‘How does your garden grow?’ or Jamaica Kincaid’s spatial praxis in My Garden (Book): and Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya

Abstract

Jamaica Kincaid’s recent books on gardening and collecting seeds, My Garden (Book): (2000) and Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya (2005), present the garden as a space of rumination and regenerative resistance: a place where she might critique imperialism(s) and seed new relations to the world. While My Garden (Book): reflects Kincaid’s ongoing interest in the ways in which imperial practices and global discourses, such as conquest and botany, have served both to displace and reconstruct a sense of locality, Among Flowers turns to a post-9/11 world where a sense of home is now fraught by anxieties about ‘distant proximities’ among various places in the world and often conflicting spatial orders. In considering Kincaid’s approach to spatiality, I begin by outlining the ways in which the garden incarnates a complex ecology for spatial reproduction and then turn to an analysis of how these dynamics infuse the relational spatial poetics at work in My Garden (Book):, which offers a meditation on the garden as dwelling place. Turning to Among Flowers, I situate Kincaid’s spatial politics of the garden in light of debates about negotiating multiple, often overlapping, and disjunctive spatialities in a globalizing world, particularly in the post-9/11 era. Finally, I consider the ways in which Kincaid’s approach to the garden discloses new horizons for spatial relations in a global context. She shows that the world cannot be left out of the garden at the same time that she demonstrates her garden is a place in and through which worldly relations are negotiated.