cultIvAtIng dIscomfort 161posits a relation between gardening and conquest, for instance, she queries
whether we might cast the conqueror as a gardener and the one who works
the fields as the conquered (1999, 116). Doing so, she recalls the slave plan-
tation, putting it into discomforting relation with her own Vermont garden.
Embedded in Kincaid’s critique of colonial practices of mastery are the dis-
continuities and ambivalences of the postcolonial subject whose practices
in relation to her garden often rehearse and subvert colonial modes and
fantasies of mastery.
Recalling Halberstam’s (2011) utopic summons to inhabit and embrace
our failures, we can read Kincaid’s always failed attempts at mastering her
garden as a promise of stalling mastery. The vital ambivalence that she
stages across her garden prose—always shifting between being the con-
queror within her garden and being conquered (by colonists and by her
garden), by casting herself as both Subject and Object—gestures toward
Monique Allewaert’s argument about personhood and colonialism in the
American tropics. Allewaert contends that when we read across “artifacts”
of the American tropics, we witness the emergence of human subjectivities
that do not conform to the models of subjectivity made dominant through
Enlightenment thought. Reading artifacts from the American tropics, Alle-
waert illustrates “the emergence of a disaggregated conception of the body
that enables an understanding of the person that cannot be reduced to
either of these periodizations’ understandings of the human, nature, or
politics” (2013, 9). Kincaid’s vital ambivalence is attached but not reducible
to the Enlightenment conception of the human, and her garden writing
emphasizes a subject whose position in relation to the “natural” world re-
mains haunted by both the force of Enlightenment thought and those other
“conceptions” of subjectivity that it has repressed.
Wild Disruptions
In a fascinating discussion, Caribbean- born Vermont gardeners Kincaid
and Kathleen M. Balutansky express their apprehensions about “coloniz-
ing” their gardens as territories already inhabited by other species. Balu-
tansky explicitly links her gardening practice to the violent erasures and
dispossessions of colonization. To this concern, Kincaid replies that “people
with our history, when we give it some thought, we are very careful about
the issue of displacing others” (Balutansky and Kincaid 2002, 795). She pos-