Abstract
In Lorna Goodison’s earliest works, gardens are sites of resistance and liberation for the female creative self. But this view evolves in subsequent collections as her speakers come to recognize the historical materiality of Jamaican gardens as biological and ideological products of an imperial agricultural project of domination, control, and dispossession. The result of this recognition is a more nuanced and complicated view of Jamaican plantings – from imperial plantation and botanical garden to provision ground and flower garden – and of the sense of postcolonial belonging which their complexities make possible and perhaps even necessary. This sense of belonging embraces the complexity of being biologically invasive and imaginatively native within and to Jamaica; it also explores the limits of ritual and of what ritualized, poetic language can achieve in the face of the biological and historical realities embodied by Jamaican landscapes and ecologies.
The New World was conquered by farmers. The Conquistadors, the soldiers, and the sailors may have taken the lands and the livelihoods (and even the lives) of the indigenous populations but it was the European farmers (for there were many farmers there before them) who razed the forests to plant sugar cane and tobacco; who pushed aside the laurier-canelles with eucalyptus and casuarinas. It was also the European farmers who brought enslaved Africans to work these lands, planting in the soil of this unfamiliar place the seeds of crops and peoples both alien and strange. Where before there had been wilderness to their European eyes, they planted gardens. Rooted in notions of Edenic purpose and informed by a rigorously European aesthetic of order, symmetry, and control over nature by art, these gardens brought forth a truly new world…not the one their masters intended, surely, but a new world nonetheless. Everywhere one goes in the West Indies one sees the legacy of the European farmers: in the buildings and institutions they left to crumble, in the descendants of their slaves and indentured workers (who are their own descendants too), and in the gardens. Lorna Goodison has been writing about gardens for most of her career as a poet. In her earliest works, gardens are sites of resistance and liberation for the female creative self. But this view evolves in subsequent collections as her speakers come to recognize the historical materiality of Jamaican gardens as biological and ideological products of an imperial agricultural project of domination, control, and dispossession. The result of this recognition is a more nuanced and complicated view of Jamaican plantings – from the imperial plantation and botanical garden to the provision ground and kitchen garden – and of the sense of postcolonial belonging which their complexities make possible and perhaps even necessary.
Goodison’s first collection of poetry, Tamarind Season (1980) 1 renegotiates the almost painfully traditional – even stereotyped – trope of woman-as-garden, as her speakers become the ground in which is planted not just the child, but the seeds of their own creative agency. In “Letter to my Love” the speaker is impregnated in an oddly dissociated manner: “Since last I saw you, / the goat boy played / his last note. / It fell somewhere / in the rain forest / and bloomed!” after which “the wind brought me some seeds / dropped on the slopes of me / ploughed by you so well! / I bloomed” (10). The result of this serialized impregnation by satyr, jungle, and the man (whose only role would appear to be that of preparing the ground for the goat boy’s seed) is not only a child but a new and terrifying (to “mere men” at least) form of motherhood: “Since then, / mere men fear me. / When picked, / I shriek, bleed, ache, / someone I have heard / has called me Mandrake” (10). In “For the Tall Comrade” the speaker again becomes the garden in which the man can sow – “You breathe through a nutmeg, life, / settle it among my breasts /…/ blooming from a clay pot / growing in my belly” (21) – but once more the anticipated birth is not just of the child, but of the mother as a creative and active agent. The speaker imagines herself constructing a suitably culturally hybrid and politically engaged reality for the child to inhabit: “We’ll build the house of terra cotta. / Our images will imitate Benin / and the child will know about Soweto / and the trees will have West African roots” (21). From the apparent passivity of a “clay pot” the speaker anticipates her role as the transformer of the present (“Tonight the Limpopo is running under / the window”) and of the future (the “revolution” of tomorrow) (21). In each poem, the representation of the woman-as-garden leads to emancipation from the usual constraints of the trope as the speaker transforms from passive vessel to active agent of change. The same emphasis on female creative independence is apparent in “Garden of the Once Fallen” as each of the four sections of the poem turns to a different plant, common and familiar to the everyday lived experience of a Jamaican woman, and finds in them images of hybridity – “I’ve been replanted in this arboreal place”; defiance of female domesticity – “Drudges, make a coat of arms / wear broomweed on your sleeves”; and self-confident, self-affirming female independence – “She don’t put out for just anyone. / She waits for HIM”, “This display is for the benefit / of the perfect one in the sky” (39). In “Keith Jarrett – Rainmaker” the speaker compensates for the temporary absence of her child by turning to the creative arts in which she brings into being an imaginative garden of her own making: “a painting becomes a / December of sorrel / a carving heaps like a yam hill / or a song of redemption wings / like the petals of resurrection / lilies” (57). This garden of female creative independence is most fully realized in “Tamarind Season”: despite the “case of spinster brown” surrounding the tamarind-woman – or, perhaps, because of it – “she finds a woman’s tongue / and clacks curses at the wind”. The poem concludes “wait is the reason / Tamarind Season” thus identifying Goodison’s first collection of poetry as the first harvest of her carefully tended poetic garden (27). Of Tamarind Season Goodison has said, “In the end I don’t even know those poems very well…they came out of me in such an organic kind of way” (Narain, 2004: 46).
