STRANGE JOY

Abstract

This article explores how Kincaid's aesthetic practice in her gardening, plant-hunting and travel writing is informed by an ‘ethical singularity’ that Gayatri Spivak describes elsewhere as open to ‘the possibility of constructing a new type of responsibility for the cultural worker’. Where Kincaid's text might simply be read as an account of a diasporic subject claiming an equivalency between her own experience of colonialism and the experience of subaltern Nepalese in the twenty-first century, attention to what Spivak calls the ‘slow attentive, mind-changing (on both sides) ethical singularity’ of Kincaid's gaze, positions Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya as a supplement to colonial plant-hunting memoirs. Kincaid's text rejects a false solidarity with the subaltern, and instead emphasizes her narrative's entanglement in travel writing and garden culture even while she seeks to dislodge these genres from their colonial moorings. Kincaid's book, therefore, simultaneously makes visible the colonial attitudes that inflect the activity of seed-collecting and botanical exploration even while it revels in the experience of retracing the Himalayan routes and narratives of colonial botanists like Joseph Dalton Hooker and Frank Kingdon Ward. Kincaid approaches the narration of her experience of seed-collecting in Nepal through a form of ethics Spivak calls ‘diasporic responsibility’, challenging readers to examine the stakes of their own interest in writing about gardening, adventure travel and the environment.

Keywords:

• disaporic studies
• eco-cosmopolitanism
• ethics
• garden history
• parataxis
• travel writing

Notes

¹Tiffin 1998, 2000; O'Brien 2002; Ewert 2006; Azima 2006–7; Casteel 2007: 109–31

²Vital and Erney 2006–7; Cilano and DeLoughrey 2007; Huggan and Tiffin 2007; as well as DeLoughrey, Gosson and Handley 2005; DeLoughrey and Handley 2011

³Haraway defines ‘situated natureculture’ as an environmental context where ‘all the actors become who they are in the dance of relating, not from scratch, not ex nihilo, but full of the patterns of their sometimes-joined, sometimes-separate heritages both before and lateral to this encounter’ (2008: 25; original emphasis).

⁴For a more thorough unpacking of ethical alterity in Spivak's work on subaltern voice, see Didur and Heffernan (2003).

⁵ See Raj (2004), For more background on this recent sociopolitical history.

⁶For an examination of this aspect of Kincaid's text, see Didur (2010).

⁷Kincaid's account of the China trip is published as an essay, ‘Plant Hunting in China’, in My Garden (Book). There are references to Hinkley's participation in the China trip in this essay as well as to his nursery, Heronswood. Hinkley has also published his own books on gardening, most notably The Explorer's Garden (1999), where he thanks Kincaid, among others, for ‘inspiring [him] to be a better writer’ (20).

⁸Different portions of this essay were first presented at the ACLALS Triennial Meeting, UBC, on 19 August 2007, and the Beyond Environmentalism Conference, UCSB, on 22 May 2009.

⁹Similarly, when writing about how the group enjoys a few beers on a bench in Chichila, Kincaid comments, ‘There was no other way for that beer to be had other than someone carrying it from Khandbari on his back’ (46).

¹⁰In his 1924 trip to the Yarulung Tsangpo River, the substance of Ward's book The Riddle of the Tsangpo Gorges (1926), Mueggler notes that Ward and his travelling companion, the Earl of Cawdor, employed a chief of staff ‘whom they called Tom, never learning his real name’ (2005: 456).

¹¹Spivak notes how Kincaid's novel Lucy uses the tongue as a ‘metonym for (the failure of) sexual contact’, loving and communication (2000: 340–1).

¹²For an analysis of colonial discourse in mountaineering literature, see Slemon (1998).

¹³A View-Master is mentioned in Kincaid's first novel, Annie John, and associated with conveying colonial exploration and travel in a hyperreal (totalizing) fashion. As Annie relates: ‘The View-Master came with pictures of the pyramids, the Taj Mahal, Mt Everest, and scenes of the Amazon River. When the View-Master worked properly, all the scenes looked as if they were alive, as if we could just step into the View-Master and sail down the Amazon River or stand at the foot of they pyramids. When the View-Master didn't work properly, it was as if we were looking at an ordinary, colorful picture’ (Kincaid 1983: 11).

¹⁴Email correspondence, 22 February 2007.