Garden Inventories: Reflections on Land, Place and Belonging by Mariam Pirbhai
“…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
After a lifetime of traversing continents and cities, Mariam Pirbhai found herself in Waterloo, Ontario, and there she began to garden. As she looks to local nurseries, neighbourhood gardens and nature trails for inspiration, she discovers that plants are not so very different from people. They, too, can be uprooted, transplanted – even naturalized. They, too, can behave as a colonizing or invasive species. And they, too, must learn to adapt to a new land before calling it home. In Garden Inventories, Pirbhai brings her scholar’s eye, her love of story and an irrepressible sense of humour to bear on the questions of how we interact with the land around us, from what it means to create a garden through the haze of nostalgia, to the way tradition and nature are bound up in cultural ideals such as “cottage country,” or even the great Canadian wilderness.
Roses, mulberries, tamarinds and Jack pines wend their way through these essays as Pirbhai pays close attention to the stories of the plants, as well as the people, that have accompanied her journey to find home.
Throughout, she shows us the layers of history and culture that infuse our understandings of land, place and belonging, revealing how a garden carries within it the story of a life – of family, home, culture and heritage – if not also the history of a world.
MARIAM PIRBHAI is an academic and creative writer. She is the author of a newly released book of creative nonfiction titled Garden Inventories: Reflections on Land, Place and Belonging (Wolsak & Wynn, 2023), a debut novel titled Isolated Incident (Mawenzi 2022) and a short story collection titled Outside People and Other Stories (Inanna 2017), winner of the 2018 International Independent Publishers’ and American BookFest awards. She is Full Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, where she specializes in postcolonial literatures, diaspora studies and creative writing. She is the author and editor of book-length studies on the global South Asian diaspora and its literatures, 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). She has served as the President of the Canadian Association for Postcolonial Studies (formerly known as CACLALS, the Canadian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies), and is deeply committed to decolonizing the way we think about and teach literature and creative writing. She was born in Pakistan and lives in Waterloo, ON.
