Gardening as Resistance: Ecofeminism in Detroit and My Garden by Jamaica Kincaid

To be an amateur is to question institutions of knowledge, how they are invented and to critique how you may potentially be complicit in the social reproduction of these institutions as a result of your family’s history combined with the demographic categories you are boxed into. For Jamaica Kincaid, amateurism is both an aesthetic hobby as well as a privileged mindset. Her garden provides her with a safe space in which she is able to explore her sense of self and connection to the earth in a way that is free from the confines and standards of other elite educational or occupational structures. Her relationship to her garden as a safe space is also experienced through a lens of double consciousness that her way of life was not afforded to her family members in their cultivation of plant life as a means for survival rather than beauty. Her race and her class are at odds with each other in a way that allows her to interrogate the standards of her position in the garden as an elite hobby she is able to participate in, but one that has been historically defined by colonial white men. The garden becomes her safe space as she explores the domestication of the exotic, as well as the reinvention, censorship, and creation of knowledge by a ruling, white upper class. In her garden, Kincaid navigates performances of privilege and creation of safe spaces as an act of resistance to racist, sexist institutions in her pursuit of understanding her relationship to the earth as an amateur gardener with a non-traditional educational background. Through Kincaid’s writing practice, she provides her readers with context through which to understand real-world applications such the ways in which African American female residents of Detroit have pursued ecofeminism in an effort to combat the racialization of food insecurity in their community.

As a product of a postcolonial society, Kincaid interrogates the scope of authoritative gardening standards with respect to beauty, utility, authority, and control. From her position as an insider who maintains a conscious and conflicted privilege to dissociate herself from her culture, Kincaid herself states, “I do come from this tradition of possessing and claiming yourself, because if you don’t possess and claim yourself, someone else will” (Ferguson 184). Her paradox of awareness allows her to absorb the tools of the master to dismantle the systems of oppression that have resulted in historical limitations to gardening as a mode of anything other than survival. As the first woman in her family who is able to employ the verb “garden” as opposed to the “farm”, Kincaid’s empowerment in her personal mastery over nature is experienced through the lens of pain as she reinvents a space that was once occupied by her family members in the context of conquest and submission (Kilkenborg). From her doubly conscious position, Kincaid identifies her garden as being “planted only because [she] wished to have such a thing, and that [she] knew how I wanted it to look and knew the name, proper and common, of each thing growing in it” (Kincaid 120). Her education about her background coupled with her experience has led to her informed understanding of naming is equivalent to possession.

Kincaid nurtures a duality of awareness as a wealthy woman who has the freedom to plant outside of the realm of survival but was raised in a poor family with limited resources to provide her with a formal education. In Antigua, she “would have been a picture of shame: a woman covered with dirt, smelling of manure” in her garden, but because he has knowledge of how to perform successfully in a postcolonial capitalist society, she avoids the “ignorance of botany” she experienced in Antigua (120). The conflicted of Kincaid’s background allows her the opportunity to transition out of the conquered class in her recognition of her family’s inability to access to the resources provided to those who built and subscribed to educational and linguistic institutions that enforce and this “ignorance” in the first place (120). Kincaid’s unique contextual understanding coupled with her displacement from her upbringing allows her to identify tools of rebellion against structures of oppression by refusing to use the “proper” name when identifying plant life in her garden. The transition is brought about by the fact that her lack of use of the proper name is a deliberate and calculated choice not born out of ignorance, but rather out of informed decision based on her refusal to be complicit in elitist institutions that dominated family members who came before her as well as informed the way she views herself today. Kincaid resisted the “proper name, or a Latin name… assigned to [the plants] by an agreed-on group of botanists” (160) because to use their names would be to echo systems of oppression that would compromise ancestral dignity in a space where she has been actively working towards weeding out any threat to her dignity as an Antiguan woman.

As a woman who straddles both the conquered and conquering classes, Kincaid’s garden walls oscillate between boundaries that imprison and boundaries that protect her from the outside world as she reclaims the ability to feed herself, and therefore her own autonomy. Kincaid’s reconciliation of her dual membership drives her desire to claim ownership over her habitat in a way that is grounded in her lived experience. A similar instance of women of color cultivating a safe space in the context of a longstanding history of social structures that have continuously perpetuated inequality in ways that restrict their capacity to nourish themselves and their families is the rise of an initiative for food security in Detroit driven by African American women. In response to the link between Detroit’s growing food insecurity issues and the identification that “lower-income and African American neighborhoods have fewer supermarkets and greater access to liquor and convenience stores with lower-quality food and limited access to more expensive, healthy food options”, female members of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network organized in the name of fighting against “capitalist and racist oppression” (White 15-16). Their organization came about when the women were fed up with their “harsh economic realities”, and decided to transform vacant lots around the city, turning land into “outdoor, living, learning, and healing spaces for themselves and for members of the community”(18). While Kincaid’s privileged garden space is curtailing different from a food security movement, both parties are nonetheless related to a more overtly political movement. The Detroit women see this initiative as essential to their self-determination and empowerment, and their push for this self-reliance “endorses a human collaboration with nature as opposed to the domination of nature” as “an exercise of political agency and empowerment” and an opportunity to “work against systems and structures that have oppressed them” (18).

