"L'arbouse flamboyante que je fus": Cultivating Womanhood in Taos Amrouche's Garden

Abstract

abstract:This article examines the construction of postcolonial womanhood through an ecocritical lens in Taos Amrouche'sSolitude ma mère. I focus on the three main ways the protagonist, Aména, considers vegetal being as a metaphor for womanhood: first, as a form of pure potential; second, as a mode of failure when blooming does not occur; and finally, as a re-appropriation of this failure, a feminist and indigenous form of refusal in a colonial context. Amrouche's use of gardening tropes invokes Romanticism and the pathetic fallacy, yet, as I show, Aména's lived experience as a racialized woman complicates Amrouche's novelistic assumptions.