"Heaven is Green": The Ecoglobalism of Refugee Desert

Gardens
Yasmine Shamma

Journal of Narrative Theory, Volume 50, Number 3, Fall 2020, pp. 321-338
(Article)

Published by Eastern Michigan University

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jnt.2020.0013

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/766422

[ Access provided at 27 Oct 2020 08:31 GMT from Carleton University Library ]
“Heaven is Green”:
The Ecoglobalism of Refugee Desert Gardens
Yasmine Shamma
There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass
grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.
(“What Kinds of Times are These,” Adrienne Rich)

There are ways in which the relationship between ecopolitics and migra-
tion will come to be further understood by the scholars and policy makers
in the coming years, as the world begins to grapple with the extent of cli-
mate refugees and mass migration caused by environmental disasters in
the era of climate change. Indeed, ecocritic Lawrence Buell links the emer-
gence of ecoglobalism with economic modernization, explaining that “The
emergence of U.S. ecoglobal imagination is symbiotic with the history of
economic modernization,” while also expressing an awareness that such
linking risks leading to “capitalism-bashing (which blocks one from un-
derstanding how a ‘responsible’ ecoglobalism might arise as a messily par-
tial yet partially honorable reaction against the conquest mentality itself)”
(232). Buell gestures towards the slipperiness of such terms which inher-
ently respond, in the case of Buell’s work on American literature, to Amer-
ican settlement as a “culture of economic entrepeneurialism” (232); my
own work with Buell’s phrase “ecoglobalism” draws on its transnational

JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 50.3 (Fall 2020): 321–338. Copyright © 2020 by JNT:
Journal of Narrative Theory.
322 J N T

potential, as Buell offers a definition that reaches towards the implications

of engagements with the physical environment, which, though site spe-
cific, is also inherently global. Or, more succinctly, I am interested in how
one in “times like these” might, as Adrienne Rich puts it in her poem, “talk
of trees.”
Buell explains:

By “ecoglobalist affect” I mean, in broadest terms, an

emotion-laden preoccupation with a finite, near-at-hand
physical environment defined, at least in part, by an imag-
ined inextricable linkage of some sort between that specific
site and a context of planetary reach. Either the feel of the
near-at-hand or the sense of its connection to the remote
may be experienced as either consoling or painful or both.
Diaspora can feel wrenching and liberatory by turns. (232)

Buell is not the first to suggest the romantic implications of the wandering
diasporic subject, before moving away from the implicitly understood
complications of such romanticizing—that is, that the pastoral tradition,
which Romanticism engages with, is arguably also a colonial tradition.
What interests me here, though, is that the diasporic subject is the first ex-
ample Buell reaches for, when describing what a lived-in ecoglobalism in
action might come to mean. In my experience interviewing refugees of the
Syrian migration crisis in the refugee camps of Jordan, I have found that
the reverse happens frequently enough, too. That is, when diasporic sub-
jects begin to discuss their wandering, they reach for examples of the un-
naturalness of such wandering in discussions of things like trees that fre-
quently take a spiritual turn towards imaginings of edenic landscapes.
In a 2019 interview on a late-night Arabic talk show, the Amal Pro-
gram, a popular actor and comedian was invited to talk about the ongoing
Syrian refugee crisis, and to my surprise, he too began talking of trees.1
The actor, Durraid Lahham, has been outspoken in his support of Bashar
al Asad and unique in his decision to stay in Damascus throughout the en-
tirety of the recent crisis and conflict in Syria. During the episode, the pre-
senter asks why a public personality with the financial resources and pro-
fessional mobility of Lahham would choose to stay in their country
“during all the hard times.”
 The Ecoglobalism of Refugee Gardens 323

