In My Garden (Book) (1999), her collection of writings about the garden, the Antiguan American writer Jamaica Kincaid documents her attempts to create a garden in her adopted New England environment. First, she scatters packets of seeds across shady, unprepared soil, but nothing grows. Later, she tears up a lawn to form flower beds in “the most peculiar ungardenlike shapes.”Footnote 1 She plants these with vegetables and flowers even as the previous gardener’s peonies and daylilies continue popping up like traces of a forgotten past.Footnote 2 “I could see that [the garden beds] were odd,” she writes. Only much later did it “[dawn] on me that the garden I was making (and am still making and will always be making) resembled a map of the Caribbean and the sea that surrounded it”—the garden as an archipelago.Footnote 3
Kincaid’s early horticultural experiments reference the archipelagic geography of the Caribbean and appear to reenact the practices of terraforming, sowing seed, and transplantation that spread European empire in the Caribbean and elsewhere by means of botanical gardens and the plantation system. By provocatively replicating these practices as a diasporic Caribbean gardener living in the American Northeast and writing about them in an English-language book, Kincaid, herself a transplant, generates a larger series of questions about the postcolonial inheritance of imperial forms, practices, and materials. “What is the relationship between gardening and conquest?” she asks.Footnote 4 By extension, how does one garden, and write, as a postcolonial subject with an awareness of how imperial violences have shaped the present conditions, materials, and possibilities of creative production?
For Kincaid, as for other Black female gardeners in the Americas such as Alice Walker, gardening and writing are two forms of creativity that have been historically suppressed by racial capitalism, its expressions in colonialism and enslavement, and its gendered enforcement. In her classic essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” (1974), Walker identifies gardening as a strategy for how “the creativity of black women [was] kept alive, year after year and century after century, when for most of the years black people have been in [the Americas], it was a punishable crime for a black person to read or write.”Footnote 5 In their discussions of gardening and writing, both Kincaid and Walker look toward the African continent as a source of creative inspiration, implying the existence of real or imagined practices that predate racial capitalism’s erasures and offer important, even liberatory, models for botanical and literary production. Kincaid refers to Tsitsi Dangaremba’s novel Nervous Conditions (1988), where flowers are grown “just for the sheer joy of it,” while Walker imagines African huts where Phillis Wheatley’s imagined mother figure tends vegetable plots.Footnote 6
Yet, outside of these imagined literary images, neither Kincaid nor Walker engage in a sustained way with African writers or writing. Despite a significant archive of African writers whose work represents gardens and cultivation—including Nervous Conditions; agricultural novels by Grace Ogot and Bessie Head; the novels and garden letters of Yvonne Vera, and Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise (1994)—this horticultural blind spot extends to literary scholarship of African literature, which rarely addresses the garden beyond its status as a literary motif.Footnote 7 Yet, as this essay will show, the garden is a critical geographic space, physical environment, and theoretical category within African literature. African writers use the garden to stage and work through challenges of imperial inheritance and creative production that Kincaid also articulates. For African writers, gardens do not exist in a prelapsarian or precapitalist state. In their imbrication within circulations of trade, capital, and religion, and the often-unfree movement of sailors, gardeners, farmers, commodity goods, and botanical specimens within them, African gardens have much to teach about transoceanic connectivities, processes of creolization, and both human and nonhuman diasporic collectivities.
This essay focuses on the role of the garden in the Kenyan writer Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s 2019 novel The Dragonfly Sea. Owuor’s novel was written two decades after Kincaid’s My Garden (Book) and, therefore, could not have been referenced by Kincaid at the time. But the two texts are notable for their shared investment in Black women’s creativity and self-expression within transoceanic imperial histories and the garden as an exemplary site of inheritance and creative practice. The Dragonfly Sea’s primary setting is Pate Island off the coast of Kenya, part of the Lamu archipelago in the western Indian Ocean. Its plot follows the coming of age of a young female protagonist, Ayaana, who upon learning of her Chinese heritage, the result of the Chinese empire’s maritime exploration in the fifteenth century, embarks on a series of travels across the Indian Ocean, including to China and Turkey, before returning home to Pate. The site of her departure and return is her mother’s garden, an organic assemblage of native and transplanted herbs and flowers from around the Indian Ocean world that overtakes the grounds of an old cemetery. Thus far, literary scholarship on The Dragonfly Sea has focused on the novel’s engagement with oceanic aesthetics and epistemologies specific to the Swahili coast.Footnote 8 The garden, despite bookending the novel’s oceanic journey narrative and playing a central role in its protagonist’s material survival and subject formation, has yet to receive critical attention.
