Gardening in the Diaspora: Place and Identity in Olive Senior’s Poetry
Jordan Stouck. Mosaic : a Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature. Winnipeg: Dec 2005. Vol. 38, Iss. 4; pg. 103, 20 pgs
Abstract (Summary)
Senior’s poetry collection, Gardening in the Tropics, asserts the need for identity distinctions and dynamic exchanges, deploying the garden, in its ambivalent history as a space of colonial exclusion and postcolonial hybridity, as a figure for these processes. Senior both embraces and problematizes the rhizomatic and creolizing theories of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Edouard Glissant. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
Copyright MOSAIC Dec 2005
| [Headnote] |
| Senior’s poetry collection, Gardening in the Tropics, asserts the need for identity distinctions and dynamic exchanges, deploying the garden, in its ambivalent history as a space of colonial exclusion and postcolonial hybridity, as a figure for these processes. Senior both embraces and problematizes the rhizomatic and creolizing theories of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Edouard Glissant. |
Gardening and cultivation are ambivalent acts within contemporary and postcolonial literatures. As a metaphor, gardening works both in relation to postcolonial theories of hybridity, diaspora and dissemi/nation, and in relation to colonial histories of conquest and the desire for pure origins. While, on the one hand, gardening can be a means to identity for migrant writers, on the other, it is profoundly imperialistic. Gardening can encourage hybridity and propagation and yet simultaneously it seeks to weed out indigenous populations perceived to be inappropriate. This ambivalence continues: while community and organic gardens function discursively as means to identity, industrialized crops have become one of the hottest issues worldwide for critics of globalization, who observe their negative effects on identity and local economies. In this ambivalence, the concept of the garden serves as a succinct metaphor for one of the major impasses within postcolonial identity politics: how can theory preserve a space for specific forms of identity while seeking to overcome the limitations of traditional identity categories through modelling processes of hybrid, cross-cultural exchange? Both Christopher Bongie and Peter Hallward explain that while postcolonial theory has sought to eliminate oppressive hierarchies of identity, concepts of nation, race, and ethnicity, rooted in colonial history continue to be essential in delineating and preserving difference (Bongie 11, Hallward xii). The garden, as I will use it in this essay, is a figure for regional affirmations of identity, as well as for fertile and often painful cross-cultural exchanges. As in any horticultural endeavour, the balance in transnational identity politics is between nurturing the growth of distinct forms and encouraging hybrid propagation. Olive Senior’s 1994 poetry collection, Gardening in the Tropics, succinctly captures this double ambivalence. Senior writes on the ways in which gardening can become a form of relating to a new place or of establishing identity through understanding the place of origin, while also recalling historical displacement bound to the land (since her speakers are frequently revealed as descendants of plantation slaves). Similarly, the collection suggests the creative identity possibilities arising out of transplantation, as well as out of shifting locations and cultures, and points toward the losses associated with that process. In Gardening in the Tropics, the garden’s ambivalence functions as a space to negotiate the complex exchanges between colonial, postcolonial, and global, and to describe the contradictory impulses within current theory toward identities grounded in regional and historical particularities and toward identities that are forever deferred by movements of transnational exchange. The rhizomatic garden is also used as a metaphor for identity politics in the work of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Edouard Glissant, but the historical discourses and practices that underlie gardening in Olive Senior’s poetry construct the metaphor as a far more ambivalent and conflicted process than even Deleuze acknowledges. Unlike these critics, Senior insists on the potentially tragic losses produced by negotiations of identity and place as well as the productive possibilities.
Gardening in the Tropics is one of Senior’s first works to combine her family history of slavery in the Caribbean with her migration to Canada in the early 1990s. While insisting that she remains “a conscious Caribbean person” (Allen-Agostini), Senior has been embraced by Canadian cultural institutions and now divides her time between Canada and Jamaica. The collection represents Senior’s attempt to reconcile a Caribbean past with a North American present and deploys the ambivalent processes and meanings of gardening to negotiate the two experiences. Indeed, the use of the word “tropics” in Senior’s title acknowledges the colonial history of the region within a collection that also explores the new possibilities available to migrant writers. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “tropics” was first applied to colonial territories located between latitudes twenty-three and a half degrees north and south in the early 1500s and during the nineteenth century became used more generally to describe the hot, lush, and foreign qualities associated with those regions. As a colonial demarcator, “tropics” is used in Senior’s title to indicate her negotiation with imperial history and with the stereotypes that imperialism produced, while the non-finite verb “gardening” signifies a concept of identity as process. Throughout the collection, references to colonial tropes of Eden and El Dorado, and to indigenous and imported plants, locate gardening as both a means to identity and the site of colonial oppression. Similarly, Senior’s descriptions of global farming practices and of the experience of migration define transnational exchange as a process of conflicts and possibilities, locations and dislocations. Previous critics have noted that dynamic and conflicted subjectivity is a persistent theme in Senior’s work. Alison Donnell, for instance, describes the “complex and difficult task of the negotiating of identities” in Senior’s work (118), while Mark Beittell and Giovanna Covi typify Senior’s approach as refusing fixed identity for a prismatic and situational subjectivity (395). Focusing neither solely on the oppression of colonialism, nor on an overly idealistic version of migration, Senior’s poems cultivate a concept of identity as simultaneously situated in regional space and open to multiple transnational permutations.
