Today I was rereading a short essay Jamaica Kincaid published in the New Yorker recently. It’s called The Disturbances of the Garden, and is about, put excruciatingly simply, how the garden is less this tranquil space that colonizer mentality would teach us, it is a place where you can see so elegantly the power and terror that humans can wield over the natural world.
Kincaid’s work was some that inspired my wanderlust early; I read A Small Place as a teenager and the feeling I got after reading it was what I imagine white Americans have been feeling this year, as in: how can this thing that I love so much be so bad?
Granted, when I was 14 or 15, or however old I was when I first read this slim work, I had never been anywhere. But my ever-growing wanderlust was reaching a fever-pitch at my private school while I watched all my classmates fly around the world every spring, if not more.
But seriously, A Small Place really fucking broke my brain for a minute there. It raises some pretty confusing questions for a teenager, even the genius kind like I once was myself: is simply going somewhere…a bad thing?
For a while, until I was about 20 or so, I didn’t know how else to reconcile it save “I’ll never go to Antigua,” but even when I would say it I knew it was an empty answer. Because within that essay is this pervasive idea of dominion and the things that drive it, and even then I knew all those powers could exist anywhere.
So reading this new essay of hers in the New Yorker brought up all of these same old feelings of struggling to justify my ability to exist in another country without holistically engaging with the ways that my presence supports all the things I despise.
It’s been 25 years, and I’m still constantly evaluating my relationship to other places, but it’s always through this rubric of like: hey, how can I keep doing what I’m doing and still sleep at night?
There’s a phrase I use for myself and people like me, who are blessed to have citizenship somewhere, anywhere, but the ideals or culture of that nation do not reflect us: culturally stateless. And yeah, I get it. There are real stateless people in this world. So maybe this tagline needs a revamp, but I have yet nothing else to call it.
But just because your home country doesn’t want you back doesn’t mean that your responsibilities to any other country end, specifically when your physical body is located there.
But maybe for the first time, particularly here on this weird little block that I share with some of the other people that this city rejects like the elderly and disabled and the myriad of different sex workers that populate my little neighborhood, it been so much easier to plant the seeds of a manifesto.
Maybe manifesto is a bit hyperbolic.
But everyone seeks dominion over something, and I think my absolute lust for turning words into bewitchments has been a rather healthy one as far as colonizing tendencies go. And in a perfect world I’d like to use these words to cast a spell over anyone that reads them, not just myself for having written them.
It’s ironic because more than any other piece of travel writing I’ve ever read [is that what A Small Place is? Do not quote me on this] it made me want to go to the place described the most, yet Antigua was immediately slapped with my own version of a Level 4 Travel Advisory because of the same, exact words therein. It was one that I granted to that place out of ignorance, I literally didn’t know how else to proceed in my mind, but there was something delightful I came across in Garden that relieved some of the guilt I’ve felt all of these years from not properly addressing the concerns I first had as a teenager.
“It was in his writing that I found the distance between the garden I was looking at and the garden in the wilderness, the garden cast out of its Eden which created a longing in me, the notion of “to go and to see.” Go see!”
In my adulthood I know that Kincaid herself is quite the traveler, though I will admit I’ve never read her work about trekking the Himalayas collecting and documenting plants. But reading these words felt like drinking an antidote, some potion carefully crafted with things she describes in the piece maybe, and I feel released from a long-held guilt that she gave to me so many years ago in the same manner.
But now, rather than wallow in unearned complacency, it’s time to work. Because we have new gardens to grow and new spells to compose.
–M