The garden in The Dragonfly Sea is an African garden creolized by the African, European, Arab, and Asian presences swirled through the Indian Ocean world.Footnote 9 While the essay focuses on The Dragonfly Sea, I also weave in discussion of the garden in Paradise, Gurnah’s novel set on the Swahili coast, which helps establish a tradition of gardens in African literature and serves as a useful counterpoint to the formative impact of creolization and the importance of gender in Owuor’s garden. My reading of The Dragonfly Sea and Paradise departs from Kincaid and Walker’s figuration of imagined African gardens, which look “back to Africa” and express a desire to establish connections between the practices of diasporic Africans in the Caribbean and continental Americas, and African collectivities on the continent. As Isabel Hofmeyr points out, this Atlantic-dominant framework has become “normative” within African diaspora studies and as Kincaid and Walker’s own imaginings illustrate, it can rely more on romanticized imaginings than on substantive African realities.Footnote 10
Édouard Glissant similarly cautioned Caribbean diasporic communities forcibly displaced and reconfigured by imperial violence against a search for African origins, which he deemed the false promise of root identity.Footnote 11 As an alternative to what he called the attraction of the continental and linear (i.e., colonial and imperial) narratives of history, Glissant formulated the notion of the archipelagic, an analytical framework and method of relation generated in response to imperial rupture and the fragmentation of cultures, languages, and epistemes it caused. Glissant’s archipelagic framework provided a structure that highlighted the commonalities between similarly fragmented subaltern cultures while also maintaining their divergences and disjunctures.Footnote 12 While developed to describe how communities forced into close proximity in the Caribbean creatively processed experiences of cultural fragmentation, archipelagic thinking was in Glissant’s view relevant to any human and nonhuman configuration shaped by imperialism and colonialism, and it is increasingly taken up in contemporary scholarship to conceptualize forms of relation, anti-imperial solidarity, and creative memory practices across the formerly colonized world, including the Indian Ocean.Footnote 13
Archipelagic thinking invites critics to “extend our axes of investigation” and puts Caribbean and Indian Ocean forms of gardening in conversation on a level comparative field, not one imbalanced by the search for origins or derivatives.Footnote 14 The fact that Kincaid constructs her garden as Caribbean archipelago and Owuor depicts a garden within the Lamu archipelago is emblematic of the commonalities and disjunctures that characterize archipelagic thinking across Afro-descendant collectivities. An archipelagic framework does not collapse these two forms of gardening into sameness, but rather supplies a structure for maintaining and exploring site- and history-specific iterations. Reading archipelagically invites recognition of the creole gardens produced by Black women creatives as a literary and cultural form shared across transoceanic contexts.
In the following sections, I provide an overview of the imperial history of botanical gardens and creolized relations with a focus on the Indian Ocean world. I then analyze the garden in The Dragonfly Sea as an example of an Indian Ocean creole garden, drawing on the novel’s thematization of inheritance, the rose as a metonym for Sufi Islam, and the use of flowery descriptive language. In this section, I briefly compare the garden in The Dragonfly Sea to the one in Gurnah’s Paradise. The second part of my analysis focuses on formal literary techniques that create Owuor’s novel as a garden cultivated by South–South creative flows and strategic opacity, before concluding with a short discussion of the garden as a site of return.
1. The garden as imperial tool and resistance method
Beginning in the seventeenth century, botanical gardens played a significant role in European imperial expansion, both culturally in the cooptation of metaphors about planting and sowing (activities that create colonies) and materially by producing and maintaining colonial power through the forced migration of plants and people (diaspora). The first European garden outside Europe was founded in Cape Town in 1652 under the supervision of the Dutch East India Company; by 1900, the Cape gardens were the fulcrum of a transoceanic empire of extractive botany and forced labor, with 100 botanical gardens spread across the British, French, Dutch, and German colonial territories in the Caribbean (Saint Vincent, Jamaica, Saint Domingue, Cayenne, and Martinique) and on both sides of the Indian Ocean (Ceylon, Burma, Penang, Java, Singapore, Calcutta, and Mauritius).Footnote 15 Whatever their location, colonial gardens were typically constructed in the parterre style: a level, segmented, and manicured design that required significant alterations to the surrounding environment and deliberately set off the gardens from the (often tropical) jungle topography and foliage around them.Footnote 16 These landscaping practices conveyed mastery and control over nature, provided almost interchangeable “spaces of sociability” for homesick colonialists, and facilitated the extraction, organization, and classification of local botanical specimens and knowledge.Footnote 17
Colonial botanical gardens were precursors to the plantation economy. Acclimatization carried out in garden nurseries incubated both the plant material necessary for plantations and the relationships of dehumanization and domination that crystallized within them. For instance, Le Jardin des Pamplemousses on Mauritius, the western Indian Ocean island some 1700 miles east from Pate, was an important hub for botanical transplantation and acclimatization. Taking its name from the grapefruit citrus initially imported from Java by the Dutch, Le Jardin des Pamplemousses was acquired by the French colonial administrator Bertrand-François Mahé de La Bourdonnais in 1736.Footnote 18 La Bourdonnais used enslaved labor to cultivate a household vegetable plot.Footnote 19 Thirty years later, the botanist Pierre Poivre bought the “vulgar vegetable garden” and turned it into a hub of pilfered botanical material, including spices such as nutmeg and cloves smuggled out of the Dutch-controlled Maluku Islands, as well as tallow and camphor trees, Camellia flowers, jujubes, and various citrus and fruit trees from China, Japan, and other parts of Asia.Footnote 20 Similarly, gardens in Singapore, Jamaica, and Haiti acclimatized cash crops such as cocoa, coffee, cotton, tea, and tobacco from one colony and hemisphere to another, often without regard for invasive species. This work was carried out in garden nurseries by enslaved or indentured laborers who produced seedlings on plantation-level scales. Under Poivre, Pamplemousses achieved “international fame as the tropical base of [colonial] experiment” and produced cultivars that “seeded” clove plantations in Mauritius, the Île de Bourbon (Réunion), Seychelles, and Zanzibar, worked by forced labor “transplanted” from Madagascar, east Africa, and the Indian subcontinent.Footnote 21