Lahham responds: “My dear, the days are very hard when one is not at
peace with oneself. No, I am at peace with myself.” He then invokes the
Quran, citing a passage in which the sacred places which the three main
prophets lived in or passed through are offered as emblems of “the fig, the
olives, and Mount Sinai” (Abraham, Jesus, and Mohammad). As is cus-
tomary with religious citations, the calling up of this verse evokes both an
innocence and an austerity; a vulnerability and an authority. The audience
and presenter, in this situation, are not fazed by the political implications
of Islam, as throughout the Levantine Middle-East it is widely assumed
that the links between religious guerilla militias and actual religious spiri-
tuality are conveniently nominal.
Lahham offers a way through his metaphorically constructed Eden:
“We are the figs and the olives. A tree that abandons its roots dries out. It
dies. We are rooted. This is our land.” He goes on, to push the metaphori-
cal implications of displacement beyond the ecological, asking: “If some-
one’s mother gets ill, would one leave her and seek another or will he stand
by her until she recovers? My homeland is my mother, mine was ill. Will I
seek another?” In tying the ecological with the maternal, the comedian
draws on an age-old conceit embodied in the English word ‘motherland,’
without mentioning it—for there is no equivalent in Arabic. Rather, the
Arabic word (balad) that Lahham uses refers to land in contrast to nation,
and as he continues, he further implies that the earth-based (rather than
nation-based), intrinsic rootedness of ecological systems should translate
to humankind.
He cites the assertive contemporary Syrian writer, Ghada Al-Samman,
recalling her warning: “Don’t try to take your tree with you to your coun-
try of refuge to sit by its shade. Trees don’t take refuge in migration”
(Amal Program). In Lahham’s interpretation of these lines, he offers a
manifesto:

If my country is wrong I will be by its side. If my country

is cold I will be its cover. If it is sick I will stand by it. If it
is old I am its Cain and if it is shoeless I am its shoes. . . .
Because it is the crown on my head and my lord. And
where my mother and our martyrs are buried, in its soil.
Some people left seeking a handful of money and riches, I
324 J N T

have a belief that a golden bed will not ward off bad
dreams.

Again, Lanham draws on a religious text in this justification of growing

where one is originally planted. Invoking the threat of a hell-on-earth exis-
tence in the limbo of expatriotism, he argues for a patriotism rooted in a
sense of ancestral environmental allegiance rather than a historical or so-
cial apprehension of one’s land.
I listened to this interview in 2016, a few months after leaving the Za-
atari and Al-Azraq refugee camps of Jordan, where I had been interview-
ing Syrians displaced by the crisis that began in 2012. These refugees did
not have the resources at Lahham’s disposal to insure their continued
safety in Syria, and the stories they told me explained that their decision to
leave their homeland did not feel like a choice, but rather a matter of life
or death. And while the focus of my interviews was on the creation of do-
mestic situations within their new urban built environments (flimsy though
these buildings are), the repeated tendency of the interviewees to engage
in an imaginative and figurative drifting to explore and explain an outside
nesting experience suggested that the description of the space surrounding
their tent or caravan was as central to their nesting imaginations as the cre-
ation of a space within their inhabited domestic spaces. Caravans are uni-
form dwellings made of sheet metal, offered as sturdier (than tents)
portable small one-room spaces by the UN after the crisis began to appear
long-term. These caravans replaced tents that had been used for upwards
of five years by many refugees, but were not originally meant to withstand
the elements beyond a year. Most refugees whom I spoke with expressed a
relief to have moved out of their tents to a caravan, though some, as late as
2016, were still residing within the tents. Though the focus of my inter-
views was on the internal domestic space, the refugees themselves tended
to shift the conversation towards discussions of the make-shift gardens that
surrounded their tents or caravans. The refugees I spoke to tended, like the
actor Lahham cited above, to draw on imagery from the Old Testament,
the Quran, and the contemporary Arab imagination populated by song and
literature, to shift the focus of my inquiry inside-out. When asked about
their nesting practices within their allocated tents or caravans, even the
most resourceful refugees I spoke to were either embarrassed or apolo-
getic, often using the space of the question to recall the technology and
 The Ecoglobalism of Refugee Gardens 325

comforts of their lost homes. But when asked about the nesting implied in
the immediate spaces surrounding their provisional domiciles—in their
makeshift (and often illegal) gardens, pride or enthusiasm colored the re-
sponse.
For an example of this, consider the excerpt below, from an interview I
conducted in 2016 with a woman from a suburb of Aleppo.

