gardening in the diaspora important reference.docx

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Important Reference; Gardening in the Diaspora: Place and Identity

in Olive Senior's PoetryJordan 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 dynamicexchanges, deploying the garden, in its ambivalent history as a space of colonial exclusion and postcolonialhybridity, as a figure for these processes. Senior both embraces and problematizes the rhizomatic andcreolizing theories of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Edouard Glissant. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

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(7517 words)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 figurefor these processes. Senior both embraces and problematizes the rhizomatic and creolizing theories of GillesDeleuze, 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 inrelation to colonial histories of conquest and the desire for pure origins. While, on the one hand, gardening canbe a means to identity for migrant writers, on the other, it is profoundly imperialistic. Gardening can encouragehybridity and propagation and yet simultaneously it seeks to weed out indigenous populations perceived to beinappropriate. This ambivalence continues: while community and organic gardens function discursively asmeans to identity, industrialized crops have become one of the hottest issues worldwide for critics ofglobalization, who observe their negative effects on identity and local economies. In this ambivalence, theconcept 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 limitationsof traditional identity categories through modelling processes of hybrid, cross-cultural exchange? BothChristopher Bongie and Peter Hallward explain that while postcolonial theory has sought to eliminateoppressive hierarchies of identity, concepts of nation, race, and ethnicity, rooted in colonial history continue tobe essential in delineating and preserving difference (Bongie 11, Hallward xii). The garden, as I will use it in thisessay, is a figure for regional affirmations of identity, as well as for fertile and often painful cross-culturalexchanges. As in any horticultural endeavour, the balance in transnational identity politics is between nurturingthe 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 whichgardening can become a form of relating to a new place or of establishing identity through understanding theplace of origin, while also recalling historical displacement bound to the land (since her speakers are frequentlyrevealed as descendants of plantation slaves). Similarly, the collection suggests the creative identitypossibilities arising out of transplantation, as well as out of shifting locations and cultures, and points toward thelosses 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 thecontradictory impulses within current theory toward identities grounded in regional and historical particularitiesand toward identities that are forever deferred by movements of transnational exchange. The rhizomatic gardenis also used as a metaphor for identity politics in the work of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and EdouardGlissant, but the historical discourses and practices that underlie gardening in Olive Senior's poetry constructthe metaphor as a far more ambivalent and conflicted process than even Deleuze acknowledges. Unlike thesecritics, Senior insists on the potentially tragic losses produced by negotiations of identity and place as well asthe productive possibilities.


