{"id":167542,"date":"2024-05-10T11:17:21","date_gmt":"2024-05-10T15:17:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=167542"},"modified":"2024-05-10T11:17:21","modified_gmt":"2024-05-10T15:17:21","slug":"the-abcs-of-gardening","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/05\/10\/the-abcs-of-gardening\/","title":{"rendered":"The ABCs of Gardening"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

From\u00a0An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children<\/em>. Kara Walker.<\/p><\/div>\n

A<\/em> is for ABC book. An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children<\/em>, a new book by Jamaica Kincaid and Kara Walker, is an alphabetical sequence of lavishly illustrated, crisp lyric essays that takes readers on a tour of gardening, past and present, and serves as a teaching tool for children to learn about flora while practicing their letters. But at its roots, An Encyclopedia<\/em> is a postcolonial excavation of the tyrannical alphabetization that has formed America since its origins. As the historian Patricia Crain writes in The Story of A: From The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter<\/em>, her investigation of the alphabet\u2019s chokehold on American letters, \u201cThe alphabet is the technology with which American culture has long spoken to its children and within which it has symbolically represented and formed them.\u201d Teaching children how to use the alphabet might seem like a natural, lawful neutral activity: here are the building blocks that create our communication system. But alphabetization as the default mode for organizing subjectivity\u2014\u201cAs easy as ABC\u201d\u2014is a recent, and surprisingly problematic, phenomenon.<\/p>\n

B<\/em> is for Bible. The New England Primer<\/em>, the first reader designed for the American colonies and the foundational text for schoolchildren in the United States before 1790, presents the alphabet via Biblically themed and morally didactic rhyming couplets: \u201cIn Adam\u2019s Fall \/ We sinned all,\u201d the A<\/em> ditty goes, and the letters march on a mostly tragic journey from there, with dour little images that illustrate each couplet. Today, ABC books do lots of things. Many use the genre to provide a parade of content: A <\/em>is for activist; R<\/em> is for Rolex. Alphabet books aimed at adult audiences often satirize the genre. The Cubies\u2019 ABC<\/a><\/em>, from 1913, skewers Futurist artists in alphabetical order, shooting them down in doggerel: \u201cB is for Beauty as Brancusi views it. \/ (The Cubies all vow he and Braque take the Bun.) \/ First you seize all that\u2019s plain to the eye, then you lose it; \/ Next you search for the Soul and proceed to abuse it. \/ (They tell me it\u2019s easy and no end of fun.)\u201d ABC books sometimes even undercut the well-trodden form itself, with a wink or some wishfulness. Michae\u0308l Escoffier\u2019s Take<\/em> Away the A: An Alphabeast of a Book! <\/em>suggests an alternate universe for a world without each letter: \u201cWithout the D, Dice Are Ice\u201d depicts dice clinking in drinking glasses. Kincaid and Walker\u2019s Encyclopedia<\/em> embraces all these modes, from instructive to subversive to lyric to sly. Here, A<\/em> is for apple, but it\u2019s also for \u201cApple and Adam, too,\u201d and \u201calso for Amaranth.\u201d A<\/em> gets three entries; S<\/em>, T<\/em>, U<\/em>, and W<\/em> each get two; the rest get one. The rule seems to be that there is no rule, bucking the alphabet\u2019s insistence on pattern.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Colored<\/em> in the new book\u2019s title gives a jump scare. Segregation leaps to mind. But the chromatic anachronism colored<\/em> is also a literal description of the book, with its densely saturated, Crayola-bright pages and Walker\u2019s deft watercolors.<\/p>\n

\u201cD Is for Daffodil,\u201d for example, shows the disturbing grip of the colonial imagination on Western culture and the way we think about flora and fauna. For centuries, children schooled in the British system, no matter where they lived, had to memorize William Wordsworth\u2019s \u201cI Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,\u201d which features a rhapsody on a \u201chost of golden daffodils\u201d as a peak joy of everyday life\u2014even though most subjects of the empire, as Kincaid observes, \u201cwere native to places where a daffodil would be unable to grow and so would never be seen by them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Entries in An<\/em> Encyclopedia <\/em>weave history and fantasy with pragmatic gardening instructions. Each page appears on a color-saturated sheet, rejecting the implicit notion of white as the default background for text, and Walker\u2019s limpid watercolors gleam.<\/p>\n

Familiar faces emerge while reading: the book cross-pollinates images and etymologies. Connections appear, if you\u2019re looking out for them. \u201cOrange\u201d is Citrus sinensis <\/em>because it originates in China; \u201ctea,\u201d botanically, is Camellia sinensis<\/em> for its Chinese origins.<\/p>\n

Gardening can be both a literal activity and an imaginative one. Take \u201cM Is for Musa,\u201d which, Kincaid explains, is the proper name for the banana (Musa \u00d7 sapientum <\/em>or paradisiaca<\/em>). Kincaid keeps the writing practical, focusing on what a monocot is (a plant that emerges from its seed with one leaf), while Walker\u2019s painting takes us to the imaginative: it\u2019s legendary dancer Josephine Baker, shimmying in the famous banana skirt she wore in the Folies-Berg\u00e8re revues in Paris.<\/p>\n