Q: What makes you feel at home? Are there any objects,

stories, or meals that make you feel particularly at
home?
We have some cousins here and my children and hus-
band. We have to get used to the situation because other-
wise it will be hard for us to survive. Hope is always there
of course.
Some time ago I visited a friend of mine because she
had a newborn. Once I entered her place I felt like I was
back in Syria because she had a lot of greenery inside her
caravan. Back in Syria our houses were filled with green-
ery. I was very happy to see the greenery and flowers.

Q: Do you think of planting a small garden outside your

house?2
Yes, I was thinking of telling my husband to fix up a
space outside the house for a garden. That’s his job; he
works as a carpenter. Planting a garden would make me
feel more comfortable and closer to home.

Q: How do you pass the time?

I spend most of my time reading the Quran and listen-
ing to religious songs [humming]. The Quran makes me
feel comfortable from the inside. I teach Quran to the
young as well. If it weren’t for the Quran, I wouldn't have
forgotten all the suffering that we went through.

Q: What is your favorite meal that reminds you of

home?
Stuffed vegetables. It is the meal that reminds me of
home. But I don’t have time (or the garden!) to cook with
here, so I do easier more local meals like mansaf.
326 J N T

Even when asked for descriptions of material of home—ie, objects that

might make her feel at home within the interior of her new temporary
space, the refugee redirects the conversation to green spaces, products of
green spaces (vegetables), and to divinity. In this context, it bears men-
tioning that these are Syrian refugees living within the camps of Jordan—
a desert land. Many of these refugees hail from provinces such as Aleppo,
which enjoy a Mediterranean climate and in this way share the experience
of Palestinian refugees forcibly displaced throughout Jordan, a desert
country whose population is often estimated to be 75% refugee. These mi-
grants come from landscapes where fruit grows abundantly, in Edenic
ways, and where the diet is accordingly plant based. In moving—however
temporarily—to the camps and cities of the desert of Jordan, they experi-
ence an environmental and dietary shock: having left the green spaces of
their homelands, they are now surrounded by a sepia toned pastoral of
sand and dirt, and moving from a diet rich in vegetables to a meat-based
Jordanian cuisine. In shifting from consuming the oft-mentioned stuffed
vegetables (which, in various forms, managed to receive citation in almost
every interview I conducted), to the Jordanian meal of mansaf (a lamb,
yogurt and rice dish traditionally consumed with one’s hands), refugees
experience a shift in greenery, outside in, with their previously vegetarian
diet maintained in the mostly Mediterranean climate of Syria, being re-
placed by a more meat-heavy diet in the desert country of Jordan.
This specific refugee also had attempted to recreate the architecture of
her lost home within her caravan-space. Her aforementioned husband—
the carpenter—had, at her request, built a fountain in front of their cara-
van. In Courtyard Housing: Past, Present, and Future, the ongoing culture
of courtyard housing is linked to a Syrian and Iraqi architectural tradition.
In the book’s third chapter, E. Mahmoud Zein Al-Abdin opens his elabo-
rate description of Syrian courtyard housing and floorplans by offering a
sense of its vagabond heritage:

Courtyard housing dates back to the beginning of the mil-

lennium before Christianity when it appeared in the build-
ings of Al-Sham. . . . Arab nomads made use of the concept
of a courtyard during their movement and stay in desert.
They set up their tents around a central space, which pro-
vided shelter and security. . . . With the development of
 The Ecoglobalism of Refugee Gardens 327

Arab-Islamic architecture, the courtyard space became an

essential typological element. It is likely that the previous
nomadic desert lifestyle of Arabs had a strong influence on
their desire to have an open space or spaces within their
permanent houses. The courtyard therefore fulfils a deep-
rooted need for an open area of living. (31)