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Gardening in the Tropics is one of Senior's first works to combine her family history of slavery in the Caribbeanwith her migration to Canada in the early 1990s. While insisting that she remains "a conscious Caribbeanperson" (Allen-Agostini), Senior has been embraced by Canadian cultural institutions and now divides her timebetween Canada and Jamaica. The collection represents Senior's attempt to reconcile a Caribbean past with aNorth American present and deploys the ambivalent processes and meanings of gardening to negotiate the twoexperiences. Indeed, the use of the word "tropics" in Senior's title acknowledges the colonial history of theregion 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 latitudestwenty-three and a half degrees north and south in the early 1500s and during the nineteenth century becameused more generally to describe the hot, lush, and foreign qualities associated with those regions. As a colonialdemarcator, "tropics" is used in Senior's title to indicate her negotiation with imperial history and with thestereotypes that imperialism produced, while the non-finite verb "gardening" signifies a concept of identity asprocess. Throughout the collection, references to colonial tropes of Eden and El Dorado, and to indigenous andimported 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 transnationalexchange as a process of conflicts and possibilities, locations and dislocations. Previous critics have noted thatdynamic 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 MarkBeittell and Giovanna Covi typify Senior's approach as refusing fixed identity for a prismatic and situationalsubjectivity (395). Focusing neither solely on the oppression of colonialism, nor on an overly idealistic versionof 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 metaphorwith everyday gardens as places to (re)enact cultural myths and identity practices. Carolyn Merchant describesWestern culture as a recovery narrative in which colonial gardens were substituted for the Garden of Eden inan attempt to return to a state of untroubled bliss (134). "The idea of recovery functions," Merchant writes, "asideology and legitimation for settlement of the New World, while capitalism, science and technology providedthe means of transforming the material world" (137). Annette Kolodny concurs, explaining that New Worldgarden discourse "from the first, took its metaphors as literal truths" (5). The guiding myths of colonialism andcapitalism-restoration of the Garden and discovery of El Dorado-thus intersect, so that the garden is at leastpartially a repository for Western ideals and for the concepts of identity that those ideals produce. John Prestdescribes 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 Gardenwas metaphorical and forever denied to post-lapsarian humanity, but many others felt that the ruins of theGarden 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 mightwell contain the mythical Garden (since explorations in the Middle East, the original surmised location of theGarden, had failed). Early explorers' accounts described the islands in distinctly Edenic terms. ChristopherColumbus's letters and journals, for instance, emphasize the climate, presence of fresh water, and verdure ofthe Caribbean in terms that recall biblical descriptions of paradise, while the garden metaphor became almoststandard in later descriptions of the Caribbean region (Columbus 110, 121). Sir Francis Drake's account of hisvoyage to the West Indies describes Santo Domingo as "having in it many sorts of goodly and very pleasantfruites, as the Orenge trees and other, being set orderly in walkes of great length together. Insomuch as thewhole Island being some two or three miles about, is cast into grounds of gardening and orchards" (qtd. inHakluyt 102). Sixteenth century concepts of the garden thus legitimated the colonial project and conflated theideal 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 thatthe Fall had scattered the elements of Paradise and that these elements could be re-assembled in the greatbotanical gardens of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Botanical gardens were structured to representthe four corners of the globe and, while frequently located in Europe, plundered areas like the Caribbean forplant life. Donal McCracken explains that, in Europe, botanical gardens were tied to national identity and wereenclosed within high walls at least partially to exclude what were perceived to be the corrupted and undesirableelements of the world (including people of other nations and cultures) (3). Anne Collett emphasizes theeconomic and colonizing function of Kew Gardens, which bred and refined commercially profitable seed fordistribution to the colonies (89). Breadfruit, sugar cane, cocoa, tobacco, bananas, and a variety of spices wereonly the most common crops to be refined by the British and then grown commercially in the Caribbean


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(foreshadowing multinational agricultural practices in which Western corporations select and genetically modifyseeds for global mass production). Inevitably, European botanical gardens operated according to a literal andsymbolic 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. McCrackennotes the focus on producing "economics," crops with commercial potential, in colonial gardens (7) and HelenTiffin describes the work of colonizers such as Thomas Thistlewood who established a botanical garden inJamaica 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" worldfunctioned 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 theland and its products but also in the materialistic aspect of exploiting foreign resources for maximum profit. If ElDorado, like Eden, did not exist in a natural form, then colonizers would create it out of the materials andresources that were available.

Colonial gardens were not, however, the only cultivating force present in the Caribbean. Undevelopedindigenous territory and slave allotments afforded the horticultural equivalent of resistance in the Caribbean. Inthis sense, gardening in Caribbean experience has always been and continues to be both a way of establishinglocal community and a means to global domination. Anne Collett notes that European hybrids of tropical cropswere not the only transplants to the islands, but that African slaves brought yams, pumpkins, gourds, andvarious other seeds with them to plant in small provision grounds. As Collett writes, "The garden allotments ofthe plantation slaves might also be termed tropical gardens of subversion and dissent, for it was here, awayfrom the eye of the plantation owner, that the seeds of old customs and new rebellions were planted andbrought to fruition" (88). Indeed, Beth Fowkes Tobin analyzes the cultural significance of slave provisiongrounds and the marketplaces that arose to sell excess produce during the eighteenth century and concludesthat, "the slaves' gardens provided the basis for a proto-peasant economy that existed independent of andeventually in opposition to the plantation system" (173). Not only did the slaves' horticultural abilities representa level of knowledge beyond that of white planters, but the autonomy that the slaves developed as a result ofthe provision grounds established an identity in connection to the land. In other words, in eighteenth centuryslave society, the act of gardening was a means to African Caribbean identity despite the dispossession andoppression tied to the land that slavery represented. Provision grounds also included indigenous crops such ascassava, corn, and callaloo (Tobin 167), so that gardens in the Caribbean exemplify the processes ofcreolization in which European, indigenous, and African elements combine in never ending and highlyunpredictable ways. As a metaphor for identity positions and processes, the Caribbean garden encompassesboth colonial definitions and hierarchies and an alternative history of slave resistance. Gardening in theCaribbean diaspora has developed therefore as a doubly ambivalent situation: a clearly located, groundedidentity, originating from the cultivation of indigenous plants and slave gardens, is necessary for migrantwomen writers to situate themselves materially and historically, yet such fixed identity categories also carry alegacy of colonial oppression.

