Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-14T01:28:40.776Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The World and the Garden: Ekphrasis and “Overterritorialization” in Jamaica Kincaid’s Garden Writing*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2018

Shirley Lau Wong
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The garden is often regarded as a feminine space of withdrawal. By contrast, this essay examines how Jamaica Kincaid envisions the garden not as a retreat from the world but as an opportunity to delve into the colonial histories of plants. Kincaid traces the twinned histories of botany and empire, highlighting how the botanic garden served as a laboratory for the development of plantation crops and therefore played a pivotal role in imperial and capitalist expansion. I concentrate on Kincaid’s use of ekphrasis, which reveals the many aesthetic, scientific, and colonial discourses that construct the garden as a both discursive and material space. Kincaid’s ekphrastic prose produces an effect of “overterritorialization,” in which loco-descriptive details do not provide the reader with a sense of place; rather, the overabundance of details overwhelms and even unsettles the reader. Kincaid’s garden writing thus shows us an alternative model of reading postcolonial environmental literature.

Keywords

Jamaica Kincaidpostcolonial ecocriticismplace and literaturegarden writingbotanyekphrasis
Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , January 2018 , pp. 36 - 52
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Acknowledgement: My infinite thanks go to John Easterbrook, who provided generous and insightful notes on an earlier draft of this essay.

References

1 Naipaul, V. S., The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies—British, French, and Dutch—in the West Indies and South America (New York: Vintage Books, 1981)Google Scholar, 182–83. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text.

2 Readers familiar with Kincaid’s work will note the garden’s frequent appearances in her fiction and nonfiction. In The Autobiography of My Mother, Kincaid details the gardens of the protagonist Xuela’s husband, who impractically attempts to adapt the traditional flora of English country gardens to the climate of Dominica: “And pressed between the pages of this book were some specimens of flower he had known and I suppose had loved, but flowers that could not grow in this Dominican climate; he would hold them up to the light and call out to me their names: peony, delphinium, foxglove, monkshood …” In the memoir My Brother, Kincaid notes how she was reading Russell Page’s autobiography The Education of a Gardener when she learns of her brother’s AIDS diagnosis: “And when I picked up that book again, The Education of a Gardener, I looked at my brother, for he was a gardener also, and I wondered if his life had taken a certain turn, if he had caused his life to take a different turn, might he have written a book with such a title?” See Kincaid, Jamaica, The Autobiography of My Mother (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), 143–144 Google Scholar; Kincaid, , My Brother (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 11 Google Scholar.

3 Kincaid, Jamaica, My Garden (Book): (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 7 Google Scholar. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text.

4 Wendy Knepper, “How Does Your Garden Grow? Jamaica Kincaid’s Spatial Praxis in My Garden (Book): and Among the Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya,” in Postcolonial Spaces: The Politics of Space in Contemporary Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 44.

5 Voskuil, Lynn, “The Victorian Novel and Horticulture,” The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel, ed. Lisa Rodensky (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)Google Scholar. More broadly, Voskuil traces the linkages between gardening and discourses of improvement in both horticultural journals and also the Victorian bildungsroman (what she terms “Bildungsgarten”), which demonstrated how plants and people were subjected to the same sorts of cultivation and training. For more on the language of “improvement” in Victorian garden writing and novels, see her forthcoming book, Horticulture and Imperialism: The Garden Spaces of the British Empire, 1789-1914.

6 Ruskin, John, Sesame and Lilies, ed. Nord Deborah Epstein (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 77 Google Scholar. This is a truncated account of the complex genealogy of garden writing and its intersections with the Arts and Crafts Movement. For more on this history, see: Tankard, Judith B., Gardens of the Arts and Crafts Movement: Reality and Imagination, (New York: Abrams, 2004)Google Scholar.

7 Williams, Raymond, Keywords (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 87 Google Scholar.

8 Walcott, Derek, “The Garden Path,” The New Republic, April 13, 1987, 27 Google Scholar.

9 Implicit in Kincaid’s reimagining is the fact that Christopher Columbus infamously introduced sugarcane to the Caribbean. For more on the history of botany’s role in imperialism, see: Casid, Jill, Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

10 Ecocriticism has come under deserved fire for its inattention to race and gender and to the environmental issues of the global south. Over the past decade, however, postcolonial ecocritics have partially corrected this myopia, and much ecocritical scholarship has recently crystallized around Caribbean history and culture. It is not surprising that postcolonial ecocriticism has concentrated on the Caribbean given the region’s position in the Atlantic slave trade and the almost unparalleled environmental devastation it has suffered from monocultural plantation agriculture. For more on this growing body of scholarship, see: Allewaert, Monique, Ariel’s Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013)Google Scholar; DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, Gosson, Renée K., and Handley, George B., eds., Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2005)Google Scholar; DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Iannini, Christopher, Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American Literature (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012)Google Scholar.

