What the records tell us is this: human desire is a powerful thing. It is also ephemeral, lost in the moment it is felt, though its traces remain in the world long after. From a swelled root to a crinkled leaf: in the plants we eat, there are remnants of our search for the medicinal and the palatable, and in their genetic makeup, a record of our movements between places.
As written by the child of immigrants — author Jessica J. Lee has a Taiwanese mother, a Welsh father, and was born and raised in Canada — Dispersals shares a unique view on what it means to be “out of place”; whether considering plants or people, she makes the case that the language we use regarding what is “foreign” is pretty similar. Lee has an impressive educational background (with a Masters in International Development and a PhD in Environmental History and Aesthetics), and has travelled widely — working and living in Germany and England for the past several years — and as she now teaches Creative Writing at the University of Cambridge, she is, from every angle, perfectly experienced to think and write on these themes. Dispersals is a collection of essays that combines Lee’s personal stories with geography, science, and philosophy, and in each one, she displays deep thinking, fascinating facts, and clear writing. I don’t know what I was expecting from this book, but I enjoyed it a lot. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
I am fascinated by the way words can be bound tight to past places, by the way a simple question can unfold an entire scene, long thought forgotten. The way a fruit — even just its mention — can carry more than its weight in flesh.
This quote is from a section on mangoes, and this plant is one of several that Lee links to the history of empire-building (with the shorthand history being that Portugal first popularised the mango when they brought it out of their colonies in India). Lee quotes from E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, demonstrating how over the decades, the literary treatment of this fruit has become “extraordinarily fraught…signifying exoticism performed for a white gaze.” Lee has similar treatments for cherry trees — it’s interesting to learn that the corridor formerly occupied by the Berlin Wall is now planted with thousands of cherry trees gifted from Japan after its fall, but also that Japan has a long history of planting cherry trees in countries they have colonised [ie, Korea and Taiwan] in order to transform both landscapes and mindsets — and the history of tea (the secrets of its cultivation and processing were “stolen” from China by a British man disguised as a local), and as Lee grew up with parents who enjoyed two very different tea rituals, hers is an interesting take on how both plants and their related customs are translated across time and space.
In addition to the big and showy, Lee writes about the small: the seaweeds, mosses, and fungi that are (mostly) accidentally transported around the world. And while in some cases these are harmless, she warns that there are always going to be those people wanting to return areas to some impossible-to-determine baseline “natural” state; which in Britain, she subtly links to xenophobia and Brexit; and having lived in Berlin, she makes a more overt link to Aryan notions of purity. Interesting stuff to think about.
Simply through repetition — in storybooks and novels deemed classics, curricula — British landscapes come to signify romance, an ideal in nature. I pay no attention to flora outside my window — in a flat land of canola and corn, where forests are built of sugar maple and pines. I read so little of these plants, and in truth, they hold little interest for me. It will take me years before I realise that I’ve built my notions of beauty from the stories of a distant land.
As I also grew up in the centre of Canada, I share Lee’s experience that the view outside my window doesn’t necessarily jibe with what I’ve been conditioned to consider idyllic beauty; and that’s an interesting effect of technically living in a colony. There’s a lot here on empires (including Lee’s increasing discomfort travelling on her British passport) and how delineating borders exacerbates the us-vs-them attitude (whether discussing people or plants), and for the most part, it’s a fair discussion of ideas I haven’t thought about in this way before. Worth the read.
