On Subsistence and Renewed Stories
By Isabel Bradley
The clean wind sweeps my ears and tropical plants sway around me, but it is still October and I am still in New York City. How strange to stumble upon the plot here—transposed, transplanted, vibrantly asserting its presence through permutations of cellulose and chlorophyll. I have been immersed in archives lately, so each plant appears too vivid, a manifest version of its manuscript counterpart, as if it had leapt out from an image traced in ink and watercolor. The difference between castor bean and cassava plants is subtle; nearly-identical red stems support similar palmate foliage. Cotton, cane, and indigo are nearby too, not in their capacity as monocultures but as subsistence neighbors offering up fibers, leaves, and juice for weaving, dyeing, or quenching thirst. The plants spill out from their beds, reaching towards each other. Some perpetuate themselves by going to seed.
“African American Garden: The Caribbean Experience” was curated with care by renowned culinary historian Jessica B. Harris, who is perhaps most known for her intricate investigation of African diaspora foodways in High on the Hog, adapted for Netflix in 2021. Around the perimeter of the garden unfurls a poetry walk. This trilingual collection by the Brooklyn-based literary foundation Cave Canem betokens the inseparability of verse and vegetable, with words and food plants nearly rebounding off each other in a multisensory profusion. Neither decorative nor derivative, the poetry growing amidst jewel tones of tropical autumn abundance brings me back to a set of questions I have been turning over for a while: What is the relationship between plants and poetics in the context of “Caribbean experiences,” and what is the significance of this relationship as the plantation continues to proliferate and condition planetary futures? [1] What types of nourishment besides physical do plot-like spaces continue to offer? How is cultivation “both a biophysical and narrative act,” and how is sowing for food related to the autonomy of sensing, knowing, and being? [2]
[Isabel Bradley, Pigeon peas and a bottle tree (the prosaic and the poetic), 2023]
In this garden, the past is present in the sound of cane rustling, encased in the chromatic contrast of striated blades of green. The past is somehow encased within this perennial grass, flowing through the pithy matrix of its stalks. Or as Édouard Glissant writes in his 1964 novel, The Fourth Century:
You don’t see any of the past things planted there in the earth to speak to you. […] Just take a young cane plant, watch it grow in the ground until its point bursts into the sky, then follow in its tracks to the Central Factory […] then you understand the pain and underneath the registers you hear the real words of earlier days, that over such a long time have never changed. You hear them (222).
The simmering, silenced anguish of long-ago cannot help but erupt through the shoots of cane growing on Martinican land still possessed by béké descendants of enslavers. The healer Papa Longoué understands that the pain of the past is sown into the earth, that it continues to speak through arrows of cane stalks. The message he imparts to Mathieu is a critical one for those of us who seek out historical truth in written registers; it encourages us to look beyond colonial recordkeeping, to listen to the things planted in the earth. The impossibility of unraveling plant material from poetics (and the past) lies at the heart of Glissant’s oeuvre, whose “very words and letters […] are entangled in the strands, the mobile structures of [his] own landscape” (Caribbean Discourse, 146).
Caribbean philosophers like Glissant and Sylvia Wynter prepare the ground for an understanding of vegetal worlds beyond the semantic and epistemic strictures of botanical sciences that barely disguise their inherited colonial taxonomies. They dwell at length on the “language of landscape” and its interdependence with human representational structures, symbolic expression, and material creation. As I walk in the garden, no yam tubers reveal themselves underneath insect-eaten leaves, but the words of “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation” flood back to me all the same: “African peasants transplanted to the plot all the structure of values that had been created by traditional societies of Africa, the land remained the Earth—and the Earth was a goddess” (99). Many readers of Wynter’s compact yet conceptually abundant essay have commented on the links between the plot and a strain of creolized—or rather, indigenized—poetic knowledge. With the cultivation of familiar and unfamiliar plants in provision grounds, bondspeople enacted a praxis of living in refusal of the plantation’s symbolic “codes of life and death.”