But gardens – and in particular, West Indian gardens – are tricky things. Jamaica Kincaid’s gardening memoir, My Garden (Book): (1999), explores and critiques how her gardens have produced her sense of belonging in and to her New England homes; but when she remembers a botanical garden near her childhood home in Antigua, a very different tone emerges: “The botanical garden reinforced for me how powerful were the people who had conquered me; they could bring to me the botany of the world they owned” (120). The history borne by the botanical garden is one of dispossession and loss; Kincaid finds it impossible even to imagine – for she cannot remember, or find historical record of – the gardens of pre-conquest Antigua. She links this erasure of the native to her recognition that the presence of her own ancestors in Antigua is part and parcel of the same imperial-agricultural project (137-9). It is perhaps no surprise, then, that the final effect of her meditation upon Antiguan gardens is a profound sense of dissociation: “When I was looking at the book of tropical gardens, the flowers and trees so familiar to me from my childhood, so native to a background like mine, were without any hold at all on me” (141). Sarah Phillips Casteel (2007) has detailed how a rigorously European gardening aesthetic embodying an ideology of control and domination was introduced to the West Indies from the very earliest days of European conquest, in order to “facilitate settler cultures’ creation of a sense of place” (9-11). Casteel argues that Kincaid’s garden writing is able to critique or destabilize the “heavily colonised territory of the garden” by rejecting the garden as a space of exclusivity and repose, and by focusing instead on “the relations of power and the histories of dislocation” embodied by New World gardens (112). However, the effect of this destabilization is not, according to Casteel, a new or reconfigured sense of belonging but a growing awareness of how Kincaid’s own gardens replicate and depend upon the violent dispossession of the land from its original inhabitants (both human and botanical) by the European farmers whose project she is now (quite consciously and with great pleasure) continuing (125-6, 130-1). Rachel Azima (2007) has argued that Kincaid’s interweaving of personal memories and imperial history allows her to move past this sense of dissociation and to make “a space for oneself in the face of that history” (102). This sense of belonging, however, is one that exists in a tensive and negotiated space between the Antiguan botanical garden of her youth, the New England gardens of her adulthood, and the English gardens that she has visited (103-4, 111-112). As in Casteel’s argument, Azima characterizes Kincaid’s sense of dissociation from Antiguan reality as being not overcome by her gardens but (re)generatively incorporated into a new kind or type of transnational garden/sense of belonging which subsists upon recognizing the continued presence of a history of loss and dispossession (113). Helen Tiffin (2000) goes even further than Casteel and Azima in her argument that in the Caribbean the historical “entanglement” of agriculture and imperialism is so complete that any hope of recovering or even of reimagining an “original” version of the West Indies is impossible, and that any imagining of the West Indian landscape – “original” or current – necessarily evokes that history of violent dispossession and loss (150-154). Tiffin concludes that the result of this “entangled legacy” evoked by Kincaid’s garden memoirs, renders “any myth of origins – and any ‘original’ static Paradise – impossible” (162-163). 2
The complicated inheritance and trace of this “entangled legacy” can be seen in “For My Mother (May I Inherit Half Her Strength)” – arguably one of the most intensely personal poems in Tamarind Season (and certainly one of Goodison’s greatest) – as it explores not just the different sorts of plants, but the different sort of plantings (flower gardens, agricultural land, provision grounds, and the plantation) that one finds in Jamaica and Jamaican history. The poem begins with the speaker’s father seeing her mother for the first time “by the oleander, / sure in the kingdom of my blue-eye grandmother” (71). The ornamental oleander, poisonous but beautiful, is a familiar sight in Jamaican flower gardens: this one apparently under the dominion of the speaker’s grandmother. At the speaker’s parents’ wedding, her mother’s bouquet “looked all the world like a sheaf of wheat/…/backed by maidenhair fern, representing Harvey River” (72). Once more, the plants are ornamental and symbolic, both of the bride’s impending motherhood and of her sense of belonging in and to the land; however in this instance the type of planting evoked is not the flower garden, but the farm (the productive wheat) and the rural countryside (maidenhair fern). Once married, the speaker’s mother prepares “cabbage leaves and a carrot and a cho-cho” (73); gone now are the flower garden and the farm, and in their place are the humble but necessary produce of a Jamaican woman’s provision grounds. The final type of planting also comes at the poem’s emotional and narrative climax:
Just that morning, weeks after, she stood delivering bananas from their skin singing in that flat hill country voice she fell down a note to the realisation that she did not have to be brave, just this once, and she cried. (73)
