“The garden
is a space which is omnipresent in the work of Caribbean women writers.”
This comment
by a scholar came at a colloquium in Paris earlier this month, highlighting the
many complex forms that “gardening” can take in Caribbean writing, especially
in the work of Antigua-born writer Jamaica Kincaid.
The two-day colloquium,
titled “The Art and Craft of Grafting in Jamaica Kincaid’s work”, focused not
only on Kincaid’s acclaimed range of books, but it also compared her work with
that of Michelle Cliff, Olive Senior and others. (Senior’s most known
collection of poetry is probably Gardening in the Tropics.)
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| Prof. Carole Boyce Davies, a keynote presenter. |
But why is
the theme of gardening or grafting so significant?
According to the organizers
of the conference: “When transposed into the botanical world cherished by
writer Jamaica Kincaid, the creolization that has long characterized Caribbean
cultures can be reread as the art of grafting - an act of defiance in the face
of a traumatic colonial history fraught with obsessive monocultures of cotton
and (later and above all) sugar cane.”
Plant
grafting can thus be read as “the subversion of unicity and as a practice of
recycling, irregularity, re-composition and survival: the art of the survival
of writing and of living forms”, they added.
Readers may
find “medicinal herbs known to the slaves who survived the Middle Passage” as
well as Wordsworth’s daffodils growing in Kincaid’s “largely imaginary garden -
a space between and beyond the Caribbean and New England”, for instance.
The
organizers also pointed out that gardening paradoxically “encapsulates the
experience of uprootedness and drifting” - so common to Caribbean history.
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| One of the scholarly panels at the colloquium. |
About 20 scholars from Europe, the Caribbean and the United States presented papers at the colloquium, examining themes of creolization, resistance and survival - as portrayed through literary gardening. Carole Boyce Davies of Cornell University, and Daryl Dance,
Professor Emerita at Richmond University, gave the keynote lectures.
The event's organizing committee included representatives from Toulouse University, Paris 8
University and the Sorbonne: Corinne Bigot, Andrée-Anne Kekeh-Dika, Nadia Setti
and Kerry-Jane Wallart.
