My Garden (Book)

by Jamaica Kincaid

  This botanical garden of my childhood is an enormous expanse of land, Edenic, in my memory. For a large period of my childhood life, I spent every Sunday afternoon there; for a shorter period of my childhood life, when my father and I were happily (it seems to me now) sick together, he with heart and digestive problems, me with a persistent case of hookworm, I spent many weekday afternoons there. On Sunday afternoons I could never seem to traverse the whole of it. I was always surprised when the dark of nighttime began to come on and I was still in only one part of it, the part of it that I had headed for the minute I entered.

  The parts of that botanical garden that were my destination on Sunday afternoons were the secluded parts. The Bamboo Grove (it was called that, the Bamboo Grove) was particularly favored. It was there in the middle of this patch of giant grasses, a species of plant completely foreign to Antigua, that I met the great loves of my then life. These great loves were all girls; for them to have been boys would have been a serious mistake, a mistake that would have, not might have, changed my life, for I knew either by instinct, or it had been drummed into me, that boys (who eventually grow into men) never think of consequences, never care about consequences unless it pleases them to do so, never indulge in the fantasies of pretending, and so must take everything to its logical conclusion, at which point they then move to take on another event and bring it to its logical conclusion.

  What type of bamboo was in the Bamboo Grove, where it was from, I do not now remember. I am sure it had some little legend of information placed near it, because not only is such a thing expected, it is also just the sort of thing the people planting the bamboo in its botanical context would do. It is not native to the place I am from. This clump of bamboo that I knew, the only clump of bamboo that I knew then, could have come from that mysterious place known to me as the Far East, or that mysterious place known to me as Africa. The one thing I do know is that the bamboo was brought to me by people I was most familiar with, people who had influenced me to such a degree that though I did not resemble them in any physical way, I thought of myself as more like them than the people I did resemble in a physical way.

  There was a rubber tree. Did I know that its proper name was Ficus elastica? I doubt it; in any case, this would not have interested me. I knew it was a part of the economy of some of the people of the mysterious Far East. The people native to the Far East, like the people native to everywhere, were workers; that is, they worked in the fields where they cultivated the plants native to their place or the plants that had been made native to their place.

  There was a rubber tree in this botanical garden. It was not too far away from the grove of bamboo. The rubber tree was a massive twist of trunks and roots all coiled up and turned in and out of each other. When first seen by any of us (and by us, I mean not only my immediate family but the people of my small island), it was a curiosity; eventually we accepted its presence in our midst, even as we accepted our own presence in our midst, for we, too, were not native to the place we were in. Did I know that such a gigantic tree could be epiphytic? And should knowing that have been consoling? The man who was not really my father, I only thought him so, he was presented to me as that, my father, he and I were once sick at the same time, he with problems in his chest and stomach that had been diagnosed as a malfunctioning heart and a malfunctioning digestive tract; I with a severe and persistent case of hookworm. In a poor country his maladies had no real cure from a doctor; in a poor country parasites of every kind, except the human kind, the colonial, that severe and persistent problem, are attacked zealously, and their (the parasites who are not human) eradication is the goal of every good person.

  When my father and I grew sick simultaneously, we had a delicious time. We had not meant to. In the mornings, after our breakfast of porridge and eggs and grapefruit, we would lie in bed with our feet resting on the windowsill; the sun, by some strange arrangement, never came in to make the inside of our small house hot, it always remained just outside the doorway, just at the windowsill. While we were lying in bed, my father obsessively studied football coupons, hoping to settle on a combination of English football teams that would all do the same thing (I can’t remember whether it was that they would all win or they would all lose), and if he chose correctly, he would win a great deal of money. He never managed to choose correctly. I read a book, any book, I can’t remember now what they would have been, but it was something of which my mother had a high opinion. After our lunch, which would have been something delicious, but something I am sure (even now) I did not eat much of, my father and I would set out on a walk. Our destination was always the botanical garden, and in the botanical garden our destination would eventually be a nice afternoon spent sitting under the rubber tree.

  The reason why when we reached the botanical garden our destination would eventually be the rubber tree was that my father would first make stops in various sections of the garden and surreptitiously pick parts of other plants growing there, from which he would make a tea to treat his ailments. There was one shrub in particular, called by him a myrtle bush. It was a low-growing shrub, with small thorns down its long, slightly drooping stems, and it bore fruit, small red berries. I do not remember seeing it in flower. There were other plants that he felt compelled to pick to treat his illnesses, but I do not remember them as clearly as I do this myrtle bush, which now I see resembles a barberry (and perhaps this whole episode explains my resistance to barberries and why I do not have them growing in my garden; on the other hand, were I to have a passion for barberries, this whole episode could explain it, too). His making of a tea from this bush was an unusual sight, for my father was never seen performing any task that was vaguely domestic. He did not even polish his own shoes, my mother did that; she even made sure he had a fresh glass of water each night in which to place his two rows of false teeth (the false teeth, she felt sure, were the cause of his digestive problems).