11 Casteel, Sarah Phillips, Second Arrivals: Landscape and Belonging in Contemporary Writing of the Americas (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2007), 30–31 Google Scholar.

12 It is difficult to pinpoint exactly who coined the term daffodil gap, but scholars often attribute it to Helen Tiffin. That said, it should be noted that Tiffin does not take credit for inventing the term but rather explains that it commonly circulated among postcolonial writers: “The gap between the lived colonial or post-colonial experience and the imported/exported world of the Anglo-written has often been referred to by Commonwealth post-colonial writers and critics as ‘the daffodil gap’” (920). See: Tiffin, Helen, “Cold Hearts and (Foreign) Tongues: Recitation and the Reclamation of the Female Body in the Works of Erna Brodber and Jamaica Kincaid,” Callaloo 16.7 (1993): 909–921 Google Scholar.

13 Kincaid, Jamaica, Lucy: A Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 17 Google Scholar. Subsequent references appear as parentheticals in the text.

14 Smith, Ian, “Misusing Canonical Intertexts: Jamaica Kincaid, Wordsworth and Colonialism’s ‘absent things,’” Callaloo 25.3 (2002): 817 Google Scholar.

15 Stewart, Susan, “Garden Agon,” Representations 62 (1998): 111 Google Scholar.

16 Heffernan, James, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 19 Google Scholar.

17 Mitchell, W. J. T., “Ekphrasis and the Other,” Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 151-181 Google Scholar. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text.

18 For more on the pivotal role that cotton has played in modern capitalism, see: Beckert, Sven, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Vintage Books, 2015)Google Scholar.

19 I borrow this pithy turn-of-phrase from Lytle Shaw’s scholarship on site-specific art and poetry. See Shaw, “Where Does It Mean? The Site-Specific Critic as Ignoranter Schoolmaster,” paper presented at the annual meeting for the Modernist Studies Association, Boston, Massachusetts, November 19–22, 2015.

20 Katherine Bergren discusses in detail how Kew Gardens played a vital role in building English nationalism and empire. See: Bergren, Katherine, “Localism Unrooted: Gardening in the Prose of Jamaica Kincaid and William Wordsworth,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 22.2 (Spring 2015): 303–325 Google Scholar.

21 Drayton, Richard, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), xii–xiii Google Scholar. In addition to Drayton, numerous other historians and anthropologists have explored the imperial history of the botanic garden. See: Brockway, Lucile H., Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Garden (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Schiebinger, Londa L., Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Grove, Richard, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)Google Scholar. Indeed, it is worth noting that many of Kincaid’s garden essays predate the publication of these seminal books on the history and anthropology of the botanic garden.

22 Fidecaro, Agnese, “Jamaica Kincaid’s Practical Politics of the Intimate in My Garden (Book):,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 34.1/2 (2006): 255–256 Google Scholar.

23 Although many of Kincaid’s publications contain colons in the title, this collection’s particular mixture of parenthetical and colon is unique as the colon proceeds rather than precedes the word Book.

24 Azima, Rachel, “ ‘Not-the-Native’: Self-Transplantation, Ecocriticism, and Postcolonialism in Jamaica Kincaid’s My Garden (Book), ” Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 13.2–14.1 (2006–2007): 112 Google Scholar.

25 More precisely, Gerard Genette would regard the cover and pull quote as part of the “publisher’s peritext,” which he defines as the “whole zone of peritext that is the direct and principal (but not exclusive) responsibility of the publisher … the cover, the title page, and their appendages” (16). The peritext is part of the book’s greater “paratext,” which makes present the reception of the book to its audience: “[paratext] ensure[s] the text’s presence in the world, its “reception” and consumption in the form (nowadays, at least) of a book… . [T]he paratext is what enables a text to become a book and to be offered as such to its readers and, more generally, to the public. More than a boundary or a sealed border, the paratext is, rather, a threshold, or—a word Borges used apropos of a preface—a ‘vestibule’ that offers the world at large the possibility of either stepping inside or turning back” (1–2). See: Genette, Gerard, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

26 The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Harold Fromm and Cheryll Glotfelty (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996), xviii. Glotfelty herself was the first appointed professor of literature and the environment in the United States, a position that she currently holds at the University of Nevada, Reno. The main academic body of ecocriticism is ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment), which publishes the journal ISLE (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment). Many scholars have gone on to criticize ecocriticism for its disciplinary focus on literary studies.

27 Heise, Ursula, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

28 Massey, Doreen. Space, Place, Gender (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 146–156 Google Scholar.

29 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, “Thinking Cultural Questions in ‘Pure’ Literary Terms,” Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall, eds. Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Grossberg, and Angela McRobbie (London: Verso, 2000), 338 Google Scholar.

30 Edwards, Brent, “Selvedge Salvage,” Cultural Studies 17.1 (2003): 29 Google Scholar.