Slow, Situated & Reparative Reading (The Garden Edition)

Together in the garden, we share books, poems and essays as ways of tuning in and turning towards.¹The garden referenced in this text can be any garden, yours, mine or a friend’s, or it could be the commons collectively cared for, or a balcony filled with beloved plants. That isn’t to suggest these leafy encounters are generic or interchangeable. Each has its own qualities that tune the reader and the reading. That’s certainly the case with my garden and how it has and continues to work upon me. For over fourteen years, I’ve had an allotment at the SNV complex in Rotterdam. During this time, it has been a place of growth and gathering for plants, family, friends, and acquaintances. It is also integral to how I’ve come to understand what it means to teach and learn. In my garden, I have met with students to discuss their work. During COVID and lockdown, when I witnessed students, especially those without family nearby, overwhelmed by isolation and the impenetrability of the screen, I would suggest meeting at my allotment. Walking along the complex’s intersecting pathways, we would keep our prescribed distance while still in a shared physical reality. Step by step, we would unpack our thoughts together. As I continue to meet students at my allotment, I see there is something about the distraction of the green or feeling a breeze, which short-circuits the strictures associated with academic settings. Maybe it is the simultaneity of existence that relativises and gives air for breathing outside of the ever-spinning mental narrative that falsely casts the self as the protagonist. Instead, the mind falls in line with the body, and subsequently, the senses connect to the surroundings. Or, as the artist and gardener Michelle Teran, and I have discussed on numerous occasions, gardens are learning grounds that, in turn, ground learning and the learner. These thoughts about my garden have been germinating for a while. In the past, together with literary scholar Frans-Willem Korsten, I taught a course called Critically Committed Pedagogies. During the seminar, we held sessions in our respective allotments. Although in two different cities, our gardens faced similar threats from the municipality. We discussed possible strategies for resistance and coalition forming. We talked about how a site and situation shape hierarchical, non-hierarchical and emergent ways of learning and practised the pedagogical differences between explanation and demonstration. Together in our gardens, we discussed how traditional classrooms arranged like factories with desks lined in rows reinforce centralized authority or how more contemporary settings mimicking the open offices of tech industries promote surveillance. In contrast, gardens bring insights more akin to forest schools where the site of learning is not a disciplining tool or simply a backdrop but dialogic and with a curriculum that is irreducible to words. More recently, I have been teaching Issues in Contemporary Art Education: Learning with Others with designer, curator, and fellow gardener Irina Shapiro. The course considers how we might learn with and from others in multi-species environments and how education all too often foregrounds human experience and know-how at the exclusion of all other intelligence and ways of existing. Such oversights have devastating consequences on a large scale that is hardly fathomable for the mind. However, our gardens, with their limited square meters, offer humble starting points where we can share listening practices, tuning methods and intimate forms of observation aimed at undermining our sense of human sovereignty. Threaded throughout these experiences is a fundamental lesson I don’t want to learn. It is a pedagogy of perishing where, sadly, extinction is the final exit qualification. Like many green spaces, my garden stands at an all too familiar precipice. Having faced countless threats from the municipality in the past, the complex, now only a third of its original size, continues to be under pressure from urban expansion, housing development and climate crises. When I listen to the dawn chorus of birds and witness the seasonal shifts, I can’t help but consider what will be lost if it disappears. It is a library, an archive, a storyteller, a testimony to the many —living, non-living, human, and more than human. Under its influence, I’m the one being gardened. It is a caretaker that simultaneously needs care. My garden is indexical to everything at stake around us, near and far. As I was writing this manifestation, I wondered if I was writing a love letter or a eulogy. I suppose these modes of address may be indistinguishable in the end, or rather, our end.To do this, we go against the pace of the emergency, resisting its terms and conditions, which numb us from so much. ² This “we” is not the kind of “we” that levels difference or proclaims to speak for others. Maggie Nelson writes in her book On Freedom, “…our entire existence, including our freedoms and unfreedoms, is built upon a “we” instead of an “I,” that we are dependent upon each other, as well as upon nonhuman forces that exceed our understanding or control.” (Maggie Nelson, On freedom: Four songs of care and constraint (Minneapolis MN: Graywolf Press, 2022) 10-11.)
It is also akin to the Aboriginal Rights group in Queensland and indigenous artist and activist Lilla Watson’s declaration: “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” In these paradigms, “we” are tightly and inextricably knotted. Instead, we engage in a counter practice of slow, situated and reparative reading, pouring over the works of Amitav Ghosh, Jamaica Kincaid, Robert Macfarlane, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Donna J. Haraway, Rachel Carson, and so many other canaries in a coal mine who continue singing across time, sometimes in a whisper and at other times, in a chorus.