Bananas were brought to the Americas from Africa by European farmers; cultivated initially on plantations for consumption by slaves, by the twentieth century bananas were the basis of large commercial farms owned and operated by American fruit companies for export to American and European markets. The mother’s moment of intense self-recognition comes, then, at the precise moment at which the imperial history of Jamaica – in the form of plantation and industrial monoculture – overwhelms the memory of small-plot flower gardens, farm-holdings and provision grounds; 3 her acceptance of the reality of her individual life is thus partnered to the poem’s admission that this life has been led against the backdrop of a landscape dominated by plants and plantings that are biologically and materially implicated in a historical process of oppression, loss, and exploitation. As Kincaid explains in the introduction to her memoir:
When it dawned on me that the garden I was making (and am still making and will always be making) resembled a map of the Caribbean…I only marvelled at the way the garden is for me an exercise in memory, a way of remembering my own immediate past, a way of getting to a past that is my own (the Caribbean Sea) and the past as it is indirectly related to me (the conquest of Mexico and its surroundings). (1999: 7-8)
In the collections that follow Tamarind Season – I Am Becoming My Mother (1986), Heartease (1989), and To Us, All Flowers Are Roses (1995) 4 – the emancipatory poetic gardens of Tamarind Season give way to other, less consoling kinds of plantings from within Jamiaca’s history. In “Jamaica 1980” for example – which Goodison has called a “monument to the fact that over 800 people died” in the political violence of the 1970s (Birbalsingh, 1996: 154) – she laments the “jasmine selling tourist-dreams” of “edenism” which threaten to overcome “Jamaica / my green-clad muse” with “the smell of necromancy” (38). The poem thus links the continuing political and social agonies of a postcolonial nation to its colonial past, as the poetic hope of her “green-clad muse” is overwritten by Jamaica’s neoimperial gardens: the coca fields of the drug lords, and the tropical “Eden” of the tourist brochures. “In City Gardens Grow No Roses as We Know Them” examines how rural immigrants to Kingston attempt to re-create a sense of place and belonging within this “necromantic Eden” by planting flower gardens amid the horrors of urban poverty. In this new setting, however, dominated by “The long blunted silver trunk / of a decapitated breadfruit tree” (1995:13) – evoking the plantations and barracks where breadfruits were grown as a bland staple for slaves – these gardens are not nourishing sources of connection, but markers of what has been lost (“no delicate blooms could survive here”), reminders of the sickness and decay that surrounds them (“Necessary medicinal herbs”), and signs of what is no longer possible in the urban jungle (“In city gardens grow no roses as we know them”). The richness and poetic possibility of creative language stands here not as the outcome of the poet’s poetically constituted garden (as in Tamarind Season), but as an oppositional counter-measure to the grimness of communal reality: unable to have real roses, the urban poor have taken the name and “bestowed it / generic, on all flowers, called them roses” (15). Even in a poem such as “Nayga Bikkle”, dedicated as it is to the praise and celebration of “all manner of ground provision./…of the tuberous diversity of yam / from different race and country” (1995:32), such celebration can take place only within the context of the slavery that brought the slave’s provision ground into being; the poem begins with the admission that “massa was always complaining about our cooking”, and although it moves to the speaker’s triumphant assertion “that massa eat nayga bikkle” (34), the presence and power of the slave owner over the provision ground is inescapable: “One day in the middle of October / month for rainy weather, / as God would have it here comes massa, / master of all him survey” (32). It is perhaps at least in part due to the lingering memory of this history that the speaker of “Bulls Bay, Lucea” refuses to enter the Church on “harvest Sunday” because it is decorated with “Ribbon-striped sugar-cane and moon-white yams” (the crops that were variously the cause of slavery and that which fed its victims) (66). She instead seeks the “deep cleansing” of a visit to the seashore where the only plants she will have to contend with are either ornamental (“a coco plum tree”) 5 or metaphorical (“all flesh is grass”) (67-68). 6
Even in a poem dedicated to celebrating the transformative power of language – of its ability to take even the humblest flower and render it a “rose” – when the speaker of “To Us, All Flowers Are Roses” allows herself to reflect upon the historical reality of sugar cane the tone is singularly and remarkably despairing:
There is Blackness here which is sugar land and they say is named for the ebony of the soil. At a wedding there once the groom wore cobalt blue and young bride, cloud white, at Blackness. But there is blood, red blood in the fields of our lives, blood the bright banner flowing over the order of cane and our history. (70)
In this passage we see linked together the history of the people brought to Jamaica to raise sugar cane and the land upon which they grew it; united both by their “Blackness” and by the “red blood”, it is a history that can be endured and tolerated but never overcome: the wedding of “cobalt blue” and “cloud white” is fleeting, bracketed on both sides by the “Blackness” of the blood-soaked earth, and overshadowed in the end by “the order of cane and our history”. Ultimately, the only redress the speaker can find in the face of this history is the “Hope” that immediately follows this moment. It is a response sustainable by the speaker, who goes on in the poem to expand that hope to a grand celebration of Jamaican reality, but it does not erase nor does it transform the ineradicable trace of history marked by the sugar plantation.
