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Whether through anticipation, repetition, or rhythm, time structures our desires. There is no coloniality as we know it without the temporality and the violence of the modern clock. So often, the imposition of colonial time upon plants, in our own gardens and our own homes, leads to their death. Plants know light, and they know air, they know water, they know each other, and perhaps they may know us too, but they do not know time as we know it, colonial time. Over and over again, colonial time kills. How might we kill time before time kills us? As Rasheedah Phillips reminds us, the conquest of Black and Indigenous land and life and being is coterminous with the conquest of time and space. She writes: “Clocks are themselves maps, offering another way of spacing time and timing space. Like maps, clocks are objects that embody certain ideas, politics, notions of time, and boundaries.”[1] How might one abolish time in order to enter instead, again and again, the temporality of the sprouting seed, of the unfurling leaf, of thirst, of the cutting taking root, of the pruned branch branching out again? That plants exist outside the strictures and structures of time is but one way in which they refuse the ableism that defines capitalism. For plant life and human life, disability and illness are but two ways amongst many in which time is disrupted and restructured.
Plants, especially in urban spaces, on balconies, rooftops, alleys, fire escapes and windowsills, teach us that needs for light, water, soil, and fertilizer, as well as sensitivity to any imbalance in optimal nourishment and comfort, vary greatly and simply constitute knowledge and information that anyone wishing to care for them will have to learn. There is ideally a back and forth, a dialectic that leads us back to labouring on ourselves and each other, which leads us to interdependence. Black subjects in community with plant life have transmitted modes of belonging, desiring and being that sometimes run counter to capitalist modes of production, reproduction, and extraction. Black subjects in community with plant life no doubt reimagined different modes of collective care, repair, and power.
On days when their chests were heavy and it was hard to breathe, what secrets did the enslaved confess to the plants around them? What truths did they find as their fingers traced the curve of a leaf, as their hands embraced the wide, rugged trunk of a familiar tree? What temporalities emerged from planting seeds for their own consumption? What solidarities were woven between Black folks and plants in knowing themselves both to be consumed?
Jamaica Kincaid asks, in her reflections on her experiences as a gardener: “What is the relationship between gardening and conquest? Is the conqueror a gardener and the conquered the person who works in the field?”[2] This opposition between the gardener and the person who works in the field might help us understand the role played by the small plot of land that enslaved people had to cultivate subsistence crops. Is it possible that the small plot contributed to subverting the logic of the plantation and of conquest? Writing about the enslaved in Saint-Domingue at the time of the Haitian Revolution, Michel-Rolph Trouillot asserts that: “the acquisition of family land and the laborer’s right to the product of the labor on such land were the terms under which freedom was first formulated in the history of the nation.”[3] For the enslaved, the practice of tending to one’s own garden, of developing economies separate from the plantation provided a terrain for experimenting with and articulating agency and autonomy beyond conquest. On the largest scale, this praxis led to sustained armed resistance against enslavement and colonialism; it led to the historical affirmation of Black power and dignity and to new formations of freedom, sovereignty, and independence. Another world was not only possible; it was crawling and growing and blooming out of the very soil the enslaved toiled during moments stolen for self-preservation and survival. On the smallest scale, the garden offered and continues to offer a language and a grammar for healing, for growing, for surviving, for slowing down, for agency, intimacy, accessibility, and belonging.
Plantlife offers an aesthetic and political framework grounded in care, vulnerability, and abundance. What interests me is a mode of engagement that counters disposability and the temporality of consumption even at the scale of touch, at the scale of the gaze, in discrete moments of intimacy and disability. While we may never know the strategies that enslaved people developed in order to cultivate agency in the face of relentless white terror, these questions remain essential ones. When the state-sanctioned and extra-legal production of death produces terror, anxiety, and disability, how does one carve out agency and accountability as one navigates mental illness and systemic oppression?[4] How does the anxious Black heart say no? What does it mean for the anxious Black heart to say yes? How does the anxious Black heart get a grip?
Anxiety can feel like a desire for control, yet anxiety is often characterized by thoughts one cannot control – paranoia, germaphobia, hypochondria, worry – all of which feel like something is letting go, birthing its own narratives and setting them in motion. Anxiety might also be a porosity, to feeling, but also to structures or orders, including the structures erected to support capitalism and the supremacy of whiteness. Anxious thoughts so often seem to stem from white and capitalist logics – perfectionism, conflict avoidance, and all or nothing thinking, for instance – that seep into our minds and painfully spill out.