The opening section of Senior's collection, "Traveller's Tales," clearly sets up the historical links betweencolonial, postcolonial, and global and depicts the binaries of oppression and resistance that initially definedgardening discourse. The poem "Meditation on Yellow" describes the mythic El Dorado that colonists expectedto find and then sought to extract from the Caribbean. The lyric moves from colonial origins in the Caribbean tothe modern tourist trade, wittily focusing on Westerners' obsession with gold and all things yellow or orange inhue:

At three in the afternoon

you landed here at El Dorado

(for heat engenders gold and

fires the brain)

[...]

I wished for you


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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 ofperiods 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 AfricanCaribbean point of view, the poem achieves continuity through tracing a history of Western oppression in theCaribbean. Gardening in this context is an experience of oppression bound to the land as the speaker lists theseemingly endless tasks s/he has performed over the ages, cultivating everything from sugar cane to cocoabeans to tourists' hair. Ultimately, the narrator establishes a resistant, disconnected relationship with the landsince it has been given away, as s/he says,

I give you the gold

I give you the land


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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 colonialideologies that structured gardening as an exclusionary identitarian practice and the practices of resistance thatthis experience also produced. Identity in the colonial garden was radically split between the perpetuation ofoppressive 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 anearly focus for postcolonial theory. Indeed, postcolonialism began as an attempt to delineate the oppressiveways of thinking that had, up to that point, been transparently accepted and as an effort to locate the modes ofresistance that might provide an initial move in deconstructing those paradigms. Homi Bhabha describes thefounding 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 theempowering strategies of resistance that began postcolonial criticism, but, of course, recognizes that truechange involves a more thorough rewriting of cultural discourse: "To reconstitute the discourse of culturaldifference demands not simply a change of cultural contents and symbols [...]. It requires a radical revision ofthe social temporality in which emergent histories may be written" ( 171 ). As a consequence of such calls fordiscursive revision, the theories of Edouard Glissant, Giles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari have gained popularityfor their complication of the binary between identity and difference. Peter Hallward notes that EdouardGlissant'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'sapproach into totalitarian concepts of identity, his larger criticism of Glissant as abandoning the specificity of hisearlier work in favour of a new world order, a totalitmonde, is, I will argue, founded on a linear reading ofGlissant'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 betweenidentity 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 identitythat Senior goes on to problematize in her poetry.

Edouard Glissant articulates a particularly suggestive model of creolization in relation to discourses of placeand identity. The term "crole" has been used variously to indicate people of mixed race, people of Europeanorigin 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 allthese components. Rather than attempting to define the characteristics of creoleness or locate the kinds ofcomposite societies produced by crole 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 thenecessary role that identity assertions can play within a postcolonial and increasingly global world. The conceptof antillanit represents for Glissant the assertion of a Caribbean identity within the fluid crole dynamic andremains 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 FelixGuattari in A Thousand Plateaus to describe his fluid yet grounded concept of identity. The rhizome, accordingto Deleuze and Guattari, is an alternate to the root, which has been a notion of purity and singular origins (forpeople, plants, and nations) throughout Western culture. The root prompts a quest for a single national andcultural identity, Deleuze and Guattari argue, while the rhizome is an alternative structure that operates throughdivision, variation, and multiplicity (21). "The rhizome is an antigenealogy," they write, a means of propagationwhich operates underground, without hierarchies, connecting multiple points, places and identities (21). Therhizome puts down individually rooted plants even as the larger process promotes a "deliberate wandering" ormigration 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


