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Unearthing

E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
416 Seiten
Englisch
ONEerschienen am07.03.2024
A gripping and emotionally eloquent memoir about a family secret revealed by a DNA test, the lessons learned in its aftermath, and the transformative possibilities of growing plants __________ 'Magnificent...I will never forget it' Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love 'A mind-altering and supremely generous exploration of kinship, selfhood, memory, and the roots we share across time, space and species' Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything 'In this beautiful book Kyo Maclear unravels the knotty stories we inherit - and create - about who we are and where we come from. With deftness and clarity she ranges from meditations on memory, belonging and truth, to the earthy tangibility of the garden. Fierce, loving, inquisitive, devastating - this book got under my nails and into my heart. I loved it' Lulah Ellender, author of Grounding __________ Three months after Kyo Maclear's father dies in December 2018, she gets the result of a DNA test showing that she and the father who raised her are not biologically related. Suddenly Maclear becomes a detective in her own life, desperately seeking answers from her ailing mother whose memories and English are failing. Maclear no longer speaks Japanese, her mother's first language, so she turns to her mother's second fluent tongue: the wild and green language of soil, seed, leaf and mulch. Can the humble act of tending a garden provide common ground for an inquisitive daughter and her complicated mother? What role does storytelling play in unearthing the past and making sense of a life? What gets planted and what gets buried? Unearthing is a captivating and propulsive story of inheritance that goes far beyond heredity, full of unflinching insights into grief, loyalty and the relationship between mothers and daughters.

Kyo Maclear is an award-winning novelist, essayist, and children's author. Her books have been translated into eighteen languages and published in over twenty-five countries. She is the author of the hybrid memoir Birds Art Life (2017), winner of the Trillium Book Award. Kyo holds a doctorate in environmental humanities and is on faculty at the University of Guelph Creative Writing MFA.mehr
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BuchGebunden
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TaschenbuchKartoniert, Paperback
EUR21,00
E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
EUR15,59

Produkt

KlappentextA gripping and emotionally eloquent memoir about a family secret revealed by a DNA test, the lessons learned in its aftermath, and the transformative possibilities of growing plants __________ 'Magnificent...I will never forget it' Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love 'A mind-altering and supremely generous exploration of kinship, selfhood, memory, and the roots we share across time, space and species' Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything 'In this beautiful book Kyo Maclear unravels the knotty stories we inherit - and create - about who we are and where we come from. With deftness and clarity she ranges from meditations on memory, belonging and truth, to the earthy tangibility of the garden. Fierce, loving, inquisitive, devastating - this book got under my nails and into my heart. I loved it' Lulah Ellender, author of Grounding __________ Three months after Kyo Maclear's father dies in December 2018, she gets the result of a DNA test showing that she and the father who raised her are not biologically related. Suddenly Maclear becomes a detective in her own life, desperately seeking answers from her ailing mother whose memories and English are failing. Maclear no longer speaks Japanese, her mother's first language, so she turns to her mother's second fluent tongue: the wild and green language of soil, seed, leaf and mulch. Can the humble act of tending a garden provide common ground for an inquisitive daughter and her complicated mother? What role does storytelling play in unearthing the past and making sense of a life? What gets planted and what gets buried? Unearthing is a captivating and propulsive story of inheritance that goes far beyond heredity, full of unflinching insights into grief, loyalty and the relationship between mothers and daughters.

Kyo Maclear is an award-winning novelist, essayist, and children's author. Her books have been translated into eighteen languages and published in over twenty-five countries. She is the author of the hybrid memoir Birds Art Life (2017), winner of the Trillium Book Award. Kyo holds a doctorate in environmental humanities and is on faculty at the University of Guelph Creative Writing MFA.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9781911590965
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen
FormatE101
Verlag
Erscheinungsjahr2024
Erscheinungsdatum07.03.2024
Seiten416 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse3263 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.14066110
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe



THE BEGINNING


when my father died and i was still his daughter in all ways and without question, I began making weekly visits to a public greenhouse. For seven Mondays, I rode the streetcar across town to warm myself in a glass building full of plants. No one had warned me that hard-hitting losses sometimes take the form of ordinary problems such as temperature-related discomfort. I had not seen this play out in stories, so I was not prepared for the cold current that entered my body and spread like ice through my veins. I did not know ski gloves and wool fleece would be my mourning vestments.

For seven Mondays, I sat with leaves the size of airplane wings under a glistening dome. I basked in winter sunshine, buried myself among the dripping fronds of palms and cycads. The busy trees put on a good show as I folded inward, as the vines tunneled through me, binding the grief. Slow, slow, the leaves and petals moved at a pace I understood.

For seven Mondays after my father died, I came to this glass church to sit with the plants and feel their deep sweat. It now occurs to me with some curiosity and a little sadness that people, particularly the faithless and those without reliable rituals, grieve in unusual places and that these places are not always so obvious. We all have ideas about what happens after a loved one dies but these ideas are often wrong or, at least, incomplete-because everyone has a different grief and, therefore, a different bereaved state of being.

when my father died, when I was still his daughter in all stories, those he told and those I told, I was tasked with funeral arrangements. A week after his death on Christmas Day, he was returned to me in a purple velvet pouch. The funeral home sent the ashes directly to the cemetery and they were waiting for us at the reception desk, in a sack so reminiscent of a Crown Royal bag I would not have been surprised to hear D&D dice rattling inside. Please check this, said Maria, our host, inviting me to confirm the name on the box inside the bag. I nodded, Yes, this is my father, as tears pooled quickly in my eyes and the room with its solemn chairs and my seated sons became a swimmy blur.