Turn Thanks (1999) presents something of a turning point in Goodison’s representation of and meditation upon gardens. “After the Green Gown of My Mother Gone Down”, the opening poem of Turn Thanks, begins familiarly enough, with the direct association in the speaker’s imagination between her mother’s death and “last leaves in scarlet and gold fever burning” (3). The speaker goes on to imagine the Blue Mountains opening to embrace her mother, who thus becomes the nourishing source of “the headwaters of all our rivers” – “Earth, she was a mother like you / who birthed and nursed her children” (4). The poem, however, does not end with the image of the dead mother as a fruitful new garden, but with a vision of the mother going into a garden with the spirit of her predeceased sister:
Mama, Aunt Ann says that she saw Aunt Rose come out of an orchard red with ripe fruit and called out laughing to you. And that you scaled the wall like two young girls scampering barefoot among the lush fruit groves. (5)
Edward Baugh (2001) has characterized this poem as a performative utterance that through language and imagination “performs a ritual” of cleansing and healing (26). He argues that the final image of the mother going into the garden with Aunt Rose “has a transcendental, visionary, Blakean simplicity about it that goes beyond the purely naturalistic and sustains the promise of the redemptive in the ritualistic” (26). Hugh Hodges also examines Goodison’s ritualistic use of (and faith in) language, and sees in this concluding image “the remedy…for the ‘tourist-dream edenism’ that ‘Jamaica 1980’ lamented” (2005: 31). Hodges, like Baugh, argues that the productive effect of the rituals enacted within and by Goodison’s poetry is a “promise” (to use Baugh’s word) or “hope” (to use Hodges’s) for Jamaican community. Both Baugh and Hodges conclude that images such as this one constitute renewing and redemptive rituals, capable of “gathering up” (Baugh, 2001: 30) a fragmented peoples and reality that will “bring Jamaica back to itself” (Hodges, 2005: 31). Hannah Chukwu and Susan Gingell similarly read the final stanza of this poem as enacting a transformation of the mother through death into an ongoing and enduring presence of creativity, organized around Goodison’s celebratory approach to female domesticity (2005: 49-51). 7
These responses dehistoricize the enclosed garden which completes “After the Green Gown” by eliding recognition of it as an imagined (or remembered) memorial and as the concrete reminder of the mother’s painful absence; Goodison herself has described this poem as “an elegy” which she is happy to have read at funerals (Bertram, 2007: 44). Dehistoricizing the garden allows us to overlook the fact that it is “an orchard” and thus part of the agricultural landscape created by European farmers in Jamaica; the mother’s return to it problematically restages the role of African labour in that (ongoing) agricultural project. What is more, the image of the Blue Mountains opening to “seal her corporeal self in” (4) is potentially disturbing in light of the memory of those Africans similarly taken in (and consumed by) the coffee plantations for which the Blue Mountains are (justly) famous. Ritual may be more than capable of transforming perceptions and relations within a community but it can never (nor do Baugh, Hodges, Chukwu, and Gingell claim that it can) alter, change or transmute the concrete reality of lived experience.
The gardens of Turn Thanks, marked by histories of loss and dispossession, explore the limits of ritual and of what ritual can accomplish. “The Domestic Science of Sunday Dinner” links the speaker’s memories of “the produce” (Hodges, 10) from their provision grounds to the death of her father, creating yet another memorial garden; and “This Is My Father’s Country” explores the repercussions to the speaker’s family after the theft of her grandmother’s farmland by an unscrupulous family member (22). “About Almonds and Ambergris” begins with the speaker “meditating” upon a beach; unlike the speaker of “Bulls Bay, Lucea” – who retreats to the seashore rather than face the sugarcane-decorated church – this speaker does not find peace and escape, but memories of an altogether different sort: “I think that I shall add the scent of berries now / to the perfume rising off the ocean. Water berries, / bright red such as those which cheered the eyes of Columbus” (39). The speaker’s attempt to imagine the landscape anew, to control it even by “adding the scent of berries”, only results in the unwelcome intrusion of the historical moment at which that landscape was claimed by European farmers: “I think about Columbus how he thought at first / these islands would be a source of gold, / of cotton and mastic, aloes, wood, and things invaluable / to him, poor thing” (40). Against this history of loss, the speaker offers up a benediction: “May the perfumed tides wash my people now bright berries” (40). The poem ends on a hopeful note, but not a transformed one, as the violent act of agricultural dispossession that marked the European intrusion into Jamaica is neither undone nor reversed, only (somewhat tentatively) redressed. “To Mr. William Wordsworth, Distributor of Stamps for Westmoreland” begins with a moment that foregrounds the dissonance between the imposed reality of imperial education – which taught generations of West Indian school children to write poems about English daffodils – and the poet’s lived, Jamaican reality: “The host of golden flowers at my feet / were common buttercups not daffodils, / … / Still it was a remarkable show of sorts / which opened my eye, the inward one” (45). Spurred on by a tradition that celebrates the daffodils of Wordsworth, the speaker sets out to reclaim and preserve the poetry of her great-grandmother, which she collects “from where they fell on banana trash. / The binding ones on the star apple tree, / … / I rescued them…/…refuse and trash / of the sugarcane, the ones call broken / and indecent, patois, bungo, words for bondage and shame” (46). The “Jamaicanness” of her great-grandmother’s poems and experience, of her words and language, is established and maintained by and through this association with the tailings of the plantation, thus establishing a sense of place that subsists upon the ruins of the imperial agricultural past rather than ritualistically transforming or redeeming the present.
