Diary: Jamaica Kincaid, Entries from an Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children
Image by Kara Walker from An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children, a new collaboration between author Jamaica Kincaid and artist Kara Walker
C is for cotton (Gossypium), a member of the mallow family, which also includes okra, hollyhock, and cacao or cocoa, from which is made chocolate. Cotton appears in regions nearest the equator. It has been used to weave into clothing for thousands of years. Adam and Eve could quite possibly have used it after they grew tired of using the leaf of the fig to hide their nakedness from each other. Cotton is one of the crops that played an important part in the industrialization and wealth of Europe. The community of people now disparagingly known as Luddites and portrayed as ignorant people opposed to the progress of the industrial revolution were really weavers of textiles who could not keep up with the vast amount of cotton produced by the enslaved people of African descent in the newly conquered islands in the Caribbean and the southern parts of North America. The mechanization of weaving textiles made the hand loom inefficient and unprofitable, and the hand loomers resorted to sabotaging the mechanized looms because they were losing a way to make sense of the world. Cotton, along with the sugarcane, was among the first commodities to make the world we now live in a global community.
I is for indigo (Indigofera tinctoria). Indigo is a member of the pea family (Leguminosae), also native to the tropical area of China. Its exquisite blue color, used for dyeing, comes from its leaves and new stems, which when fermented produce a substance known as indican, which then is transformed into the dye known as indigotin, hence, indigo. It was introduced into the New World, as it was called, because of the European conquest of the Western Hemisphere, as a cash crop like sugar and cotton, eventually becoming an important part of the economy of France. In its time, indigo, which was grown in Haiti, produced more wealth for France than the entire East India Company did for England, and the Haitian Revolution, which freed the enslaved Africans, was so catastrophic to France’s economy that it led Napoleon Bonaparte to sell Louisiana to President Thomas Jefferson.
S is for sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum), a monocot, and a member of the grass family, native (or endemic) to the part of the Earth now known as New Guinea. It is the source of sugar, a food that is now regarded as providing no nutritional value whatsoever, and yet its cultivation and eventual exploitation by Europeans in the parts of the world that came to be known through the journey of Christopher Columbus from Spain to the Caribbean became the foundation of the wealth and power of the region we now refer to as Europe. It led to the wholesale subjugation and exploitation of many people who were occupants of the area of the world we call Africa. This lone plant, innocent of all the evil now associated with it (the enslavement of so many people living their lives in Africa), is now associated not with nourishment or beauty or pleasant memories but with despair and injustice. Many people in contemporary times are suspicious of sugar, and some parents will not allow their children to consume beverages that contain sugar of any kind.
From An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children, a collaboration between author Jamaica Kincaid and artist Kara Walker, to be published in May.
Jamaica Kincaid was born in St. John’s, Antigua. Her books include At the Bottom of the River, Annie John, Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother, My Brother, Mr. Potter, and See Now Then. She teaches at Harvard University and lives (and gardens) in Vermont. She has previously written for Book Post about plant-hunting on the Continental Divide, gardening as conversation, and walking to Robert Frost’s house, and we published her “Letter to Robinson Crusoe.”
Kara Walker is a painter and installation artist best known for her investigations of race, gender, sexuality, and violence through silhouetted figures. Her work can be found in the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Tate Gallery, among other collections. The Walker Art Center organized a survey of her work in 2007. In the spring of 2014, her monumental installation, A Subtlety: Or… the Marvelous Sugar Baby an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant, was on view at the abandoned Domino Sugar refinery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She lives in New York and is the Tepper Chair in Visual Arts at Rutgers University.
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