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discarded by creating a new, political relationship to the world, a relationship in which the rhizome as a conceptof grounded yet open crosscultural exchange replaces the root (Poetics 146). The rhizome is, in other words, afluid approach to identity as conceived through landscape, a process of cross-cultural exchange that intervenesin traditional concepts of nation and identity as fixed and selfevident without discarding moments of identityassertion 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 ofdifference toward a universal concept of relation that transcends specificities. Hallward reads Glissant's laterwork, and particularly Poetics of Relation, as arriving at a "global de-territorialisation" that breaks with thenation to advocate a totalizing concept "which equates all forms of reality" (68,122). Hallward's accusation ofincreasing relativism differs from J. Michael Dash, Jeannie Suk and my own readings of Glissant as workingaccording to a horizontal concept of exchange in which linear progress no longer figures but in which the binaryopposition of identity and difference is profoundly and repeatedly destabilized (Dash 14; Suk 69). WhileGlissant's novels and criticism at times emphasize the need for Caribbean national identities and at timesemphasize the process of cross-cultural exchange, his work cannot be read as a linear narrative progressingfrom 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 newpossibilities. Hallward's warning against equating forms of experience does, nevertheless, point to what I seeas 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 creatingopportunities "beyond the impositions of economic forces and cultural pressures" (Poetics 19). Senior's poemsalso thematize the possibilities of cross-cultural exchange, but, in contrast to Glissant, insist on the often painfulemotional, material, and social losses that result from transnational movements. Rhizomatic thought is aproductive 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. Migrationand exchange offer new, creative possibilities for conceiving identity and yet the transnational processes ofglobalization can also nurture imperialistic tendencies.

A second poem in Senior's initial section, "Meditation on Red," offers a more complex and ambivalent versionof the relations, connections, and disjunctions between colonial, postcolonial, and crole. This poemproductively crosses cultures and locations, but also qualifies the celebratory focus of Glissant's rhizomaticprocess. "Meditation on Red" situates modernist, feminist, and white crole writer, Jean Rhys, as predecessorand 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 theracial 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


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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 ofCaribbean Literatures articulates the ideas at stake in this poem. James initially points out that Olive Senior andJean Rhys's short stories share similar themes and so establish "subtle and nebulous links" that reflect tworacial and social sides of a common mirror (193). Gyllian Phillips responds with a caution against conflating thetwo writers and uses "Meditation on Red" to argue that Senior's poem entangles intertextually with Rhys's workin order to "question the disciplines that keep space, time and subject separate and coherent" (202). In otherwords, Phillips argues, while differences cannot be conflated, the relationship between Rhys and Senior ismore complex than simple identification or difference and Senior responds to Rhys as a fractured figure, caughtbetween cultures and nationalities (206). Ultimately, the poem performs a shifting and contingent practice ofidentification and difference, suggesting that both Phillips's emphasis on distinctions and James's emphasis onconnections are important in reading the text. "Meditation on Red" insists on the racial and locationaldifferences that distinguish Rhys from the narrator, and yet both the speaker in her tribute to Rhys and Rhysherself 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, racialhistories, and familial origins.

Senior's decision to use Rhys as both literary mentor and colonial representative entails a constantrepositioning within the poem, a process of exploiting the double meanings and perspectival shifts whichexemplify not only the links between a colonial past (Rhys) and a postcolonial present (the speaker), but alsoinitiate the processes of creolization. Words with multiple meanings, like "craft," suggest the differentperspectives evoked and played with throughout the poem. The craft of writing is something both speaker andsubject share, yet the crafts in which they voyage across the sea are clearly distinct. Moreover, the craftinessRhys and the speaker deploy in expressing their points of view within respectively unfriendly environmentsachieves different ends so that, ultimately, the multiplicity of the word suggests the multiplicity of perspectivesengaged with in the poem. Indeed, the reference to "dark voyagers," while clearly racial and establishing amajor distinction in experience between subject and speaker is, nevertheless, presented in a context ofsolidarity where Rhys's precedent creates the possibility for other voices to be heard. These links anddistinctions between past and present, between speaker and subject, productively entangle the colonial pastand 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 isarriving at Rhys's grave, able only to establish an imaginative link with the author rather than a truly animatedexchange. Rhizomatic identity processes may enable some forms of cross-cultural exchange, but for thewomen writers in Senior's poem, a full connection is not possible. In this sense, Rhys's alienation as a whitecreole woman, a perspective very different from the speaker's, is also reconstructed in the poem. Seniorrecreates Rhys's difficult and painful experiences as a stranger, and one who was distinct in sensibility andcultural origins from the smalltown Devon society in which she lived:

Meantime each day


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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 withher new, English home. Rhys's identity as a migrant woman and as a writer is at once located in the Caribbeanand altered by her experiences in Europe. Senior's speaker recognizes that, for Rhys, migration was not anuncomplicated, 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 oftransnational exchange and incommensurably isolated. Creolization and the horticultural figure of the rhizomethat Glissant arrives at thus represent an important theoretical complication of identity discourse, but Senior'stexts reveal that creolization does not address the painful aspects of cross-cultural exchange that globalizationis now exposing.

