My Garden (Book)

by Jamaica Kincaid

  That morning, just as we were getting on the bus to leave Weixi (it might have been a Wednesday, it might have been a Thursday, it might have been a Friday, none of us knew the names of the days anymore, only that it was day and then it was night), there was a huge commotion in the courtyard near the kitchen; something (mammal) was screaming in agony, the pathetic, last, hopeless appeal that mammals make before they die (and they know it well, for so much of the time they are the cause of it). Among us there were many oh Gods and oh Christs and oh shits; but Hans and I went to see what or who was making such a cry. This is what we saw: a very big pig, its two front legs tied together, its two back legs tied together, surrounded by four people; one of them held the pig’s head, another one was plunging a knife into its neck; the pig’s cries grew louder and then softer, blood spurted out of its neck, and someone held a large basin in place to catch the blood; the basin quickly filled up with blood, it was too small to hold all the pig’s blood. Hans and I joined the rest of our group on the bus. This incident was never mentioned again. For lunch we ate our delicious meal of pig, pig, pig, pig, pig, no fish, many vegetables cooked in fat rendered from pig, rice, and beer; that evening in Judian, we ate our delicious dinner of pork, pork, pork, pork, pork, no fish, many vegetables sautéed in fat rendered from the flesh of a pig, rice, and beer.

  It was in Judian that I had my most serious nervous breakdown. I went to our Chinese guide and said this: “The rooms are the filthiest rooms I have ever been in; there is blood on the walls, there is shit on the walls, there are the remains of vomit on the walls.” Judian was the place where our guide had been born and grew up; but I did not know this when I spoke those words, I only knew because Paul gave me a lecture on other people’s reality, on other people’s feelings, and though he did not mention that dreaded word “acceptance” he implied that I should accept the things I was faced with. I did not think, What a Christian! then, I only wished I had thought it then, so I could regret my prejudice now. And it was John who said to me that our experience was more authentic the closer we came to the Chinese, and by that he meant the major and minor stooping situation that I had been complaining about; he said that the whole experience of the unsanitariness of everything, the preparation of our food, the places in which we ate and slept (all this according to my feelings, not my scientific evidence, I have no scientific evidence, I don’t even believe in such a thing as scientific evidence), that all of this made our experience in China more authentic. And I thought to myself, Well, the last time I had such an intimate experience with anybody was with my children, changing their diapers, cleaning up their vomit when they had a flu, cooking their food, and worrying about where it, their food, came from (strawberries from Chile or California), and I do not think all of that makes our relationship more authentic, I could have done without all of it, the vomit, the blood, the shit; I only said all this to myself, I did not say any of this to anybody, not to John; I did not say to John, I like the Chinese, I like the way they grow food (I would then be thinking of how those terraces and terraces were cultivated), I like the way they eat food, it is the things they do in between growing and eating I don’t like, the things they do after eating the food, I don’t understand that; all the things I thought, everything I thought, I did not say one word of to John. I only looked at him (John); he caressed his beard (he had a beard), he stroked his nose between his thumb and his forefinger as if to refine it (his nose); and all this about John—caressing his beard, stroking his nose, the sound of his voice, his opinions on authenticity or inauthenticity—made me sorry for the people who would be on a hike with him in Nepal (this was to come), made me sorry for people who would not or could not speak freely (to him, a simple man, or to something more complicated than a simple man); but just as I was having feelings of sympathy for John and all who would meet or could meet John, it was then that he said (John did) I was always bitchin’ and bitchin’, and it was then that I transformed him saying this (“bitchin’ and bitchin’”) into him actually calling me a bitch, and at that moment he was ashamed of himself for using those words (“bitchin’ and bitchin’”) and I was suddenly glad that I had bitched and bitched. If a person who stroked his beard and caressed his nose was against bitching, then most certainly a person like me must be a bitch. When John said that I had been “bitchin’ and bitchin’” and I had then turned this phrase into a badge of honor for myself, he had not expected that, he was cowed, he was quiet after that, we parted with heartfelt kisses, and only time will tell if those heartfelt kisses were forever. If I were to see him again I would be so pleased, especially if he did go off to build those houses for Habitat for Humanity; he talked a great deal about that during the time I felt him to be unendurable, and that and that alone mitigated my desire to slice his head off his body. Even now (especially now), I am glad an impulse for good (building homes for people who had none) intervened between my desire for something bad and my desire for something that was not bad. I did not like John; I did not hate John, I only did not like him, and when he was gone (off to walk on a trail that ran among the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains, and I was very envious of that, even though I had never imagined such a thing until John mentioned it) I missed him.

