In the garden and kitchen, two authors find irony, struggle, history, and joy
With words by Jamaica kincaid and watercolors by kara Walker, “An encyclopedia of gardening for colored children: an Alphabetary of the colonized World” brings together two of the great artist-interrogators of colonialism, slavery, and the aftereffects of each. Working together for the first time, kincaid and Walker have crafted a children’s primer containing thirty-five entries on europe’s colonial expansion into the Western Hemisphere and the flora crucial to that enterprise. the duo not only names and illustrates plants native to the West, they also cite some imported to the new World from other colonized regions and note several others which have been disseminated globally as a demonstration of the endless reach of imperial power.
in her collages, hand-cut silhouettes, and “A subtlety” — a huge, daring sugar sphinx — Walker renders black experience and American history as a swirl of cruelty, hilarity, salacity, and irony. Her new watercolors serve as elegant evocations of kincaid’s taxonomies. For instance, “M is for Musa” — “the proper name for the banana (Musa x sapientum or paradisiaca)” — is coupled with Walker’s image of a spry, gesturing, seemingly airborne figure sporting a banana skirt reminiscent of Josephine baker. opening with “A is also for Amaranth (Amaranthus)” and closing on “Z is for Zea Mays” — maize — Walker enhances kincaid’s respective notes with a regal figuration of Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec patron god of Mexica and a scene of indigenous maternity that recalls Mexican modernist symbolism.
kincaid’s writing has always been keenly focused on the lives of caribbean girls and women, and on the undiminished resonances of british colonialism. early on, in “b is for breadfruit (Artocarpus altilis),” kincaid explains that on his first voyage to the polynesian islands in 1769, captain James cook “discovered” this member of the mulberry group, “from whose fruits wine and jam can be made, and whose leaves are the sole food of the silkworm.” Among cook’s crew on that junket was the botanist Joseph banks. He categorized the plants taken as colonial plunder in an “economic annual” that climate matched and redistributed the vegetation to other regions. benefiting “that bastion of evil known as the british empire,” banks sent breadfruit to the caribbean, where it became “a cheap source of food for the enslaved people on the islands. the slaves apparently were taking time from their labors to grow food to feed their hungry selves. the breadfruit was the cargo carried on the HMs bounty, captained by captain William bligh, when his crew mutinied.”
kincaid seems to insinuate that the global capitalist project, fueled by enslaved Africans, the genocidal erasure of indigenous life, inequitable labor structures, and the international circulation of breadfruit and other plant life, is always susceptible to raids, rebellions, and mutinies. At the top of Walker’s layered corresponding illustration, a fully-rigged 18th century merchant ship — maybe bligh’s bounty — leans toward its demise as two women, one polynesian, one caribbean, reach out to each other, a breadfruit suspended between them. perhaps Walker and kincaid can make beautiful work because in their differing but conjoined practices, both rely on modes of lyricism to deliver acidic truths.
though Aimee nezhukumatathil’s new essay collection “bite by bite: nourishments and Jamborees” is a record “of personal and natural history” more concerned with honeyed family memories than the bitter past, the author claims that these pieces also “remember struggle — sometimes tart and sometimes sweet.” A poet and essayist of the natural world, nezhukumatathil catalogs how food — whether nourishing family or consumed among friends — charges her imagination. though the collection is not ordered alphabetically, it does contain an abecedarian, “onion,” a gorgeous prose poem elaborating the bulbous herb’s layered glories.
unfolding as an onion does, “bite by bite” is a follow-up to “World of Wonders,” the author’s award-winning 2020 essay collection. As in that previous work, Fumi nakamura’s illustrations add lush visual representations of the foods and flora that nezhukumatathil takes up in this new book’s forty essays. Frequently, the author’s riffs close with notes of wonderment, merriment, delight, or celebration. A few pieces, such as “Apples,” feel too short, and some endings pat, too neat, as though nezhukumatathil had to dash toward positive feeling before more ambiguous, ruffled sentiments arose.
possibly nezhukumatathil’s quick exits help her evade the memoir’s sorely tender subtext: her elderly parents and growing sons. the time for witnessing her mother chopping “by hand all the ingredients for the lumpia filling” or listening to her father “excitedly explaining” the magic of the miracle fruit is slowly running out. Meanwhile, her sons move through these pages stepping deeper into teenagedom, edging away from her grasp. For sustenance in grappling with these midlife adjustments, nezhukumatathil relies on her strong marriage and thick friendships. “Watermelon,” likely the collection’s best effort, is both a paean to and a loving pastiche of the poet-essayist ross gay, nezhukumatathil’s collaborator and dear friend.
nezhukumatathil, whose father and mother are from india and the philippines, respectively, draws from the same context informing “An encyclopedia of gardening for colored children,” which, had it been published a decade earlier, the author might have offered to her two sons as a kind of compass for navigating the entanglements of their lineage with colonial histories. in several spots — the essay “Vanilla,” for example — nezhukumatathil’s writing springs from these intricacies. charming and skillfully sculpted, “bite by bite” compels readers to engage their own delicious memories and complex inheritances.