{"id":477,"date":"2021-09-28T11:39:41","date_gmt":"2021-09-28T15:39:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/?p=477"},"modified":"2021-09-28T11:39:41","modified_gmt":"2021-09-28T15:39:41","slug":"the-act-of-possessing-plants-and-colonialism-in-jamaica-kincaids-lucy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/issue-2\/the-act-of-possessing-plants-and-colonialism-in-jamaica-kincaids-lucy\/","title":{"rendered":"The Act of Possessing: Plants and Colonialism in Jamaica Kincaid\u2019s Lucy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Norma Jean Haynes\u2019 close reading of Jamaica Kincaid\u2019s Lucy offers an insightful perspective on the author\u2019s use of plants and gardens in the novel. Haynes highlights the ways in which plants and agriculture are a site of colonialism and slavery, while simultaneously noting their liberatory power. Beyond presenting a precise reading of Kincaid\u2019s writing, Haynes also applies a keen and unique historical analysis to the novel, and reveals a deeper meaning in the natural world which surrounds us. –Ari Jewell ’22, Editorial Assistant<\/span><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/h4>\n

The Act of Possessing: Plants and Colonialism in Jamaica Kincaid\u2019s Lucy<\/i><\/strong><\/h4>\n
Norma Jean Haynes, Ada Comstock scholar, ’23<\/strong><\/h5>\n

For Jamaica Kincaid, the garden is a place where history and memory grow into the present. Alongside her acclaimed fiction, Kincaid is known for her gardening columns in The New Yorker<\/i>, wherein she has explored the colonial histories that often echo in plants and their cultivation. \u201cThe Disturbances of the Garden\u201d is one such article, in which Kincaid draws connections between horticulture and colonialism, providing insight into the role of plants in her novel, Lucy.<\/i> Kincaid describes gardening as an \u201cact of possessing\u201d that constitutes a luxury extended to those in positions of power along with the privilege of experiencing plants as beautiful, rather than strictly useful (\u201cDisturbances\u201d 5). Through plants, Kincaid expresses the enduring consequences of colonialism, including exoticization, generational trauma, and social inequality. Through the character of Lucy, however, Kincaid proposes a postcolonial relationship with plants\u2014a \u201crepossession\u201d of the garden centered on individual growth.<\/p>\n

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William Clark. “A Mill Yard, On Gamble\u2019s Estate, Antigua.” 1823.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

In \u201cThe Disturbances of the Garden,\u201d Kincaid references Eden as the original garden, naming agriculture as the Tree of Life and horticulture as the Tree of Knowledge. \u201cWe cultivate food,\u201d she writes, \u201cand when there is a surplus of it, producing wealth, we cultivate the spaces of contemplation, a garden of plants not necessary for physical survival\u201d (4). Kincaid writes here of horticulture as a luxury, reserved for those who have the resources to concern themselves with more than the survival of the body. This way of thinking belongs to Kincaid\u2019s output as a postcolonial writer, acknowledging the historical connection between commercial agriculture, colonization and enslavement. The American agricultural system has relied at various points on enslaved, indentured, and undocumented immigrant labor; the same is true of Antigua, where Kincaid was born. Meanwhile, the majority of wealth, and of contemplative space, continues to reside with the descendants of colonizers wherever there is a history of colonialism. This inequality, regarding who has access to the cultivation of plants for contemplation and appreciation, is a central tension in Kincaid\u2019s novel Lucy.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

