Among Flowers: A Journey with Jamaica Kincaid
Photo of Intersect’s Resident Historian, Shannon Meade-Graham, holding a copy of Jamaica Kincaid’s Among Flowers
“I have not wanted to part with anything, word or experience, I have had while walking the foothills of the Himalaya in Nepal among its flowers.” — Jamaica Kincaid, Among Flowers, p.139
I have Kiki of @ifthisisparadise to thank for me seeking out Jamaica Kincaid’s travel novella, Among Flowers: A Walk Through the Himalayas. As I saw it on her feed, I immediately knew that it was a book I wanted to feature in my #ReadCaribbeanMonth adventures. I made it my mission to find the exact, gorgeous copy she had and managed to locate it from an independent bookseller online — an attempt to quell my conscience for searching beyond local for this one.
Have you ever looked at a book, read its synopsis, and just knew it would be a book that would change your life? I felt this way about this book. From the moment I began reading Among Flowers, I mourned finishing it. This is a feeling that stayed with me throughout Kincaid’s writing as she laid bare before us her awe in the wake of so much beauty, so much peril, and such majestic unknowns — familiarity made unfamiliar by their setting in a far-off land.
I felt entranced by her words, so much so that I did not even care that she chose — and indeed loved — using the Latin names for the plants she saw and sought. I was too busy basking in the feelings that her words instilled in me. So, I let my imagination run wild as she sketched her ever changing scenery with me, envisioned what I thought the flowers of Nepal’s mountains looked like and kept reading. I felt both her unease and awe of her surroundings, as well as the daily routine that was mostly filled with uncertainty — especially when it became clear that Maoist rebels were occupying the foothills of their journey.
I also valued the frankness in which Kincaid shared how her knowledge paled in comparison to her companions — how difficult the terrain was and how persistent the local leeches were.
Image of Jamaica Kincaid’s Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalayas
This book is about a quest to find seeds — seeds of plants that would suit a garden in Vermont, a quest whose irony is not lost on Kincaid. There are references to the colonial legacy that bloom naturally in most of her writings, and on this journey collecting seeds, Kincaid finds herself amongst men who explored the far reaches — the highest mountains in the name of glory, science, and empire. As she contemplated her place in an unfamiliar setting, I found myself thinking with her, thinking on the knowing of oneself outside of the context of everyday life — in a place that surpasses the extraordinary, that is as equally beautiful as it is deadly.
I hope that this book finds you as it found me, unexpectedly and beguilingly. I hope you feel inspired to read about searching for seeds in the Himalayas, about finding familiar beauty in an unfamiliar setting. I hope you, as I did, find yourself sitting with the words of this book as if you were viewing a garden — maybe even imagining the very garden that inspired this journey in the first place.
