For this Power Q & A, we’re delighted to be joined by author and academic, Mariam Pirhabi, to talk about her lastest book, Garden Inventories: Reflections on Land, Place and Belonging (published by Wolsak & Wynn). In this book, Pirbhai looks carefully at the pocket of land she has called home in Southern Ontario for the past seventeen years, which she notes is a milestone for her, and asks how long it takes to be rooted to a place? And what does that truly mean? Today, we ask her about the roots of this beautiful book.
Grab a copy of Garden Inventories wherever books are sold, including directly from the publisher at Wolsak & Wynn.
Q: What inspired you to write this book and would you say there was a certain reader you were writing it for?
A: I’m of the view that a book is inspired by an amalgamation of experiences and reflections. For me, the pivotal experience is the fact that I lived in several other countries and continents before my family immigrated to and settled in Canada. This got me thinking about how, as first-generation immigrants, we task ourselves with trying to determine what it means to belong to the cultures and communities of an adopted country, but we leave little energy to focus on what it means to belong to or interact with the land—that is, its natural environment, its sense of itself as a geographic space, and also how that space is shaped and reshaped, often destructively so, by multiple waves of human migration and settlement, including our own. So, in fact, the first inspiration was a set of questions I posed for myself: what is your relationship to this land? And how does your awareness, as someone who has also lived in some very different lands (e.g., Pakistan, England and the Philippines), inform or influence the way you have come to see Canada and its landscapes?
In a book titled Garden Inventories, it goes without saying that the other major inspiration for this book is nature and gardening. As my husband and I really started to dig, so-to-speak, into this wondrous world of creating a garden, we quickly realized just what novices we were, and just how little we understood about gardening in a place that is considered the most southerly region of Canada and yet also a distinctly northern environment with a fleeting growing season. We realized that this land has a lot of stories to tell us, not only through plants and the history of plants in this place, but also through the wider environment to which our gardens are invariably connected—from storm drains to neighbourhood creeks, to woodlands and conservation areas. In fact, while this is a book inspired by gardening in a southern Ontario suburb, it is not, by any means, written by a gardening expert! Far from it, it is a book about what it means to take that first tentative step into a garden and, with it, into a land. This was my inspiration, I suppose: the journey that gardening has set me on. It’s both like and unlike all of my other migrations: on the one hand, I know it will be a constant journey because that is what is so magical (and challenging) about gardening: the nature of nature is change, so the learning curve is not only steep but perpetual. On the other hand, gardening has invited me to stand still for a moment and, perhaps for the first time in the 30+ years I’ve lived in Canada, helped me rethink my original question: namely, instead of asking, what is my relationship to this land, I now ask, what does it mean to bear the gift of this land in my earth-scented fingertips?
My answer to your second question about readers goes something like this: this book is for anyone who lives and walks through the natural world that is their proverbial backyard and takes their sense of place in it for granted; and this book is for anyone who lives and walks through the natural world that is their proverbial backyard and takes their sense of outsidership in it for granted. That is to say, this book is intended for everyone.
Mariam Pirbhai in her garden.
More about Garden Inventories:
Seeing the landscape around her with the layered experience of a childhood spent wandering the world, in Garden Inventories, Pirbhai shares her efforts to create a garden and understand her new home. From the strange North American obsession with non-fruiting fruit trees to the naming conventions of plants that erase their heritage, she casts a sharp eye on the choices that have shaped our gardens, and our society. Pirbhai considers wildflowers and weeds, our obsession with lawns, the choices in our plant nurseries and even our Canadian dedication to the cottage with warmth and humour. The result is a delightful collection of essays that invites the reader to see the beautiful complexity of the land around us all in a new way.
More about Mariam Pirbahi:
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 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 pioneering scholarly works 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). From 2017-2019, she served as President of the Canadian Association for Postcolonial Studies (formerly known as CACLALS, the Canadian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies), Canada's longest-running scholarly association devoted to postcolonial and global anglophone literatures. Mariam was born in Pakistan and she and her husband live in Waterloo, ON.