The plantation system forced previously unprecedented forms of proximity and interaction among plants and people from around the globe, resulting in adaptative strategies that Caribbean theorists Stuart Hall, Kamau Braithwaite, and Glissant have termed creolization. Despite its broad contemporary usage, “creole” was initially employed as a term that denoted colonial acclimatization: the first “creoles” were white Europeans who either were born in the colonies or had lived there long enough to acquire “native” characteristics.Footnote 22 According to Hall, “creole” was also adopted as an assessment of Black slaves; eighteenth-century plantation documents “marked the distinction between ‘Africans’ and ‘creoles,’” with the latter term referring to slaves “well ‘seasoned’ to local conditions [and] acclimatized to the harsh circumstances and rituals of plantation life.”Footnote 23 In contemporary usage, creole and creolization refer to strategies of “cultural and linguistic mixing” developed by communities forced to acclimatize inherited values and customs to new and completely different environments as a result of involuntary proximity and cohabitation.Footnote 24 While Glissant later expands creolization to a global phenomenon (the chaos-monde), he maintains that strategies of “transculturation” never occur naturally and are instead the direct product of entanglement, by which he means the tensions and struggles of European imperialism and colonization.Footnote 25 Speaking specifically to the Caribbean context, Hall identifies three inputs—the présence africaine, présence européene, and présence américaine—that mix and fuse in unique configurations in each colonial setting to produce creolized “third spaces” and the creative and literary projects that emerge from them.Footnote 26
In their search for models for Black women’s creativity within the plantation and its afterlives, both Kincaid and Walker look to the third space of the Caribbean creole garden. Also known as the slave garden or jardin de case, creole gardens were provision grounds allocated to people enslaved on plantations to grow food.Footnote 27 One of the few forms of property that enslaved persons could pass on to descendants or others after death, the slave garden was a colonial technology that promoted the illusion of autonomy—or even, in some visual representations, “health, ease, and abundance”—while simultaneously rooting the enslaved person in place.Footnote 28 Yet, in their remixing of European, African, and local plants and practices, gardens could also function as creolized third spaces, which were key sites and symbols of resistance for oppressed communities. In contrast to European parterre gardens, Caribbean creole gardens were often closely integrated with their natural surroundings. Using African and indigenous American techniques, creole gardens were interplanted with food crops, medicinal plants, and flowers to provide shade, pollination, and root support.Footnote 29 This unruly aesthetic, where disorder was not chaos but a challenge to what those in power deemed normative, contrasted with European ideals of order and beauty.
Glissant praises the creole garden in conversation with Manthia Diawara, drawing attention to its rhizomatic nature: “plants mutually protect each other; this is the logic of the rhizome [where] roots intertwine, mix, and help each other.”Footnote 30 Likewise, creole gardens also extended protection to their human tenders, supplying nutrition, medicine, and beauty while strategically protecting botanical knowledge and methods of resistance and subversion. In “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” Walker draws a line from imagined gardens cultivated by African women, to gardens planted by enslaved women on plantations, and her mother’s “ambitious” and overflowing flower garden on rented property, arguing that the garden reconfigures the very “ground” of the plantation system into a site for developing, practicing, and preserving “everyday aesthetic practices of resistance.”Footnote 31
The creole garden is a recognizable cultural formation in the Atlantic and Caribbean but has received far less attention in the Indian Ocean world, reflecting larger trends in the critical study of creolization.Footnote 32 Penda Choppy hypothesizes that the region’s relative marginalization may be due to its relatively late history of European settlement, its production of fewer literary texts, and the dominance of the French creole islands (Seychelles, Réunion, and Mauritius).Footnote 33 These factors are exacerbated by academic discourse’s preference for “Eurocentric forms and methods,” which the Indian Ocean world often renders peripheral.Footnote 34 In Gurnah’s literary description, the region spans from “our stretch of coast [the Swahili Coast and Madagascar], the Horn of Africa, then [to] the Red Sea coast to Suez, the Arabian peninsula, the Persian Gulf, India, the Malay Peninsula and then all the way to China.”Footnote 35 The Indian Ocean “world” was created by the cyclical and environmental influence of the monsoon system, which in the boreal summer blows south-west, then reverses in the winter, facilitating “a sophisticated, regular system of long-distance exchange of commodities, people, ideas, and technologies.”Footnote 36 In Françoise Vergès’s terms, the ocean was “the subterranean ground of creolization,” home to “layer upon layer of significations” between the African, Asian, and Arab communities who lived along its shores and crossed its waters.Footnote 37 These included not only the established diasporas of Hadramis in East Africa, Gujaratis in Southeast Asia, and Chinese in both, but also subaltern subjects who moved within systems of unfree labor such as slavery, indenture, pawnship, and debt bondage.Footnote 38 Unlike practices of enslavement in the Atlantic, where the boundary between enslaved and free was marked by race, race and slavery were not unequivocally linked in the Indian Ocean world, nor was slavery heritable.Footnote 39 Yet the “majority of those enslaved and trafficked [in the Indian Ocean] were women and children,” and writers like Gurnah and Owuor draw particular attention to the ways that Indian Ocean networks of patronage, religion, and economy exploited the most vulnerable.Footnote 40
European arrival in the Indian Ocean in the late fifteenth century accelerated the region’s integration into the capitalist world system, especially through the settlement and transformation of islands like Mauritius and Réunion into plantation societies. Yet Indian Ocean scholars such as Vergès maintain that European presence did not “destroy the Indian Ocean world” and its preexisting routes of exchange and relation.Footnote 41 Engseng Ho’s distinction between colonialism and imperialism is also useful: while the Indian Ocean world did not experience the “foreign presence in, possession of, and domination over bounded, local places” (colonialism) to the same extent as the Caribbean and Americas, it certainly was subject to European “foreign domination, without the necessity of presence or possession, over expansive, transnational spaces” (imperialism).Footnote 42 The proliferation of botanical gardens in the Indian Ocean and the movement of plants and people to fill them are direct results of these imperial encounters.