Alice Walker writes in her poem titled “Desire”: “this is how I’ve survived: / how the hole / I carefully tended / in the garden of my heart / grew a heart / to fill it.”[5] What might it mean to be the gardeners of our own anxious hearts and of each others’ anxious hearts? A culture of validation might get in the way of this work because uncritical validation might lead us to forget that anxiety can reproduce unhelpful and even harmful thoughts that are the product of a society that is itself the product of nefarious delusions, chief amongst them, the delusion of whiteness. What then, do Black anxious hearts say to each other? In her poem titled “Coping,” Audre Lorde writes about the work of tending to each others’ gardens. The poem reads: “It has rained for five days / running / the world is / a round puddle / of sunless water / where small islands / are only beginning / to cope / a young boy / in my garden / is bailing out water / from his flower patch / when I ask him why / he tells me / young seeds that have not seen sun / forget / and drown easily.”[6] Lorde’s poem begs the question, how do we show up in each other’s gardens after the rain, or after drought? How might we be the friend who helps to bail the water out of the flower patch? The struggle of the anxious heart lies in part in how a culture of validation can turn into a culture of enabling, particularly in queer communities, as Kai Cheng Thom explains: “I have seen countless such situations where queers, struggling to be supportive of friends and community members, have adopted validation as the easiest and most politically correct approach. We tell people that they are always right, that their perception of minor conflict as life-threatening is accurate. We tell them that their substance use is fine and their choice, even when it is affecting us or others very negatively. (…) In short, we enable.”[7] At the most basic level, validation makes our thoughts more solid, which is affirming but can be limiting if not followed by other insights, ways of reframing that offer other perspectives, nuance, and the complexity and contradictions of our own hearts. Toni Morrison calls the emotional and intellectual labor of reframing, “being a friend of someone’s mind.” Morrison wrote in Beloved: “She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It’s good, you know when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.”[8] The question remains an open one: how might we gather ourselves and gather each other’s anxious hearts? What are the temporalities of this gathering when it draws upon the experience of gardening? How does one know when the pieces are in all the right order? How might we commit, again and again, to rest, and to resisting the orders that make our worlds and our solidarities, our hearts, and our gardens smaller, narrower, disconnected from each other?
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Footnotes
[1] Rasheedah Phillips, “Planning Time, Timing Space: Dismantling the Master’s Map and Clock,” The Funambulist, p. 45.
[2] Jamaica Kincaid, My Garden (book), New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993, p. 166.
[3] Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Haiti, State Against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism, New York, NYU Press, 1990, p. 38
[4] Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, 2007, p. 28.
[5] Alice Walker, The World Will Follow Joy: Turning Madness into Flowers (New Poems), New York, The New Press, 2013.
[6] Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn, New York, Norton, 1978, p. 45.
[7] Kai Cheng Thom, I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes from the End of the World, Vancouver, Arsenal Pulp, 2019, p. 33.
[8] Toni Morrison, Beloved, New York, Knopf, 1987.
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Works cited
Gilmore, Ruth W. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, 2007.
Kincaid, Jamaica. My Garden (book), New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993.
Lorde, Audre. The Black Unicorn, New York, Norton, 1978.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved, New York, Knopf, 1987.
Phillips, Rasheedah. “Planning Time, Timing Space: Dismantling the Master’s Map and Clock,” The Funambulist, issue 18, 2018, p. 44-45.
Thom, Kai Cheng. I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes from the End of the World, Vancouver, Arsenal Pulp, 2019.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Haiti, State Against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism, New York, NYU Press, 1990.
Walker, Alice. The World Will Follow Joy: Turning Madness into Flowers (New Poems), New York, The New Press, 2013.
About Nathalie Batraville:
Nathalie Batraville is an Assistant Professor at Concordia University's Simone de Beauvoir Institute, where she teaches and conducts research in the areas of Black feminist, decolonial, and queer theory, with a particular focus on prison abolition and cultural productions of the Black Atlantic. Her scholarship examines the sexual politics of race in the wake of the transatlantic slave trade by analyzing literature, essays, visual art, as well as archives. In so doing, she works to generate and illuminate frameworks that unsettle hierarchies of difference and challenge violence at the level of the state and interpersonal relationships.