I began with the idea that West Indian plantings are the biological and ideological productions of an agricultural history of dispossession and loss, and have attempted to demonstrate how between Tamarind Season (1980) and Turn Thanks (1999) they come to stand as the concrete markers of ritual’s limit in Lorna Goodison’s poetry – as signs of the ineradicable traces of the complicated, entangled, and violent history that they embody and upon which any hope or future of Jamaican community will have to be built. I would like to conclude with somewhat more sustained readings of just three poems, taken from Travelling Mercies (2001) and Controlling the Silver (2005), in which Goodison attempts to create a sense of postcolonial belonging that subsists upon that history rather than seeking to transcend or ritualistically transform it.
The opening lines of “About the Tamarind” evoke the much earlier “Tamarind Season” with the relation of the poetic voice to the tree: “Under strict dry conditions I can grow as high / as eighty feet, and my open frame half as wide…too substantial and stout for you / to wrap your short arms around” (14). This (by now familiar) representation of the independent and even transcendent female self brackets (in the ellipsis) an open acknowledgement of the use value to which the tamarind has been put as “timber / called by some the mahogany of Madeira” (14). The poem thus begins by juxtaposing the metaphorical representation of the poetic self as the tree, with the historical cause of the tamarind’s introduction to Jamaica as an agriculturally “useful” crop. This juxtaposition of metaphor and history invites an interesting consideration of the parallel projects of poet and European farmer as both look to the tamarind for the raw material of their craft.
The poem’s second stanza heightens the contrast as the speaker confronts head-on the violent history of dispossession and loss embodied by every Jamaican planting: “My crown, a mass of fine light green foliage / pinnate leaves which dip gracefully to shade you” are the backdrop against which “bloom small gold flowers which appear / to bleed the gold of guinea and the blood / drawn by the cut of slavery” (14). The speaker then turns to consider the tamarind’s African origin and its first transplantation by farmers into Asia: “I bear long, I bear abundance / and Pharoahs ate of me. / Tamr-hindi, the Persian poet chanted under my shade” (14). Her history of the tamarind thus begins with an emphasis on the poetic “use value” to which she herself is putting it. This emphasis continues as she considers how the tamarind has come to Jamaica:
Tamarindus indica, native of Africa, from root to leaftip my every part has been employed to meet human need… … …My fruit, which is sometimes sour, can be sugared into tamarind balls, symbols of slavery. (15)
The sour fruit of the tamarind, “sugared” over with poetic symbolism, becomes for the speaker a powerful force for healing, and she goes on in the next three stanzas to enumerate its many medicinal uses. As she proceeds with this catalogue, though, the speaker moves further away from the Jamaican reality pointed to by her recognition of “slavery”; she instead focuses on the tamarind’s role in African and Asian ritual, and even on the beneficial effects of tamarind for “the elephant’s long memory” (15). But as the poem moves into its final four stanzas, the imperial and agricultural history of which the tamarind is a part begins once again to emerge: “My leaves give soothing bush baths for rashes or the cut / of the tamarind whip. The correction and the cure / both come from me” (16). Metaphor and history merge once more, as the speaker considers the dual nature of the tamarind both as a concrete part and sign of the imperial history of dispossession and violence which brought it to Jamaica, and as a poetic symbol with which to redress that past.