Whether enacted collectively or alone, silently or aloud, slow reading allows time to pause, rewind, doubt and pursue what at first sight may be tangents. ³ Slow reading is a methodology collectively developed by the Slow Readers during COVID and lockdown. Initiated as a part of my research fellowship at V2 Lab for the Unstable Media, the project took place online over the course of six months. Through reading relevant texts, we looked at AI and gender inequality. Aside from informing my approach, reading Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living* by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela was especially relevant to understanding our interdependency. I still remember that day sitting in my garden cottage, reading it aloud together while being apart in isolation. Confined to tiny squares on the screen, as we talked about the intricacies of living systems, messages from other gardeners suddenly poured in on my phone. An eagle owl had escaped from the neighbouring zoo and was sitting in the Dawn Redwood on my plot. I ran outside and tilted my laptop upwards for the Slow Readers to see it. While I wasn’t sure if it was visible on the screen, that moment nonetheless felt stranger than fiction, a reminder in a surreal and mostly online time that the physical world was still out there and shared with other creatures. I am eternally thankful for that owl disrupting and simultaneously grounding our reading. My heartfelt gratitude goes out to all the Slow Readers whose sharpness and generosity anchored me during the untethered life of lockdown. The Slow Readers bios can be found here. See Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living Dordrecht NL: D. Reidel Publishing, 1980.

Analogous to gardening, it is a means of tending to and being in attendance with what is read. As the Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers points out: “speed demands and creates an insensitivity to everything that might slow things down: the frictions, the rubbing, the hesitations that make us feel we are not alone in the world.” ⁴Isabelle Stengers, Another Science Is Possible: A Manifesto for Slow Science (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), 70. Urgency abounds, but we must not become desensitized under the pressure of its pace. Stengers argues for deceleration, noting: “Slowing down means becoming capable of learning again, becoming acquainted with things again, reweaving the bounds of interdependency.” ⁵Ibid. Although counter-intuitive amid multiple crises, slow reading hits the pause button and summons, as if by séance, an incongruous temporality.

Within that parallel time zone, slow reading acclimates itself to subtle movements and listens closely to declarations of doubt. Wait, I’m confused. There’s just something I’m not getting. Without hesitation, we recalibrate, adjusting to linger with the lost or even admit that we ourselves are lost too. There is solidarity as we have all been there. R-E-A-D-I-N-G, in this way, is a practice that consciously aligns itself with the seemingly negative associations of slowness–of not being clever, lacking efficiency, not getting things done and simply not knowing. Rather than a hindrance, these qualities are generative. They create an opening for exploring questions, giving attention to shimmering lights in the margins and accounting for things escaping words altogether. As the British nature writer Robert Macfarlane observes:

There are experiences of landscape that will always resist articulation, and of which words offer only a remote echo – or to which silence is by far the best response. Nature does not name itself. Granite does not self-identify as igneous. Light has no grammar. Language is always late for its subject.⁶ Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks (London: Penguin Books, 2016), 10.

 

In reading, ever so slowly at a snail’s pace, we listen to distant echoes. Continuously thumbing through pages and fumbling for words, we preserve placeholders for the unsaid and silences. ⁷Within my teaching practice, the presence of silence has always interested me. What does it do, how is it palpable, and how might its impact, if not lessons, be understood? I am fascinated by more abstract notions of silence as articulated and evoked by John Cage and Pauline Oliveros. But also, there are political understandings of silence. In the Mother of All Questions: Further Feminisms, Rebecca Solnit writes about layers of silence, saying: “In the landscape of silence, the three realms might be: silence imposed from within; silence imposed from without; and silence that exists around what has not yet been named, recognized, described, or admitted. But they are not distinct; they feed each other; and what is unsayable becomes unknowable and vice versa, until something breaks.” In another life, with more time and, yes, silence, I would like to explore and unpack these ideas further.



For more read Rebecca Solnit, Mother of All Questions: Further Feminisms, London: Granta, 2017, 28. We nurture places for what may have been and the yet-to-be. ⁸Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 146.

Rather than championing the avant-garde, slow reading fosters falling behind, failing to comprehend, stopping and taking time to follow up. Sorry to interrupt you, but can we go back and read that last part of the sentence again? Yes, slow reading allows space for falling behind, failing to comprehend, stopping and taking time to follow up. Slow reading rejects hierarchy, cold, critical analysis, disavows any illusions of mastery and does not surrender to the linear. Without seeking definitive interpretations, it relishes in the complexity of entwined and contradictory knowledge(s).

However, slow reading does not happen in a vacuum or in the imagined ethereal solitude of the mind. It is a situated and embodied practice operating from the perspective that all texts are permeable and influenced by material conditions, place, time, mood, memories, histories and the present. Borrowing from Donna Haraway, it is the opposite of “a view from above, from nowhere.” ⁹Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective”, Feminist Studies, 14, no. 3 (Autumn 1988): 575-599. Instead of objectivity, it holds dear the modesty of a partial view and the premise that context matters and matter forms and informs.