Building on the abundance of cultural and linguistic mixing within the Indian Ocean world that predates and extends beyond the period of European colonialization, Choppy adapts Hall’s terminology for the Indian Ocean. She introduces the notion of the présence orientale to refer to Arab and Asian présences, which parallel the présence americiaine in the Caribbean and denote the native or indigenous ground of Indian Ocean creolization.Footnote 43 While Choppy uses the présence orientale to refer to the entire Indian Ocean world, in the following section, I tease out distinct Arab, Persian, and Chinese vectors of the présence orientale in Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea. By illuminating “layer upon layer of significations” within Indian Ocean creolizations and their archipelagic relation to Caribbean counterparts, my reading expands the creative expressions Indian Ocean creolization can take, focalizing critical attention on the garden and the novel.
2. The creole garden in The Dragonfly Sea
The Dragonfly Sea is Kenyan writer Owuor’s second novel and a contemporary coming-of-age narrative that adopts the structure of an oceanic journey of departure and return. Its primary setting is Pate island in the Lamu archipelago off the coast of Kenya, home to over 11 centuries of syncretism between east Africans, the Omani sultanate, and travelers from across the Indian Ocean world.Footnote 44 In the author’s note, Owuor explains that The Dragonfly Sea was inspired by specific events in Pate’s history, including the seven voyages of Chinese admiral Zheng He between 1405 and 1433, in which he explored the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the East African coastline. On Zheng He’s fifth voyage, two of his ships sank during a “storm-wrought shipwreck” in the Lamu archipelago; while many of the sailors died, legend has it that “about 20 men succeeded in reaching shore [where] they then converted to Islam, married local women, and lived among the Swahili.”Footnote 45 Heritage experts confirmed this accidental diaspora using DNA tests in 2002 when they identified six Pate residents, “an aging woman…her three daughters and two sons” with “Chinese ancestors.”Footnote 46 In 2005, Mwamaka Sharifu, one of the daughters, was awarded a scholarship to study in China because of her ancestry.
Owuor’s author’s note clarifies that The Dragonfly Sea is “not this young woman’s story,” yet the novel uses the historical incident as inspiration for its protagonist, Ayaana, who similarly discovers her Chinese ancestry and embarks on a journey across the sea, from Pate to the coastal city of Xiamen for university, then to Turkey, before returning to Pate.Footnote 47 Through her Chinese heritage, Ayaana literally embodies the présence orientale, and the novel thematizes a form of Indian Ocean inheritance shaped by historical and communal processes of creolization. The coordinates of her journey also represent the novel’s emphasis on South–South trajectories and Indian Ocean relations, evident in references to the Bandung Conference of Asian and African leaders in 1955 and the resulting Non-Aligned Movement, as well as China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a large contemporary infrastructure project intended to promote commercial growth between China, Southeast and South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.Footnote 48 While many African novels follow their protagonists on journeys from the continent to Europe or America (and sometimes home again), Ayaana crafts a specifically Indian Ocean trajectory from Africa to various Asian locations back to Africa while completely circumventing Europe.
The specific geography of Ayaana’s departure and return is her mother Munira’s garden. Located “near the tombs” on the island, the garden is grounded in and nourishes itself with the skeletons and bones of past ancestors, including African islanders and mainlanders and the Chinese sailors whose ancestry Ayaana shares.Footnote 49 An aesthetic and embodied sign of the présence africaine and présence orientale within Ayaana’s and the island’s creole history, the garden’s location also signifies Munira’s status as a social outcast. The daughter of a patrician trading family integrated into Indian Ocean trade networks for centuries, Munira ran away to mainland Kenya, became pregnant, and returned with a child; after an attempted suicide, she is cast out of the family, who relocate to Zanzibar. “Broken off” from the inherited “secret spaces” of wealth and power, Munira quickly joins the ranks of the vulnerable.Footnote 50 She has no family name and is instead called “kidonda,” the Kiswahili word for wound, while her daughter’s only inheritance is an insult—“mwana kidonda” (child of the wound).Footnote 51 Seeking a provision ground for herself and her daughter, Munira appropriates the public space of the cemetery and transforms it into a medicinal and flower garden, where she grows a range of plants to harvest, process, and sell in perfumes and tinctures. Reflecting gendered associations of the garden, Pate residents, especially men, acknowledge that the garden is “alluring” while also questioning “what sort of person cultivates plants near a grave.”Footnote 52
At first glance, Munira’s pathway into gardening does not seem to align with the lineage of female gardeners in other creolized contexts, such as Kincaid and Walker’s. She is neither enslaved herself nor the descendant of enslaved people; neither does her personal history of departure and return conform to the romantic imaginary of the native African gardener. Instead, Munira is a creole gardener who expands the forms of forced human migration associated with the metaphor of transplantation. Munira’s initial departure from Pate cuts her off from the family root structure and when she returns, she must reacclimatize herself without social support. Moreover, she must find ways to provide for her daughter, who has materially inherited the weight of centuries of oceanic history.