The discourse of gardens and gardening has, historically, entwined the Garden of Eden as ideal and metaphor with everyday gardens as places to (re)enact cultural myths and identity practices. Carolyn Merchant describes Western culture as a recovery narrative in which colonial gardens were substituted for the Garden of Eden in an attempt to return to a state of untroubled bliss (134). “The idea of recovery functions,” Merchant writes, “as ideology and legitimation for settlement of the New World, while capitalism, science and technology provided the means of transforming the material world” (137). Annette Kolodny concurs, explaining that New World garden discourse “from the first, took its metaphors as literal truths” (5). The guiding myths of colonialism and capitalism-restoration of the Garden and discovery of El Dorado-thus intersect, so that the garden is at least partially a repository for Western ideals and for the concepts of identity that those ideals produce. John Prest describes the conflicting discourses surrounding the garden during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when settlement in the “new” world began. Some late Renaissance theologians believed the Edenic Garden was metaphorical and forever denied to post-lapsarian humanity, but many others felt that the ruins of the Garden could still be found or re-assembled on earth (Prest 23-4). Those who believed in the Garden’s real, re-creational properties came, during the age of exploration, to feel that the Caribbean climate and location might well contain the mythical Garden (since explorations in the Middle East, the original surmised location of the Garden, had failed). Early explorers’ accounts described the islands in distinctly Edenic terms. Christopher Columbus’s letters and journals, for instance, emphasize the climate, presence of fresh water, and verdure of the Caribbean in terms that recall biblical descriptions of paradise, while the garden metaphor became almost standard in later descriptions of the Caribbean region (Columbus 110, 121). Sir Francis Drake’s account of his voyage to the West Indies describes Santo Domingo as “having in it many sorts of goodly and very pleasant fruites, as the Orenge trees and other, being set orderly in walkes of great length together. Insomuch as the whole Island being some two or three miles about, is cast into grounds of gardening and orchards” (qtd. in Hakluyt 102). Sixteenth century concepts of the garden thus legitimated the colonial project and conflated the ideal Garden in Eden with everyday horticultural practices, making gardening in the “new” world a symbolic act.
When the Garden of Eden did not prove to exist in the Caribbean, literal re-creationists began to believe that the Fall had scattered the elements of Paradise and that these elements could be re-assembled in the great botanical gardens of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Botanical gardens were structured to represent the four corners of the globe and, while frequently located in Europe, plundered areas like the Caribbean for plant life. Donal McCracken explains that, in Europe, botanical gardens were tied to national identity and were enclosed within high walls at least partially to exclude what were perceived to be the corrupted and undesirable elements of the world (including people of other nations and cultures) (3). Anne Collett emphasizes the economic and colonizing function of Kew Gardens, which bred and refined commercially profitable seed for distribution to the colonies (89). Breadfruit, sugar cane, cocoa, tobacco, bananas, and a variety of spices were only the most common crops to be refined by the British and then grown commercially in the Caribbean (foreshadowing multinational agricultural practices in which Western corporations select and genetically modify seeds for global mass production). Inevitably, European botanical gardens operated according to a literal and symbolic economy of belonging and exclusion and in this sense reflected the dynamics of colonial power. Botanical gardens were also constructed in the colonies for both symbolic and practical reasons. McCracken notes the focus on producing “economics,” crops with commercial potential, in colonial gardens (7) and Helen Tiffin describes the work of colonizers such as Thomas Thistlewood who established a botanical garden in Jamaica that combined “native” and “exotic” plants for commercially profitable cross-breeding (150). Patricia seed explains that, for the English in particular, the enclosing and cultivation of gardens in the “new” world functioned on a symbolic level as a “ceremony of possession” for laying claim to those territories (28-31). Thus, Caribbean horticulture was in many respects continuous with colonial practices, not only in laying claim to the land and its products but also in the materialistic aspect of exploiting foreign resources for maximum profit. If El Dorado, like Eden, did not exist in a natural form, then colonizers would create it out of the materials and resources that were available.
