Rough Trade Books x Garden Museum: Testimonies on the History of Jamaica vol.1
Testimonies on the History of Jamaica vol.1: Or a General Survey on Things That Have Been Said About the Ancient and Modern State of That Island | By Zakiya Mckenzie
The idea of ‘the garden’ is a complicated, curious thing. They loom large in the imagination—a locus of desire, aspiration, colonisation, care, effort, property, land and ownership, loss and literature.
Rough Trade Books partnered with the Garden Museum to create a set of pamphlets examining all of these ideas and more, with a group of writers and gardeners generating new work inspired in some way by our notions of all things green and pleasant, or perhaps less so.
Has there ever been so much rich thought around the radical potential of gardening, with so much urgency surrounding how we maintain our little bits of earth, of the meaning that plants carry?
History was written—England captured Jamaica from the Spaniards under Oliver Cromwell in 1655. Much of this history has been retold by Edward Long, best known for his first socio-economic and political study The History of Jamaica. His polemic supported the enslavement of African and Caribbean people and the monopolies and monocultures played out through the natural environment.
These testimonies address some of Long’s claims. A slave woman tells of the naming of Catherine’s Peak and the erasure of the achievements of Black Jamaicans in the field of natural history. A mystic takes us back to the Spanish occupation. The maroons Juan de Bolas and Juan de Serras grieve their fate and the tragic future that came with sugarcane. These are imaginings of what the people who lived through this wrestling of Jamaica might have said, given the chance.
Testimonies on the History of Jamaica vol.1: Or a General Survey on Things That Have Been Said About the Ancient and Modern State of That Island | By Zakiya Mckenzie
The idea of ‘the garden’ is a complicated, curious thing. They loom large in the imagination—a locus of desire, aspiration, colonisation, care, effort, property, land and ownership, loss and literature.
Rough Trade Books partnered with the Garden Museum to create a set of pamphlets examining all of these ideas and more, with a group of writers and gardeners generating new work inspired in some way by our notions of all things green and pleasant, or perhaps less so.
Has there ever been so much rich thought around the radical potential of gardening, with so much urgency surrounding how we maintain our little bits of earth, of the meaning that plants carry?
History was written—England captured Jamaica from the Spaniards under Oliver Cromwell in 1655. Much of this history has been retold by Edward Long, best known for his first socio-economic and political study The History of Jamaica. His polemic supported the enslavement of African and Caribbean people and the monopolies and monocultures played out through the natural environment.
These testimonies address some of Long’s claims. A slave woman tells of the naming of Catherine’s Peak and the erasure of the achievements of Black Jamaicans in the field of natural history. A mystic takes us back to the Spanish occupation. The maroons Juan de Bolas and Juan de Serras grieve their fate and the tragic future that came with sugarcane. These are imaginings of what the people who lived through this wrestling of Jamaica might have said, given the chance.
Testimonies on the History of Jamaica vol.1: Or a General Survey on Things That Have Been Said About the Ancient and Modern State of That Island | By Zakiya Mckenzie
The idea of ‘the garden’ is a complicated, curious thing. They loom large in the imagination—a locus of desire, aspiration, colonisation, care, effort, property, land and ownership, loss and literature.
Rough Trade Books partnered with the Garden Museum to create a set of pamphlets examining all of these ideas and more, with a group of writers and gardeners generating new work inspired in some way by our notions of all things green and pleasant, or perhaps less so.
Has there ever been so much rich thought around the radical potential of gardening, with so much urgency surrounding how we maintain our little bits of earth, of the meaning that plants carry?
History was written—England captured Jamaica from the Spaniards under Oliver Cromwell in 1655. Much of this history has been retold by Edward Long, best known for his first socio-economic and political study The History of Jamaica. His polemic supported the enslavement of African and Caribbean people and the monopolies and monocultures played out through the natural environment.
These testimonies address some of Long’s claims. A slave woman tells of the naming of Catherine’s Peak and the erasure of the achievements of Black Jamaicans in the field of natural history. A mystic takes us back to the Spanish occupation. The maroons Juan de Bolas and Juan de Serras grieve their fate and the tragic future that came with sugarcane. These are imaginings of what the people who lived through this wrestling of Jamaica might have said, given the chance.
