Politics, Roses, and George Orwell
If Rumer Godden’s The River gave me an inside-out kind of permission to write about India in my own here and now, George Orwell’s books, and later his dramatic essay, Shooting an Elephant offered me unsparing views of power and privilege, suggested that society and history are fraught with endless complications, and even hinted that perhaps I didn’t need permission from anyone.
I read Emma Larkin’s pseudonymous book, Finding George Orwell in Burma, in one big gulp, fascinated by its travelogue-memoir mix but really looking for connections between Orwell’s books and his life and what both meant for a country close to the country of my birth, one that was embroiled in its own unending struggles.
Now I’m reading Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit, a personal, historical, and literary meditation on Orwell as gardener. Eric Blair, the man behind the pseudonym, planted roses in the garden of his cottage—a residence obtained for him by his suffragist aunt in the Hertfordshire village of Wallington.
Solnit locates Orwell’s critique of communism in the history of his time.
Excerpt:
The American journalist Eugene Lyons repented afterward that he’d gone along with the lies, in a 1937 book called Assignment in Utopia. Orwell observed in his review of the book, "Like many others who have gone to Russia full of hope he was gradually disillusioned, and unlike some others he finally decided to tell the truth about it.”
She traces the career of Nikolai Vavilov, an agronomist who devoted his life to the study and improvement of wheat, maize and other cereal crops that could sustain a global population. He was taken down in the end by the propagation of lies and died, starving, in a prison camp. His opponent, charlatan and anti-geneticist Trofim Lysenko, would later become head of the Soviet Institute of Genetics. Before Orwell died in 1949 he pasted this headline into his journal: “WHEAT CAN BECOME RYE”—LYSENKO
From Soviet propaganda about food crops via Stalin’s obsession with lemons, Solnit leads that chapter to the wheat fields around Wallington: “…even seeds for annuals or practices like farming could outlast a regime, a dictator, a pack of lies, and a war against science. Lies mutate more freely than seeds, and there are new crops of those as well.”
Beyond wheat and lemons lie the crops of Empire—sugar, tea, opium—each pouring its story into Eric Blair’s family history and leading to his birth in Motihari in the present-day Indian state of Bihar. And so too, we circle around to roses and thence to Jamaica Kincaid’s fierce narratives of gardens and displacement, and the flower industry in the periphery of Bogotá, Colombia.
Here’s a ramble through history, through Orwell’s gardening mind, that lands us by implication in our very own time and our own peculiar circumstances. It reflects on the dreamy quality of Nineteen Eighty-four, on the beauty of landscape in the darkest of times. It leaves me wondering if there is, after all, good to be found in the world, like a seed waiting to grow.