Colonial gardens were not, however, the only cultivating force present in the Caribbean. Undeveloped indigenous territory and slave allotments afforded the horticultural equivalent of resistance in the Caribbean. In this sense, gardening in Caribbean experience has always been and continues to be both a way of establishing local community and a means to global domination. Anne Collett notes that European hybrids of tropical crops were not the only transplants to the islands, but that African slaves brought yams, pumpkins, gourds, and various other seeds with them to plant in small provision grounds. As Collett writes, “The garden allotments of the plantation slaves might also be termed tropical gardens of subversion and dissent, for it was here, away from the eye of the plantation owner, that the seeds of old customs and new rebellions were planted and brought to fruition” (88). Indeed, Beth Fowkes Tobin analyzes the cultural significance of slave provision grounds and the marketplaces that arose to sell excess produce during the eighteenth century and concludes that, “the slaves’ gardens provided the basis for a proto-peasant economy that existed independent of and eventually in opposition to the plantation system” (173). Not only did the slaves’ horticultural abilities represent a level of knowledge beyond that of white planters, but the autonomy that the slaves developed as a result of the provision grounds established an identity in connection to the land. In other words, in eighteenth century slave society, the act of gardening was a means to African Caribbean identity despite the dispossession and oppression tied to the land that slavery represented. Provision grounds also included indigenous crops such as cassava, corn, and callaloo (Tobin 167), so that gardens in the Caribbean exemplify the processes of creolization in which European, indigenous, and African elements combine in never ending and highly unpredictable ways. As a metaphor for identity positions and processes, the Caribbean garden encompasses both colonial definitions and hierarchies and an alternative history of slave resistance. Gardening in the Caribbean diaspora has developed therefore as a doubly ambivalent situation: a clearly located, grounded identity, originating from the cultivation of indigenous plants and slave gardens, is necessary for migrant women writers to situate themselves materially and historically, yet such fixed identity categories also carry a legacy of colonial oppression.
The opening section of Senior’s collection, “Traveller’s Tales,” clearly sets up the historical links between colonial, postcolonial, and global and depicts the binaries of oppression and resistance that initially defined gardening discourse. The poem “Meditation on Yellow” describes the mythic El Dorado that colonists expected to find and then sought to extract from the Caribbean. The lyric moves from colonial origins in the Caribbean to the modern tourist trade, wittily focusing on Westerners’ obsession with gold and all things yellow or orange in hue:
At three in the afternoon
you landed here at El Dorado
(for heat engenders gold and
fires the brain)
[…]
I wished for you
a sudden enlightenment that
we were not the Indies
nor Cathay
No Yellow Peril here
though after you came
plenty of bananas
oranges
sugar cane
[…]
And just when I thought
I could rest
pour my own
-something soothing
like fever-grass and lemon
cut my ten in the kitchen
take five
a new set of people
arrive
to lie bare-assed in the sun
wanting gold on their bodies (11, 12,14-15)
This continuity between colonial and supposedly post- but often neo-colonial periods is indicated by the lack of periods until the end of the poem. Senior draws a direct line from the original myths that motivated colonization, to the trade and resource based re-creation of El Dorado that followed and the modern tourist gold which now runs Caribbean economies and alters the landscape. Told from a transhistorical, indigenous and African Caribbean point of view, the poem achieves continuity through tracing a history of Western oppression in the Caribbean. Gardening in this context is an experience of oppression bound to the land as the speaker lists the seemingly endless tasks s/he has performed over the ages, cultivating everything from sugar cane to cocoa beans to tourists’ hair. Ultimately, the narrator establishes a resistant, disconnected relationship with the land since it has been given away, as s/he says,
I give you the gold
I give you the land
I give you the breeze
I give you the beaches
I give you the yellow sand
I give you the golden crystals. (15)
Caribbean economics, colonial and neo-colonial, have created a disjunction between land and people. Historical discourses on gardening and poems such as Senior’s “Meditation on Yellow” reveal the colonial ideologies that structured gardening as an exclusionary identitarian practice and the practices of resistance that this experience also produced. Identity in the colonial garden was radically split between the perpetuation of oppressive categories and hierarchies and the resistance of such modes of being.
