The Garden Palimpsest: Space, Time, and the Anthropocene in Leslie Marmon Silko's Gardens in the Dunes

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• The Garden PalimpsestSpace, Time, and the Anthropocene in Leslie Marmon Silko's Gardens in the Dunes
• Dylan Couch (bio)

Leslie Marmon Silko's third book, Gardens in the Dunes (1999), matches the scale and breadth of her earlier novel Almanac of the Dead (1991) and expands on themes of identity and perseverance central to her first, Ceremony (1977). It starts with the fictional Sand Lizard, a southwestern desert tribe for whom home is the spring-fed oasis called the "old gardens." This transnational tale—which shifts from the Arizona desert to several European gardens and a South American jungle—exposes readers to a wide range of garden spaces, practices, and corresponding worldviews. The viewpoints presented in the novel illustrate just how tightly entwined gardening is with westward expansion in the United States and colonial incursions writ large. Indeed, while colonization and its enduring effects weave through her entire oeuvre, Silko distinguishes Gardens in the Dunes from her other books by displaying an acute knowledge of the history surrounding gardens and its connection to global imperialism.

The portrayal of colonization in the novel falls along botanical lines, which suggests that, generally speaking, every "garden" bears the material consequence of entangled histories that merge botanical colonialism with precolonial traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). As the character Aunt Bronwyn mildly affirms, "the kitchen garden was the modern garden as well. … Plants from all over the world—from the Americas, tomatoes, potatoes, pumpkins, squash, and sweet corn; and garlic, onions, broad beans, asparagus, and chickpeas from Italy—grew with peppers from Asia and Africa" (Silko 240). Sketching the historical paths these diverse plants took [End Page 49] to arrive at the present-day garden would unravel a wide-reaching colonial narrative, and Gardens in the Dunes accomplishes this very imaginative feat by positioning fictional characters and actions within a real-seeming picture of the final decade of the nineteenth century at the height of westward expansion.

It's with Aunt Bronwyn's quote in mind that we can appreciate the garden as a material palimpsest that inscribes colonial attempts to erase Indigenous peoples and exploit and monetize traditional ecological knowledge. Palimpsests can portray a range of things, including built landscapes, like gardens, "where history accrues in layers over time, or as assemblages, sites where things 'gather'" (Ladino 20). I find Daniel Cooper Alarcón's book The Aztec Palimpsest helpful in considering the palimpsest as a theoretical paradigm to, in his case, foreground the construction and representation of Mexican cultural identity through competing yet interwoven narratives that enable an examination of the "history, cultural identity, ethnicity, literature, and politics in relationship to each other" (16; emphasis original). This essay makes a similar move concerning the palimpsest as a theoretical paradigm to think through competing yet entwined relationships to gardening, but I use that paradigm to probe how those relationships represent divergent understandings of space and temporality. Thinking of gardens as palimpsests draws attention to how their material form obscures the underlying colonial histories that combined plants from other spaces and epochs in one place, plants emblematic of other forms of being. As palimpsests, gardens gesture toward larger temporal and spatial scales, but detached from the global and historical processes that led to their construction, their presence today contorts an understanding of space and time.

Although none of them involve palimpsests per se, much of the recent scholarship on Silko's novel grapples with gardening, Indigenous lifeways, and colonialism. To highlight one example, in her essay "The Garden in Motion," the scholar Yeonhaun Kang invites readers "to appreciate the precarity of the environment" resulting from the development of Western science and capitalism and hence "the many worlds entwined with the global networks of plants" (104). Kang asserts the project behind Silko's novel was two-fold: to show how botany and the plantation system facilitated "the expansion of settler colonialism around the globe" and, second, to [End Page 50] emphasize Indigenous approaches to gardening that challenge an imperialist agenda (104). This essay also dwells at the intersection of plants, colonialism, and Indigenous worldviews, but my own reading enriches others before me by employing cognitive narratological terms to illuminate the connection between narrative comprehension of space...