I lost everything this week, I overheard my mother say to a man offering her coffee in the corner. I lost my husband and I lost my Air Miles card.

In keeping with his wish to be buried with simplicity and privacy, we were the only people present at the service. At the end of our short, improvised ceremony, my husband sang a song. When we first married, he was studying to be a professional cantor, but ended his training when he was told he could not continue unless his non-Jewish wife converted. Now, as we stood close in a huddle, the bended beauty of his voice twisted and twirled in the cold air, ribboning the sky like a bluesy liturgy. You chose a good one, my younger son whispered to me with a nudge and nod in his father´s direction.

Shoveling dirt into a grave is hard work. The ice-frosted mound would only budge with great exertion on our part. Don´t worry, said Maria, we can do that for you. But the physical labor was soothing, so we kept chiseling and shifting clods of soil. The air filled with slow, percussive thuds as we took turns spearing the spade into the ground, jumping on it a few times so it would cut sharply downwards. Maria told us again not to worry. She nodded toward a groundskeeper a few meters away, a man I noticed for the first time seated in a small backhoe, wearing a fur flap hat and mirrored sunglasses, who now slowly raised a hand in greeting. Thud, thud, thud. A frozen wedge toppled. My sons´ digging and grunting movements were determined but somehow upbeat: they would tuck their grandpa into the earth and bury their mama´s grief.


Walking from the gravesite across the frozen ground, I made out the blunt tapping of my mother´s cane behind me. I was hit by a car a few years ago and injured my foot, I heard her say to Maria. I could have been killed! But I am a survivor! A village of human dust lay beneath our feet. I am a survivor, she repeated, this time waving her arm around as if to say, Clearly, I am not of their number. Then, after the briefest of pauses, Maria replied: Well done.

a simple one, my father said, when asked by his lawyer what sort of funeral he wanted. He wished to be cremated at a modest funeral site, that the attendance be that of my family only, that the exception might be my half brothers ... He wished for the ashes for a moment to blaze over the home of those I love.

my father was a dramatic storyteller and now there was no story. The car on the way home felt quiet and empty, even though it was full of us.


 


When one person leaves, the old order collapses. That´s why we were speaking to each other carefully. We were a shapeshifting family, in the midst of recomposing ourselves. What is grief, if not the act of persisting and reconstituting oneself? What is its difficulty, if not the pressure to appear, once more, fully formed?

during those winter weeks and months when I began visiting the greenhouse every Monday, I craved rooted, growing, ongoing things. Rolling moss, misty leaf, moist vine. I wanted more leaf of all kinds: wispy fronds, bubbly strings, wide strips, loopy lines, huge paddles, serpentine ivy splaying like my heart in all directions.


I missed my father´s charm and his sly humor. As far back as I could remember, my favorite activity was to sit with him and have long conversations about politics and life. If someone had asked why I was hiding under glass, I might have answered: I am waiting.

My father´s last months had been very hard and after the medical chaos of his final weeks, when his body hurried deathward, it was a relief to have him sheltered inside my heart where it was safe, but I still wondered when we could chat again. A part of me did not accept the situation´s irreversibility; could not believe that nothing new or unplanned would ever happen again. I´ll see him on my birthday, I thought, holding out for another moment. I was still only at the beginning.

In the Cactus House, one morning, imagining I was in the driest desert on earth, drier than Death Valley with its prickly pear and prowling coyote, I studied the arms of one spiny pillar in particular, thinking about the genius of adaptation. A cactus´s entire life is about protection against insects, predators, the elements, and that´s why they are scarred and wrinkled. They have been through some things.


A man in a blue chore jacket emerged from the potting shed with a drip tray full of plants with fingery leaves, upraised like birthday candles.

Blue chalksticks, he said.

Where do you belong, blue chalksticks? I wondered.

They´re from South Africa, he said, reading my thoughts.

what immense journeys had these plants endured, across oceans and seas, occupied lands, through dramatic shifts of weather and landscape, parted from parents and community, to arrive in this living museum, this plant zoo, brimming with pampered exotic specimens ? What had they lost?


One night, I began reading Jamaica Kincaid´s old gardening columns. Openly enchanted by the deep history of plants, Kincaid described how the world of the garden changed in 1492 when Columbus set sail from Spain. She traced snared histories of violent transplantation and radically transformed landscapes, the grand dreams of landed gentry enthusing about native flora, the looting in the name of inventory and order.

But she also insisted the colonial encounter was not a finished or unidirectional story. And maybe this was why I came across visitors from all over the world at the greenhouse, each with a different history of migration. The plants might have been a strange mix, opening and closing at the wrong time; the clusters of orange clivia and hibiscus clearly out of season. But, still, people sat with the floral riot, to breathe familiar smells and for a moment be among others far from their homescapes. The well of a backhome flower was not just a fraught vortex of loss but also a deep, fortifying pleasure.


Much to my surprise, I was falling in love with greenhouses in general, and this one in particular. I was falling in love with the plants and people that gathered in this magical, fragile, neglected corner of my city.

there were mondays, when at certain moments, I felt my father, the person I most wanted to be earthbound, everywhere. He was there in the ferocity of my missing him, in the bright smell of green. At certain moments, I felt light. I felt buoyant.

...

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Autor

Kyo Maclear is an award-winning novelist, essayist, and children's author. Her books have been translated into eighteen languages and published in over twenty-five countries. She is the author of the hybrid memoir Birds Art Life (2017), winner of the Trillium Book Award. Kyo holds a doctorate in environmental humanities and is on faculty at the University of Guelph Creative Writing MFA.