Munira develops creolized modes of reacclimatization and support through gardening. As Kincaid’s early gardening suggests, the act and the metaphor of botanical transplantation may involve violent modes of uprooting and dislocation. Conversely, the descriptions of Munira’s gardening in The Dragonfly Sea reference and expand the associations of transplantation, again through the inclusion of specific Indian Ocean présences. The novel describes Munira’s cultivation of transplanted sprigs, slips, and seedlings on the bone-saturated soil of the island’s cemetery:
You are in the garden you created to perfume faith, hope, and a beauty you imagined would restore life… You carried livestock manure from Mombasa to feed this soil. You massaged the dung in, centimeter by centimeter. You smuggled in dirt from fertile places in paper bags. You have borrowed, begged, and stolen herb, flower, shrub, tree seedlings for this garden. You learned about the character of plants, how human they were… You found the ones that purged the salt that would have burned roots. And the earth yielded to you. It helped you raise your daughter.Footnote 53
This passage notably uses second-person narration to address Munira as “you,” the gardener-creative, a device I will return to later. Here the emphasis is on how Munira creates a creole garden that both resonates with the models Kincaid and Walker identify in the Caribbean and is identifiably Indian Ocean in nature. On the one hand, Munira connects with the practices of Black gardeners in other archipelagic contexts by acclimating herself through the reclamation of public space and the transformation of the cemetery into a provision ground. To this ground, which literally holds the embodied entanglement of oceanic history, she adds a variety of organic material—manure from mainland Kenya, stolen soil, and a variety of herbs and flowers. On the other hand, her botanical material, including clove and cumin, lavender and rosemary, neem, eucalyptus, mint, moonflower, and her signature wild roses, is sourced from around the Indian Ocean world. Many Indian Ocean readers would associate the presence of roses in the garden with Islam, particularly Sufi mysticism and the Islamic paradise gardens originating in ancient Persia. The ancient Persian term for the walled or enclosed garden is pairidaeza, the root of the English word “paradise,” and Munira’s garden is indeed walled, if crumbling and open to all manner of human and botanical transplants.Footnote 54
The pairidaeza (paradise) garden inspired not only The Dragonfly Sea but also an earlier Indian Ocean novel, Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah. Paradise is an historical novel set in east Africa in the years between the Berlin Conference and the First World War and features perhaps the most well-known representation of a garden in African literature, a courtyard garden at the center of a traditional Islamic house on the mainland of the Swahili coast. Like The Dragonfly Sea, its coming-of-age narrative both adopts and alters the formal conventions of the Bildungsroman, but its cast of characters is almost entirely male as opposed to the evenly balanced cast and female protagonist of Owuor’s novel. The protagonist Yusuf’s story closely mirrors the Surat Yusuf in the Qur’an, in which a young man is seduced by an older woman, blamed for the seduction, and cast out of the household and into slavery. Yet in the novel’s rendition, the sexual aspects of seduction are secondary to Yusuf’s desires for family relations, home, and belonging—for inheritance and rootedness. The scene of Yusuf’s seduction is the garden in his uncle’s home, which synthesizes the signifiers of the Islamic paradise garden and the biblical garden of Eden, divided into four quadrants separated by water channels and planted with exotic fruit trees. Paradise develops the flowering and ordered abundance of the garden only to reveal its emptiness and tactics of enclosure. After a caravan trip into the African interior, which dispels European imaginaries of Africa as a land of plenty and initiates the boy into various forms of African masculinity, Yusuf returns to the garden and his uncle’s accusations of betrayal. He is cast out of the garden without kinship ties into a dangerous world where European colonialism in east Africa looms on the horizon.