The impasse between identity and difference, as figured in this context through the colonial garden, was an early focus for postcolonial theory. Indeed, postcolonialism began as an attempt to delineate the oppressive ways of thinking that had, up to that point, been transparently accepted and as an effort to locate the modes of resistance that might provide an initial move in deconstructing those paradigms. Homi Bhabha describes the founding tenets of postcolonial criticism as a process of “bear[ing] witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social authority.” Bhabha acknowledges the empowering strategies of resistance that began postcolonial criticism, but, of course, recognizes that true change involves a more thorough rewriting of cultural discourse: “To reconstitute the discourse of cultural difference demands not simply a change of cultural contents and symbols […]. It requires a radical revision of the social temporality in which emergent histories may be written” ( 171 ). As a consequence of such calls for discursive revision, the theories of Edouard Glissant, Giles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari have gained popularity for their complication of the binary between identity and difference. Peter Hallward notes that Edouard Glissant’s work on creolization fits the more recent agenda of postcolonial theory as “a project both ‘post-identitarian’ and contextspecific” (66). While Hallward usefully cautions against the recuperation of Glissant’s approach into totalitarian concepts of identity, his larger criticism of Glissant as abandoning the specificity of his earlier work in favour of a new world order, a totalitémonde, is, I will argue, founded on a linear reading of Glissant’s work which distorts such a non-linear theorist. More importantly for Senior’s work, Glissant, Deleuze, and Guattari deploy horticultural concepts of the rhizome and root as figures for the relationship between identity and difference. Their approaches intervene in the impasse between oppression and resistance that structured gardening discourse to the midtwentieth century and locate the possibilities of transnational identity that Senior goes on to problematize in her poetry.
Edouard Glissant articulates a particularly suggestive model of creolization in relation to discourses of place and identity. The term “créole” has been used variously to indicate people of mixed race, people of European origin born in a colony, Caribbean linguistic processes and, in a very general sense, cultural mixing. However, current theoretical models, including Glissant’s, locate creolization as a cultural dynamic that encompasses all these components. Rather than attempting to define the characteristics of creoleness or locate the kinds of composite societies produced by créole interactions, Glissant views creolization as an open potential, an “unceasing process of transformation” (Caribbean 142). For Glissant, creolization is change, movement, endless process rather than simply or only a fixed identity position. Glissant does, however, acknowledge the necessary role that identity assertions can play within a postcolonial and increasingly global world. The concept of antillanité represents for Glissant the assertion of a Caribbean identity within the fluid créole dynamic and remains in his most recent discussions a necessary component of cross-cultural exchange (Lecture 2001). Ultimately, Glissant deploys a rhizomatic and ecological figure first formulated by Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus to describe his fluid yet grounded concept of identity. The rhizome, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is an alternate to the root, which has been a notion of purity and singular origins (for people, plants, and nations) throughout Western culture. The root prompts a quest for a single national and cultural identity, Deleuze and Guattari argue, while the rhizome is an alternative structure that operates through division, variation, and multiplicity (21). “The rhizome is an antigenealogy,” they write, a means of propagation which operates underground, without hierarchies, connecting multiple points, places and identities (21). The rhizome puts down individually rooted plants even as the larger process promotes a “deliberate wandering” or migration between identity positions. Transplanting Deleuze and Guattari’s model to a Caribbean context, Glissant argues that concerns with possessing and claiming land and with hierarchies of identity can only be discarded by creating a new, political relationship to the world, a relationship in which the rhizome as a concept of grounded yet open crosscultural exchange replaces the root (Poetics 146). The rhizome is, in other words, a fluid approach to identity as conceived through landscape, a process of cross-cultural exchange that intervenes in traditional concepts of nation and identity as fixed and selfevident without discarding moments of identity assertion and regional affiliation. As Glissant states in Poetics of Relation, “The notion of the rhizome maintains [… ] the idea of rootedness but challenges that of a totalitarian root” (11).
Peter Hallward has argued that Glissant’s oeuvre presents a shift away from antillanite and its assertion of difference toward a universal concept of relation that transcends specificities. Hallward reads Glissant’s later work, and particularly Poetics of Relation, as arriving at a “global de-territorialisation” that breaks with the nation to advocate a totalizing concept “which equates all forms of reality” (68,122). Hallward’s accusation of increasing relativism differs from J. Michael Dash, Jeannie Suk and my own readings of Glissant as working according to a horizontal concept of exchange in which linear progress no longer figures but in which the binary opposition of identity and difference is profoundly and repeatedly destabilized (Dash 14; Suk 69). While Glissant’s novels and criticism at times emphasize the need for Caribbean national identities and at times emphasize the process of cross-cultural exchange, his work cannot be read as a linear narrative progressing from one extreme to the other but an enactment of his fluctuating and fundamentally heterogeneous practice. Glissant deploys the rhizome specifically as a figure for identity that is at once nationalistic and open to new possibilities. Hallward’s warning against equating forms of experience does, nevertheless, point to what I see as a more fundamental issue in rhizomatic theory and that is its emphasis on positive experiences of cross-cultural exchange. Glissant focuses on rhizomatic process as transcending oppression and creating opportunities “beyond the impositions of economic forces and cultural pressures” (Poetics 19). Senior’s poems also thematize the possibilities of cross-cultural exchange, but, in contrast to Glissant, insist on the often painful emotional, material, and social losses that result from transnational movements. Rhizomatic thought is a productive horticultural metaphor for creolization’s intervention in the binary of oppression and resistance; however, Senior reveals that this intervention, particularly for migrant women, is not unproblematic. Migration and exchange offer new, creative possibilities for conceiving identity and yet the transnational processes of globalization can also nurture imperialistic tendencies.