The chapter continues to offer images, floorplans, and an architectural his-

tory of the courtyard space, specifically as rooted in a Syrian tradition.
What interests me here is the possibility of contemporary Syrian refugees
recreating this space in what is assumed to be a nostalgia for the recently
lost home, but in doing so actually engaging in an even older tradition, and
re-invoking a nomadic heritage in the very act of reassuming nomadic
modes forced upon them. And yet the refugees themselves engage in a sort
of ancestral skipping over this historical fact, to instead imply that their
gardening and enclosing of their gardens—through the replication of
courtyard architecture and other means—is a retreat, not to a history of
nomadic modes, but to the imagery of Eden itself. Like Eden, the garden
in the traditional Mediterranean architectural sense (specifically pertain-
ing to Syrian and Lebanese urban environments) has come to embody both
refuge and prospect—the possibility to be hidden and private within one’s
own vineyards, and the opportunity to grow one’s own fruits and vegeta-
bles. As Jala Makhzoumi and Reem Zako explain, “Prospect-refuge theory
applies equally to the experience of natural landscapes and to the ‘aesthet-
ically contrived landscape(s)’ and both are evident in the Mediterranean
garden” (4).
Indeed, references to gardens are, like the reference to the tree’s need
for roots, often suffused with both functional and religious implications.
And, as is often the case with language, the words themselves invite these
possibilities, the Arabic word for garden, Jneayneh, being derivative of the
word Jannah, which translates to heaven. In the instance of the comedian
Lahham’s conversation, the citation of the Qur’anic verse provides his
analogy of the natural implications of migration the cloak of seriousness
and truth. In the ways that refugees utilized religious imagery, the garden
was—at least in my experience—most steadily referred to as heaven-like.
One refugee with seven daughters greeted me outside her tent, whose en-
trance was framed by carefully grown plants. I begin our interview by ask-
328 J N T

ing her, “Is this your garden? Did you have a garden in Syria?” “Yes,” she
smiled nodding to both questions: “It’s a plant called Muknisit il Janneh.
And yes, we used to have olive trees back in Syria outside our house. This
plant grows quickly.” The irony of Zaatari camp being set on an old aban-
doned olive grove is not lost on me, nor is the plant’s name, Arabic for
“Heaven’s Sweeper.” The plant she refers to is Bassia Scorporia, “summer
cypress,” a sometimes invasive tumbleweed plant that can grow in the
most arid of conditions.
Gardening, as opposed to farming, implies a decorative cultivation of a
fixed plot of land, rather than the sprawl and productivity of farming.
With, for example, Jasmine flowers planted to regrow annually, rather than
the farmer’s vegetables to be annually reaped, it implies senses of leisure,
longevity, and enclosure, free from agriculture’s implications of utilitarian-
ism. It is an implicitly aesthetic act, yet also confined in a curious domes-
tication of nature; more of the ‘refuge’ than the ‘prospect.’ In her work on
Native American environmentalism, Joy Porter writes of enclosure within
gardening in contrast to appreciations of wilderness, explaining:

The idea of the garden is as fraught with historical com-

plexity, biblical roots, and ugly memories as any other.
“Garden” has always existed in juxtaposition with the other
terms now out of fashion and prone to deconstruction—
terms such as “wilderness” and “park.” . . . Olwig explains:
“The garden idea is potent because it has long been a vital
symbol in Western culture of a moral society living in nat-
ural social and environmental harmony. Historically, the
counter positioning of the paradise garden park to the
wilderness was a means of making a symbolic statement
about the nature of natural national existence.” In essence,
garden is good, and wilderness is bad. . . . It is important to
bear in mind that all gardens, like all parks and enclosed
areas, are as much about who and what gets excluded as
they’re about who and what gets included. . . . Enclosure of
land is stage one of a process of constructing an image or
series of images that reflect the intention of the gardener.
(25)
 The Ecoglobalism of Refugee Gardens 329

Porter’s distinction helps to identify the refugee’s green spaces as espe-

cially rebellious in its non-capitalism: enclosing the exposed, excluding
within a culture (the camp) of lack of privacy—taking the land (back?) in
small, humble, but noteworthy ways. In the case of Palestinian refugee
camps within Jordan, so overcrowded through their sixty-plus years of ex-
istence, inhabitants garden on rooftops, demonstrating an insistence in
their gardening on nostalgia, internal resources, and a connectedness to
the earth which is, otherwise, nowhere theirs for the taking.3
What then, in the case of the refugee, especially in lieu of Lahham’s
comments on the perils of a migrating tree, are the implications of con-
tainer gardening and planting trees within such inherently temporary
spaces? An especially resilient woman I interviewed in Al Azraq camp of-
fers something close to a theory for such migrant planting, beginning with
the anthropomorphic suggestion that “Syria makes the stone cry,” before
breaking down for a moment and explaining through her tears that “The
last thing I remember is my mother.”4 In the case of this woman’s narra-
tive, the land and the mother are one, and deprived of both she is overcome
by the desolation of an earth of “stones.”
As the interview continues I ask the woman from the North to recall
the moment when her “caravan” came to feel like home. Her quiet
ecoglobalism manifests itself in the sequence of actions she describes as
home-making:

After I cried when I came here, I decided to keep myself

strong for the children and start building the caravan to
make it like home. They were at an age where they under-
stood what was going on. They were sensitive to the situa-
tion and they could lose all that they have if they weren’t
nurtured in a way that made them feel like they were home.
I found it very hard on them to leave their rooms and their
computers and all the things that they loved. So I sat them
down and told them: the five of us are here, me you and
your father, wherever the five of us are, that place should
be your heaven. Whether it’s in a caravan, in a deserted land
. . . the most important thing is that we are together. [The
most important thing is] that we did not lose one of our-
selves on the way. That we didn’t bury any one of our-
330 J N T

selves. [From here on out], wherever the five of us are—

together—that will be our heaven and our home.
I also told them not to listen to the people around us.
The people were asking why we were fixing the caravan.
They would ask: do you think that you will be staying here
for long? The day I planted that tree outside, all the neigh-
bors ridiculed me, calling me ridiculous for planting out-
side my caravan. They would say: “with all that planting
you’re doing it seems you are planning on staying awhile!”
I would tell them that it does not matter if I stay here for a
long time or if I leave tomorrow. If I leave tomorrow this
tree will stay as a standing memory of us to the people that
will live here after us. It could serve as a means of shadow
for a passer-by or a place where a bird could nest. After that
I started planting more things, until it became a garden.
(“The Woman who Planted a Tree: An Interview”)

The woman from the North ties heaven to home—the two are synony-
mous, in much the same way as “Syria” and “mother” are. Her linguistics
slips and slides suggest the dense entanglement of Rich’s “dark mesh of
the woods” in “What Kind of Times are These.” Indeed as the interview
continues, the landscape—actual descriptions of landscape—become fur-
ther enmeshed in the complexities of an essentially resilient and vibrant
and deeply ecological imagination: the woman without a home is immedi-
ately engrossed in the whole-earth project of creating homes—acquiring
“the language of ecological humility” (as Christopher Manes calls such a
language “free from the directionality of humanism”) to think and act be-
yond the human (17). Gardens inherently imply an intention to stay awhile,
and as was the case with many of the refugees I spoke to throughout the
camps of Jordan, the tendency to garden began sort of as an act of surren-
der. It cropped up as a nesting practice especially with those refugees
whom I interviewed in August of 2018—in what was effectively the sev-
enth year of the crisis in Syria, when the mood within the camps was de-
cidedly bleak (which many attributed to the lack of global response to the
April 2018 chemical attack in Douma).
For example, in 2018 I returned to the tent of the woman from Aleppo
with the courtyard fountain, who had dreamed of a garden 2016. Two
years later, her tone in discussing gardening was distinctly despondent. I
 The Ecoglobalism of Refugee Gardens 331

ask her what her hopes are for the immediate present and the future. She
responds:

I pray that my kids get better at school and in their studies.

Financially, I do hope we get better. I hope we have enough
to make this caravan nicer, like the other caravans. I hope
we can pour concrete onto the floors so that we no longer
live on the dirt. I hope we can grow a garden, which we can
water with abundance.

Here the request is not only for a garden, but for one that might grow;
there is decidedly long-term thinking evident in this mother’s hopes. There
is also the implicit reference to the third implicitly subversive facet of gar-
dening within the camps of Jordan: that the refugees who are doing so are
doing so within a country that is a desert. The lack of water is a well-
documented ecological and political problem in Jordan, brought about by
the occupation of Palestine (consider the 1964–1967 War over Water), but
it has taken new forms in the context of the evolution of the refugee crises
within Jordan.5 John M.B. Balouziyeh, in Hope and a Future: The Story of
Syrian Refugees, explains:

Even before Syrian refugees began streaming in, Jordan

suffered from scarce water supplies. Public institutions
often lacked sufficient water to maintain sanitation stan-
dards. Water supplies were often inadequate to perform the
Islamic daily ablutions. Neighbors would often visit one
another to obtain water, but would often find that their
neighbors’ water supply similarly ran dry.
At the inception of the Syrian civil war, the tense water
situation further worsened. The thousands of refugees that
poured in from Syria added stress to and increased tensions
over the Jordanian water supply. Today, areas of Jordan
with significant refugee populations face water shortages
on the threshold of emergency levels. (105)

It is above all for these reasons that gardens are heavily policed, especially
in Al Azraq camp, where the woman from the North is based. Yet even in
Zaatari, where I spoke with the woman from Aleppo, the ecological imag-
332 J N T

ination loomed large. By 2018, streets had been completely named, often
after flowers and plants that did not grow there. On “Yasmine Street,” for
example, the street’s name was written along a caravan painted pink and
decorated with vines of fabric flowers—words and images standing for the
often-cited flower impossible to grow within the arid conditions of the
camp and available to these refugees only as an overpowering perfume
sold as a pricey oil roll-on in the market-place.
In concluding my return interview with the woman from Aleppo, I
asked her how she has, over the past two years in particular, made her car-
avan more homey. I ask her this using a strange mix of words, since the
Arabic language has one for “house” and one for “homeland,” but none for
“home.” She explains: “To be able to live here one has to recreate a home
as much as possible. We spend most of our time here, don’t we? So you
have to do things to achieve that.” The word she uses for “home” here is
bayt, which is synonymous with house, and implies a fixed structure that
can be referenced in the possessive (bayti), to denote a homeliness more
strongly than the reference to a “house” which the word bayt more simply
suggests. Her tone is despondent, and so I work to change it by compli-
menting her nesting efforts. Pointing to her makeshift bed and mattress, I
tell her that I like the blue colors she used in her quilt. She responds, “—
And green. Green brings me comfort.”
“And you have flowers on the wall,” I mention, pointing.
“Yes, one can create—”
Here we are interrupted by her daughter asking about offering me
juice, to which the Aleppo mother replies that it is not proper to even ask,
that it is a given to offer the guests a drink, though I am politely explaining
that it is not necessary, and the daughter, no more than seven years old and
likely born within the camp, disappears obediently on the errand. The
mother returns to the topic at hand without hesitation, explaining emphat-
ically:

Simple things can create home atmosphere; the curtains,

the closets, such things we’ve tried to make. We put some
dirt there under the windows in hopes of planting a few
things, so that when I open the windows I will find flowers,
like I did in Syria. There my in-laws had a big planted area
with vegetables and greens, everything we needed. Here we
 The Ecoglobalism of Refugee Gardens 333

have put the dirt but not the flowers yet. They need a lot of
water.

Here was a woman explaining the desire for flowers and the lack of water
to grow them, while also insisting on performing the etiquette of offering
me a temporarily thirst-quenching drink.
It was more difficult to visit the camps the second time and meet some
of the same people who had felt ignored for not only five years now, but
seven, but of course it was not as difficult to visit the camps as it is to re-
side in them. In 2016, the woman from Aleppo had a strength in her insis-
tence on offering her children a religious education, on creating a sense of
home and safety for them within Zaatari. In 2018, this strength was palpa-
bly aching for replenishment, in much the same way that the dirt by her
make-shift windowsill was waiting to be filled with seeds and water. And
yet the sense that if there could be green, there might be hope, remained
consistent throughout the years and in the responses from these desert
camp inhabitants.
These two women share that their responses to various forms of resis-
tance are apolitical: The resilient woman who planted a peach tree re-
sponded to the ridicule of neighbors, in words and in action, with an insis-
tently environmental outlook, turning towards cultivations of land that is
not hers for the sake of something beyond her; similarly, the woman from
Aleppo is interested in planting for the sake of soothing her soul. Neither
engages in discourse related to nationhood. Anecdotally speaking, these
refugees displayed a nascent and rogue eco-globalism in their pursuits of
gardens.
In Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature, a col-
lection of essays advocating for transnational approaches to reading and
appreciating literature, Lawrence Buell explains what he means by the
term “ecoglobalism”:

