On Gardens and Other Inheritances – A Reading by Jamaica Kincaid

In this reading and conversation, Kincaid reflects on the intimate and complex relationship between writing, motherhood, and gardening — a connection first cultivated through her mother, whose garden became both a source of wonder and a site of instruction. Over the years, this relationship grew into a central metaphor in Kincaid’s work, where gardens appear as spaces of beauty and care, but also of domination and erasure — microcosms of colonial history.


Kincaid will speak about the generative and destructive qualities of gardening, the act of cultivation as an expression of both love and control, and the ways in which tending to the land can become an act of resistance and reparation.


Jamaica Kincaid is currently in Berlin as part of her fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin.


Tickets include admission to the exhibition.

 

Jamaica Kincaid is a writer and Professor Emerita of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She holds honorary degrees from Amherst College, Tufts University, Middlebury College, and the University of the West Indies, among others. Celebrated for her evocative reflections on family, memory, gender, colonialism, her native Antigua, and gardening, Kincaid is the author of numerous award-winning and widely translated essays, short stories, and novels, including At the Bottom of the River (1983), Annie John (1985), Lucy (1990), A Small Place (1988), The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), My Brother (1997), Mr. Potter (2002), Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalayas (2005), See Now Then (2013), and most recently An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children (with Kara Walker, 2024). Her “Talk of the Town” columns for The New Yorker appeared in Talk Stories (2001). She is the winner of the 2022 Paris Review Hadada Prize for Lifetime Achievement, the 2017 Dan David Prize, a 2014 American Book Award, and the 2000 Prix Femina Étranger, among many other honors. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009.