“When Is a Tulip Not a Tulip?”: Grafting, Exoticism, and Pleasure Gardens in Jeanette Winterson’s The PowerBook

It was on the cherry that I first learned the art of grafting and wondered whether it was an art I might apply to myself.

Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

There are many legends of men being turned into beasts and women into trees, but none I think, till now, of a woman who becomes a man by means of a little horticultural grafting.

Jeanette Winterson, The PowerBook

Jeanette Winterson’s 2001 The PowerBook is, in part, a fictional tale of bodies and pleasures and an imaginative journey through cyberspace where characters exist both within and outside of history. Because the narrator Ali/x, a “language costumier,” utilizes the momentary and imaginative possibilities of virtual reality, she is able to transport herself and the object of her affection, Tulip, through time and space as she promises, “this is an invented world. You can be free just for one night. Undress. Take off your clothes. Take off your body. Hang them up behind the door. Tonight we can go deeper than disguise.”² In an attempt to seduce Tulip, Ali/x composes sexy and imaginative online narratives where the two are able to experience and express their unrealized passions. In one such playful narrative, because “a theft lies behind the rise of the tulip in Holland,”³ Ali/x takes advantage of the unarticulated spaces between fact and fiction and strategically inserts Ali, a queer working-class Turkish figure referred to as “the exotic of the East,”⁴ into the very real historical accounts of tulipomania in Europe (1636–37).

“Ali tells stories. He puts himself in the stories. Once there, he cannot easily get out again. . . . Ali’s story is not well documented.”⁵ As theorists we must begin with the stories that are silenced or simply not recognized, suggests Judith Halberstam. Halberstam asserts that we have perfected the ability to critique the concept of normativity, but we have fallen short “at describing in rich detail the practices and structures that both oppose and sustain conventional forms of association, belonging, and identification.”⁶ When Ali’s tale opens in 1591, she has been appointed by Constantinople’s Sulyman the Magnificent to carry and present the first tulip to the people of Holland.⁷ As a way to secretively and successfully transport this coveted flower across geographical borders, and as a “natural” complement to her gendered performance of an alternative masculinity, Ali cleverly “straps on” a tulip and two bulbs. As the tulip, also referred to as “the exotic of the East,” is grafted onto Ali’s body, the sexed, sexual, and raced categories determining who can be recognized as normal, natural, and even human are questioned, challenged, and disrupted.⁸ As Winterson reappropriates the figure of the Other as a site of possibility and expands upon the trope of grafting introduced in her 1989 Sexing the Cherry, she simultaneously challenges Western stereotypes surrounding the Middle Eastern Other as well as Western identity categories that appear eternally fixed.

Ali’s ability to transform and escape categorization is enough to disturb the “natural” order of things, but it is also her/his foreign, working-class, and exotic brown body that initiates “trouble.”⁹ In the end Ali fails to deliver her/his tulip and bulbs to their assigned destination and instead cultivates an unsanctioned tulip-filled pleasure garden that is specifically about the proliferation of pleasure: Ali “bought a piece of land by the river and planted a pleasure garden for the ladies of Holland.”¹⁰ The community’s attraction to the sexual, erotic, and exotic space of the garden allows for the creation of a communal pleasure garden—an ars erotica—that moves sex, race, and sexuality into the public sphere.¹¹ The celebration, pleasure, and variation discovered and exchanged in Ali’s garden are not about discovering a “true” self; instead they are about intensity, proliferation, and refusing identification as a specific sexualized being. As the surrounding community takes part in strapping on the tulip, variation is acknowledged and pleasure spreads. Thus, Ali and the tulip...