In keeping with Senior’s comment above that she mines culturally specific folklore and mythologies for information that links specific human traits with particular plants (see, for example, the poem “Starapple” where the plant is likened to someone who is “mean” or close-fisted), the poem begins with a Jamaican folk saying. Bamboo love, as the saying goes, is the kind of relationship that is very intense (“burns/ bright and hot,” line 2) but does not last long. The prevailing sense here is of impermanence, fragility, and vulnerability—maybe even untrustworthiness and betrayal. But on closer look, that impression is mediated by the fact that after the bamboo is consumed, it leaves “behind/ as residue/ fugitive/ bamboo ashes” (lines 5-8). Although elusive and fleeting like a “fugitive,” the ashes, which are light and easily blown away, contain a trace of the plant consumed by fire so it has not fully disappeared. In fact, when one remembers that bamboo ashes are often used as fertilizer it is possible to argue that in the remnants of the bamboo’s destruction itself lies the possibility of its rebirth.

This idea of rebirth—and thus of resilience—is picked up and expanded on in the second variation. A fast-growing giant grass, the bamboo is known to send its roots “deep into/ cliff and mire” (line 14) so that the plant can withstand a variety of harsh conditions: “wind, rain, axe and forager” (line 11). The bamboo, it seems, is difficult to destroy, even in the wake of “that dread enemy/ of conceit: fire” (lines 7-18). Its growth may be slowed, but it knows “the art of living long” (line 10). One of its defining features, then, is its ability to rebound after disaster or setbacks, and to survive. This is a feature that Senior claims throughout Gardening in the Tropics for Caribbean/New World peoples and cultures. Like folklore, mythology is referenced because of the parallels it draws between the plant and the human worlds. The third variation recounts an indigenous aetiological tale in which humankind’s mortality is explained as the consequence of Bamboo winning a debate with Stone. But while Bamboo cannot claim to be as indestructible as Stone, it has the advantage of being able to regenerate. It affirms that, with “careful tending” (line 28), new shoots will continually spring from old roots.

It is Bamboo’s ability to produce new shoots from old roots—i.e. choose change over the kind of stasis that can result in atrophy—that provides an interpretive framework for the brief narrative presented in the fourth variation. In this part of the poem, a precocious eleven-year-old girl seeks solitude and sanctuary in a dense thicket of old bamboo roots and fresh bamboo shoots away from her Great-Aunt Emily whose claustrophobic and restrictive dictates regarding proper female behaviour the girl defies at every opportunity. Instead of spending her time dusting, cooking, polishing silver, or knitting, the girl prefers to read books that allow her to give flight to her imagination and envision other realities than the one she is being forced to live. Undeterred by old wives tales that would have her fear the malevolent spirits that supposedly inhabit the roots of the bamboo plant, the girl escapes to her bamboo hideaway every chance she gets, daring to believe that there—rather than in the Church at the centre of Great-Aunt Emily’s life—she will find that which truly sustains and affirm her spirit/self. While the tone in the fourth variation is playful (the little girl’s feistiness and her conflict with her guardian are humorously depicted), its critique of the role religion and the Church as a Western institution have played in socializing Caribbean females into Eurocentric, class-based gender identities that can severely undermine their sense of themselves as culturally autonomous and valid beings runs deep. Senior has addressed this issue in other poems (such as “Colonial Girls’ School” in her collection Talking of Trees) as well as in her prose fiction (including the short stories “Bright Thursdays” and “Do Angels Wear Brassieres?” from Summer Lightning and Other Stories). Significantly, then, it is the Indigenous New World myth which presents Bamboo as the prototype for humankind’s ability to renew itself in positive ways through natural cycles of death and regeneration rather than the Christian conception of death as the consequence of Original Sin that the poem offers as a more liberating way of knowing and being for the little girl, and future generations of Caribbean women. But, as Bamboo warns in the third variation, the cycles of death and regeneration—of young shoots springing up from old roots—will continue routinely and unabated only if those roots are carefully tended. This suggests that Caribbean/New World peoples have to do the cultural and psychic work necessary to release themselves from the centuries of self-abnegation represented in Great-Aunt Emily’s clinging to beliefs and practices used to invalidate her and her culture so that they too, like the little girl, “can breathe in (without/ sneezing) a naturally fresh and liberating air” (lines 69-70).

In the fifth variation, the poem addresses another issue that, as evident in several other poems in Gardening in the Tropics, has greatly impacted the lives of Caribbean/New World peoples: migration. The persona in this section of the poem (ostensibly an adult) has moved from a Caribbean location to “Saint Clair Avenue Toronto/ Canada” (lines 83-84). Here, the poetic persona bears witness to her own experience of migration and diaspora in that she speaks directly in her own voice to an implied listener about her physical and emotional response to resettlement. At first it might appear that the persona is hearing things—that her perception of her new environment cannot be trusted. Although she now lives in a place where there is no “river-bank” or “hill” (line 85), she insists that she hears “something like a dry rustle/from the river-bank” (lines 74-75) and the “sound of wild/bamboo flutes scaling up and down/ mountain passes” (lines 79-81). Her auditor appears to be puzzled that she is hearing similar sounds of nature—from the “high window” in her former “house/in the hills” (lines 71-73) presumably somewhere in a mountainous region of the Caribbean like the Cockpit Mountains of Senior’s birthplace, and from the “high window” looking out from an apartment in an high rise building in Toronto—in two very dissimilar landscapes. But rather than functioning as an indicator of the persona’s mental or physical disorientation/dislocation in her new environment; or, as Jenny Burman argues, as evidence that the poem is “antidiasporic” and “does not locate a thriving Jamaica in Toronto” (Burman 68), the persona’s mishearing suggests exactly the opposite. Like the bamboo whose rustling leaves and flute notes she keeps hearing, the persona is able to spread her roots so that she simultaneously (and comfortably) belongs to two worlds. Again, the reader is invited to call upon what she learned about the natural properties of bamboo in the earlier variations and apply them to a reading of the brief narrative that unfolds in this final variation. It is no coincidence that this persona, like the little girl, seems to have an affinity with the bamboo plant as it becomes, like various features of the natural world in Senior’s creative garden space, a potent symbol of a culture’s ability to heal and sustain itself.

Work Cited

Burman, Jenny. “Remittances; or Diasporic Economies of Yearning.” Small Axe 12 (2002): 49-71. Print.

On Gardens and Gardening. Prod. Hyacinth M. Simpson. Perf. Olive Senior. Toronto: Ryerson University, 2007. DVD.