  And by that time again, I was so far away from everything that had come to have meaning for me (my children, my husband, the home in which I lived, the other people I saw every day), that the world I knew only through the telephone or through some other form of communication receded and receded and I could barely remember it, and was uncertain that I would see it again. Driving along the Yangtze River as it went one way, and then driving along the Yangtze as it went in an opposite direction, taking a dramatic (to me, at any rate) turn; driving toward the Mekong and then the road disappearing; driving along a road that had been cut out in the middle of a formidable ridge (a mountain), the whole thing reduced to something a child would construct out of sand on a beach, if a child was granted such a luxury. The botanists, their eyes searching the sides of the mountains for areas beyond which they could just sense lay a rich collection of plants that had set seed, would demand a stop, and then another; they were so voracious, but only for plants that had set fruit; they did not eat an enormous amount of food, they all lost much of their evidence of American physical prosperity (fat) after three weeks; they stopped and stopped and collected and collected; once we had to stop because two vehicles going in opposite directions had collided while going around a blind bend; no one was hurt, but it took a while to clear the road; it was there one botanist collected Iris colettii, a species of iris I had never heard of before.

  To see Dali again was reassuring and all those strange people (natives of Denmark, France, England, the Netherlands); their presence no longer annoyed me, I was only curious about them, my curiosity did not need to be satisfied. At that time there was a big moon in the sky, a full moon; and to see such a thing as that moon, so familiar, and those people (from Denmark, France, England, the Netherlands), so familiar, made me feel confident, made me feel as if the world would be mine again, I could dismiss the things I did not like (the certainty of the people from Denmark, France, England, the Netherlands); and so when I saw a funeral, someone being buried in a city in China, I was curious, I wondered what that was like, to miss someone forever in a place like that, Dali, China. Some of the mourners had wrapped their heads in white cloth, some of the mourners carried an old framed picture of the dead person, some of the mourners wept, some of the mourners held the weepers in their arms, some of the mourners took turns carrying the coffin, some of the mourners banged on drums and some played tunes on a reed instrument. The coffin was painted red and was shiny, as if freshly lacquered; I was sorry, just at that moment, that I did not know the person inside it, and I was glad, just then, I did not know the person inside it; to be sorry, gladness should come first, but when sorrow comes, I can never remember that I had once been glad. It went through Dali, the entire procession, some weeping (the people walking behind the
coffin), some laughing (the people who took turns carrying the coffin), and when they got to a part in their travels that separated Dali from the burial grounds, the people carrying the coffin ran away from the rest of the mourners; the rest of the mourners seemed devastated, the rest of the mourners pretended to be devastated (this is how it seemed to me), and then there was the loud noise of firecrackers and the smell of things burning (but not seriously burning), and then the mourners carrying the coffin proceeded up a long, steep hill; the other mourners, the ones left behind, looked longingly at the disappearing people carrying the coffin.