In the garden, situated reading roots firmly with feet planted into the ground. It is immersed in the muck and imbued with a mixture of scents, sensations; the itchy sting of mosquitos in summer and the frosty bite of cold in winter. ¹⁰One of my cherished reading experiences was with Kate Price, an artist whose work engages in garden practices and Irina Shapiro, who I mentioned earlier. In the middle of winter, we sat under the dying tomato vines in the waning warmth of the allotment’s glasshouse. Snacking on the few remaining yellow tomatoes, we discussed whether the vines should be cleaned away or allowed to collapse from the trellises and self-seed. We read two chapters, The Garden in Winter and The Glass House,  from Jamaica Kincaid’s My Garden (Book). Kincaid’s words reminded me that the glasshouse is a colonial legacy where the bounty of there is violently extracted to accrue wealth for here. It was the first time we ever read together, and for some reason, that session stuck with me the most. I am grateful to Kate and Irina for that day in the greenhouse. Both have been pivotal in expanding my thoughts and garden bibliography. While we struggle to synchronise our schedules, our scarce and gem-like reading time has been invaluable to me.

See Jamaica Kincaid, My Garden (Book), London: Vintage, 1999.As an unfolding process amongst us humans and more-than-humans, reading is subject to diurnal, crepuscular and nocturnal stretches and flows. Here, porosity is a virtue, connecting us to ourselves and various others, with their own rhythms of being. I’m a blip on that rock’s timeline, and that annual has gone to seed. Here, lessons abound, or as the anthropologist Tim Ingold notes:

The world itself becomes a place of study, a university that includes not just professional teachers and registered students, dragooned into their academic departments, but people everywhere, along with all the other creatures with which (or whom) we share our lives and the lands in which we – and they – live. ¹¹Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2013), 2.

Here, there are no heads down with noses buried in books to escape reality. On the contrary, poetry and prose are fleshy, connective tissues weaving us into the world, binding the animate, inanimate, singular, plural, the ground elder, the stone, the bumblebee and the tiniest shrew. Here, at last, we are not alone and potentially greater than our sum. To repeat, we are tuning in and turning towards when we read in the garden. It is not because it’s Edenic, it’s not because it’s stress-free, it’s not that we are liberated from distraction. Again, to the contrary, it’s because the garden is, as Jamaica Kincaid observed in her essay The Disturbances of the Garden, a contentious site of past trauma and ongoing crisis. ¹²Jamaica Kincaid, “The Disturbances of the Garden”. The New Yorker, August 30, 2020. Any urban or rural garden bears witness to the violent legacies wrought by colonisation. Think of Carl Linnaeus and his binomial nomenclature of plants, or hydrangeas, introduced to Europe by the Dutch East India Company. History seeks reckoning even in our garden. Or consider the scorching summers bereft of rain and how such parched conditions speak to forests burning across the globe. Here, the grand narratives and minor stories crisscross so tightly they cannot be unpicked.

You see, when we gather in this humble bit of cultivated green, we engage in what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, poet, teacher and queer scholar, would call a reparative reading. ¹³I want to acknowledge the many animated conversations I had with the artist and writer Amy Pickles while she was studying at the Piet Zwart Institute. At that time, she was thinking through scripts and what it means to read aloud and hold the words of another in your mouth as an act of care. Together, we talked about the work of Sedgwick and the potential of reparative reading. I was graced and grateful to have such thoughtful exchanges with Amy, where I truly learned so much. In her educational work, she has a way of transforming the most theoretical concepts into something lived and grasped through all of the senses. In her beautiful meditation on queerness, literature, and the Aids crisis, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, she writes:

Hope, often a fracturing, even a traumatic thing to experience, is among the energies by which the reparatively positioned reader tries to organise the fragments and part-objects she encounters or creates. Because the reader has room to realise that the future may be different from the present, it is also possible for her to entertain such profoundly painful, profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities as that the past, in turn, could have happened differently from the way it actually did. ¹⁴Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (n 8) 146.

 

With each word, pause, hesitation, or stammer, we pick up pieces, mourn, imagine a whole that resists being stitched too tight, and dream, if not plot otherwise. While wide-eyed and sober about what is, we seek reparation in the gaps. This is a labour of tenderness, and care. ¹⁵While the educator and curriculum designer Lisanne Janssen worked on her thesis at the Piet Zwart Institute, we had numerous discussions about the relationship between gardening and education. Tending to, being in attendance with, and tenderness were words that continually punctuated our talks. We also spoke of the history of women’s labour, often invisible and repetitive and of darning socks, mending clothes, and giving attention to something or someone through small gestures as a form of care and love. Through Lisanne’s sensitive and nuanced reflections, she helped refine my thinking about the value of these subtle acts. To read is to hold words, touch them and be touched by them. And although this can be a centering act, we read not to centre ourselves but instead to feel our interdependency. María Puig de la Bellacasa writes in Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds, “Affirming the absurdity of disentangling human and nonhuman relations of care and the ethicalities involved requires decentering human agencies, as well as remaining close to the predicaments and inheritances of situated human doings.” ¹⁶María Puig de La Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds (Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 2. Here in the garden, we vibrate amongst other reverberations. As we engage in slow, situated and reparative reading, we are quilting ourselves back into an imperfect but illustrious patchwork. This is not a manifesto; it’s a manifestation. ¹⁷In the Autumn of 2022, an early version of this text was read aloud together with the Reading Rhythms Club in my garden house. I want to thank all of you for embodying these written words, liberating them from the page and making them manifest through speech. Your polyphonic voices remain in my ears. By tending to and being in attendance with all that surrounds us in the garden, we are in a state of becoming in our differences together.