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interlude one Mala’s Garden: A Caribbean Interlude Mala’s companions were the garden’s birds, insects, snails and reptiles. She and they and the abundant foliage gossiped among themselves. She listened intently. With an ear pressed to the ground she heard ant communities building , transporting food and breeding. She listened to worms coiling arduously from place to place. She knelt on the ground and whispered to the grass and other young plants, encouraging them to grow, and then she listened as they stretched up to her. She did not intervene in nature’s business. When it came time for one creature to succumb to another, she retreated. Flora and fauna left her to her own devices and in return she left them to theirs. At first Aves, Hexapoda, Gastropoda and Reptilia burrowed instinctively into nooks and crevices. They realized eventually that they had no cause to hide.1 Set on a Caribbean island modeled on Trinidad, sometime near the end of the colonial era, Shani Mootoo’s novel Cereus Blooms at Night, quoted above, imagines a Caribbean garden where the taxonomic names used to classify exotic plants for European readers have become oddly redundant. Mala Ramchandin is a descendant of Indian (that is, East Indian) indentured workers transported to the Caribbean to work in its fields in the postslavery colonial era, yet another wave in the global transplantation of peoples that is mirrored in the transplantation of plant species between the East and West Indies, the two poles of colonial enterprise that structure Abbé Raynal’s Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements & du commerce des Européeans dans les deux Indes, or, more familiarly, L’Histoire des deux Indes (1777).2 In Mootoo’s novel, Mala’s garden of delights is the reiterated emblematic scene for queer partnering that goes back two generations and sets in place the scene and events for another couple when Tyler, a shy, homosexual nurse who cares for Mala late in life, meets the crossgendered Otah. The plant figure that gathers the symbolic energy of the narrative is the demipersonified cereus plant, the night-blooming cactus that others prefer to “pass-along” to someone else.3 Precisely because it blooms only once a year, its night-blooming habit had long attracted European notice; in The Temple of Flora, Thornton alternated between two dif- 160 c l a n d e s t i n e m a r r i a g e ferent engravings of “the Night-Blowing Cereus.” Seductive, hidden, and heavy with scent when it blossoms—it attracts a generation of lovers as they stroll by Mala’s garden—the Cereus embodies exotic profusion, be it botanical or sexual (the Latinate name insures that Linnaeus’s sexualized categories are ever in the background) or both, that outpaces its taxonomic name. Elsewhere in Mala’s garden, the family names of the mid- nineteenth century Natural System only just hang on as artificed, quasi-abstract names ill-matched to the movement of actual creatures (“Aves, Hexapoda, Gastropoda and Reptilia burrowed instinctively”).4 The taxonomic categories that served the colonial imaginary so well across most of the globe no longer count for much in Mala’s garden and Mootoo’s novel, where life and plant forms proliferate on their own hook and human sexual difference is similarly resistant to known or permitted categories. In Mala’s garden no one tries to manage plants and animals. Mala herself, who long ago “stopped using words,” has no interest in giving any of them names, not even indigenous ones.5 In the pas de deux between Mootoo and the taxonomic categories that materially assisted the work of empire, there are no compromises and nothing remotely collaborative.6 Mootoo’s novel pushes back against a long history in which taxonomical description and colonial botany in Latin America worked in concert, even though evidence of local informants and slave gardeners sketches a more intricate history of knowledge gathering about botany in the New World. Jill Casid has argued that slave gardens, their unsanctioned use of planters’ prized specimens and hidden cultivation by Maroons, escaped slaves, in the mountains of Caribbean colonies, offer unacknowledged evidence of resistance to the plantation agricultural economy . Londa Schiebinger and other scholars provide evidence of local informants and knowledge that disturbs the picture offered by official British and French accounts of colonial plantation and Caribbean natural history, whose notice of Indian medicinal expertise is uneasily divided between their knowledge of poisons and cures.7 British natural...

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