Dispersals
Following Turning and Two Trees Make a Forest, Jessica J. Lee recently published her third book. Dispersals, On Plants, Borders and Belonging consists of fourteen personal essays about plants crossing borders and putting down roots in new places. Lee chooses several trees, shrubs and algae, which hold meaning in her own life, to engage with their history and journeys into different parts of the world. In doing so, she questions under what circumstances species are considered either cosmopolitan or invasive. In the preface, she explains that she wrote Dispersals in a period when she herself, unexpectedly, moved several times – from Berlin to London to Cambridge and back to Berlin – and when her life underwent drastic changes. Not only was it the time of the coronavirus pandemic, but also, she became a mother.
In Dispersals, Lee narrates how her mother, after migrating to Canada, replicates a bit of Taiwan there by building a koi pond in their back yard, filled with iris and papyrus. Plants or landscapes can evoke a feeling of home in people, although in a way it is an illusion that they belong to certain places, as Lee illustrates especially in her chapter “Words for Tea”. She remembers the different tea traditions she grew up with, each connected to the Welsh or Taiwanese parts of her family. The encounter of these different tea traditions within her own family allows her to trace the journey of the tea plant across various world regions and, simultaneously, to criticize colonial power dynamics. Particularly these colonial links highlighted by Lee are relevant to poco.lit. She explains how in the age of colonial expansion, not only potatoes, tomatoes, or tobacco found their way to Europe, but also European flora was planted in the newly acquired colonial territories. She takes a critical look at the practice of ordering and classifying nature according to European concepts, as well as at the role of plant hunters who concealed local knowledge, making it invisible. As Lee notes, “[k]nowledges and histories shift depending on who’s doing the storytelling”.
What is clear is that plants are on the move – just like humans. This requires a lot of adaptation. In a soothingly calm manner, Lee devotes herself to both her own insecurities in a changing world and to broader questions of colonial contexts. As in her previous two books, her writing is self-reflexive, well-informed and accurately observant. Even in her criticism, a certain care for the earth, its plants and humans, emerges from her thoughtful words. This approach is particularly evident in her last and perhaps most intimate essay, “Synonyms for ‘Mauve’”, a poignant letter addressed to her daughter, and an attempt to find beauty and maintain hope.
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