. . . ecoglobalism, that is a whole-earth way of thinking and

feeling about environmentality, is at the time of writing
more a model that has begun to take root than an achieved
result: a model for inquiry, furthermore, that is quite un-
evenly distributed across disciplines. The average contem-
porary geologist or ecologist or environmental economist is
334 J N T

better equipped to operate on a global scale than is the av-

erage sociologist or historian, and the average ethicist more
so than the average literary critic. (227)

Might the words of the refugees incorporated here serve as indicators of a

whole-world desire to be engaged in an environmentalism that is decidedly
resistant to a nation-centered approach to governing and gardening one’s
home-life? If, as Lahham puts it, “we are rooted; this is our land,” then the
re-rooting of oneself through the small but insistent annex of the tent- or
caravan-garden may be an engagement with that ecoglobalist pursuit of
thinking whole-earth (despite Lahham’s own patriotic though inherently
maternal line of reasoning towards remaining within war-torn Syria). The
woman who planted a peach tree, for example, cited above, does not indi-
cate concern for state or nation in her planting of a tree: she plants the tree
in spite of her own and others’ overwhelming concerns about nationhood
or belonging, choosing instead an allegiance with the earth and its crea-
tures.
While refugees seek the securities of well-intentioned states, or of se-
cure citizenship in any state, the refugees temporarily or impermanently
displaced throughout Jordan’s deserts exhibit in their gardening practices
and pursuits a “whole-earth” environmentalism, as they dream of, or
struggle to create, gardens. In so doing, they burst the confines of national
thinking and in their escapes suggest a post-human environmental project
as momentary psychological, if not perpetual, remedy. These pursuits be-
come complicated under literary lenses. While transnationalism and other
contemporary approaches to reading narratives, testimonies, and tradi-
tional prosaic and verse forms often engage with ecocriticism, they are
also fraught with the economic and social implications of neoliberalist di-
mensions. More specifically, the gardening refugee is a vulnerable subject
because they are stateless, and the interesting thing about gardening is that
while awaiting the sanctity of a secure statehood, this refugee then pursues
something beyond it—or at very least, besides nationhood, in plowing the
larger, natural earth of the land they till, instead. But in the case of the
refugee garden, something transgressive is at play. This transgression is
progressive and regressive at once, as the stateless subject entangles her-
self in the timeless practice of planting free from preoccupation for pre-
sent or future temporal or spatial implication. In so doing, she creates a
 The Ecoglobalism of Refugee Gardens 335

different experience of space and time—one that pushes back against, or

somehow ignores, temporal and spatial implications of traditionally (inte-
rior) domestic modes of home-making. The whole earth offers itself, at
least in the moment of planting, within the plot accessible to her, and she
understands that what she plants will likely survive her.
Perhaps these subjects have, like those Adrienne Rich writes in “What
Kinds of Times are These,” become “abandoned,” or become aware of hav-
ing “disappeared into the shadows of the persecuted.” And perhaps it is for
these reasons that they so often engage in conversations about home by
talking of things like trees. As the woman from the North concludes her
interview, she responds to my final question, “What stories do you tell
your children about Syria,” with a description of both a heaven and a hell:

Because we do not have a TV here, I tell them stories all

the time. I try to choose the good memories. You see, my
eldest daughter had a graduation from sixth grade a couple
of years ago. It happened that I made her late to the gradu-
ation. We learned when we got there that the school was
bombed and that many of her friends were murdered in the
bombing. I try to tell them about my childhood. I am 46
years old so my childhood was around 1975!! It was safe
and happy back then. Syria is heaven on earth. It is a place
where the rich and the poor used to live like kings. It is be-
cause we rely on our products and what we do.
That’s why we had gardens, so that we could plant
whatever we want and use the produce to make things that
we like. Heaven is green!
I tell them about how I used to have fun and how I got
my baccalaureate degree despite all of the difficulties be-
cause I am a woman. I also tell them about how I dealt with
all the people that made it difficult for me. I tell them about
my salon and how I opened it. All of this is so that they for-
get the misery that we were put in when we went to the safe
places in Syria, and despite them being safe places, they
weren’t safe at all.
My children know the names of all the weapons. Even
the youngest. I never saw a missile tank until I was 41, they
saw all of these weapons at a very young age. And they re-
member everything. When we first got to the camp, there
336 J N T

were helicopters flying outside. This was the worst thing

that anyone could do to my children, they were terrified
from all of the sound.