Both Paradise and The Dragonfly Sea use the significant geography of the garden to emphasize the important influence of Islam in the cultural matrix of the Indian Ocean world. While the garden in Gurnah’s novel reflects a relatively negative view of the predatory tendencies within Islam, the symbolism of the rose in Munira’s garden in The Dragonfly Sea serves as a counterbalance. Within the novel’s botanical imaginary, Sufism and its roses cross the ocean and are transplanted to Pate, where they connect the island rhizomatically to Mughal, Ottoman, and Persian gardens around the Islamic Indian Ocean world. That Munira’s roses are “transplanted” subtly comments on the history of Islam on Pate and redirects attention from Islam’s masculinist tendencies toward its lesser-known and more mystical expressions of divine love and beauty.Footnote 55 Roses also inform Munira’s localized aesthetic sensibilities and connect her creative beauty and perfumery practices to the larger network of Islamic beauty cultures in the Indian Ocean. Muhidin, Ayaana’s grandfather figure, explains that “the rose was a prophetess among flowers…sent to seduce humanity’s heart for God.”Footnote 56 As Rosabelle Boswell notes, scent and perfume are important means of inscribing the body for social and religious purposes for women on the Swahili coast.Footnote 57 Through Munira’s production of “costly elixirs” of marashi mawaradi (rose-hip-scented water) and halwaridi (rose attar) which “cover women in beauty,” the novel reframes the garden’s association with seduction from a negative (as in Paradise) to a positive source of creative potential.Footnote 58 Despite her outcast status, Munira’s skill with plants and perfumes provides her with a valuable creative and communal role that helps her navigate the island’s social relations.
Thus the garden, and roses in particular, are a cipher for Munira’s botanical knowledge and creative expression. In her master’s thesis that excerpts the novel, Owuor explains that her fictional project was motivated in part by “scholarly and official narratives of the Indian Ocean [that] have only rarely considered the Swahili ocean imaginary, particularly as a local way of knowing and mapping the ocean rooted in those with the most intimate proximity to it.”Footnote 59 While Owuor’s comment focuses on oceanic and maritime knowledges, The Dragonfly Sea also represents glimpses of “embodied and experiential knowledges” of botany, plant life, and beauty practices specific to the Indian Ocean world.Footnote 60 Munira clearly possesses these forms of knowledge, as evident in this description of harvesting, infusion, and distillation:
You…crouched where threshold wild roses grow, to pick petals before the morning dew… In your kitchen, you washed the rose petals in soft water and wept unutterable prayers… Few knew how you first stroked the aura of the heart of rose to beg forgiveness for needing to shred its life… Soon you would blend your oils—olive, coconut, grape seed—in the proportions that deepened their being. You had to bruise the rose petals. You did so with regret as you dropped them into the blended oils in dark-brown jars, which you carried to your rooftop wrapped in heated cloth. These would sit in clay pots that you would replenish with hot water. You would place these along shelves…next to the pile of oudhi-making wood parings, where jasmine, lemongrass, and orange blossoms also bled in the distilled water beneath the Pate sun, under the Pate moon, fringed by the Pate sea.Footnote 61
Munira’s gardening relies on knowledge of locally available plants and herbs and the full range of the senses—“sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell [and the] more abstract ‘senses’…linked to intuition” and memory.Footnote 62 Harry Garuba notes that such intuitive and embodied forms of knowledge in the postcolonial world are often dismissed, disdained, or actively erased within knowledge hierarchies that privilege what can be seen and measured; conversely, Owour’s novel foregrounds them.Footnote 63
Munira’s gardening practice in The Dragonfly Sea synthesizes continental African, Indian Ocean, and European materialities and practices and enacts relationships of human-plant interdependence. In addition to the African soil and fertilizer and the many Indian Ocean plants, Munira appropriates the tactics of smuggling and stealing associated with the history of European colonial botanical gardens but does not relate to nature as disposable. Eschewing notions of plants as inanimate property, Munira recognizes the aliveness of the beings she borrows, steals, and relocates. Acknowledging “how human they [are],” Munira relates to the botanical world with reciprocity, mutuality, and care, and cultivates an environment of shared protection and interdependence between human and nonhuman life akin to Glissant’s rhizomatic creole garden. Moreover, the production goals of Munira’s garden are not extractive and profit driven. She does not over-harvest but gathers only as much as she needs and even mourns the loss and death she knowingly creates. The garden provides sustenance and protection for her and her daughter, while its rhizomatic relations extend from the manure, to the plants that cleanse the soil, to herself and Ayaana, all of whose new roots in the cemetery “intertwine, mix, and help each other.”
The two extended descriptions of Munira’s gardening and processing quoted above exemplify what Siwei Wang in her aqueous reading of The Dragonfly Sea calls the novel’s “flowery vocabularies” and “florid, torturous, sometimes ungrammatical” English.Footnote 64 While Wang uses descriptors like “flowery” and “florid” to describe the novel’s stylized language, none of the textual examples reference the garden, and the analysis focuses instead on the novel’s oceanic and maritime elements.Footnote 65 Yet following where such metaphorically “flowery” and florid” language leads within the novel inevitably leads to the garden. The novel’s embellished language is not only stylistically evocative of the natural world, but also intentionally slows down and “exhausts” readers familiar with the stripped-down lingua franca of global capitalism, which produces texts that can be quickly scanned for valuable content to be extracted and commodified.Footnote 66 In contrast, flowery language creates a text that is a labor to read and invites readers to expend sensorial and imaginative effort, akin to Munira’s gardening methods, in the reading process.