In the final three stanzas the relation of metaphor and history becomes increasingly strained, as a specifically Jamaican history comes to the fore. The speaker begins this final movement of the poem by dissociating herself-as-tamarind from the European farmers who transplanted her from Africa: “I have not come here to rule over, overpower, / vanquish, conquer or constrain anyone” (16). In contrast to – and perhaps in defiance of – the imperial desire to “conquer and constrain”, the speaker celebrates herself-as-tamarind in terms of the poetic complexities she embodies:
I provide the mordant in dyes. Burn me for charcoal I rise as incense. My sapwood is pale and golden. My heartwood, though, is royal purple and earth brown. I am high and low all at once. Sweet and sour,
And yet at the end of this celebration of her metaphorical and poetic complexity, there comes – inevitably – the admission that
I came with the enslaved across the seas to bear for you when force-ripe capricious crops fail. (16)
No matter the metaphorical use it can be put to by the speaker in the present, the tamarind as a biological reality is tied to the history of imperial agriculture in Jamaica: a history that introduced not only the tamarind, but the slaves whose descendants now praise it. Plant and poet are both products of the plantation: both crops sown by the European farmers who brought them to the New World. And it is with this recognition that the poem concludes:
I bear. Not even the salt of the ocean can stunt me. Plant me on abiding rock or foaming restless waters. Set me in burying grounds, I grow shade for ancestors. O bitter weed and dry-heart tree, wait for me to bow. I hope you can wait. Rest in Peace, Arawaks. I am still here, still bearing after five hundred years. (16)
The metaphorical fruitfulness and abundance of the people and plants that are the legacy of the plantation stands in stark opposition to the startling acknowledgement of the peoples erased by that same history. The speaker-as-tamarind may still “bear” five hundred years after her enslavement to this place, but the “burying grounds” she presides over are those of the native peoples whose destruction predicates and underlies the creation of contemporary Jamaican reality. If this is a ritual, it is one of memorial rather than transformation, recalling the void and absence of an entire people.
“About the Tamarind” turns upon a paradox of history: a plant that is classified as biologically invasive to Jamaica (Kairo et al., 2003), is celebrated as being imaginatively native. The term “invasive species” is hotly contested. Many ecologists are reluctant to use it given its pejorative connotations, and prefer terms such as “non-native” or “exotic”. They point to the fact that many species of plant and animal which are introduced into a new ecology do not “invade” – spread uncontrollably to the detriment if not outright destruction of native species – but manage to live in some manner of equilibrium; recent research suggests that in some cases they may even be of net benefit to their new ecosystem. 8 The term is further problematic insofar as it paints with too broad a brush, typifying entire ecologies as somehow unified or homogenous units and not as heterogeneous zones of biodiversity – a plant which is “invasive” (that is, destructive) in one type of habitat within a given ecological system might not be able to survive at all in a different type of habitat within that same system. 9 The term “invasive species” is made even more ambiguous through its frequent use by government agencies and environmental groups – the former almost exclusively to describe non-native species that cause economic harm and the latter to describe any non-native species regardless of its impact. Despite these ambiguities (or perhaps in defiance of them) I have used the term “invasive” here in order to highlight how the contemporary landscapes of Jamaica are, simply put, the result of an historical invasion by Europeans and their plants. Jamaica is not, of course, alone in having been invaded by Europeans and by the non-native species that they introduced (or allowed to be introduced). Indeed, as many critics of the term “invasive” like to point out, all ecologies are the result of ongoing processes of biological exchange and encounter – it is “natural” for species to move around the globe. 10 What these criticisms fail to capture is the extent and rapidity of the change to Jamaican ecologies in the wake of European invasion. Rather than proceeding at the pace of geologic time, the landscapes of Jamaica were reinvented in a matter of two or three human generations – a pace unprecedented in human history and on a scale not to be seen again until the twentieth century. 11 (Jamaica has existed in its present geologic form for some 10 to 12 million years, during which time its flora and fauna evolved in isolation from the Old World until the arrival of Europeans just five hundred years ago; by way of comparison: if the age of Jamaica were a single day then Europeans arrived there 0.07 seconds ago.)
The relation of the tamarind to the speaker in “About the Tamarind” forces recognition that what is true for the tamarind is also true for the poetic self: like the plant, the speaker’s ancestors were brought to Jamaica as part of the imperial agricultural project; and like the plant, her ancestors were – albeit unwittingly – part of the concrete history that eradicated so many of the native plants, landscapes, and peoples of their new home. However, the poetic self is able to imagine herself into communion and contact with(in) the Jamaican landscape: to see and to represent herself as belonging there as “naturally” as does the tamarind. This is not to say, of course, that this sense of belonging is in some way unreal, invalid or without whole purchase – as is more than adequately demonstrated by the long, rich history of critical, artistic, and philosophical writings on the processes of creolization in the West Indies (a history too long and too rich to be developed or reviewed here). 12 But an imaginative sense of belonging can be surprisingly and perhaps even disturbingly mobile. In “The Garden of St. Michael in the Seven-Hilled City of Bamberg” (Travelling Mercies, 2001), for example, the speaker imaginatively creates a Jamaican garden in the heart of Germany.