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Gustav Courbet. “Young Ladies of the Village.” 1851\u201352.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Kincaid contrasts the orderly garden, a symbol of colonization, with the agricultural and medicinal uses of plants, which have historically been integral to the survival of the colonized. In both her novel and her garden writing, Kincaid presents an ancestral knowledge of plants as medicine. In \u201cThe Disturbances of the Garden,<\/span><\/i>\u201d<\/span> Kincaid remembers the herbal teas her mother offered her as a child: \u201ccups of barley water (that was for the measles) and\u2026cups of tea made from herbs (bush) that she had gone out and gathered and steeped slowly (that was for the whooping cough)\u201d (1). As Kincaid inherited a familiarity with herbs from her mother, Lucy carries similar memories in the novel. While awaiting a missed period, Lucy remembers the herbs which her mother taught her would \u201cstrengthen the womb,\u201d or induce abortion (69). This information, passed from mother to daughter, is representative of plants as survival: the knowledgeable are able to reclaim their bodies from sickness or unwanted pregnancy, without having to ask permission of their oppressors. In this way, Kincaid reveals that medicinal plants provide the colonized and enslaved a form of personal freedom, while emphasizing the ways in which society\u2019s neglect has forced descendants of Africans in the West Indies to protect themselves.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Throughout Kincaid\u2019s novel, as Lucy tries to shake her connections to this past, her understanding of herbal medicine is one aspect of her memory she cannot suppress. Though she insists that the past is \u201cthe person you no longer are, the situations you are no longer in,\u201d it is through plants that Lucy finds herself inextricably connected to her West Indies home (<\/span>137). She is overwhelmed by \u201cthe smell of clove, lime, and rose oil,\u201d plants her mother would steep, creating a protective bath to ward away evil spirits (<\/span>124). Kincaid writes that experiencing this scent \u201calmost made [her] want to die of homesickness,\u201d creating a dichotomy between the healing nature of the plants and the excruciating weight of their cultural baggage (<\/span>124). Kincaid reveals that an ancestral knowledge of plants, while rooted in healing, can also be an overwhelming connection to what has been lost through colonialism, and thus a painful reminder of cultural displacement.<\/span><\/p>\n

For Kincaid, this displacement and homesickness is rooted in the garden. She writes in \u201cThe Disturbances of the Garden\u201d<\/span>:\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cIt may be that my history, the history I share with millions of people, begins with our ancestor\u2019s violent removal from an Eden. The regions of Africa from which they came would have been Eden-like, and the horror that met them in the \u2018New World\u2019 could certainly be seen as the Fall. Your home, the place you are from, is always Eden\u2026and everything that happened after that beginning interrupted your Paradise\u201d (6). Homesickness, which threatens Lucy with \u201c[death] of longing,\u201d may be so excruciating because it carries the weight of those who were displaced before her (<\/span>91). Lucy\u2019s ancestors, some of whom were taken to the West Indies as slaves, carried an unbearable homesickness. When Lucy migrates to the United States, she experiences a similar feeling: longing for the lost Eden of her childhood connects her to her ancestors\u2019 loss.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

When Lucy arrives to her host family in the United States, who live as \u201call the prosperous\u201d do in a region with \u201cfour distinct seasons,\u201d their relationships with plants surprise and irritate her (<\/span>86). Most notable is her immediate desire to \u201ckill\u201d the daffodils which Mariah, her host mother, so admires. Though Lucy,\u00a0 a subject of the British Empire, was made to recite William Wordsworth\u2019s poem \u201cI Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’\u201d as a child, she was unlikely, as a citizen of the West Indies, ever to see the poem\u2019s signature daffodils in person. Daffodils are suited to the temperate climate where \u201call the prosperous\u201d live, and Lucy\u2019s late introduction to them implies a lack of social mobility for Caribbean Americans, which fills her with rage. Lucy\u2019s response to the daffodils is a reaction to the world of beauty and order that society has kept from her, under the unfair assumption that her life would be too centered on labor to indulge in the aesthetic beauty of the flowers.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

When Lucy does see the daffodils, she is struck with the desire to cut them down with \u201can enormous scythe\u2026 at the place where they emerged from the ground\u201d (<\/span>29). Kincaid brings in the agricultural gesture of the scythe harvesting a crop, a gesture which calls upon Lucy\u2019s agricultural past as the descendent of enslaved Africans. As Lucy narrates, \u201cNothing could change the fact that where she saw beautiful flowers I saw sorrow and bitterness\u201d (<\/span>30). Lucy carries the historical burden of her agricultural ancestors, an added trauma for an already marginalized person. Fusing the agricultural labor of the enslaved with the beautiful yet useless daffodils, Kincaid draws into focus the conflict between colonized labor and the contemplation of the colonizer.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Paul Kratochvil. “Keukenhof Flower Gardens.” (no date)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