Senior's subsequent poems in the collection locate specific problems of migration, and reveal the ways inwhich global identity can only be theorized as a balance between the specific and transnational. Rhizomaticprocess, qualified by Senior's insistence on the losses as well as possibilities of cross-cultural exchange, offersa 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 theislands. Bananas, while originating in Africa, gave global identity to many Caribbean islands (literally, "bananarepublics") as colonial crops and are used in the poem, "My Father's Blue Plantation," to represent thespeaker's complex relationship with Caribbean space as a site of both belonging and dispossession. Caribbeanbanana crops succinctly exemplify the positive and negative ways in which identity has and can be definedthrough the land. Commercial banana crops were developed by Europeans from African strains of the plantduring 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 agriculturalpractices continue this colonial legacy, as bananas have now become the focus of a trade war between the


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European Union and multinational company Chiquita. Chiquita is demanding restitution for European Unionimport quotas that limited the banana market for years, quotas that were originally instituted to protect formercolonies (Josling and Taylor 1-4). Neither the European Union nor the multinational company are concernedwith honouring regional commitments to banana growers in this dispute, creating another disjunction betweenland and people (Clegg 22). In one sense, then, the banana trade handily exemplifies the continuum betweencolonial 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 thespeaker's own identity, while the hybridization of bananas in the Caribbean parallels her family's creolizationwithin a culture that included African, indigenous, and European elements. In other words, the banana'scolonization and current exploitation on the world market represents the tragic history of many Caribbeanpeople and spaces, yet the banana is also integrally connected to the speaker's sense of Caribbean identityand to her family's early economic self-sufficiency. Moreover, as a rhizomatic plant, the banana can be read asa 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 asdisease and contamination. The speaker initially suggests that the plantation was an idyllic paradise, "a forestof leaves" she revelled in and which provided the family with a much-needed means of support. The narratorrecalls that "every bunch was earmarked to pay for / something." Yet the plantation was also contaminated byleaf spot disease and the speaker reveals that the leaves were painted blue by chemicals (now widelyrecognized 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 thecolonial legacy of the banana crop with the speaker's conflicted feelings of nostalgia and repression, belongingand dispossession. Canada, meanwhile, appears as the final location of the poem, but is not identified as anation or home either with a direct name or full description (it is only "northern light" and snow, although otherpoems in the collection establish Canada as the migratory speaker's alternative reference point). Encapsulatingthe ambivalent use of space throughout this collection, Senior asserts a Caribbean speaking position, itself fluidin its negotiation of possibilities and prohibitions, only to displace it with a Canadian location. The Caribbean isan ambivalent space for this speaker as represented by the banana plants that simultaneously recalloppressive identity hierarchies through their colonial associations, and yet also enable the speaker's migrationas 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 TropicalColours" 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 economicinscription, Senior imagines one British ex-colony being vegetatively invaded and culturally fertilized by anotherrather than by colonial powers. Indeed, the spread of vegetation and people from the Caribbean to Canada isrepresented here as altering Canada itself, giving new meaning to the landscape. Toronto, for instance, both inSenior's poems and in reality, is given new and mobile identities by people who arrive from diverse parts of theworld. The Caribbean banana plantation is an ambivalent space encompassing both a painful history of slaveryand the speaker's family origins, yet the snow-covered Canadian ground is at once a place of possibility and anuneasy home for the migrant writer. The final lines of the poem register an estrangement between the speakerand her father: she is "told" that the plantation has gone to waste and describes her father sitting alone in thehot tropical sun (84). The family connection and sense of belonging suggested in the early lines of the poemare replaced at the end by a description of family scattered across the continent. As a model of rhizomaticprocess, 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 historicalconnections. 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 andhistorical uses of the plants, noting the importance of anatto and guinep to Arawaks, Caribs, and other nomadicindigenous Caribbean peoples as well as more recent uses of the plants by African Caribbean "countrypeople." "No one today regards anatto and guinep / as anything special," the speaker declares, yet theseplants serve to trace an alternative, noncolonial, resistant history in the Caribbean (74). The plants also reflectambivalent identity processes in the poem as the second person plural African Caribbean speaker is a residentof the Caribbean and describes country practices intimately, yet also recognizes that African Caribbean


