Last Sunday, Rohan and I made our last trip down to
the gardens. It wasn’t very sunny and a bit chilly in the morning, but the
plants in the garden look great with the drizzling April shower that went that
went on the whole day the day before. We reached the garden around 11am, and
surprise surprise, no one else was there, save for two teenage boys strumming
on their guitars in the shaded area. The only thing we can do was go to the
inside of the shed and figure out what we should do from the list taped into
the back of the door. However, that list was a bit hard for me to understand. I
had to figure out what “mulch” is (according to Wikipedia, it is a layer of material applied to the
surface of an area of soil,
and in our case that meant the pile of bark chips over by the parking lot), or
how to differentiate the unwanted weeds from the carefully tended plants. I had
no idea where the “grape arbor” was and what was the “shaded area”, or what the
“compost bin” looks like. The list was as confusing to me as someone who orders
at the Starbucks for the first time. Trying to figure out the “tall, grande,
venti, trenta” system takes some time if you don’t speak Italian, don’t worry
we have all been there. The thing is, without the basic knowledge of gardening
or the basic understanding of the garden’s system and layout, I could not carry
out the instructions even though it was written very clearly. I did not have
the social competence to understand the words situated in a social context and
a culture that I knew nothing about. The
words on the list are layered with meanings that only exist in the culture
within the garden itself, and as an outsider, these words meant nothing to me, and
google was not helping by telling me that “weeds” are “a pest to the plants”
but not how they should look like in this particular bed. So instead, I just had to hope for the best
and wish that I did not pull out any plants that someone has been carefully
tending to for the past couple of months.
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| The Garden Beds |
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| The to-do list |
I decided that maybe the two guys playing on their guitar
would be able to help me out. It did not worked out the way I planned though,
as they couldn’t care less about this garden. Don’t get me wrong, they
definitely felt comfortable to be inside the garden, and think of themselves as
locals who belong there, but they did not care about the garden. “I don’t know,
throw some seeds on the ground, maybe”, might not be the most enthusiastic
answer to tell a volunteer here on work day. But I did gleam some information
from them about an event that is going to happen later in the day. As we were
working, a grandmother brought her grand kids over to the garden. They weren’t
gardening though, but instead, they took a walk around the garden admiring the
beds, and the kids decided that this place was perfect to play catch and
started running around and doing cartwheels on the field. That was when I
realized that this garden is more than a place you can get fresh food from, but
a shared community space where everyone is welcomed. It also acted as a
community park to the locals.
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| Rohan mulching the walkways, with the two guys playing the guitars at the back |
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Took me some time to figure this out but this is the Grape Arbor
Later on, Ken showed up with his other class to do a
presentation on their project at the garden, and the people started trickling
in. What was peculiar was that none of the people that showed up belong in the
local community, save for Mother Dawn and the two guys jamming on their guitar,
even though the event was to reach out to the community and the project was
mainly to serve the people from the community. The power dynamics shifted
dramatically from the hands of the locals who felt they belong there, and from
the hands of Mother Dawn who was giving us work instructions (finally!), into
the hands of the students and the academia from the university who took over
the shaded area and decorated it according what they thought was aesthetically
pleasing. Their gesture might be well-meaning, but it seems that by altering
the appearance of the area, they are transforming the space into something the
locals are not familiar and comfortable with. What they are doing here is
making what the locals think of as “our space” into “their space”, and
naturally, the locals present at the garden were not very interested in listening
to a bunch of students talking about a project that they don’t really care
about. What was happening there was that the locals are actually leaving as
more outsiders form a majority of the group and overpower the local’s presence
and claim of ownership. It was interesting to observe how majority rules might
translate into power, and how power dynamics can shift under the sheer force of
numbers. Authority was transferred from the hands of Mother Dawn into the hands
of Ken as he took charge of that event. I was fun for us to listen to people
jamming on their guitars and students presenting with their posters, but it
might not be something that the locals would enjoy. Sometimes, it take effort
for us to negotiate between the interest of the outsiders versus the locals,
especially when one does not have the social or cultural competence to get by around
a social and physical space.
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| Guitar performance at the presentation |
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