While Lucy\u2019s relationship to plants is rooted in survival and historical memory, other characters in the novel have a relationship with plants rooted in appearance\u2014a relationship that lays bare the sharp contrast between colonizer and colonized. Mariah\u2019s appreciation of the beauty of nature falls squarely within the dominant European tradition. She describes the daffodils as \u201ccurtsy[ing] to the lawn stretching out in front of them,\u201d the word \u201ccurtsy\u201d implying a European courtliness, beauty bowing to uniformity (17). Earlier, Lucy describes Mariah\u2019s family as being like the daffodils themselves: they are \u201csix yellow-haired heads of various sizes, as if they were a bouquet of flowers\u201d (12). By describing the family as a bouquet of daffodils, Kincaid implicates the family in a homogenized culture where they are prized for their beauty at the expense of other, \u201cweedier\u201d lives. It is Mariah\u2019s \u201cpleasant\u201d smell that reveals her privilege, while Lucy would prefer \u201ca powerful odor\u201d that could \u201cgive offense\u201d(27).<\/p>\n

This prioritization of aesthetics in nature contains a colonialist history. \u201cThe conquerors could do more than feed themselves; they could also see and desire things that were of no use apart from the pleasure they produced,\u201d writes Kincaid in \u201cThe Disturbances of the Garden<\/span>\u201d <\/span><\/i>(6)<\/span>. <\/span><\/i>Seeing agriculture for its beauty is often a privilege afforded to those who delegate the labor to others. While Mariah looks out the window on freshly plowed fields and expresses her love for them, Lucy looks upon them and immediately connects them to someone\u2019s labor: \u201cWell, thank God I didn\u2019t have to do that\u201d (<\/span>33). Lucy\u2019s ancestors, some of whom were enslaved Africans, may have had to, and Lucy carries their suffering in her reaction to nature; European-American Mariah can afford to ignore this history in favor of aesthetics.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Franz K\u00f6hler. “K\u00f6hlers Medizinal-Pflanzen: Cassava.” 1897.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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George Ehret. “Plantae Selectae: No. 37 – Yucca.” 1735.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
In Lucy, <\/span><\/i>Kincaid also uses plant imagery to introduce the fetishization of colonized peoples. Lucy visits Paul\u2019s apartment and sees \u201ccassy\u201d and \u201cdagger,\u201d two plants native to her home island, and she is surprised to find two common, weed-like plants \u201csitting in a prominent place in a beautiful room, a special blue light trained on them.\u201d When Paul trains his eyes on her, she feels that she too is \u201ca sort of weed in a way,\u201d held and made special in the blue light of his gaze (Lucy<\/i>. Like the paintings of Paul Gauguin, who is referenced later in the book, Kincaid is depicting here a kind of exoticism, wherein Lucy is made to stand apart because of her alterity.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n

While this exoticism gives her a momentary power, it ultimately prohibits her from belonging to her environment, from being fully human. Kincaid shows that exoticization is the perverse appreciation of another\u2019s appearance, valuing the aesthetically pleasing without acknowledging or allowing concealed trauma. Like Mariah and the fields in the previous paragraph, Kincaid\u2019s image of the plants, trained in blue light, implies an insidious tidying-up of history to exclude slave labour and colonialist trauma from the dominant cultural narrative.<\/p>\n

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Paul Gauguin. “Femmes de Tahiti, ou Sur la Plage.” 1891.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Though Kincaid uses plant imagery to bring a colonialist history into the present, she also seeks a postcolonial understanding of engagement with nature. Acknowledging the oppressive and painful colonial significance of plants and the garden, Kincaid uses <\/span>Lucy<\/span><\/i> to explore an alternative, where the title character can relate to plants on her own terms, and through her own senses. Kincaid writes in \u201cThe Disturbances of the Garden,\u201d referring to the Biblical story of the garden of Eden, that horticulture is represented by the Tree of Knowledge, the tree of the forbidden fruit. In <\/span>Lucy<\/span><\/i>, we see the title character begin to engage with plants in an intuitive way, exploring her sexuality in a manner henceforth forbidden to her. In the process, she begins to reclaim both plants and herself from the narrative of domination previously discussed in this essay.<\/span><\/p>\n

In <\/span>Lucy,<\/span><\/i> Kincaid develops a connection between fruit and sexuality which supports a metaphor of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. When Lucy tells the story of Myrna and Mr. Thomas, she describes their sexual encounters as taking place beneath a breadfruit tree. Breadfruit, as Kincaid writes in \u201cThe Disturbances of the Garden,\u201d was planted in the West Indies by colonizers who \u201cwere concerned with the amount of time it took enslaved people to grow food to sustain themselves\u201d (7). For Kincaid, then, this plant can be read as a symbol of the colonizer’s influence, an effort on their behalf to rob enslaved people of their time. That Myrna and Mr. Thomas seek shelter under the colonizer\u2019s tree, stealing time to pursue their desires, is subversive in this context: Under the umbrella of a colonial system, individuals continue to evolve.<\/span><\/p>\n