Not only did plant substances nourish biological existence (bios), but they nourished cosmogonies (mythoi). Or as Harris reminds visitors to the garden, calabash trees lent their fruits to the uncontainable creativity of “new natives,” becoming bodies for rattles and drums. Together, plant and human summoned invisible worlds to attenuate the debasement of life governed by market and empire; this phenomenon is named by Haitian historical sociologist Jean Casimir as the “counter-plantation.” [3]
In francophone contexts, Caribbean materialist philosophers continue to interrogate the relationship between plant matter and poetics by revisiting Glissant’s vegetal figure of Relation: the “Caribbean rhizome” or mangrove. The radicality of this emerging “Caribbean poetic materialism” is that it no longer primarily understands the mangrove as a metaphor for creolization or créolité; rather, it takes the unique reproductive and respiratory morphology of its trees as a source of poetic imagination. The forms and growth patterns of Caribbean plant life offer material figures that help to fashion a practice of being human at the symbolic level, “a way of inhabiting, thinking, feeling, and experiencing the world” (22). [4] The lens of materialist poetics applies even to brutal and forced intimacy with cash crops. For instance, the philosopher Dénètem Touam Bona shows through his theorization of lyannaj that even as cane is made to exhaust and consume bodies and the souls inhabiting them, the sweet reed also births place-making alongside pain, binding together what was forced apart. [5]
In the wake of traumatic uprooting, the flowering vine at my feet once enabled the reemergence and metamorphosis of shattered African systems of meaning. Yam cuttings with budding eyes, trailing tendrils, heart-shaped leaves, and cylindrical tubers sustained a way of experiencing the world, allowed humans to implicate themselves in the earth’s vital force, and loosened the grip of colonial sociogeny. Among tangles of cucurbits and morning glories, the plantation’s taxonomy separating the human, not-quite-human, and nonhuman could not achieve full purchase. [6]
Consider the discussion of edible plants in the co-authored Manifeste pour les “produits” de haute nécessité, which articulated the connection between physical and poetic nourishment in the context of the 2009 general strikes in Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, and Réunion. For the authors of the manifesto, including Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau, local vegetables occupy an especially crucial position in sustaining the poetic dimension of colonized human existence. Leafy and starchy edible plants—or in francophone Caribbean contexts, the vivres that give life to the human organism—play a particular role in countering the sterilizing impulse of emporio-imporio’s afterlives. The authors call for the dispossessed inhabitants of French overseas departments to reconnect with and tap into the poetic, understood as that which imparts meaning to existence, by pointing out the “colonial absurdity” that “made us forget our own plentiful lands, local environment and cultural realities, and turned us over, naked, poor and innocent, and without jardins bokay, to European alimentary tastes” (58). Poetic resources nurtured over centuries are demolished when the plot is paved over, because not only do food plants sustain humans at the physiognomic or “prosaic” level of “water-survival-food,” they also foster invention, subtlety, creativity, and the “expansion of the self” (56). Growing edible and medicinal plants has implications beyond the physiological plane; it is also a narrative act. To strive for food sovereignty, then, is to protect a particular “symbolic and sacred order.”
For this reason, many Caribbean thinkers have understood spaces of subsistence cultivation on the margins of the plantation at the scale of culture, as matrices. The same collection of plants harnessed to feed racial capitalism also came to provide the lifegiving “roots of culture” for an emergent African diaspora. But we might still wonder about the role of the plot—time and space detached from plantation fields, “where one learned to cherish root crops, plantains, and bananas”— in today’s world. [7] How should we make sense of the relationship between edible plants and human acts of thinking, creating, and making in defiance of plantation logics in the present moment? Do actual provision grounds—and their counterparts in urban metropolises—still constitute demonic grounds, or alternate grounds of knowledge, and serve as points “outside the system” from which to anchor, draw force, and make meaning outside the logics of market and empire? Are certain plants still necessary to make culture on the edges of capitalist coloniality?
[Isabel Bradley, Entrance to “African American Garden: The Caribbean Experience,” 2023]
[Isabel Bradley, Dr. Jessica B. Harris’s welcome message, 2023]
Returning to the African American Garden, the astounding abundance of the plot recalls the deep and ongoing relationship between autonomous plant beings, those who care for the green and its soil, and the co-creation of meaning outside the dominant/dominating world view of colonial Man. The urban earth of the New York Botanical Garden is not the fragilized earth of a Caribbean island, but the specifics of these plants matter. The poetic legacies transmitted by the plot still require the underground metamorphosis of root tubers, the heavy branches of mango trees, the solace of healing leaves. When dasheen shares earth with yam and manioc, their cohabitation disrupts market time and nourishes another mode of anticapitalist, anticolonial, antiracist sensibility. In this spirit, Touam Bona writes that human-plant relationships have a part in working against the “decomposition of the living world” or patterns of “zombification” naturalized by the cheapening of life and labor along the global color line. [8] Similarly, philosopher Nadia Yala Kisukidi asserts in “Déroute (Mangrographie de l’inhabité)” that, even today, “Caribbean plant-life offers the possibility of standing on the threshold of a different lexicon, a different grammar that undoes certain stubborn illusions” of origin and identity (32).