In this final description, the woman who planted the tree reveals the femi-
nism implied in her environmentalism as, and through, escape from the
horrors of her dislocation, the perpetuity of her waiting, and the confines
of her allocated temporary space: The transgression of the woman, outside
of her allocated space(s)—not only traditionally within the home but also
within the context of her camp-life (within her allocated tent)—is manifest
in her decision to plant, to root herself in something explicitly temporary,
but also, in this moment, essentially safe. Engaged in this form of ecolog-
ical resistance, the mother, like the plant she nurtures, manages to navigate
patriarchal silencing with limited resources.
It becomes possible, then, to consider that the ecoglobalist model of in-
quiry advocated by Buell is practiced, in small but meaningful ways, by
the refugee mothers whose generous testimonies have here been ex-
cerpted. In Rich’s poem, the “talk of trees” rhymes with “times like these,”
but also, in a feminine ending, with “necessary.” In the words of the
refugee excerpted above, the climax of her testimony also implies a lyri-
cally unsupported insistence on future gardens: “Heaven is green!” gestur-
ing both towards transgression and freedom in the unbounded spirit of a
post-migratory existence.

Notes
1. Lahham was a guest of the Amal Program in 2019, which posted the video to youtube
on 24 of June 2019 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3EAbkr3UCs&feature=
youtu.be). The portion of the video in which Lahham talks of “motherlands” occurs at
the 40 minute mark. ‘Amal’ means ‘hope’ in Arabic.

2. When I ask interviewees what makes them feel “at home,” the Arabic word for home is
the same as the word for house, so it is a natural progression to continue to refer to it
as a home / house (bayt) and is also, I find, psychologically uplifting as it is a way of
complimenting the homeliness they have achieved in their temporary spaces.
 The Ecoglobalism of Refugee Gardens 337

3. Naomi Klein’s provocative article, “Let Them Down,” explores the ways in which a re-
verse gardening—a deliberate “othering” of the natural landscape—was utilized in
Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territories.

4. This interview is published in full following this essay.

5. According to the World Health Organization, “Jordan has one of the lowest levels of
water resource availability, per capita, in the world.” (“The Health and Environment
Linkages Initiative, World Health Organization Pilot Projects, https://www.who.int/
heli/pilots/jordan/en/).

Works Cited
Al-Abdin, E. Mahmoud Zein. “The Courtyard Houses of Syria.” Courtyard Housing: Past,
Present, and Future, edited by Brian Edwards, Magda Sibley, Peter Land, and Mo-
hamad Hakmi, Taylor & Francis, 2006, pp. 41–53.

Balouziyeh, John M.B. Hope and a Future: The Story of Syrian Refugees. Time Books,
2016.

Buell, Lawrence. “Ecoglobalist Affects: The Emergence of U.S. Environmental Imagina-

tion on a Planetary Scale.” Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Liter-
ature, edited by Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell, Princeton UP, 2007, pp.
227–248.

Edwards, Brian, Magda Sibley, Peter Land, and Mohamad Hakmi, editors. Courtyard
Housing: Past, Present, and Future, Taylor & Francis, 2006.

The Health and Environment Linkages Initiative (HELI), World Health Organization Pilot
Projects, https://www.who.int/heli/pilots/jordan/en/.

Klein, Naomi, “Let Them Drown.” London Review of Books, vol. 38, no. 11, 2016, pp.
11–14, https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n11/naomi-klein/let-them-drown.

Makhzoumi, Jala, and Reem Zako, “The Beirut Dozen: Traditional Domestic Garden as
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Symposium, edited by Ayse Sema Kubat, Őzlem Ertekin, Yasemin İnce Güney, and E.
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Manes, Christopher. “Nature and Silence.” The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Liter-
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Porter, Joy, Native American Environmentalism: Land, Spirit, and the Idea of Wilderness. U
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Rich, “What Kinds of Times are These.” Collected Poems: 1950–2012, Norton, 2016, p.
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