Throughout the novel, Kincaid develops this metaphor regarding the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, by arguing that colonized peoples have not been able to mature in their intellectual or sexual development. Early on in the novel, Lucy tells the story of Sylvie, a woman whose face is scarred from \u201ca human-teeth bite\u2026 as if her cheek were a half-ripe fruit and someone had bitten into it, meaning to eat it, then realized it wasn\u2019t ripe enough\u201d (24). That same scar is described later as \u201ca dark, purple plum\u201d (25). From this point on, Lucy begins to associate coming of age with this secretive woman and her \u201cforbidden fruit,\u201d her scar a symbol of passion and violence. Sylvie, who Lucy admires for her mysterious sexuality, is only \u201chalf-ripe,\u201d implying that she has not had the opportunity to develop herself to her fullest potential. Through the image of a plum representing sexuality, Kincaid returns to the Edenic concept of the \u201cforbidden fruit,\u201d which one must eat to achieve the knowledge of good and evil.<\/span><\/p>\n

In <\/span>Lucy, <\/span><\/i>Kincaid also connects the plum image to another kind of knowledge. Returning later in the novel to the plum, Lucy remembers the plum tree that was cut down in her childhood yard \u201cbecause one of my brothers had almost choked to death swallowing whole a plum he picked up from the ground\u201d (<\/span>131). The plum tree here may be seen as a metaphor for Lucy\u2019s own education and development, which was cut short by the birth of her brothers. In the novel, <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/i>Kincaid imagines the plum as the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the \u201cKnowledge of Good\u201d represented by Lucy\u2019s curtailed education, and the \u201cKnowledge of Evil\u201d by Sylvie\u2019s \u201chalf-ripe\u201d sexuality. Through these characters, Kincaid imagines an Eden in which Eve was never allowed the opportunity to discover \u201cgood\u201d or \u201cevil,\u201d implying that the women in Lucy\u2019s West Indies community were never allowed the opportunity to mature.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

If the plum is seen as a metaphor for \u201cthe Knowledge of Good and Evil,\u201d it is bitten while \u201chalf-ripe\u201d or \u201cswallowed whole,\u201d never savored. A free exploration of one\u2019s sexuality or self-exploration, like the freedom to plant and cultivate a garden of flowers, rests on an abundance of leisure not available to Lucy\u2019s community under a colonialist system. Lucy later describes \u201cbad sex\u201d as \u201clike wanting a sugar apple and getting a spoiled one,\u201d evoking the horrible surprise of a fruit whose interior does not match its desirable exterior (<\/span>114). Her struggle to fulfill her own sexuality, thereby partaking of the Tree of Knowledge, represents her effort to transcend the sexual repression and embedded gender roles of the colonialist society into which she was born. Lucy reclaims the imagery and experience of plants in service of this transcendence. In doing so, Lucy is repossessing the Garden, defining her own relationship with plants beyond what her colonial education has offered her.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Lucy also discovers a sensuality in the deconstruction of plants, loving their<\/span> recklessness <\/span>and celebrating her own. When Lucy sees the peonies which Mariah has put in a vase, she notes that she would like to \u201clie down naked and cover [her] body with these petals so [she] could smell this way forever.\u201d\u00a0 This is a startlingly sensual response, starkly different from her reaction to the daffodils earlier in the novel. She comments that she \u201cdid not know a climate like this could produce flowers that bloomed\u2026 with such abandon,\u201d implying both that the flowers, on some level, remind her of her home climate, and that she admires their wantonness (<\/span>60). Unlike the daffodils, which her colonial education prepared her to admire in sterility, Lucy is able to admire the peonies authentically, celebrating their \u201cabandon,\u201d which is like her own. Lucy wishes to deconstruct the peonies, as she did the daffodils earlier in the novel. However, instead of destroying them, she wishes to bathe herself in their scent. Though this new sensuality regarding plants does not erase Lucy\u2019s sense of a colonialist history, it liberates her as an individual to engage the world around her on her own terms.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In <\/span>Lucy,<\/span><\/i> we see that for Kincaid, the garden contains oppression and liberation at once. Kincaid shows the reader how plants present in our environment are informed by a colonialist history, one of forced migration and international trade, and also by the ethos of colonialism, wherein a gardener decides what is \u201cvaluable\u201d versus what is considered a weed. Plants give Lucy (sometimes unwanted) access to her memory, \u201cthat haunting, invisible wisp that is steadily part of our being,\u201d and to her inherited trauma (\u201cDisturbances\u201d 4). However, it is also through plants that Lucy begins to construct a new narrative, carving an empowered sexuality out of an undesired history. In this way, she begins to repossess her personal Garden of Eden, developing an understanding of self which is informed, but not inhibited, by her ancestors. Through her writing, Kincaid illuminates the garden as a microcosm of human history, and a gateway for individual growth.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Robert E. Woolmington. “Jamaica Kincaid in her Garden.” 1999.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Works Cited\u00a0<\/span><\/h4>\n

