5 - Secret Gardens: Afro-Asian Migration and Creolization in Indian Ocean Archipelagic Art and Literature

This paper examines the garden as a constructed yet organic spatiality that stages historical and contemporary continuities and connections, solidarities and meaning making practices among African and Asian communities in the western Indian Ocean. While gardens in the postcolonial world are often theorized as tools of European conquest, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea reframes a woman-tended garden on Pate Island off the coast of Kenya as a physical expression of localized African, Arab, and Chinese migration, diaspora, and creolization—a space in which plants and humans who have been forcibly trafficked across the sea might cultivate new or hybridized forms of collectivity, interdependence, and flourishing. This paper demonstrates how The Dragonfly Sea constructs the spatiality, imagery, and materiality of the botanical landscape, as well as how activities such as planting, cultivation, weeding, and harvest are enacted outside the registers of classification, enclosure, and extractivism. It also explores the garden as a suggestive meta-narrative of the text’s relationship to its own imperial traces, including the English language, the novel genre, and the historical past. Through close-reading, the paper conceptualizes the garden as a spatialized botanical archipelago where histories of migration, diaspora, and creolization take on material, multispecies forms and where womanist and anti-imperial forms of relation and knowledge are practiced, preserved, and shared.

Paper co-authored with: Axelle Toussaint, University of California Santa Cruz