A second poem in Senior’s initial section, “Meditation on Red,” offers a more complex and ambivalent version of the relations, connections, and disjunctions between colonial, postcolonial, and créole. This poem productively crosses cultures and locations, but also qualifies the celebratory focus of Glissant’s rhizomatic process. “Meditation on Red” situates modernist, feminist, and white créole writer, Jean Rhys, as predecessor and as alien to the speaker of the poem, a Caribbean woman writer of colour. Senior’s speaker pays tribute to Rhys for her role in establishing the tradition of women’s writing in the Caribbean, while also acknowledging the racial differences and colonial history that divide the two writers:
Right now
I’m as divided
as you were
by that sea.
But I’ll
be able to
find my way
home again
for that craft
you launched
is so seaworthy
tighter
than you’d ever been
dark voyagers
like me
can feel free
to sail. (51-2)
An enlightening debate between Louis James and Gyllian Phillips in the special Rhys issue of Journal of Caribbean Literatures articulates the ideas at stake in this poem. James initially points out that Olive Senior and Jean Rhys’s short stories share similar themes and so establish “subtle and nebulous links” that reflect two racial and social sides of a common mirror (193). Gyllian Phillips responds with a caution against conflating the two writers and uses “Meditation on Red” to argue that Senior’s poem entangles intertextually with Rhys’s work in order to “question the disciplines that keep space, time and subject separate and coherent” (202). In other words, Phillips argues, while differences cannot be conflated, the relationship between Rhys and Senior is more complex than simple identification or difference and Senior responds to Rhys as a fractured figure, caught between cultures and nationalities (206). Ultimately, the poem performs a shifting and contingent practice of identification and difference, suggesting that both Phillips’s emphasis on distinctions and James’s emphasis on connections are important in reading the text. “Meditation on Red” insists on the racial and locational differences that distinguish Rhys from the narrator, and yet both the speaker in her tribute to Rhys and Rhys herself in her literary negotiations of white creole identity are engaged in processes of cross-cultural exchange. Identity in this poem is at once rooted in individuality and rhizomatic in its spread across time periods, racial histories, and familial origins.
Senior’s decision to use Rhys as both literary mentor and colonial representative entails a constant repositioning within the poem, a process of exploiting the double meanings and perspectival shifts which exemplify not only the links between a colonial past (Rhys) and a postcolonial present (the speaker), but also initiate the processes of creolization. Words with multiple meanings, like “craft,” suggest the different perspectives evoked and played with throughout the poem. The craft of writing is something both speaker and subject share, yet the crafts in which they voyage across the sea are clearly distinct. Moreover, the craftiness Rhys and the speaker deploy in expressing their points of view within respectively unfriendly environments achieves different ends so that, ultimately, the multiplicity of the word suggests the multiplicity of perspectives engaged with in the poem. Indeed, the reference to “dark voyagers,” while clearly racial and establishing a major distinction in experience between subject and speaker is, nevertheless, presented in a context of solidarity where Rhys’s precedent creates the possibility for other voices to be heard. These links and distinctions between past and present, between speaker and subject, productively entangle the colonial past and postcolonial present in what Glissant might envision as an initial move within creolization.
Yet the poem registers a sense of loss as well as connection in its tribute to Jean Rhys. Senior’s speaker is arriving at Rhys’s grave, able only to establish an imaginative link with the author rather than a truly animated exchange. Rhizomatic identity processes may enable some forms of cross-cultural exchange, but for the women writers in Senior’s poem, a full connection is not possible. In this sense, Rhys’s alienation as a white creole woman, a perspective very different from the speaker’s, is also reconstructed in the poem. Senior recreates Rhys’s difficult and painful experiences as a stranger, and one who was distinct in sensibility and cultural origins from the smalltown Devon society in which she lived:
Meantime each day
you made up
your old face
carefully
for the village
children
making faces
at you
[…]
little knowing
in that grey mist
hanging over
Cheriton Fitzpaine
how cunningly
you masked
your pain (49)
Rhys’s made-up faces were failing attempts to fit into English culture and reconcile her creole difference with her new, English home. Rhys’s identity as a migrant woman and as a writer is at once located in the Caribbean and altered by her experiences in Europe. Senior’s speaker recognizes that, for Rhys, migration was not an uncomplicated, celebratory process of cross-cultural interconnection, but one haunted by exclusion and loss. The garden’s ambivalence functions as a space to negotiate identities such as Rhys’s as both a product of transnational exchange and incommensurably isolated. Creolization and the horticultural figure of the rhizome that Glissant arrives at thus represent an important theoretical complication of identity discourse, but Senior’s texts reveal that creolization does not address the painful aspects of cross-cultural exchange that globalization is now exposing.