It is easy to see the plantation everywhere; in some academic circles, it looms descriptively to name the ongoing planetary exploitation of land and people. We are all involved in the exchanges of the market system, but as Wynter reassures, “our place in the confrontation is largely determined by whether we accept or reject this structure” (Novel and History, 100). [9] Perhaps we will never learn to hear the language of landscape, what Glissant refers to in Malemort as “the wise monotonous speech of greenery… cacao trees that tremble, shivers of yams, the thick flatness of cabbages” (29). But recognizing plant beings as active contributors to lifegiving poetic imaginaries—as generations of Caribbean scholars and communities have done and continue to do—should encourage us to renew our material commitments to supporting Black- and Indigenous- led projects of regenerative agriculture, ecological restoration, and other processes of sowing for food, wherever we are.
Notes
[1] See Katherine McKittrick. “Plantation Futures.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 17:3 (2013): 1–15.
[2] See Kathryn Yusoff. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018, 65. I take this suggestion to mean that interactions between humans, yams and other vegetal beings brought about a reversal of the operation by which African/descended subjects were “reduced to labor” (and property) on New World plantations.
[3] See Jean Casimir. The Haitians: A Decolonial History. Trans. Laurent Dubois. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2020.
[4] See Sarah Matia Pasqualetti and Chris Cyrille. Mais le monde est une mangrovité. Fontenay-sous-Bois, France: Rotolux Press, 2023.
[5] See Dénètem Touam Bona. Sagesse des lianes: Cosmopoétique du refuge 1. Paris: Post Éditions, 2021. The creole term lyannaj originated in the cane fields, where it first referred to the weaving motion by which enslaved people bundled sugarcane stalks together. For Touam Bona, this gesture at the heart of the mass exploitation of Afro-Caribbean people has become a remarkable expression of solidarity and creativity; for example, it was a rallying cry during the 2009 general strikes.
[6] See Alexander Weheliye. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.
[7] See Michel-Rolph Trouillot. “Culture on the Edges: Caribbean Creolization in Historical Context.” From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and its Futures. Ed. Brian Keith Axel. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002, 203.
[8] See Dénètem Touam Bona. Fugitive, where are you running? Trans. Laura Hengehold. Hoboken, NJ: Polity Press, 2023.
[9] The plot is alive in Soul Fire Farm, Grown in Haiti, Black Yard Farm, Bèl Nati Guyane, La Colmena Cimarrona, in the efforts of ethnopharmacologist Emmanuel Nossin, and elsewhere…
References
Breleur, Ernest et al. “Manifesto for ‘Products’ of Dire Need.” In Manifestos. Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau. London: Goldsmiths Press, 2022.
Glissant. Édouard. Malemort. Paris: Seuil, 1975.
Glissant. Édouard. Caribbean Discourse. Trans. J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1991.
Glissant. Édouard. The Fourth Century: Le quatrième siècle. Trans. Betsy Wing. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2001.
Kisukidi, Nadia Yala. “Déroute (Mangrographie de l’inhabité.” In Mais le monde est une mangrovité. Eds. Sarah Matia Pasqualetti and Chris Cyrille. Fontenay-sous-Bois, France: Rotolux Press, 2023: 31-34.
Wynter, Sylvia. “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation.” Savacou 5 (1971): 95-102.
Cover Photo Credit: Tessa Mars, "Marie-Thérèse et Dieunie" (We Are Here), 2019.
Isabel Bradley is an Assistant Professor in the Department of French Literature, Thought and Culture at New York University. Her research and teaching lie at the intersection of francophone Caribbean literature, environmental humanities, Atlantic history, food studies, and decoloniality. She has published in archipelagos, a journal of Caribbean digital praxis and in Francosphères journal (Liverpool University Press). Her current book project interweaves Caribbean literature, natural histories, and plantation archives to frame underground vegetation as a force shaping both the realization and restriction of human self-determination in the colonial Atlantic world.