📕 Jamaica Kincaid, Among Flowers
I then met my other traveling companions, the people who would make my journey through the Himalaya a pleasure. There was Cook; his real name was so difficult to pronounce, I could not do it then and I cannot do it now. There was his assistant, but we called him “Table,” and I remember him now as “Table” because he carried the table and the four chairs on which we sat for breakfast and dinner. Lunch we ate out of our laps.
This was perhaps the most disappointing book i've read this year, because my introduction to Kincaid came in January with A Small Place which burned with the flames of anger directed at colonialism. In this book, nearly twenty years later, that fire has been extinguished entirely, and Jamaica Kincaid, a black woman from Antigua plays the part of a tourist from the United States, visiting Nepal in the midst of the country's liberation struggle against an oppressive monarchy, and complaining about the freedom fighters — the maoists.
The war the maoists fought, alongside leftist and liberal forces, ultimately overthrew the monarchy and established a secular state in Nepal. And though we now live a year after that state has been dissolved, partially due to its own retrogression, we must admit, that the abolition of a Hindu monarchist state was politically progressive. Unfortunately for Nepal, it is bordered by India to the south, a regressive nation state that is attempting to establish a Hindu nation, not only within its own borders, but beyond it. Already, as Nepal attempts its difficult transition, imperialist, right-wing, and hindutva forces are gathering, threatening to return Nepal to its dark, casteist, monarchist past.
But i'm getting ahead of myself as usual; in Among Flowers, Kincaid plays a very insidious role, she enters the country as a citizen of the United States of America, working in conjunction with National Geographic, who have paid for her entire trip, and proceeds to paint the maoists, literal freedom fighters, as blundering terrorists. Listen, i would go into the role of botany as a weapon of empire (Kincaid reason to visit Nepal is to collect flower seeds for her garden in Vermont!), but her continuous complaints about the maoists charging Kincaid and her compatriots 4000 rupees (about 30 dollars by today's standards) for safe passage is infuriating, as is her constant fear that the maoists will kill her, when the only thing the maoists actually do is make the party sit through a lecture in Nepali, a language which tourists from the U.S.A. wouldn't even deign to learn because our dirty little third world languages are beneath them. I hated reading every word of this book, and while i will continue reading Kincaid's work, i know her politics now, and i will read her work knowing her as the imperialist that she is.