Senior’s subsequent poems in the collection locate specific problems of migration, and reveal the ways in which global identity can only be theorized as a balance between the specific and transnational. Rhizomatic process, qualified by Senior’s insistence on the losses as well as possibilities of cross-cultural exchange, offers a fruitful way to read these later poems for their negotiations with colonial history and for their horticultural figurations of migrant experience. Poems such as “My Father’s Blue Plantation” and “Anatto and Guinep” respectively address plants that arrived in the Caribbean as colonial imports and plants indigenous to the islands. Bananas, while originating in Africa, gave global identity to many Caribbean islands (literally, “banana republics”) as colonial crops and are used in the poem, “My Father’s Blue Plantation,” to represent the speaker’s complex relationship with Caribbean space as a site of both belonging and dispossession. Caribbean banana crops succinctly exemplify the positive and negative ways in which identity has and can be defined through the land. Commercial banana crops were developed by Europeans from African strains of the plant during the colonial period and then shipped to New World plantations. As crops grown for colonial profit, bananas initially represented oppression bound to the land for African Caribbean slaves. Global agricultural practices continue this colonial legacy, as bananas have now become the focus of a trade war between the European Union and multinational company Chiquita. Chiquita is demanding restitution for European Union import quotas that limited the banana market for years, quotas that were originally instituted to protect former colonies (Josling and Taylor 1-4). Neither the European Union nor the multinational company are concerned with honouring regional commitments to banana growers in this dispute, creating another disjunction between land and people (Clegg 22). In one sense, then, the banana trade handily exemplifies the continuum between colonial and global oppression. However, bananas were also cultivated on independent farms during the post-slavery period and for many African Caribbeans, such as the speaker’s father in Senior’s poem, represented a means to economic self-sufficiency. The African origins of the banana likewise signify the origins of the speaker’s own identity, while the hybridization of bananas in the Caribbean parallels her family’s creolization within a culture that included African, indigenous, and European elements. In other words, the banana’s colonization and current exploitation on the world market represents the tragic history of many Caribbean people and spaces, yet the banana is also integrally connected to the speaker’s sense of Caribbean identity and to her family’s early economic self-sufficiency. Moreover, as a rhizomatic plant, the banana can be read as a figure for the concept of rootedness within the larger and ambivalent dynamics of transnational exchange.
In the poem, the banana plantation that the speaker grew up on is a source of growth and inspiration as well as disease and contamination. The speaker initially suggests that the plantation was an idyllic paradise, “a forest of leaves” she revelled in and which provided the family with a much-needed means of support. The narrator recalls that “every bunch was earmarked to pay for / something.” Yet the plantation was also contaminated by leaf spot disease and the speaker reveals that the leaves were painted blue by chemicals (now widely recognized as toxic to workers). Ultimately, the speaker explains, “We children fled the blue for northern light,” seeking a fulfillment of the life possibilities that are dreamed of but foreclosed in Jamaica (84). Using the term “plantation” to reference a legacy of slavery, the poem associates the Caribbean landscape and specifically the colonial legacy of the banana crop with the speaker’s conflicted feelings of nostalgia and repression, belonging and dispossession. Canada, meanwhile, appears as the final location of the poem, but is not identified as a nation or home either with a direct name or full description (it is only “northern light” and snow, although other poems in the collection establish Canada as the migratory speaker’s alternative reference point). Encapsulating the ambivalent use of space throughout this collection, Senior asserts a Caribbean speaking position, itself fluid in its negotiation of possibilities and prohibitions, only to displace it with a Canadian location. The Caribbean is an ambivalent space for this speaker as represented by the banana plants that simultaneously recall oppressive identity hierarchies through their colonial associations, and yet also enable the speaker’s migration as rhizomatic models and economic currency.