  It was in the shade of the distorted branches of the rubber tree (though this distortion is perfectly natural to the rubber tree) in the botanical garden of St. John’s, Antigua, a garden that was the creation of the most ambivalent of people, that I came to know important things, though I came to understand them only long after. Not the least of them is how I became a writer, or at least some of the things that have contributed to my becoming a writer. My father: his mother left him when he was a small child, small enough for it to matter so much to him that he still spoke of it when he was over fifty years old, but of course it turns out that no matter what time your mother leaves you, it always matters; she went to England and he never saw her again. She once sent him a pair of shoes, but they were too big and they were put away; when he tried them on again, he had outgrown them. Perhaps at the same time, perhaps before, perhaps afterward (it was never made clear to me) his father left him and went off to build the Panama Canal. If my father knew then that his own father had not single-handedly built the Panama Canal, he did not make it clear to me. It wasn’t until much later, when I met other people from the West Indies who all had stories of their own father’s going off to build the Panama Canal, that I came to feel this: it is possible that, in a way, a very human way, my father, when sitting under the rubber tree in the botanical garden, was in the presence, the atmosphere, the shrine of Possession, and that he himself was an object, a mere thing, within it. The rubber tree was not present in Antigua through a benign curiosity; the Antigua that he lived in had not come about through the catastrophe common to the uncaring and uneven acts of nature. My father had absorbed all this culture of Possession: the rubber tree, the bamboo tree, the plant from which his medicine was made (this shrub was not native to Antigua, I do not know where it is from, but I have never seen it anywhere but in the botanical garden), the bamboo grove, all that was in the botanical garden, including himself and me (and while speaking to his daughter he had removed himself, magically, from being a mere subject in this drama of possessing). The Panama Canal has attached to it also the shameful qualit
ies of imperialism and unjustified aggression, but all this, claim and counterclaim, was of no importance to my father, the idea and reality; “Panama Canal” he understood, it rolled off his tongue as if he had a rightful and just claim to it.

  What does any of this have to do with the botanical garden or greenhouse? Often, when I am walking through a botanical garden, I come across a specimen or a replica of a landscape that makes me say to myself, Oh, this is the back yard of someone else, someone far away, someone’s landscape the botanical garden can make an object. There is usually the coconut tree, the banana, a clump of sugarcane. These are actually things I had growing in my yard when I was a child in the West Indies; I have seen pictures of them growing in the yards of people in Africa and Asia; I have seen them with my own eyes growing in botanical gardens in Europe and America.

  One day I was walking through the glasshouse area of Kew Gardens when I came upon the most beautiful hollyhock I had ever seen. Hollyhocks are among my favorite flowers, and why, I wondered, is this particular form no longer cultivated and offered? It had that large flared petal of the hollyhock and it was a most beautiful yellow, a clear yellow, as if it, the color yellow, were just born, delicate, at the very beginning of its history as “yellow,” but when I looked at the label on which its identification was written my whole being was sent a-whir. It was not a hollyhock at all but Gossypium, and its common name is cotton. Cotton all by itself exists in perfection, with malice toward none; in the sharp, swift, even brutal dismissive words of the botanist Oakes Ames, it is reduced to an economic annual, but the tormented, malevolent role it has played in my ancestral history is not forgotten by me. Even so, long after its role in the bondage of some of my ancestors had been eliminated, it continued to play a part in my life.

  My mother had a friend who lived a long walk away from us, in what was considered “the country”; in Antiguan terms then, it meant a place where you could not see too many people from your own house. My mother’s friend raised guinea hens, some pigs, and chickens. These animals were all unfriendly, sullen, not like animals in a picture book at all. In a large field beyond the house, beyond the yard where the animals lived, this woman grew a crop of cotton. I had never seen this cotton in bloom, I never even knew it had a flower. I saw the cotton only at harvest time, which coincided with my long school holidays sometime in July and August, and sometimes I was asked to reap it and, when it was all gathered up in large containers, to separate the cotton from its pod and then from its seed. There were many reasons why I came to hate this period of my young life: I was away from my mother and my family in general, I could see the graveyard from the house in which I was staying, the guinea hens were unfamiliar, the pigs were cross, the hens were unhappy, but perhaps the most lasting memory is the cotton. It had to be picked, and though I can’t remember having to actually do that, pick the cotton, I can so well remember large clumps of it filling up a room, some of the clumps free of the dry pod and seed, some of the clumps waiting to be free of the dry pod and seed. I remember my hands aching, particularly in the area at the base of my thumbs, as I tried to separate dried pod from cotton, and then the almost certainly white cotton from its certainly black seed. They were inextricably bound, seed and fruit, and they were hard to separate. This is not a fiction; this all occurred to me while seeing this particular flower in bloom in Kew Gardens. I had never seen the cotton plant in bloom before. The hollyhock, to which it is related—they are in the same family, Malvaceae—is among my favorite perennials; perhaps the fact that the hollyhock looks like cotton when it is in flower is an explanation; on the other hand, the hollyhock could have been my least favorite perennial for the very same reason. I wait for the unknown expanse called time to let me know.