The Dragonfly Sea’s floral style also enacts a critical creative opacity, what Glissant describes as a resistance to transparency and capture within dominant knowledge systems. The novel’s slow, repetitive layering of literary language evokes the pace of gardening, infusion, and distillation work “which cannot be reduced” to the quick, acquisitive tempo with which European imperialism historically gathered and processed its raw materials.Footnote 67 The novel provides glimpses of embodied and somewhat torturous labor, as well as specific methods and practices likely passed down to Munira from other female beauty practitioners, using thickly layered language and circuitously constructed sentences. By simultaneously revealing and concealing the details of localized botanical knowledge and practice through “flowery” language, it resists a transparent representation of Munira’s embodied and experiential wisdom and controls the reader’s ability to capture, commodify, extract, or erase it. Thus, The Dragonfly Sea’s stylized language is hardly metaphorical but generated from the material and epistemological grounds of the creole garden, precisely in order to protect the forms of localized and gendered knowledge that make such a garden possible.
3. Garden as book, book as garden
In My Garden (Book), Kincaid highlights similarities between the form of the garden and the form of the book. By placing “Book” in parentheses in the title, Kincaid draws attention to the text as a physical object, one that like the enclosed pairidaeza can be defined as much by its boundaries as by what challenges, exceeds, or expands them. When Kincaid questions how to relate to the garden as a spatial form and to gardening as a practice given their imperial histories, she also questions how to relate to the literary form of the English-language book with its history as a colonial education tool and to the practice of writing in English, the language of global empire and capital.Footnote 68
Through its representation of creole gardening, The Dragonfly Sea is invested in similar questions about creative production within the context of inherited transoceanic histories. This metatextual interest is most notable in the novel’s use of the second person “you.” The majority of The Dragonfly Sea is narrated by a third-person omniscient narrator outside the action, with occasional indirect focalization of Ayaana’s point of view. There are only two instances of second-person narration in the novel, both in scenes depicting the garden. Literary analysis of second-person narration distinguishes between the “narratee,” the person who is addressed as “you” by the narrator, and the “narrative audience,” the imaginary audience to whom the narrator tells the story.Footnote 69 Rhetorical “apostrophe” structures how second-person narratives are simultaneously directed toward two addressees: a direct recipient (the “you” within the text) and a secondary listener or “witness” (the reader).Footnote 70 While second-person narration sometimes invites the reader to guess the narratee’s identity, the narratee within The Dragonfly Sea’s garden passages is clearly Munira. The narrator speaks directly to Munira about her gardening methods and techniques, making visible a form of women’s labor that is often erased or taken for granted and elevating it from a rote or menial task to a form of creative production. In addition, second-person narration also creates an experience of “multiple positionings” in relation to the novel.Footnote 71 When the narrator speaks to Munira, the narrator becomes someone inside the story. Second-person narration also reconfigures the reader’s relation to the text, creating an awareness that they are not the text’s only audience and developing a sense of the reader as a listener who is overhearing or witnessing what is being said.
Combined with second-person narration, The Dragonfly Sea deploys a vast range of paratextual and textual literary techniques—chapter and section breaks, epigraphs, onomatopoeia, multilingualism, multigeneric intertextuality, and artistic endpapers—that impact the reading experience. While most critics attribute the proliferation of literary devices to the novel’s “aqueous form,” they might also be imagined as a bouquet.Footnote 72 More importantly, Owuor’s novel’s intense concentration of literary techniques signals its self-awareness as a commodity object within a global system of literary circulation. Like the garden, the novel genre can function as a cultural technology of knowledge capture which is, for Edward Said, “unthinkable” outside of the cultural and material history of European imperialism.Footnote 73 Early English-language novels like Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), inspired by early European expeditions to the New World, played a key role in the production of colonial fantasies of exotic prelapsarian nature, human subalterns, and the ease and morality of resource extraction. Just as damaging as imperialism’s material violence was what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o called the “psychological violence” of colonial language and education. During twentieth-century British colonial rule in Ngũgĩ and Owuor’s Kenya, home to over 60 indigenous languages, “English became…the language” of culture and creative expression.Footnote 74 Students educated within the British colonial system were more likely to know the landmarks of the colonial metropole than “a single street of their own capital, let alone the major rivers of their country.”Footnote 75
The Dragonfly Sea directly addresses the legacy of the Anglophone novel in Kenya by developing a creolized literary aesthetic that takes its inspiration and form from Munira’s creole garden. Just as the garden is interplanted with plants from around the Indian Ocean world, so the novel incorporates a variety of languages from the Asian and African continents and islands into its English, including Kipate, Kiswahili, Arabic, Turkish, and Mandarin. Words in non-English languages are used without Latinization or translation, as in this list of garden plants: “anise, basil, chamomile; kisibiti, kalpasi, kurundu; pilipili manga, pilipili hoho; tangawizi, cafarani, nanaa; langilangi, lavani, kiluwa, karafuu.”Footnote 76 The Dragonfly Sea is also densely interwoven (interplanted) with literary references to African, Arabic, Asian, and Latin American creatives, from poetry by Sufi female mystic Rabia al-Adawiyya and the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore to Bollywood and Chinese sci-fi. Its many sections are prefaced by Kiswahili proverbs or quotations from Kiswahili and Mandarin and, in one instance, the Brazilian Portuguese poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade. With Andrade’s intertext, the novel cleverly folds expressions of South–South solidarity from the Atlantic world in to what Ananya Jahanara Kabir calls “transoceanic creolization,” or “the dynamic swirl of creolised cultural fragments,” from one regional gyre like the Atlantic to another in the Indian Ocean.Footnote 77
The Dragonfly Sea is overt about its creative inspiration which, like Munira’s garden, borrows, steals, and plants a vast archive of transoceanic literary and linguistic présences to creolize the novel. Clearly, there is not only a garden in the novel, but the novel is also a garden. The novel’s multiplicity of languages and dialects, its seeds of cultural wisdom and slips of poetry, dispel the notion that English is the single language of Kenya, of African or Indian Ocean literature, or of the global novel. Rather, transplanting this vibrant polyphony transforms the skeleton-laden ground of the novel genre and dissolves the notion of a self-contained and self-sufficient individualized narrative. In its place is a vision of the novel as a set of linguistic, textual, historical, material, human and nonhuman relations—the novel as creole garden.