  But it was the familiarity of Dali (the funeral reminding me of death, the bars where I could buy whiskey and rum and vodka, the restaurants where I could buy coffee or something resembling coffee, a hamburger, a toilet where my bodily remains disappeared when I pressed a lever, people who took a tip as a reward for their satisfactory service) that made me miss my husband, my children, my home, my garden with everything in it dying, going dormant. The botanists and their companions (the nursery people) went off to a place called Huadianba, to search for something that would make the American garden (a luxury) even more beautiful, but my ankle (which looked more than ever like a serviceable implement in the history of the American garden) hindered me from joining them. They came back in a rush, they came back excited, they came back with tales of not enough beer, too much solitude, not enough seeds from plants they expected to find in seed; they came back saying how wonderful everything had been, they came back looking forward to going to Emeishan. Between Dali and Emeishan we stopped in Kunming (again) and Chengdu. Kunming and then Dali seemed like Paris (the capital of France, not the plant the botanist had been seeking); and then, long after, Kunming and Chengdu seemed like themselves, not like anything I had known before, not like anything I wanted to know again, like places (cities) in my imagination, like places (cities) I had heard or read about. In Kunming we ate pork, pork, pork, beef (not yak), fish, vegetables, rice, and beer; we sent by special post to North America all the seeds we had collected in Yunnan Province. John left for his trek in the Himalayas, a woman named Elsa replaced him; it was then, when John had left, that Grace asked me who would take his place as asshole and I said that I would, though I was not happy to take his place. Elsa and Grace were assigned to room with each other. Grace liked Elsa very much, we all liked Elsa very much, Elsa was so very nice, we all missed John so very much, we had come to like John very much.

  We flew to Chengdu (the capital of Szechwan Province), and then took a bus to the foothills of Emeishan, a mountain holy to people of the Buddhist faith. There are places on this earth to which you are drawn because they promise to make you forget where you are from, and there are other places, existing all by themselves, and they make you forget where you are from and where you were just the other day. Emeishan was such a place. It had a history: a holy mountain, one of the most holy mountains to Buddhism; it was so holy that hundreds of years ago steps were built that led from its base to its summit, so that people could walk up (to see Nirvana, the place, or just simply the state of mind) or down (at which point they perhaps might come to the realization that Nirvana is neither a place nor a state of mind).

  At the base of Emeishan, the botanists collected the seeds of a begonia, a hepatica, an epimedium with leaves twice the size of my palm and shiny as if they had been polished by a very industrious person. It takes three days or so for a devoted pilgrim to walk up to the summit of Emeishan; it took us a day to walk almost three-quarters of this same path down the mountain. Walking down, I collected the seeds of Astilbe grandis, Viburnum nervosa, Buddleia forrestii, and Aconitum volubile (a climbing monkshood); and when walking down those stairs, I once again wondered where I was, where I really was, and if I would find my way home again, if I would ever see the things that were most familiar, the things that I most loved, again: my children, my husband, my friends, the garden; the garden I have made and loved was in back of me, the garden I hoped to have and so hoped to love was in front of me, at my feet, on the slopes of this mountain that was holy to some people, not to me. It was on this mountain that we came across bands of monkeys, native to that part of the world, native to that mountain, and they were very unpleasant, reminding me of myself, my relatives, people I might actually know: they were beautiful, they were demanding, they were greedy, they were ill-mannered, they were violent; they jumped on the back of a woman from France and ripped her knapsack apart in a flash, they tore off a pocket on someone else’s jacket; when I saw a band of them approaching me, hissing and baring their teeth, I screamed and pushed in front of me a young woman named Jen, a young woman half as old as I. She only realized I was serious about using her as a shield when she found my fingernails burrowing into the soft flesh of her arm. Jen staved the monkeys off for me and Hans, too, and after that I walked down the stairs confidently, because I asked everyone I met coming up if there were any monkeys below, and they always said no; and I believed them, even though I wasn’t sure they understood me, for they were all Chinese, and they remained so, stubbornly … Chinese. I walked and walked all day, stopping only for a delicious lunch of pork, pork, pork, noodles, eggs, tomatoes, and rice at a wayside restaurant; I ate that meal with Dan and Ozzie and Hans and Laura Lu and Frank; near the end of the day, with my destination not more than a quarter of a mile away (I could even see the end of the walk, a sharp drop of stairs below me), I could not walk anymore. I could not feel my own legs, they would not do what I commanded them to do, and I started to cry. Dan came upon me going down the stairs on my bottom, like a baby just learning the mechanics of walking, and he tried to carry me in his arms, but to take his mind off what a burden I was to him, he told jokes and made me laugh so much that I became more of a burden laughing than I had been when I was crying. I then paid two men three hundred yuan to carry me to the end of the trail; they had charged me sixty, but I was so grateful to them for carrying me one quarter of a mile or so that I would have given them more than was required.

