IRA MATHUR
This week, Bookshelf trains its spotlight on Trinidad-born writer and psychotherapist Marchelle Farrell, whose debut memoir Uprooting (Canongate Books) won the Nan Shepherd Prize.
A consultant psychiatrist and psychotherapist based in the UK, Farrell, also an amateur gardener, says she “spends a lot of time outdoors getting to know her country garden in Somerset and writing about what the garden teaches her about herself.”
Farrell calls the process of writing her memoir a “compulsion” that “grew out of the soil of this English garden into which I found myself locked at the beginning of the pandemic, just months after the sudden upheaval and relocation of our lives here.”
Farrell reveals that when she moved to the UK more than two decades back, she “never dreamed of living in the countryside.”
Yet she found herself “following a strange, strong pull to this land.” Farrell says she wrote the memoir “to make sense of the story of my life unfolding before me, of unplanned but inexorable new paths and horizons and to find the thread of how my story was entangled with those whose lives had come before and had shaped mine.”
Farrell writes to “make sense of things in a world that often seems mad. We are a meaning-making species, and we shape the world around us through the stories we tell ourselves about how it works. In a time of multiple, connected crises that threaten our thriving and survival as a species, we need different stories that help us see the world in another light, to shape it anew.”
On the intersectional nature between therapy and writing, she says, “This is a therapist’s work, on the individual scale, in the intimacy of the treatment room. To uproot the true story lying behind the mind’s defences and delusions. On a much wider stage, it is also the writer’s task to help us collectively see the truth of ourselves.”
Farrell calls her memoir “a love letter to place. To the place that has surprised me by so lovingly welcoming me and my family, and to the place that birthed me, the root of it all, a way to write my way home.”
EXCERPT Uprooting with permission from the publisher, Canongate Books, exclusively for the Sunday Guardian:
“I am still deeply missing my childhood landscape, wistful and nostalgic for the gardens I grew up in. I remember sitting on the green-painted back steps, a blaze of Antigua heath cascading down beside them. Our cat would hide among the flowers and try to hunt the birds that came to feed on the nectar. Big-eye grieves would sing their warning call, and dive-bomb her hiding place until she slunk away. I remember the huge gmelina, long racemes of maroon and yellow cascading over the gate at the side of the driveway. Next to it the datura, the devil’s trumpet. Large, creamy-white, bell-shaped flowers with their drowsily heavy scent laying thick over the bottom of the garden every evening. Its touch was poison, a deadly beauty.
Other night-scented beauties gave life. The jasmine, flowers shining like stars, whose leaves were used for tea. And my father’s favourite, the lime hedge from which he made lime-bud tea; it flowered sweetly just before the rains. Evenings also brought the bats to the calabash tree. They pollinated the night-blooming flowers, creating the large gourds that would follow as fruit. And at the back of the house a bank of ginger lilies growing as high as the roof, brightly marked spiders living among them. The house on many levels, ground level on one side, one floor up on the other, a basement level carved into the steeply sloping hillside in which it was set. That home and garden no longer exist, sold and demolished to build a huge new house occupying almost the entire plot. Even if I could fly back to Trinidad again, I can never go back home. My heart keens at the truth of it.
A friend recommends that I read Jamaica Kincaid’s My Garden (Book):. I search out a copy online – it is not easy to get hold of, seeming not to be currently in print in the UK. When it arrives I immerse myself in it like she immerses herself in the bath with a seed catalogue. It is a delight to read, and I chuckle along with her observations of being someone from the Caribbean gardening in a temperate place. She was born in Antigua and the book largely deals with her experience of making and tending her garden in Vermont. I read along with deep pleasure, and then one chapter, ‘What Joseph Banks Wrought’, punches me in the gut.
There, on a page, she lists common plants of the Antiguan garden, also common to the gardens of my childhood, and notes that none of them belong to the Caribbean at all. Bougainvillea, plumbago, croton, hibiscus, allamanda, poinsettia, bird of paradise, flamboyant ... Relentlessly she goes on and on, naming the flowers I have loved and missed, flowers of my grandmother’s and mother’s gardens. They were all imported under colonialism. She asks who now might know what the island looked like before all that? No one knows, there is no memory of it.
I am devastated. I realise that I do not know my island at all. That all that I am homesick for is a colonial creation; I have been raised to love a lie. The meaning of that love has been annihilated. It was not only the roses of my grandmother’s garden that were alien imports; none of her flowers belonged there. Her great-grandmother, the one who was rumoured to be native to the Caribbean, would have viewed the garden I grew up in as foreign territory. I have been rendered even more profoundly homeless in the world, the comfort of the gardens of my childhood proven false.
Blindsided by grief, I go out and walk agitatedly through the woods and up along the path that climbs the hill above the village. All of this landscape is actively managed and maintained, and I realise as I walk that even here, in the English countryside, this landscape that I am gazing on is a colonial creation. Dear Marchelle
Indigenous ancestors of this place would view my garden here, these neatly hedged and divided fields, as foreign territory. It strikes me that the only truly wild places free from human curation and management are the weedy verges, just as it was in the city. This country landscape is no more free from the scars of colonialism than I am.
As I walk I remember my favourite places to visit back home, our family trips to the remote northeast coastline, where fishing was the main trade and the land was never cultivated. I think about trips into the interior of Tobago, guided hikes into the rainforest of the Main Ridge Forest Reserve, the oldest conservation forest in the world. That landscape was conserved after the arrival of the wave of colonisers so set on bending landscapes and people to their will, but those pockets of remote land perhaps offer the last clues to what the island might have once been. I understand why I have loved them the most. I get to the top of the hill and turn back to look at the view over the valley, the village’s church spire rising above the trees. To my wetly colonised eyes, it is beautiful.”
–End of Excerpt
Marchelle Farrell will present her memoir Uprooting at the 2024 upcoming NGC Bocas Lit Fest in Trinidad.
Ira Mathur is a Trinidad Guardian writer and the winner of the 2023 Non-Fiction Bocas Prize for Literature. www.irasroom.org
Queries by woman authors interested in being featured by Sunday Guardian Bookshelf can be sent to Ira Mathur at irasroom@gmail.com