Whitney Smith, Detroit Black Community Food Security Network Service Member and Food Warriors Youth Program Facilitator. Photo by Food Corps as credited in Works Cited.

 

Not only does the garden stand as a metaphorical wall protecting the community from food insecurity as a  racialized social disease, but it also builds bridges between members who participate in environmental empowerment as a peaceful protest in their shared experiences of oppression. Locally grown food is both healthier physically in terms of the absence of GMOs and pesticides used by profiting industrial food producers, but also psychologically due to the fact that the food never passes through the infrastructures that have been complicit in the perpetuation of their oppression. Just as their food has not passed through oppressive institutions, their quest for agency and self-reliance exists outside of governing institutions as well. The women of Detroit firmly believe in the power of liberating themselves through refusing to petition their local government “to increase access to fresh food, or lobbying for more grocery stores and markets to locate in the city” and instead have focused on revitalization of their environment as “they transform vacant land into a community-based healthy food source that allows them to be able to feed themselves and their families” (19). The insight these women have into the legacy of their ancestors and the connection between “food justice and resistance of African people” provides context and understanding to systems of oppression and how they operate, allowing them to be better equipped to modern-day iterations of agricultural persecution. Because the members of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network see self-reliance as so much more than where their food comes from, their double consciousness allows for the heightened awareness of the role that food has played in “the history of injustice” that Kincaid discusses in My Garden.

The capacity to sustain oneself in a way that is free from institutionalized racism and food insecurity is a human right. However, because not all humans are provided with the opportunity to live out this right while others have more than they need, there is a large spectrum on which the act of growing plants is situated. The spectrum extends from food insecurity in urban food deserts like Detroit to growing plants as fulfilling a basic need to feed oneself, to orchestrating an aesthetic collection of plants that are solely consumed by the eye. Kincaid ironically makes a nod to in the discussion of her ability to “become so confident of having a constant supply of food that often when [she decides] to grow things [she] can eat they have to transcend the ordinary… they must be the favorite food of the people in the countryside of France or Italy”(Kincaid 56) she basks in her ability to take pleasure in the act of feeding herself and overturning the earth in a way that was denied to her family. This attitude is a tongue in cheek commentary incorporates both the ways in which her family and members have been subjugated, as well as Kincaid’s awareness of the spectrum of privilege associated with cultivating plant life. This awareness also comes across when she acknowledges that Francis Bacon was able to take pleasure in “green grass kept finely shorn” because he “was someone who had never had to cut the grass himself”(112). Whether it be white colonialists building an empire on the backs of populations they deem to be of a lower social standing, or members of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network raising their communities out of a place where they were denied the basic human right to have a say in the ways they sustain themselves, the first step to building or rebuilding a culture is agriculture (Treacy).

Whitney Smith helps a child in White House vegetable garden. During two terms in the Food Corps, Whitney educated students on gardening, food justice, nutrition and urban agriculture. SHFWire photo by Kritika Gadhvi, 2014.

Control of one’s ability to nourish themselves and connect with the earth in a way that removes all harm and hierarchy is an incredibly powerful sentiment behind the project in Detroit. But when does the fulfillment of one’s basic needs trespass the realm of farming and dip into the realm of gardening or cultivating beauty? As an amateur equipped with the knowledge of the potential for manipulation and subordination of entire classes of people, Kincaid navigates her transition out of the conquered class but resists the full immersion in the conquering class. While she delights in her privilege to grow plants and vegetables that are not essential to her survival, she navigates her privilege through the lens of pain that she has inherited as a woman of color with food insecurity woven into her family’s history. Similarly, for the ecofeminists in Detroit, their transformation of the public spaces are driven by and interpreted through the lens of their self-identified connection between the “oppression and pollution of the earth with their own oppression and view the earth as an ally in the respective liberation struggles”(White 25). Given the intersectionality of their race, class, and gender, Jamaica Kincaid and the women of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network see themselves as “structurally located to understand and connect with the earth” (White 25), fortifying their performance of ecofeminism as resistance to the inherently gendered and racialized practices of planting.

 

Works Cited

Ferguson, Moira. “A lot of Memory: An Interview With Jamaica Kincaid.” The Kenyon Review.

Volume 16. Number 1. (Spring 1994): 163-188.

Kincaid, Jamaica, and Jill Fox. My Garden. Farrar Straus Giroux, 2001.

Klinkenborg, Verlyn. “Gardening.” The New York Times, The New York Times Archive, 5 Dec. 1999,   archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/12/05/reviews/gardent.html.

Treacy, John M. “Building and Rebuilding Agricultural Terraces in the Colca Valley of

Peru.” Yearbook. Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers, vol. 13, 1987, pp. 51–57. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25765680.

White, M. M. “Sisters of the Soil: Urban Gardening as Resistance in Detroit.” Race/Ethnicity:

Multidisciplinary Global Contexts, vol. 5 no. 1, 2011, pp. 13-28. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/462927.

Whitney Smith. Digital Image. Food Corps. Web. 25 April 2018. <foodcorps.org>