  Accounts of botanical gardens begin with men who have sworn to forsake the company of women and have attached themselves to other things, the pursuit of only thinking, contemplating the world as it is or ought to be and, as a relief from this or complementary to this, the capture, isolation, and imprisoning of plants. This is my interpretation, this is the view I favor.

  It was in a glasshouse, the glasshouse of a rich man named George Clifford, that Carolus Linnaeus, Adam like, invented modern plant nomenclature. He gave names to the things he saw growing before him. George Clifford lived in the Netherlands, and for reasons never made clear, he is always described as an Anglo-Dutch banker. The plants in his glasshouse could have come to him only through, and I quote from The Oxford Companion to Gardens, “the influence of the world trade being developed by maritime powers such as The Netherlands and Great Britain.” Exactly where the plants originated and what their names were before Linnaeus named them and the names he gave them, I do not know. I know they were not native to the Netherlands or Great Britain; if they had been, he would not have needed the glasshouse. The name Linnaeus is interesting; his family seems to have adopted it out of a special feeling an ancestor of his had toward the linden tree. Perhaps, then, the naming of plants was for him a matter of spiritual destiny.

  I do not mind the glasshouse; I do not mind the botanical garden. This is not so grand a gesture on my part, it is mostly an admission of defeat: to mind would be completely futile, I cannot do anything about it anyway. I only mind the absence of this admission, this contradiction: perhaps every good thing that stands before us comes at a great cost to someone else.

  IN HISTORY

  What to call the thing that happened to me and all who look like me?

  Should I call it history?

  If so, what should history mean to someone like me?

  Should it be an idea, should it be an open wound with each breath I take in and expel healing and opening the wound again and again, over and over, and is this healing and opening a moment that began in 1492 and has yet to come to an end? Is it a collection of facts, all true and precise details, and if so, when I come across these true and precise details, what should I do, how should I feel, where should I place myself?

  Why should I be obsessed with all these questions?

  My history begins like this: In 1492, Christopher Columbus discovered the New World.

  Since this is only the beginning and I am not yet in the picture, I have not yet made an appearance, the word “discover” does not set off an alarm, I am not yet confused by this assertion. Discover is a fact that I accept; I am only taken by the personality of this quarrelsome, restless man. Who is he? His origins are sometimes obscure, sometimes no one knows just where he really came from, who he really was. His origins are sometimes quite vivid: his father was a tailor, he came from Genoa; as a boy, he wandered up and down the Genoese wharves, fascinated by sailors and their tales of faraway lands; these lands would be filled with treasures, all things far away are treasures. I am far away but I am not yet a treasure, I am not a part of this man’s consciousness, he does not know of me, I do not yet have a name. And so the word “discover,” as it is applied to this new world, remains uninteresting to me.

  He, Christopher Columbus, then discovers this new world. That it is new only to him, that it had a substantial existence, physical and spiritual, before he became aware of it, does not occur to him. To cast blame on him now for this is childish, immature, small-minded, even with all the moral substance of a certificate given to a schoolgirl for good behavior; to be a well-behaved schoolgirl is not hard. When he sees this new world, it is really new to him; he has never seen anything like it before, it was not what he had expected, in his mind he had images of China and Japan, and though he thought he was in China and Japan, it was not the China or Japan he had fixed in his mind; he, after all, had never been to China and Japan ever. When he saw this new world, he couldn’t find enough words to describe what was before him: the people were new, the flora and fauna were new, the way the water met the sky was new, this world itself was new. It was the New World—but New only because he had never seen it before, new to him in a way even heaven itself could not have been.

  “If one does not know the names, one
’s knowledge of things is useless.” This is attributed to Isidorus, and I do not know if this is the Greek Isidorus or the other Isidorus, the Archbishop of Seville; but why not put it another way: To have knowledge of things, one must first give them a name. This, in any case, seems to me to have been Christopher Columbus’s principle, for he named and he named; he named places, he named people, he named things. This world he saw before him had a blankness to it, the blankness of the newly made, the newly born. It had no before. I could say it had no history, but I would have to begin again, I would have to ask the question again: What is history? This blankness, the one Columbus met, was more like the blankness of paradise; paradise emerges from chaos and chaos is not history, chaos is the opposite of the legitimate order of things. Paradise, then, is an arrangement of the ordinary and the extraordinary, but in such a way as to make it, paradise, seem as if it had fallen out of the clear air. Nothing about it suggests the messy life of the builder, the carpenter, the quarrels with the contractor, the people who are late with the delivery of materials, the whole project going over budget, the small disappointments to be found in details of the end result. This is an unpleasant arrangement, this is not paradise. Paradise is the thing just met when all the troublesome details have been vanquished, overcome; paradise is the place that does not hold any of the difficulties you have known before; it holds nothing, only happiness, and it never reveals that even happiness is a burden, eventually.

  Christopher Columbus met paradise. It would not have been paradise for the people living there; they would have had the ordinary dreariness of living anywhere day after day, the ordinary dreariness of just being alive. But someone else’s ordinary dreariness is another person’s epiphany.