A Walk Through the Garden
With Andrea Chung and Jamaica Kincaid
If you are a regular or if you have landed on Tarantula: Authors and Art for the very first time, get ready to enjoy a tiny history lesson to go with our artist of the month. Our contributor, Karen Grace, an art teacher and historian, will take you on a little literary walk through the garden. If a friend forwarded you this article, welcome; if you like it, share it or why not subscribe?
Gazing into the eyes of the women in Andrea Chung’s work I find myself wanting to know their stories - to know more about them and the lives they led. Usually, I am a firm believer in the idea that art, once the artist releases it into the world, is whatever the viewer wants it to be. But with these works I stumble, and I need another’s words to help me fill in the voices with authenticity and love.
So, I turn to a favorite author, Jamaica Kincaid, because it is her voice I hear in my head when I look at these images. In her book A Small Place, we are taken to a tropical paradise (Antigua, Kincaid’s birthplace) and shown the flip side of the tourist experience. Colonialism and all its discontents are on full display, but Kincaid leads us there so matter-of-factly, it’s nothing more mysterious or hidden than the weather really. All one has to do is look.
You disembark from your plane. You go through customs. Since you are a tourist, a North American or European—to be frank, white—and not an Antiguan black returning to Antigua from Europe or North America with cardboard boxes of much needed cheap clothes and food for relatives, you move through customs swiftly, you move through customs with ease. Your bags are not searched. You emerge from customs into the hot, clean air: immediately you feel cleansed, immediately you feel blessed (which is to say special); you feel free.
To me, the beauty of these images is the way in which they both raise difficult issues and offer healing. Being wrapped and layered with the jewels of earth’s bounty, it feels like Ms. Chung is setting things to rights, returning them home again. This is another reason I’m looking to Kincaid… her absolute fascination with plants and the good green earth. In My Garden (Book) Kincaid shares with us the joys, the heartaches, and wonderings of a life spent in the garden.
the Carpinus betulus ‘Pendula’ was doing very nicely, … with its stout trunk like a strong backbone, I have surrounded this beautiful specimen, with its long, weeping branches and corded leaves, with thalictrum and Scabiosa ochroleuca and Filipendula ‘Venusta’ and plume poppy and some lobelia (ordinary blue) and some turtlehead (pink) and some Aster tataricus and more late-blooming monkshood and some Eryngium yuccifolium and the poor thing, the Carpinus betulus ‘Pendula,’ that is, looked as if it had found itself orphaned and in care of people who could not love it in the way it had thought appropriate in which to be loved.
From its title you might expect a typical gardening book, filled with plant lists and companion planting suggestions, and there is some of that, but there’s also plenty of sass and angst and conflict. Kincaid is as rapturous about heirloom roses twining with clematis as she is enraged about colonialism and the inevitability of winter. She lives and gardens in Vermont, but being from Antigua she can’t stand winter, and yet she perseveres anyway.
I hear that the temperature will drop to such a low degree it will cause a frost, and I always take this personally, I think a frost is something someone is doing to me…The effect of the cold air on the things growing in the garden is something I still cannot get used to, still cannot understand, after so many years; how can it be that after a frost the garden looks as if it had been to a party in … hell.
Kincaid meanders freely between her garden paths and new plantings to muse about the great dramas and conundrums in the plant world. The fancy academic term for one such cataclysmic shift is the ‘Columbian Exchange’ or the movement of plant and animal life between the old world and the Americas after the Conquistadores became frequent sailors across the Atlantic. But really, it was theft.
And what is the relationship between gardening and conquest? Is the conqueror a gardener and the conquered the person who works in the field?
Perhaps you already know that potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate, vanilla, squash, beans, and corn all came from the Americas? And of course, you know that the people living on Caribbean islands today are largely the descendants of those who were brought there from Africa as slaves? But how about the cocoxochitl? That, my friends, is the original Aztec name for the dahlia - such an exquisite flower, so highly coveted by gardeners and ordinary humans, it only became “dahlia” by way of Europe, when it was brought to Sweden (of all places) and hybridized by a student of Carl Linnaeus named Andreas Dahl. Dahlias are not the easiest things to grow in Sweden, which makes a lot of sense when you realize they would be much more at home in Mexico. The beautiful ladies in Chung’s artworks, they were taken from their homes too - renamed, planted in new soil, and asked to thrive in impossible circumstances.
And yet, they did, and here we all are. It is impossible to imagine our entire world without this “exchange” - we are inextricably all bound up in it together. It is in our gardens, on our plates, and in our families. It contorts what we think we know. That hibiscus (white flower) in the picture above? Most of us would probably agree that looks like a flower that belongs to a place like Antigua or Jamaica but guess again, its original home is East Africa or Asia. How do we right the wrongs of colonialism? How do we restore our environment? There’s some heavy responsibility in our current position and a challenge to do the right things, both for our planet and its people, even though it’s confusing and muddled. At the end of A Small Place, Kincaid offers this conclusion:
Of course, the whole thing is, once you cease to be a master, once you throw off your master’s yoke, you are no longer human rubbish, you are just a human being, and all the things that adds up to. So, too, with the slaves. Once they are no longer slaves, once they are free, they are no longer noble and exalted; they are just human beings.
So, it seems the end is a pretty good place to start: let us strive to be human beings together.