CHAPTER 55 Cultivating Discomfort
I open this final chapter, about cultivation, discomfort, and the cultivation
of discomfort, with an end that ushers us back toward a beginning. In the
final sentence of Jamaica Kincaid’s My Garden (Book) (1999), the Antiguan
writer provocatively concludes her garden reveries by asserting, “I am in
a state of constant discomfort and I like this state so much I would like to
share it” (1999, 229). What is it about Kincaid’s relation to her garden that
produces this unabashed discomfort? Indeed, what is so enjoyable for her
about discomfort, and how might we read and learn from her desire to
“share” it? Kincaid’s garden book—which explores her “attachment in adult
life to the garden” (3) through colonial histories, botany, consumerism,
mundane garden life, and exotic garden travels—is replete with sketches
of bodily and psychic discomfort. Unlike the more romantic genre of gar-
dening prose, Kincaid unearths her Vermont garden by contextualizing it
within histories of colonization and their attendant human and botanical
transplantations. In a similarly unromantic gesture, she also shares her own
masterful fantasies through her garden meditations. Her fantasies of vio-
lence thus comingle across the text with the histories of colonialism from
which she emerged as a subject.
In the earliest pages of My Garden (Book), Kincaid narrates a scene in
which she finds herself inexplicably digging up parts of her lawn into “the
most peculiar ungardenlike shapes,” until one day she realizes “that the
garden I was making (and am still making and will always be making) re-
sembled a map of the Caribbean and the sea that surrounds it” (1999, 7– 8).
For Kincaid, the garden is a repository of history, “an exercise in memory”
that draws her back to uncontainable pasts both personal and political (8).
Like those histories it elicits, the garden escapes and refuses the will of
the gardener who desires mastery over it. Through Kincaid’s discomfort,