Suggesting the more productive possibilities of global horticulture, Senior depicts the migration of plant life from Jamaica to Canada in this and other poems in the collection. In “My Father’s Blue Plantation,” “hot Tropical Colours” now bloom like flowers in a Canadian closet (84). Parodying and revising another colonial (and neo-colonial) trope in which Canada is a blank slate, an empty pool of resources, waiting for imperial and economic inscription, Senior imagines one British ex-colony being vegetatively invaded and culturally fertilized by another rather than by colonial powers. Indeed, the spread of vegetation and people from the Caribbean to Canada is represented here as altering Canada itself, giving new meaning to the landscape. Toronto, for instance, both in Senior’s poems and in reality, is given new and mobile identities by people who arrive from diverse parts of the world. The Caribbean banana plantation is an ambivalent space encompassing both a painful history of slavery and the speaker’s family origins, yet the snow-covered Canadian ground is at once a place of possibility and an uneasy home for the migrant writer. The final lines of the poem register an estrangement between the speaker and her father: she is “told” that the plantation has gone to waste and describes her father sitting alone in the hot tropical sun (84). The family connection and sense of belonging suggested in the early lines of the poem are replaced at the end by a description of family scattered across the continent. As a model of rhizomatic process, Senior’s poem insists on the disjunctions as well as new connections occasioned by migration.
The poem “Anatto and Guinep” uses two indigenous plants to address an alternative set of historical connections. In contrast to the banana crop, anatto and guinep are non-commercial plants currently devalued, yet persistently useful to Caribbean people as dyes and food staples. The poem entangles modern and historical uses of the plants, noting the importance of anatto and guinep to Arawaks, Caribs, and other nomadic indigenous Caribbean peoples as well as more recent uses of the plants by African Caribbean “country people.” “No one today regards anatto and guinep / as anything special,” the speaker declares, yet these plants serve to trace an alternative, noncolonial, resistant history in the Caribbean (74). The plants also reflect ambivalent identity processes in the poem as the second person plural African Caribbean speaker is a resident of the Caribbean and describes country practices intimately, yet also recognizes that African Caribbean presence is a result of the displacement of indigenous peoples and their traditions and that true belonging thus remains tenuous:
Well, with the Arawaks and others who were
here before us
it wasn’t so. Nothing could happen without
anatto paste
or guinep stain to paint their bodies
with. (74)
This ambivalent space of belonging and dispossession articulated on the part of the speaker is further developed through the use of these plant dyes as signifying medium. The modern author of the poem is connected to and yet distinguished from the ancient, indigenous peoples through the act of writing. The poem describes how the original Caribbeans,
[… ] wore these colours on their bodies
as we wear clothes:
to protect themselves, to signify, or
engage in play,
as markers on the road of life. (75)
The speaker is connected to the Arawak and Carib peoples through the common act of signification, yet, like the link established between Jean Rhys and the speaker in “Meditation on Red,” the meanings and forms of signification differ. Plant dyes might serve as clothing and a writing medium for the indigenous Caribbeans, yet the speaker is careful not to conflate Arawak identity with that of African Caribbeans. Indeed, the line breaks and spacings used throughout the poem formally represent this process of connection and distinction as sentences both cross and are fragmented by blank spaces. In “Anatto and Guinep,” a set of historical entanglements beyond the colonial moment is established through the cultivation of these two plants, and yet, again, the process is one of ambivalent connection and disjunction.
Anatto and guinep signify multivalently, recalling a lost indigenous past that valued the plants, as well as a present in which the non-commercial crop is denigrated as backward and (literally) distasteful. This devaluation of native crops, and consequently native knowledge and history, is a contentious issue in global culture. Edouard Glissant explains that the “affective standardization” of tastes in poor countries has resulted in a harmful disconnection between people and the land, and that this is a loss of history and identity. “It will not be easy,” Glissant notes, “to replace products bearing an intense relational charge, such as Coca-Cola, wheat bread, or dairy butter with yams, breadfruit or a revived production of madou, mabi or any other ‘local’ products” (Poetics 148). The result of this devaluation of native products is a new colonization of taste and a loss of diversity. Caribbean products and identity are measured against heavily marketed and fetishized European and North American brands and are found lacking (to the material benefit of the industrial powers). The only resolution, Glissant argues, is “to renew the visions and aesthetics of relating to the earth,” so that in a connection to the land and to the products of small, indigenous gardens, people can recover a sense of self (Poetics 148). Olive Senior addresses this issue in the poem “Anatto and Guinep” when she notes that “Big people / scorn [guinep] / (though they eat it)” (74). While the African Caribbean speaker may be ambivalently located as a second comer to the area, the poem traces the history of the plants to suggest their importance to all Caribbeans in maintaining identity and establishing a relationship to the earth. Senior’s poem does not uncomplicatedly celebrate the links between indigenous and African Caribbean people, emphasizing the disconnections as well as interrelations, but instead describes identities that are very specifically defined in history and background, yet connected within the context of Caribbean culture.