The novel’s unruly and swirling collection of languages and intertexts means that few readers, even Indian Ocean ones, will be able to comprehend all the references interwoven within it. Readers of non-English languages such as Kiswahili, Arabic, Mandarin, or Turkish may at times feel directly addressed by the text as a narratee, just like Munira is addressed in the second-person garden passages. The novel’s use of apostrophe evokes a vast imagined community of readers across the Indian Ocean and around the world. At other times, when The Dragonfly Sea uses a language the reader does not know, they may become aware of the multiple positionings within the text and their own status as a listener and witness to a conversation taking place regardless of their ability to access it. Since almost all readers will experience this inaccessibility at some point, the novel is an invitation to accept that certain forms of connection, knowledge, and solidarity will remain opaque and to embrace partial comprehension and unknowing. Just as the garden’s “flowery” literary descriptions work to reveal and conceal its forms of localized knowledge and creative abundance, so the novel’s second-person narration, multilingualism, and intertexts are complementary techniques that both celebrate and protect its forms of solidarity and creative expression.
II conclude, as The Dragonfly Sea does, with the garden as a site of return. In Gurnah’s Paradise, the Islamic garden on the African coast is a site of impossible return emptied of meaning and significance. In contrast, the creole garden of Owuor’s novel creates the conditions for a more positive experience of return. Syncretically composed of a number of African, Arab, Asian, and European présences, Munira’s creole garden appropriates the grounds of oceanic history and constructs mutually supportive rhizomatic networks of human–plant relation. Within the Indian Ocean creole garden, what has been inherited from many different trajectories and histories can be re-acclimated and transformed into practices of care and creativity.
When an adult Ayaana returns to Pate after her education in China, she reunites with her mother in the cemetery garden. The garden is not the same as when she left, but neither is it materially or metaphorically empty. Munira has maintained the garden through a variety of practices:
Your daughter says, “The seed harvest is good.” You shift on your feet. “What do you know?” You pretend to frown…She laughs. “I spy on you. […] Harvest seeds before dawn… You sing to them, and tell them how necessary and beautiful they are; that is why they grow for you.” […] Your daughter’s head is against your heart. Tomorrow you will show her which one of the chests contains your seed bank, now hers… She will know what to do with it.Footnote 78
The second-person narration performs a double move in this passage, positioning the reader as eavesdropper in Ayaana and Munira’s conversation and revealing that Ayaana herself has been witnessing and listening. As a result, Munira, initially the narratee, becomes the passage’s subject and focus. This is fitting given the focus on Munira’s gardening methods, which constitute an answer to Kincaid’s question about the relationship between gardening and conquest and are a metatextual image of the novel’s own literary techniques. In contrast to the careless broadcast of seeds thrown to the wind, a metaphor for masculine reproduction and the colonization process, Munira reclaims the act of seed-sowing and recontextualizes it within a form of matrilineal inheritance: the seed bank. In the novel’s Indian Ocean context, the seed bank and the garden it reflects are neither silos of dislocated material accumulation nor extroverted displays of botanical knowledge. Rather Munira’s seed bank simultaneously localizes seed conservation to the particular landscape, climate, and soil of Pate and expands it to a transoceanic practice undertaken by gardens and gardeners in creolized settings around the world. Metatextually, the seed bank is also an image for the novel, a physical object filled with material gathered from local and far-flung circulations, formed by a creative practice of mutuality and embodied care.
By gifting the seed bank to Ayaana, Munira reframes the question of inheritance. Kincaid’s question about how to create—whether through gardening or writing—as a postcolonial subject in the shadow of imperial violences conveys the heavy burden that Black women creatives inherit. Approaching this question archipelagically through the garden, The Dragonfly Sea opens up the possibility that inheritance, including the painful ruptures of creolization, contains within it the raw materials for future creative expression and reciprocal relationality. By reclaiming the acts of seeding, transplantation, and acclimatization associated with European imperial gardens, The Dragonfly Sea develops transoceanic networks of material and creative circulation, dispels English-language hegemony, and cultivates literary and practical strategies of opacity. Enacting creolized creative expressions by African women that far exceed the imaginative return of Kincaid and Walker’s “back to Africa” gaze, The Dragonfly Sea puts forward practices of unruly engagement with the materiality, relations, and methods of the past that are capable of sustaining the gardens, books, and books-as-gardens to come.
Author contribution
Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Methodology, Writing - original draft: K.M.
Conflict of interests
The author declares no competing interests.
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