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presence is a result of the displacement of indigenous peoples and their traditions and that true belonging thusremains 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 furtherdeveloped through the use of these plant dyes as signifying medium. The modern author of the poem isconnected to and yet distinguished from the ancient, indigenous peoples through the act of writing. The poemdescribes 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 ofsignification differ. Plant dyes might serve as clothing and a writing medium for the indigenous Caribbeans, yetthe speaker is careful not to conflate Arawak identity with that of African Caribbeans. Indeed, the line breaksand spacings used throughout the poem formally represent this process of connection and distinction assentences both cross and are fragmented by blank spaces. In "Anatto and Guinep," a set of historicalentanglements 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 apresent in which the non-commercial crop is denigrated as backward and (literally) distasteful. This devaluationof 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 aharmful disconnection between people and the land, and that this is a loss of history and identity. "It will not beeasy," 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 ofdiversity. Caribbean products and identity are measured against heavily marketed and fetishized European andNorth American brands and are found lacking (to the material benefit of the industrial powers). The onlyresolution, Glissant argues, is "to renew the visions and aesthetics of relating to the earth," so that in aconnection 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 "Bigpeople / scorn [guinep] / (though they eat it)" (74). While the African Caribbean speaker may be ambivalentlylocated as a second comer to the area, the poem traces the history of the plants to suggest their importance toall Caribbeans in maintaining identity and establishing a relationship to the earth. Senior's poem does not


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uncomplicatedly celebrate the links between indigenous and African Caribbean people, emphasizing thedisconnections as well as interrelations, but instead describes identities that are very specifically defined inhistory and background, yet connected within the context of Caribbean culture.

Subsequent poems in the collection acknowledge even more directly the ways in which globalizationperpetuates 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 continueto 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 theCaribbean and that the speaker, who lives modestly off the land and is identified with it through her regionalcreole dialect, is closest to living without sin. Rather than the land being exploited by Westerners to serve theGenesis myth, the poem suggests that Caribbean peoples and lands must be valued in their fecundity anddiversity as the source of life. This global specificity connected to the land begins to fulfill eco-critic AnnetteKolodny's call for more beneficial patterns of identification with the external world (9). Moreover, this gardencontains New World plants such as corn, tomatoes, starapples, cassava, and naseberries rather thanEuropean 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 Westernideological and material fulfillment, Senior's version of Eden functions to restore the inherent value of theCaribbean.

Western concepts of the garden also functioned according to an economy of belonging and exclusion and, inre-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 andcuttings 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 issuggesting an alternate vision for the future. Colonial and global practices may be inextricably linked, but truechange lies in complicating binaries and spreading new ideas. The garden in "The Tree of Life" migratesthrough the world, as Glissant has suggested rhizomatic identities do, but it is a world understood as bothspecific 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 arecurring theme in Senior's collection and suggests that identities that seek a connection to the earth mustnegotiate 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 ofself, yet must also seek new possibilities in rhizome-like migrations. The garden is a vital metaphor forcontemporary 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 womenwriters, the garden has served as a dualistic trope. Sandra Pouchet Paquet notes that, while Claude Mackayconstructs the garden as an idyllic space, Caribbean women writers such as Erna Brodber, Jean Rhys, andPatricia Powell have all constructed it as profoundly divided (108). Similarly, Isabel Moving describes thegarden represented in Michelle Cliff's work as a dualistic space associated both with alternative, lesbian fertilityand with the heterosexual expectations of biblical myth (264-65). In both Paquet's and Hoving's analyses, thegarden 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 andloss, writing that:

The virtual erasure of the indigenous population and the slave labour of millions in the fields ensured thatrelationships with the land itself, and the practices of agriculture and horticulture were necessarily and variouslyassociated by different Caribbean populations with dispossession, slavery and servitude [...]; more rarely, withmemories, 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 andredrawn. (149)


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Senior deploys these tangled histories to locate the Caribbean garden as a source of identity, a self-constitutingmemory, and, in its multifaceted colonial history and current global exploitation, as the (literal) root of herspeaker's dispossession. This insistence on a continuing legacy of oppression usefully qualifies celebratorytheories of the rhizome as a process of exchange and suggests that the way forward lies in exploiting thedynamics of belonging and exclusion, possibility and loss.