  When coming down Emeishan, Grace wandered off the path to get a better view and she almost fell off a ridge into nothing for hundreds of feet before the nothing changed into naked rocks; when she told us of this experience, we were all shaken, and the next day she went off to Shanghai to make contact with people who propagate tree peonies, and after she left we all would say to each other, from time to time, “I wonder how Grace is doing,” for Grace had left us and took her spontaneity, her impetuosity, all amounting to a kind of loneliness; we never heard from her again and I missed her, especially at the last meal we all ate together; the botanists and I wanted to have our serving of rice at the same time we had our delicious servings of pork, pork, pork, pork, yak, vegetables sautéed in pork renderings, chicken, and no fish, not after; we gestured, we spoke loudly, we gestured, we spoke loudly, but nothing we said or did conveyed any meaning to our waitress. Ozzie then got up and went into the kitchen and showed the waitress the pot of rice, and that was how we got to eat rice at the same time as our other food. It was then Pierre said, “Isn’t this funny? We want rice, the place is full of rice, but we don’t know how to ask for rice; you would think by now we could have figured out how to say ‘rice’ in Chinese.” It was then I missed Grace, and that was also the last time I missed Grace.

  We said goodbye to each other in Hong Kong. I had collected the seeds of 130 different flowering plants. I would send them to Andrew and to Jack, two men who grow many things from seed for me. I got on a plane early one morning and I flew through that morning and a night, and then arrived in Chicago on the very same morning that I left Hong Kong. All that I left behind was real enough: the days on the bus in the company of the same people, wearing the same clothes (I loved their smells); the same food—pork, pork, pork, rice, vegetables, yak, fish every once in a while, I never grew sick of it; Benzilan, where the moon looked strange in the sky and the sky itself looked not real, or not like the sky I had gotten to know; the glacier I could see at Beimashan Pass, a gla
cier in a place that on the map is at the same latitude as Cuba; the toilets that did not work—the toilets will never work, they have a different idea altogether about hygiene; my grumpiness, my bitchiness, my nervous breakdowns; the wet meadows of primulas; the gulleys filled with columbine and meadow rue and sanguisorba chewed to the ground by grazing yaks; the grazing yaks themselves; walking hurriedly to meet the bus and coming upon a large colony of Primula capitata in seed; the rhododendrons and the rhododendrons and the rhododendrons again—so many different species would have to bloom before even Dan could say with certainty what they are; all those people who stared at me, all those people I would have stared at if I had seen just one of them in my small village in Vermont. I slipped back into my life of mom, sweetie, and the garden; I was given much help by buying a fashion magazine that had on its cover a picture of that all-powerful and keenly discerning literary critic Oprah Winfrey.

  THE GARDEN I HAVE IN MIND

  I know gardeners well (or at least I think I do, for I am a gardener, too, but I experience gardening as an act of utter futility). I know their fickleness, I know their weakness for wanting in their own gardens the thing they have never seen before, or never possessed before, or saw in a garden (their friends’), something which they do not have and would like to have (though what they really like and envy—and especially that, envy—is the entire garden they are seeing, but as a disguise they focus on just one thing: the Mexican poppies, the giant butter burr, the extremely plump blooms of white, purple, black, pink, green, or the hellebores emerging from the cold, damp, and brown earth).

  I would not be surprised if every gardener I asked had something definite that he or she liked or envied. Gardeners always have something they like intensely and in particular, right at the moment you engage them in the reality of the borders they cultivate, the space in the garden they occupy; at any moment, they like in particular this, or they like in particular that, nothing in front of them (that is, in the borders they cultivate, the space in the garden they occupy) is repulsive and fills them with hatred, or this thing would not be in front of them. They only love, and they only love in the moment; when the moment has passed, they love the memory of the moment, they love the memory of that particular plant or that particular bloom, but the plant of the bloom itself they have moved on from, they have left it behind for something else, something new, especially something from far away, and from so far away, a place where they will never live (occupy, cultivate; the Himalayas, just for an example).