How do Kincaid and Walker keep an ABC book appropriate for all ages? Keep the adults guessing (what kind of story will Kincaid reveal about the plant?); keep the children on track with rhythm and repetition; keep everyone captivated with word and visual games.<\/p>\n

Illustrations help. \u201cG Is for Guava\u201d focuses on the guava\u2019s deliciousness in three sentences, but Walker\u2019s watercolor reveals a more sinister underbelly. A Black girl holds a cut guava to the skies while she\u2019s standing on a box that says \u201cFor Export.\u201d The white boy peering lasciviously under the Black child\u2019s floating white dress suggests that the guava might not be the only item for export: slave narratives are always under the surface, even in the most innocent-seeming moments.<\/p>\n

Jamaica Kincaid herself, in real life, is a master gardener\u2014I highly recommend checking out @virtuouspomona, her flowers-only Instagram account, to drool over a ridge planted with seemingly endless daffodils, snaking like a long river over the rippling earth.<\/p>\n

Lyric essays that grow from her gardening have become a specialty of hers over the past several decades.<\/p>\n

My Garden (Book)<\/em>, for instance, is Kincaid\u2019s 1999 collection of intertwined nonfiction sprung from her extensive garden at her home in Bennington, Vermont, which started as a tiny plot in the middle of her front lawn. The garden is both deeply personal and a site of postcolonial reclamation. Per Kincaid, \u201cWhen it dawned on me that the garden I was making (and am still making and will always be making) resembled a map of the Caribbean . . . I only marveled at the way the garden is for me an exercise in memory, a way of remembering my own immediate past, a way of getting to a past that is my own (the Caribbean Sea) and the past as it is indirectly related to me (the conquest of Mexico and its surroundings).\u201d<\/p>\n

Naming each plant is a labor of love but also an act of violence.<\/p>\n

Obsession with names is the B plot of An<\/em> Encyclopedia<\/em>, which both celebrates and interrogates the colloquial and Linnaean names we\u2019ve thrust upon plants, and a recurring theme throughout Kincaid\u2019s writing on gardens. In her 2020 essay \u201cThe Disturbances of the Garden,\u201d Kincaid writes, \u201cTo name is to<\/p>\n

Possess; possessing is the original violation bequeathed to Adam and his equal companion in creation, Eve, by their creator. It is their transgression in disregarding his command that leads him not only to cast them into the wilderness, the unknown, but also to cast out the other possession that he designed with great clarity and determination and purpose: the garden! For me, the story of the garden in Genesis is a way of understanding my garden obsession.\u201d<\/p>\n

Questions aren\u2019t part of the traditional ABC-book pedagogy since, usually, children come to an alphabet book to learn how to read. But Kincaid introduces some interrogations. In \u201cS Is for Solanaceae,\u201d about nightshades that originated in South America yet have become indelibly implanted into European cuisine, Kincaid asks: \u201cWhat is contemporary Irish history without the presence of the potato? What is Italian cuisine without the tomato?\u201d<\/p>\n

Reading An<\/em> Encyclopedia <\/em>feels like the literary equivalent of the internet admonishment \u201ctouch grass\u201d: go outside, get off your screen, have a<\/p>\n

Sensory experience. Or even a synesthetic one:<\/p>\n

The toy behemoth Fisher-Price produced a wildly popular set of colored plastic magnetic toy letters in the late twentieth century: red A<\/em>, orange B<\/em>, etc. A study of grapheme-color synesthetes (people who map an individual printed letter with a consistent color) revealed that those who grew up with these letters had synesthetic alphabets that mapped onto the Fisher-Price colors.<\/p>\n

Use this book at your own risk, then: you might not learn how to garden, but you\u2019ll start asking yourself what is hidden in plain sight and noticing when the fruit that seems sweet reveals rot at the core and the roots go deeper than we could ever see from what they produce.<\/p>\n

Vivid watercolors and plainspoken language\u2014An Encyclopedia<\/em> is for children\u2014reinforce the book\u2019s core message:<\/p>\n

We celebrate the garden\u2019s abundance, but we must unearth where it comes from and what it\u2019s for.<\/p>\n

Xanthosoma, or dasheen, is the first and only place where Kincaid\u2019s \u201cI\u201d (\u201cknown to me, this author\u201d) steps into the book, breaking the encyclopedia\u2019s traditional fourth wall. She comes in as with a light aside.<\/p>\n

Yet in her first-person moment, she is also at her most serious. The cod traditionally served with dasheen, Kincaid writes, has been overfished to the point of environmental crisis. Flora and fauna are fragile and fleeting.<\/p>\n

Zen gardens promise to imitate the essence of nature and serve as meditative spaces, designed for human contemplation. An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children<\/em> promises ongoing profusion and chaos, using the arbitrary linguistic hierarchy to reveal the troubled and growing, profligate and rotting turbulence that the garden tries to subsume.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Adrienne Raphel is the author of\u00a0<\/em>Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can\u2019t Live Without Them, Our Dark Academia, and<\/em> What Was It For.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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