My Garden (Book) by Jamaica Kincaid

Author:Jamaica Kincaid
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2012-09-06T16:00:00+00:00

I was once in a garden in the mountains way above Kingston (Jamaica), and from a distance I saw a mass of tall stalks of red flames, something in bloom. It looked familiar, but what it resembled, what it reminded me of, was a flower I cannot stand, and these flowers I saw before me I immediately loved, and they made me feel glad for the millionth time that I am from the West Indies. (This worthless feeling, this bestowing special qualities on yourself because of the beauty of the place you are from, is hard to resist—so hard that people who come from the ugliest place deny that it is ugly at all or simply go out and take someone else’s beauty for themselves.) These flowering stalks of red flames turned out to be salvia, but I knew it was salvia only because I had seen it grown—a much shorter variety—in North American gardens; and I realized that I cannot stand it when I see it growing in the north because that shade of red can’t be borne well by a dwarfish plant.

I do not know the names of the plants in the place I am from (Antigua). I can identify the hibiscus, but I do not know the name of a white lily that blooms in July, opening at night, perfuming the air with a sweetness that is almost sickening, and closing up at dawn. There is a bush called whitehead bush; it was an important ingredient in the potions my mother and her friends made for their abortions, but I do not know its proper name; this same bush I often had to go and cut down and tie in bunches to make a broom for sweeping our yard; both the abortions and the sweeping of the yard, actions deep and shallow, in a place like that (Antigua) would fall into the category called Household Management. I had wanted to see the garden in Kingston so that I could learn the names of some flowers in the West Indies, but along with the salvia the garden had in it only roses and a single anemic-looking yellow lupine (and this surprised me, because lupine is a temperate zone flower and I had very recently seen it in bloom along the roadside of a town in Finland).

This ignorance of the botany of the place I am from (and am of) really only reflects the fact that when I lived there, I was of the conquered class and living in a conquered place; a principle of this condition is that nothing about you is of any interest unless the conqueror deems it so. For instance, there was a botanical garden not far from where I lived, and in it were plants from various parts of the then British Empire, places that had the same climate as my own; but as I remember, none of the plants were native to Antigua. The rubber tree from Malaysia (or somewhere) is memorable because

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