The roof of the nave in St Michael’s church, Bamberg, has painted onto it 580 species of plants from all over the world, representing the Garden of Heaven (“St Michael’s Church, Bamberg”, 2010). The speaker notes “the lavender, the evergreen, / lilies arum, of the valley and white, gentians, cowslips, /…/ tomatoes and corn, cleansing aloes for cathartic purposes, / and tobacco to calm” (34). She goes on, however, to ask St Michael – her imagined gardener – “to consider a sunny corner of his garden for a few plants Jamaican” (34): the point being, presumably, that the church remains alien and foreign to her despite the presence of a number of New World plants (tomatoes, corn, aloe, and tobacco). The plants that she goes on to ask for, however, are – without exception – biologically non-native in the West Indies: the first two “plants Jamaican”, sansevieria and periwinkle, are native to Africa and Europe respectively. She is able to claim them as “plants Jamaican” because they have been imaginatively naturalized to her cultural and personal experience – for both plants she is able to provide a Jamaican common-name: “sansivira or donkey’s ear, the low-ranking / periwinkle, aka ram-goat-dash-along” (35). Much the same is true for the next three plants she suggests: “poor man’s / orchid, Job’s tears and the cerasee would seem to be / fitting” (35). These plants, biologically native to East Asia and Africa, point to the great fusion of cultures and plants – and peoples – that have gone into the formation of contemporary Jamaican reality. Interestingly, these plants also chart a by-now familiar pattern from the ornamental (poor man’s orchid, Bauhinia Variegata) to the productive (Job’s tears, Coix Lacryma-jobi, a grain crop) to the medicinal (cerasee, Momordica Charantia, an herbal tea). Once again, that these plants are biologically non-native to Jamaica 13 is irrelevant to the speaker insofar as they have been imaginatively naturalized – a point reinforced, and even celebrated, by the poem’s final lines: “And good / saint gardener Michael, let there be roses upon roses” (35). The Jamaican “roses” she asks for here are, surely, the same ones celebrated in “To Us, All Flowers Are Roses”: flowering ornamentals that have been rendered as “roses” by a linguistic trick of Jamaican English.
Like the painting of the Garden of Heaven above her, the Jamaican garden the speaker creates in this poem is purely imaginative, composed of the Jamaican names and memories of biologically non-Jamaican plants. Conspicuously absent from her imagined ornamental garden, however, are the agricultural crops of the plantation such as sugar cane and bananas, which – in other poems 14 – have led the speaker to recognition of the violent history of dispossession embodied by all West Indian plantings. It is perhaps because of the absence of the plantation in “The Garden of St. Michael” that the speaker is able to end the poem in triumphal celebration of Jamaican “roses” and of her ability to create a sense of Jamaican “placedness” in the very heart of a seventeenth-century European church. Her own obfuscation of plantation crops is thrown into unavoidable relief, however, by her recognition that the artist of the Garden of Heaven has not ignored them in his own representation. The creation and celebration of this “Jamaican” garden would, then, seem to depend upon a rather selectively imaginative view: one that focuses on certain kinds of imaginatively and culturally naturalized but biologically non-native plants, while ignoring others; one that is sustainable only, it would appear, in the absence or even as a result of the denial of the biological and historical reality of Jamaican plantings.
That biological reality is writ large throughout Goodison’s 2005 collection, Controlling the Silver. Sugar cane, banana, all manner of ground provisions, and non-native ornamentals appear in a third of the collection (28 of 75 poems). One of the more notable aspects of this collection, however, is what it does not contain. There is not a single poem in which the speaker assumes the persona or speaks from within the mask of a plant. The closest we come to this stance – so common in earlier collections – is the speaker’s reference in “Apollo Double Bill” to how the music of “John Coltrane blew / and split open the bark of my young green Tamarind heart” (93). Even instances of entirely figural plants are surprisingly scarce, appearing only three times, and in each instance to the same end – as metaphors for the poetry itself. 15 Controlling the Silver is dominated by the speaker’s awareness of plants as biological realities, embedded in the material experience of Jamaican life and history. 16 Nowhere in the collection – or, for that matter, in the whole of Goodison’s poetry – is this material experience more apparent than in “Where the Flora of Our Village Come From” in which the poet revisits the varied geographical and cultural origins of all Jamaican plantings. The poem, however, presents an imaginatively reconstituted version of the history that lies behind them:
Credit the Spaniards with introducing sugar cane plus the hypocrite machete that cuts both ways: Columbus encouraged the Arawak to grasp the blade of his keen sword even as he smiled a greeting. (39)
The poem does not begin with Columbus’ slaughter of the Arawaks but with the Spaniards’ introduction of sugar cane; the first instrument of destruction and violence is not the sword wielded by the Europeans against the Arawak but the machete wielded by African labourers against the cane – a tool that, ominously for the Spaniards, “cuts both ways”: even the initial hope of rebellion and resistance for the Africans is linked directly to their role and presence in this landscape as imported labour in the service of the plantation. That the slaughter of the Arawaks occurs after the introduction of the sugar cane plantation – and its machete-wielding African labour force, eerily mirroring the sword-wielding Columbus – suggests a possible complicity (unwitting and unwanted though it may be) in that slaughter by the Africans who replaced the indigenous populations, even as the sugar cane and tamarind replaced the native plants.
