I could listen to people talk about plants and gardens for hours. I could listen to Jamaica Kincaid talk about them for days, maybe. 

In one of the first pieces of Kincaid’s that I read, “The Disturbances of the Garden,” published in 2020, the author writes about her early horticultural education, a process which was imbricated in her academic and literary education. Kincaid explains that both of these educations were given to her by her mother at a very early age: “My obsession with the garden and the events that take place in it began before I was familiar with that entity called consciousness.”

I remember when I first read the essay in the New Yorker a few years ago that I loved the way Kincaid described her mother’s gardening style. She writes: “I could see it in my mother’s relationship to the things she grew, the kind of godlike domination she would display over them. She, I remember, didn’t make such fine distinctions, she only moved the plants around when they pleased her and destroyed them when they fell out of favor.” It was so amusingly reminiscent of my own experiences as a child, watching my mother, a similarly despotic gardener, witnessing the contempt she held for weeds, gophers, and banana slugs. She would often pitch the latter over the fence, explaining that she was “sending them on a vacation.”

Yet Kincaid, being a writer and also an Antiguan, has a richer and more cultivated sense than either my mother or I have of what stories and contingencies are implied by the idea of a garden. Introducing Kincaid ahead of her conversation with Townsend Center director Stephen Best at Zellerbach Playhouse on March 12, 2025, Hilton Als described Kincaid’s project as about the “return to Eden” and the “fight to determine why she was cast out.” Kincaid touches on this idea of the original garden in “The Disturbances of the Garden,” writing about how her understanding of gardens was as much bound up in her experience in her mother’s garden as it was the notion of Eden — since, for a while, the only book she was allowed to read without disturbance from others was the Bible. 

“I have since come to see that in the garden itself, throughout human association with it, the Edenic plan works in the same way: the Tree of Life is agriculture and the Tree of Knowledge is horticulture. We cultivate food, and when there is a surplus of it, producing wealth, we cultivate the spaces of contemplation, a garden of plants not necessary for physical survival.” This production of plants “not necessary for physical survival” is akin to the production of words  — a physically and intellectually demanding but nourishing use of leisure time.

Kincaid’s work testifies to this idea that the wealth and associated material comfort that enables the Tree of Knowledge, i.e. the horticultural garden to flourish, in turn, generates an imperative for writing to be interrogative and born out of intellectual “discomfort.” There are many practices and modes that might be implicated in intellectual discomfort; perhaps most essentially, it is a posture that withholds certain explanations. During the talk, Kincaid asserted that “comfort leads to a kind of death.” This death can be, but isn’t always, abstract — within the context of the British colonial project, it is often both figurative and literal. 

Works concerned with neocolonialism, like A Small Place, set these two types of comfort on the same course. Tourists to Antigua extract material comfort, and Antiguans take comfort in directing their anger towards their historic oppressors rather than their contemporary counterparts. Kincaid remarked that the pursuit of comfort complicates the pursuit of paradise, and inevitably “leads to more death.” Sitting with the requisite discomfort involved in intellectual and creative inquiry is the way we “might do the terrible thing less,” she said. For writers engaging in a literary form of this inquiry, it struck me that discomfort often works to force one to pay attention to what is immediate and familiar — and to continually seek ways to more carefully and thoroughly represent the familiar, treating aspects of your reality as if they were rocks in a rock tumbler.

It also seems to me that a gardener — someone who sees more clearly the link between the physical discomfort of manual labor, the mental discomfort of waiting, and the creation of beauty — would be predisposed to being a great writer. For Kincaid, comfort is the colonial and neocolonial object that her writing exposes, and discomfort the stylistic bent her writing takes to accomplish this. This is most evident in A Small Place, many of the precise grooves of which Kincaid retreaded in her Berkeley conversation. It is a work that takes nearly everyone to task — the Western tourist (the “you” she addresses in second-person narration throughout), the Englishmen who initially corrupted Antigua, the post-colonial Antiguan who falls into a life of corruption and Faustian bargains with overseas stakeholders, and, most controversially, the victims of this corruption who engage in a comfortable intellectual dishonesty and refuse to view themselves as part of a continuum of violence and subjugation.

At one point in the conversation, Stephen Best asked Kincaid about how she handled the negative reception of the book in Antigua after its publication in 1988. She briefly acknowledged that this period was difficult for her, but emphasized that a younger generation of Antiguans seems to have a better apprehension of the truths Kincaid was trying to speak to and the message she sought to impart — that Antiguan anger can be generative of so much more than it has been. 

The place that anger and bitterness have in Kincaid’s body of work is, I think, what distinguishes her from a number of other writers who draw significantly from colonial history and the colonial present, and offers a template for thinking about the utility of anger and bitterness in literature and in life. The move to decouple anger and bitterness in which many people engage — I always think of the Maya Angelou quote that gets repeated more often than anything else she wrote, about anger being productive and bitterness being its opposite in this sense — is missguided, and in her writing, Kincaid opts out of this discourse altogether. To the extent that anger and bitterness undergird Kincaid’s prose, they contain, and so are modulated, by the notion that they have witnessed the natural, unadulterated beauty of things and, as such, are not nihilistic. From Kincaid we also learn that anger can evade nihilism by orienting itself towards something concrete, something substantiated by history and experience. 

Kincaid spoke at length about her childhood under British rule, weaving these details into a larger discussion about botanical history and the violent means by which plants were transported across oceans by the British. Kincaid and Best discussed the story of how breadfruit was introduced to the West Indies as a way of providing low-maintenance sustenance to slaves, thereby “relieving” them of their need to develop their own agricultural practices. 

Many of the other stories Kincaid told made clear the many instances in which education was also a product shipped from England to Antigua, where children learned all about their colonizer but had no tangible experience of place to reference. She described first learning about certain species of flowers in Jane Eyre and poems by Wordsworth. Kincaid speaks of these early experiences with books with a fondness tempered by the extensive, ineluctable injustice of the construction of an incomplete reality by a colonizer. “We lived in our own literary hell,” she said. How do you decide to make a life of letters out of literary hell? 

Kincaid sources points of reference both from the garden and the literature of her colonial education, but also from paintings. Much of what Kincaid wants to do with her fiction could be described as analogous to what she thinks painting accomplishes: “intervening in the world.” This necessitates being able to view the “world” as a human invention separate from the Earth, something I gather she might have learned from her mother. In “The Disturbances of the Garden,” she writes: “For her, the wild and the cultivated were equal and yet separate, together and apart. This wasn’t as clear to me then as I am stating it here. I had only just learned to read and the world outside a book I did not yet know how to reconcile.” When Kincaid does reconcile these realities and representations, and puts them to the page, she is living in America, at a remove from her subject. 

In Vermont, where Kincaid now lives, she has a garden. At a few intervals in the conversation, she joked about her tendency to bring home cuttings of plants from various places she visits (especially if she has been instructed not to do so). She has acquired two varieties of hollyhocks this way — one from Ukraine (or one of the Baltic states, since this would have been pre-1991) and one from the West Bank. One of the species had been dormant in her garden for decades. “Last year they both showed up in my peony bed and I thought that was a sign of something,” she said. 

It's almost as if what transpired in Kincaid’s peony bed is an extension of what Kincaid’s writing encourages us to do: connect or juxtapose what might seem to be disparate events, in turn revealing what might be a difficult truth about either one or about the nature of their connection to each other. Sometimes, as in this case, the plants transplant themselves and leave us to wonder how it happened. But in horticulture, or its close analog (writing), we must do it ourselves — a process that incurs much planning, time, precision, sweat, dirt, and (possibly) error.