[Reference]WORKS CITEDAllen-Agostini, Lisa. "Olive Senior: An Embodiment of Conflict" Sunday Guardian 12 March 2000: 19.Beittel, Mark and Giovanna Covi. "Talking of Households: Olive Senior's Postcolonial Identities." Nationalism vs.Internationalism: (Inter)National Dimensions of Literatures in English. Eds. Wolfgang Zach and Ken L. Goodwin.Tubingen: Stauggenberg-Verlag, 1996. 389-97.Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.Bongie, Chris. Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/colonial Literature. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.Clegg, Peter. The Caribbean Banana Trade: From Colonialism to Globalization. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,2002.Collett, Anne. "Gardening in the Tropics: A Horticultural Guide to Caribbean Politics and Poetics with SpecialReference to the Poetry of Olive Senior." SPAN: Journal of the South Pacific Association for CommonwealthLiterature. 46 (April 1998): 87-103.Columbus, Christopher. 1893. The Journal of Christopher Columbus. New York: B. Franklin, 1970.Dash, J. Michael. The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia,

1998.Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi.Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.Donell, Alison. "The Short Fiction of Olive Senior." Caribbean Women Writers: fiction in English. Eds. Mary Condeand Thorun Lonsdale. New York: St. Martin's, 1999.117-43.Drake, Sir Francis. "A Summarie and True Discourse of Sir Francis Drake's West Indian Voyage." 1598-1600. ThePrincipal Navigations. Ed. R. Hakluyt. Vol. 7. Dent: London, 1962. 77-109.Glissant, Edouard. Caribbean Discourse. Trans. J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1989.

_____. Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997._____. Untitled Lecture. Conference on Francophone Literatures. Syracuse University, New York. 11 April 2001.Hallward, Peter. Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and the Specific. New York: Manchester UP,2003.Hoving, Isabel. In Praise of New Travelers. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001.James, Louis. "The Other Side of the Mirror: The Short Stories of Jean Rhys and Olive Senior." Journal of CaribbeanLiteratures (Special Rhys Issue) 3.3 (2003): 193-98.

Josling, T.E. and T.G. Taylor. Introduction. Banana Wars: The Anatomy of a Trade Dispute. Trowbridge: CromwellPress, 2003.Kolodny, Annette. The Lay of the Land. Chapel HiU: U of North Carolina P, 1975.McCracken, Donal. Gardens of Empire: Botanical Institutions of the Victorian British Empire. London: Leicester UP,1997.Merchant, Carolyn. "Reinventing Eden: Western Culture as a Recovery Narrative." Uncommon Ground. Ed. WilliamCronin. New York: Norton, 1999.132-67.Paquet, Sandra Pouchet. Caribbean Autobiography. Madison: Wisconsin UP, 2002.Phillips, Gyllian. "Personal and Textual Geographies in Olive Senior's Literary Relationship with Jean Rhys." Journalof Caribbean Literatures (Special Rhys Issue) 3.3 (2003): 199-206.Prest, John. The Garden of Eden: The Botanic Garden and the Re-Creation of Paradise. New Haven, CT: Yale UP,1981.Seed, Patricia. Ceremonies of Possession. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.Senior, Olive. Gardening in the Tropics. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1994.Suk, Jeannie. Postcolonial Paradoxes in French Caribbean Writing. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999.Tiffin, Helen. "'Replanted in this Arboreal Place': Gardens and Flowers in Contemporary Caribbean Writing." EnglishLiteratures in International Contexts. Eds. Anton Heinz and Klaus Stierstorfer. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 2000. 149-63.Tobin, Beth Fowkes. "'And there raise yams': Slaves' Gardens in the Writings of West Indian Plantocrats." EighteenthCentury Life 23.2 (1999): 164-76.

[Author Affiliation]JORDAN STOUCK teaches at the University of Lethbridge. She has published several articles on feminine creoleidentity in The Jean Rhys Review, Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, Journal of CaribbeanLiteratures, and Canadian Review of American Studies. She is currently working on a study of cross-cultural feminist


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