The next three stanzas focus on the plants that were brought to Jamaica from Asia and South America. The speaker, however, obfuscates (or ignores) the farmers and indentured workers who brought these plants either as ornamentals, foodstuffs or to provide timber; in each of the first lines of these stanzas, the speaker characterizes these plants’ appearance in Jamaica as being the result of their own, polite agency. “Pindar nut, Cherimoya and Alamanda” 17 are “stowaways / from South America”; “For mangoes and pungent ginger, thank East Indies”; and “Courtly bowing Bamboo came calling via Hispaniola” (39). She obfuscates as well the agricultural uses that caused them to be planted in Jamaica in the first place, focusing instead on the imaginative use to which they have been put by Jamaican peoples and experience. She begins with the purely ornamental use of flowering plants, claiming that “Ipanema girl Bougainvillea, / since she land, has been in one extra Miss Jamaica / contest with poinciana, Madagascar hottie hottie” (39). The shadows of the plantation grounds and botanical gardens that bougainvillea and poinciana were meant to decorate are banished from consideration, playfully replaced by the image of a contemporary beauty contest. The speaker, in the next stanza, shifts her attention from the ornamental to the domestic as she considers “the high-strung chattering pod / wind-activated, christened by someone acquainted / with carry-go-bring-come, the woman’s tongue” (39). Once more, the use value of woman’s tongue to imperial agriculture (both as ornament and for lumber) is elided by the speaker’s focus on how the tree (Albizia lebbeck) was given its Jamaican English name, thus emphasizing the imaginative capacity of the tree as a representation of an insistent female voice. In the following stanza the speaker does shift her attention to the agricultural use value of a plant, but not to the European farmer: “The silk pulp of Chinese hibiscus, crushed, blacks shoes, / and zen-like bleeds to ink for penniless school children” (39). Again, the ornamental value of the hibiscus to the plantation is ignored, replaced instead with the image of Jamaican peoples using the flower as a homely way of shining their shoes or, more significantly, allowing even the poor to write.
The middle three stanzas, then, proceed in the transformative ritualized manner examined by Baugh and Hodges, as the speaker uses her poetic garden as the site of a local beauty contest, as a space wherein biologically non-native plants are “christened” with Jamaican English names, and in which flowers are transformed into ink with which the poor can represent their experience. In the final stanza, however, the speaker turns her attention to the African contribution at which point we once again explore the limits of ritual:
Coffee, kola, ackee, yams, okra, plantain, guinea grass, tamarind seeds and herbs of language to flavor English; those germinated under our tongues and were cultured within our intestines during the time of forced crossings. (39)
Unlike the preceding stanzas, the plants are not presented as having arrived in Jamaica on their own but as having been carried there in the very bodies of Africans “during the time of forced crossings”. The poem thus ends where it began, by confronting directly the concrete history of dispossession and loss which the middle three stanzas had so carefully elided after its initial encounter in the first stanza. This time, however, African slave labour is not just hinted at, as it was in the poem’s beginning, but acknowledged as seminal and integral to imperial agriculture as its crops were “germinated” and “cultured” by the African body. The promise of a ritualistically redeemed or transformed Jamaican community is replaced with the far less ambitious sense of an African-”flavoured” English. The Jamaican “we” – “our tongues” and “our intestines” – imagined by the speaker in the final stanza is also radically limited in scope when compared to the expansiveness of her vision in the preceding stanzas; where the rest of the poem takes in European conqueror and Arawak, the East Indies, South Asia, and South America, the poem’s conclusion focuses exclusively on the descendants of the African slave labour brought to Jamaica to tend their owners’ gardens.
Jamaican gardens are complicated and uncomfortable places. Populated by biologically non-native plants and people, informed by a rigorously European aesthetic of control and dominion, they stand as concrete and ineradicable reminders of the violent history of invasion, dislocation, murder, slavery, and theft upon which contemporary Jamaica has been created. In the 30 years that Lorna Goodison has been publishing her poetry she has developed an equally complicated and uncomfortable response to these gardens. In her earliest works, plants were regarded in an almost entirely figural light, as she created poetic gardens in which were realized a liberated and creative female individuality; but hidden amid these groves were disturbing hints of the history borne by these plants, and as Goodison came more and more to confront the biological, concrete reality of these plants’ presence in Jamaica, as she allowed herself to consider how and why they were here, there came as well recognition of a boundary beyond which the imagination can only do so much – that ritual has its limits. The sense of belonging she achieves amid this later view is a much more complicated and problematic thing altogether. Built upon the ruins of the plantations’ fields, it is a sense of belonging that embraces all types of Jamaican plantings – from botanical garden to flower garden, from farm to provision grounds – and the historical experience that has created them and which they embody. It is a sense of belonging that accepts that experience for what it is: fragmented, violent, and – in some ways – unredeemable by the imagination. What Lorna Goodison has discovered about Jamaican gardens, and perhaps come to accept, is that like the sugar cane, they – and she – are simply there.
Footnotes
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.