Diary: Jamaica Kincaid, I was never really making a garden so much as having a conversation (Part One)

But I was never really making a garden the way that most people, who are intent on making a garden and who will have ideas at the outset about what it should mean in some way that they might not even be conscious of; I was never really making a garden in that way so much as I was having a conversation, a conversation with all the components, all the attributes, all the dangers, all the failures and pitfalls, all the moral and immoral dilemmas, all of the history of the garden and the way it has formed, starting with the Edenic prelapsarian ideal/idyll and its postlapsarian catastrophe. There isn’t a garden that I have ever encountered, whether it be one created by a king in France or a woman raising children in Cut Bank, a small town on the Great Plains of northern Montana who in her spare time made a garden of flowers, annuals that were foreign in origin to her region of the United States—nasturtiums, petunias, zinnias, portulaca, marigolds—that I haven’t, however unknowingly, involved in this ongoing conversation I have in my head: before the Fall, after the Fall.

I grew up on a small island with the Atlantic Ocean on its north side and the Caribbean Sea bordering its south. I saw an ocean and a sea every day of my small child’s life but I hardly saw fresh water for the island had been denuded of trees by colonial settlers from England in the seventeenth century. The garden, that place in which things were grown in an enclosed area and were meant to excite at least two of the senses, the eye and the nose, existed for me only in a book. In a book, people walked in them, sometimes in silence and alone, sometimes in silence but with a companion, sometimes to make mischief, sometimes to just show off how rich they were. Gardens were separate from the place where food was grown. Where food was grown was associated with labor. Gardens were the place where flowers were grown, the place where the plants existed for the sole purpose of pleasure and thoughtfulness and reflection. Later when I myself began to happily drown myself in the world of the garden I saw how that division between sustenance (food) and knowledge is reflected in the creation story. In Eden, the first garden in Christianity’s mythology, The Tree of Life (agriculture) comes before The Tree of Knowledge (horticulture); and that place called the garden comes with an explicit suggestion of there being plenty to eat and so thinking can begin. In the world of the garden someone who looks like me is associated with agriculture. I am descended mostly from enslaved Africans, the people whose forced labor made the world of the garden as we have come to know it possible, the people whose very presence itself makes the modern world possible.

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