My Garden (Book) by Jamaica Kinkaid
To Name is to Possess
"The way you think and feel about gardens and the things growing in them - flowers, vegetables - I can see must depend on where you come from, and I don't mean the difference in opinion and feeling between a person from Spain and a person from England but a difference like this . . . " and she quotes a passage from Henry James' Portrait of a Lady and one from Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions (114). Of the James she says it could only be written "by a person who comes from a place where the wealthy of the world is like a skin, a natural part of the body, a right, assumed" (116). In Dangarembga's book the idea of things growing just for the joy of it is strange and a liberation and Kinkaid asks at what moment everyday beauty becomes a luxury.