Clark, William. A Mill Yard, On Gamble\u2019s Estate, Antigua<\/em>. 1823. Print. Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora<\/em>. www.slaveryimages.org\/s\/slaveryimages\/item\/1142. Accessed 10 May 2021.<\/p>\n

Courbet, Gustav. <\/span>Young Ladies of the Village<\/span><\/em>. <\/span><\/i>1851\u201352. Oil on canvas. <\/span>The Metropolitan Museum of Art. <\/em>www.metmuseum.org\/art\/collection\/search\/438820. Accessed 10 May 2021.<\/p>\n

Ehret, George. <\/span>Plantae Selectae: No. 37 – Yucca. <\/span><\/i>1735. <\/span>Engraving. The Cleveland <\/span>Museum of Art. <\/span>www.clevelandart.org\/art\/1957.192<\/span>. Accessed 10 May 2021.<\/span><\/p>\n

Gauguin, Paul. <\/span>Femmes de Tahiti, ou Sur la Plage. <\/span><\/i>1891. <\/span>Oil on canvas. Wikimedia <\/em><\/span>Commons <\/em>www.<\/span>commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Paul_Gauguin_056.jpg. Accessed 10\u00a0<\/span>May 2021.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Kincaid, Jamaica.\u00a0Lucy<\/i>. Era, 2010.<\/p>\n

Kincaid, Jamaica. \u201cThe Disturbances of the Garden.\u201d\u00a0The New Yorker<\/i>, 31 August 2020,\u00a0www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2020\/09\/07\/the-disturbances-of-the-garden.\u00a0Accessed 14 October 2020.<\/span><\/p>\n

K\u00f6hler, Franz. <\/span>K\u00f6hlers Medizinal-Pflanzen: Cassava. <\/span><\/i>1897. Wikimedia <\/span>Commons, 26 January 2007, https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/File:Koeh-090.jpg. Accessed 10 May 2021.<\/span><\/p>\n

Kratochvil, Paul. \u201c<\/span>Keukenhof Flower Gardens\u201d<\/span>. <\/span><\/i>Photograph. Publicdomainpictures.net,\u00a0<\/span>https:\/\/www.publicdomainpictures.net\/en\/view-image.php?image=16460&picture<\/span><\/a>=keukenhof-flower-gardens. Accessed 10 May 2021.<\/span><\/p>\n

Woolmington, Robert E. <\/span>Jamaica Kincaid in her Garden. <\/span><\/i>Photograph. 1999.\u00a0<\/span>Andrea Gibbons, May 25 2020, http:\/\/www.writingcities.com\/2020\/05\/25\/jamaica-kincaid-breadfruit-gardens-empire\/. Accessed 10 May 2021.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a9 Robert E. Woolmington. Used with permission of the artist.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Norma Jean Haynes\u2019 close reading of Jamaica Kincaid\u2019s Lucy offers an insightful perspective on the author\u2019s use of plants and gardens in the novel. Haynes highlights the ways in which plants and agriculture are a site of colonialism and slavery, while simultaneously noting their liberatory power. Beyond presenting a precise reading of Kincaid\u2019s writing, Haynes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":231,"featured_media":502,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-issue-2"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/368\/2021\/08\/garden.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/231"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=477"}],"version-history":[{"count":78,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":735,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477\/revisions\/735"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/502"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}