthetic pleasure that does not fulfill desire” and the idea that culture and nature in Kincaid are both incommensurable and inextricably linked (179).
14. Homi Bhabha, “The World and the Home,” 446, 445.
18. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice.
19. See Paravisini-Gebert, Jamaica Kincaid, 39.
20. Kincaid, My Garden (book):, 67–68.
21. On the politics and poetics of home and displacement in Kincaid, see Antonia MacDonald-Smythe, Making Homes in the West/Indies. On the parallels between the relation to the mother and the relation to the mother country in Kincaid, see Ferguson, Jamaica Kincaid.
22. On the definition of trauma and the role belatedness plays in its structure, see Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery; Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony; Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience.
23. John Prest, The Garden of Eden.
24. Kincaid, My Garden (book):, 124–25. For a critique of the politics of naming connected with botany and the botanical garden, see Collett, “Gardening in the Tropics.”
25. Extending John Prest’s discussion, Tiffin describes the Caribbean “paradise” as itself “parodic, ironic, and tragic” (Tiffin, “Replanted in This Arboreal Place,” 152).
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