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Botanical brilliance with Jamaica Kincaid
Explore plants, fruits, and flowers and find your inner child, as Primary Times hears from award-winning author and essayist Jamaica Kincaid
Get ready to embark on a unique journey as renowned novelist Jamaica Kincaid explores the plant world in ‘An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children’. This fascinating new collaboration with illustrator Kara Walker, aimed at all ages, takes the reader through the ABCs of some of the plants that define our world and unearths the history that can be found in our gardens. To find out more about Jamaica’s thoughts on the book itself and on gardening and writing more widely, read on...
What does gardening mean to you, and is it something that families can enjoy doing together?
I can’t tell anyone what gardening means to me; it would be like saying out loud some thoughts I have about my underwear. Of course families can enjoy being in the garden together, why not? I can imagine families doing this, especially because my family did not. I, on the other hand, enjoyed them not enjoying being in the garden with me.
Where did the inspiration for this encyclopedia come from?
In the days when I read The New York Times as a newspaper, The Book Review section had a number of people lamenting the fact that not many books were being published with “children of color” in mind, the books presented didn’t represent the world in which they lived. Well, I didn’t like the phrase “children of color”, I didn’t like the way the words were arranged. On the other hand I liked the construction of “colored children”. Some people will object to “colored children” but I just simply remind them that there is a venerable institution called ‘The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’ in The United States. It is over 100 years old. If you look at an old photograph of the members gathered together on a step, you can see that the membership is made up of people of every possible hue under the sun.
With this being your first book aimed at children, did you enjoy the writing process and the overall experience?
I did enjoy writing this book because I wrote it for the child I still am. When I was an actual child, this is just the sort of book I would have loved. When I was a child, I could never bear to part with a book once I had read it. A book such as this I might have stapled to my heart.
With the variety of different plants explored in ‘An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children’, which of those included is your favourite, and why?
The Breadfruit (Artocarpus altilis) is perhaps my favourite, though sometimes I lean towards Nicotiana (cigarettes) because Kara’s (Kara Walker, the esteemed artist who illustrated the book) illustration is so subtly cruel: it a drawing of a little boy lying on his back, one leg bent, the other draped over it, a beautiful tobacco plant growing up from his mouth and the plant is in flower; of course if he keeps it up, he soon won’t be flowering/flourishing at all.
Do you think you’d like to write another children’s book in the future?
I have never written a children’s book. This book is for children in the way that we are all of us children. I don’t believe we ever get past 7 years of age. Everything that we are comes to us until we are 7, certainly not too much more than that, and then we spend the rest of our lives recreating those events, those relationships, those disappointments, and those joys.
An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children by Jamaica Kincaid, illustrated by Kara Walker is out now (FSG, £23.99).