STRANGE JOY

Abstract

This article explores how Kincaid's aesthetic practice in her gardening, plant-hunting and travel writing is informed by an ‘ethical singularity’ that Gayatri Spivak describes elsewhere as open to ‘the possibility of constructing a new type of responsibility for the cultural worker’. Where Kincaid's text might simply be read as an account of a diasporic subject claiming an equivalency between her own experience of colonialism and the experience of subaltern Nepalese in the twenty-first century, attention to what Spivak calls the ‘slow attentive, mind-changing (on both sides) ethical singularity’ of Kincaid's gaze, positions Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya as a supplement to colonial plant-hunting memoirs. Kincaid's text rejects a false solidarity with the subaltern, and instead emphasizes her narrative's entanglement in travel writing and garden culture even while she seeks to dislodge these genres from their colonial moorings. Kincaid's book, therefore, simultaneously makes visible the colonial attitudes that inflect the activity of seed-collecting and botanical exploration even while it revels in the experience of retracing the Himalayan routes and narratives of colonial botanists like Joseph Dalton Hooker and Frank Kingdon Ward. Kincaid approaches the narration of her experience of seed-collecting in Nepal through a form of ethics Spivak calls ‘diasporic responsibility’, challenging readers to examine the stakes of their own interest in writing about gardening, adventure travel and the environment.