Garden Inventories: Reflections on Land, Place and Belonging
In Garden Inventories: Reflections on Land, Place and Belonging, scholar Mariam Pirbhai looks carefully at the square of land she has called home in Southern Ontario for the past seventeen years, which she notes is a milestone for her, and asks how long it takes to be rooted to a place? And what does that truly mean? Seeing the landscape around her with the layered experience of a childhood spent wandering the world, Pirbhai shares her efforts to create a garden and understand her new home. From the strange North American obsession with non-fruiting fruit trees to the naming conventions of plants that erase their heritage, she casts a sharp eye on the choices that have shaped our gardens, and our society. Pirbhai considers wildflowers and weeds, our obsession with lawns, the choices in our plant nurseries and even our Canadian dedication to the cottage with warmth and humour. The result is a delightful collection of essays that invites the reader to see the beautiful complexity of the land around us all in a new way.
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Mariam Pirbhai is the author of a novel titled Isolated Incident (Mawenzi 2022) featured among CBC's "65 Works of Fiction to Watch for in Fall 2022" and a short story collection titled Outside People and Other Stories (Inanna 2017), winner of the IPPY and American BookFest Awards. Pirbhai is a Professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier University, where she teaches and specializes in postcolonial studies and creative writing. She is also the author or editor of several academic books on the global South Asian diaspora, including Mythologies of Migration, Vocabularies of Indenture: Novels of the South Asian Diaspora in Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia-Pacific (University of Toronto Press 2009) and Critical Perspectives on Indo-Caribbean Women's Literature (Routledge 2013). Pirbhai has served as President of CAPS (Canadian Association of Postcolonial Studies, formerly CACLALS), Canada's longest-running scholarly association devoted to postcolonial and global anglophone literatures. Pirbhai is the daughter of Pakistani immigrants whose arrival in Canada followed a circuitous route from England, the United Arab Emirates and the Philippines. She and her husband live in Waterloo, Ontario.
"Reading Isolated Incident is not unlike receiving a series of pinpricks that ultimately form a bruise in the reader's heart, reminding them of their relationship to the deeply rooted Islamophobia in Canada."
- Quill & Quire"Mariam Pirbhai's debut novel, Isolated Incident, is anything but evasive in its dismantling of the great Canadian immigration myth. The novel's intricately patterned characterization, drawn from the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), mirrors the 'mosaic' analogy that popularly describes the multicultural diversity of Canada. However, beyond this obvious parallel, the plot thickens to confront the fragility of Canada's global image as a haven for the world's underprivileged."
- Journal of Postcolonial Writing"Unflinching and clear-eyed, [in Outside People and Other Stories] Pirbhai makes protagonists out of those who have often been relegated to background roles, to stunning effect."
- Open Book"What a veritable garden of delights this collection of essays is! Organic, knowledgeable and insightful. Pirbhai recounts her journey as an 'émigré-settler' in a fine poetic style, tripping down memory lane with ease, building a rich tapestry of deliciously vivid memories stretching across continents. Her political awareness and cultural depth are layered with humour and self-irony. I was genuinely sorry when I got to the end."
- Rukhsana Ahmad, author of Song for a Sanctuary and River on Fire"A novice tree planter and gardener and self-described émigré-settler on Indigenous lands in Canada, Mariam Pirbhai's cascading essays in Garden Inventories: Reflections on Land, Place and Belonging are an enticing metaphoray, as Robin Wall Kimmerer states it, a walk through one's world with all of the senses - mind, body, emotion, spirit and imagination - in search of home. Pirbhai's keen observations of North American obsessions in gardening, her musings aloud on land and ownership, and the often unspoken relationship with Indigenous peoples, are informative and revealing. She invites readers to take a meditative walk through time with her as she names, compares, evaluates and reconciles the life of plants and trees native and non-native to North America, to the Grand River region and to the small garden that she and her husband tend to in southern Ontario."
- Rita Bouvier, author of A Beautiful Rebellion"At a time of increasing dislocation around the globe and a massive re-evaluation of what it means to have the pleasure and privilege of roots in a place, Mariam Pirbhai's Garden Inventories: Reflections on Land, Place and Belonging asks us whether there are other ways to create and sustain relationships with the land besides birthright. Moving from the many locations she has called home over the years to the small piece of land on which she currently lives and gardens with her husband, Pirbhai notes, 'We have brought our own stories of land and homeland to this garden, as we listen carefully to the stories that it has, in turn, shared with us.' Whether exploring on the keen focus on gardening in North America or the fraught concept of land 'ownership, ' she is, above all things, attending closely to place and holding her many landscapes in intimate, revealing conversation."
- Jenna Butler, author of Revery: A Year of Bees and A Profession of Hope: Farming on the Edge of the Grizzly Trail"Garden Inventories explores ways to decolonize our desire to create home on native land. Mariam Pirbhai and her husband are descendants of immigrants from Pakistan and Guatemala. For the last seventeen years, they've been making home in Waterloo, Ontario. Their migrant histories have given them contrapuntal vision that sees between what they learned in other places and the place where they now live. It's not lost on them that their new neighbourhood is called Colonial Acres. In essays that defamiliarize the global migration of roses, the cultural hegemony of lawns, the multigenerational rite of 'going to the cottage' and their effects on Indigenous lives and biomes, Pirbhai tracks between what she learned from the lands that were and what she's now learning from the land that is about how to participate in a new balance that can foster a healthy land that will be for the future."
- Daniel Coleman, author of Yardwork: A Biography of an Urban Place"In Garden Inventories, award-winning fiction writer, émigré and nature-watcher extraordinaire Mariam Pirbhai compels us to look twice at everything - from lawns to the Precambrian Shield to mulberries in her garden - for what they are, here and now, and what they represent elsewhere and in another time. With delightful and intelligent prose, Pirbhai crosses nature-nurture, east-west and observer-tinkerer divides in the world of plants. Each chapter is an exuberant local journey of curiosities and sensibilities, eschewing nostalgia. This makes for a refreshing, essential addition to Canadian nature-writing literature."
- Madhur Anand, Governor General's Literary Award winner for Nonfiction and Professor of Ecology