Subsequent poems in the collection acknowledge even more directly the ways in which globalization perpetuates colonial agricultural practices and complicates identity for the migrant writer. In the global garden, small, indigenous crops are replaced by larger, commercial, and often genetically modified seeds that continue to colonize Caribbean spaces. Senior delivers a clear ecological warning on the dangers of mass production in “The Tree of Life” where the speaker proclaims:
Taking on the Eden myth in a new form, this poem suggests that, indeed, the original garden did exist in the Caribbean and that the speaker, who lives modestly off the land and is identified with it through her regional creole dialect, is closest to living without sin. Rather than the land being exploited by Westerners to serve the Genesis myth, the poem suggests that Caribbean peoples and lands must be valued in their fecundity and diversity as the source of life. This global specificity connected to the land begins to fulfill eco-critic Annette Kolodny’s call for more beneficial patterns of identification with the external world (9). Moreover, this garden contains New World plants such as corn, tomatoes, starapples, cassava, and naseberries rather than European vegetation. The El Dorado of material wealth that the agricultural officers seek through commercial farming is, meanwhile, revealed as foolish and short-sighted. Rather than a place to be plundered for Western ideological and material fulfillment, Senior’s version of Eden functions to restore the inherent value of the Caribbean.
Western concepts of the garden also functioned according to an economy of belonging and exclusion and, in re-creating Eden, the poem seeks to undo this exclusionary aspect of the garden and suggest an alternative, diasporic vision for the future. The speaker proclaims that, “He ordered us to take from / the branches slips and cuttings and plant / them everywhere,” deconstructing any sense of the garden as contained and exclusive (92). In other words, the poem is not simply reversing colonial attitudes to valorize Caribbean culture, but is suggesting an alternate vision for the future. Colonial and global practices may be inextricably linked, but true change lies in complicating binaries and spreading new ideas. The garden in “The Tree of Life” migrates through the world, as Glissant has suggested rhizomatic identities do, but it is a world understood as both specific and transnational, rooted and dynamic, full of possibility as well as loss.
This dialectic between traditional, rooted subjectivity and the new possibilities of a productive migration is a recurring theme in Senior’s collection and suggests that identities that seek a connection to the earth must negotiate the links and disjunctions between Caribbean and North American spaces and colonial, postcolonial, and global trajectories. Like plants, people must have a firm ground or basis on which to develop their sense of self, yet must also seek new possibilities in rhizome-like migrations. The garden is a vital metaphor for contemporary identity negotiations not only in its history, which addresses issues of belonging and exclusion, but also in its potential for both propagation and differentiation. Particularly for migrant Caribbean women writers, the garden has served as a dualistic trope. Sandra Pouchet Paquet notes that, while Claude Mackay constructs the garden as an idyllic space, Caribbean women writers such as Erna Brodber, Jean Rhys, and Patricia Powell have all constructed it as profoundly divided (108). Similarly, Isabel Moving describes the garden represented in Michelle Cliff’s work as a dualistic space associated both with alternative, lesbian fertility and with the heterosexual expectations of biblical myth (264-65). In both Paquet’s and Hoving’s analyses, the garden embodies traditional, coherent concepts of self, as well as the desire for alternative and dynamic complications of identity. Helen Tiffin similarly describes Caribbean gardens as sites of both possibility and loss, writing that:
The virtual erasure of the indigenous population and the slave labour of millions in the fields ensured that relationships with the land itself, and the practices of agriculture and horticulture were necessarily and variously associated by different Caribbean populations with dispossession, slavery and servitude […]; more rarely, with memories, pleasure, even perhaps joy. […] Crops and flowers thus became less parts of a description of “natural” or cultivated environments than traces and symbols of and in a (re)constructed landscape in which, through a dialogic process of image making, the entangled history of colonizer and colonized was invoked and redrawn. (149)
Senior deploys these tangled histories to locate the Caribbean garden as a source of identity, a self-constituting memory, and, in its multifaceted colonial history and current global exploitation, as the (literal) root of her speaker’s dispossession. This insistence on a continuing legacy of oppression usefully qualifies celebratory theories of the rhizome as a process of exchange and suggests that the way forward lies in exploiting the dynamics of belonging and exclusion, possibility and loss.
| [Reference] |
| WORKS CITED |
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| [Author Affiliation] |
| JORDAN STOUCK teaches at the University of Lethbridge. She has published several articles on feminine creole identity in The Jean Rhys Review, Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, Journal of Caribbean Literatures, and Canadian Review of American Studies. She is currently working on a study of cross-cultural feminist literature. |
