Civilising Grass. Jonathan Cane
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is perhaps the brownest landscape one could imagine – smog, veld, mine dumps and dust. And therefore, to even imagine (never mind actually plant and keep) a lawn in this place is to push the naturalness of the lawn trope to its most audacious limits.
However, I would argue that the findings of this book are relevant in general across South Africa and even in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Kenya and Tanzania because of their Anglo-colonial similarities. That said, one would expect future research to flesh out differences. For instance, a study on KwaZulu-Natal would have to reckon with the influence of Brazilian modernist landscaping and the valorisation of tropicality, as Sally-Ann Murray (2006) has pointed out, and a study of the Cape would have to take into account the specifics of Cape colonial history.
The archive for Civilising Grass is composed from two groups of texts: those I call ‘scientific’, for lack of a better term, and those I call ‘artistic’. The distinction is not one that could hold up to any scrutiny; I could not possibly convince the reader that so-called scientific texts are not profoundly aesthetic, nor would I want to. To be deeply suspicious of any text that claims to be truth-telling is the inheritance of critical theory. And yet, in my archive, there is a coherent body of texts that claim to have something true to say about the lawn: This is how to mow it; this is how to plant from seed; that is too much water; these kinds of lawns are beautiful; those are unfashionable, uncivil, shameful and so on. These texts were written by experts – historians, administrators, scientists, botanists, teachers, gardeners, garden owners, garden writers, landscape architects and architects and they give shape to the discourses that govern the lawn. The writers often have uncomfortable things to say about ‘garden boys’, weeds, the poor and so on. They are overwhelmingly white – in fact, almost exclusively white – but many are women, and a couple are queer, too. They tend to write with little aesthetic or rhetorical finesse, but this lack of literary sensitivity can be read as signalling one of the ways a text of this kind makes a claim for facticity, strengthening its scientific pretensions and, possibly, its imagined lack of bias. What could be less political than advice on digging holes or choosing the right lawnmower?
If the first body of texts is characterised by its blindness to politics, the artistic texts are characterised by their blindness to the lawn. In these texts, the lawn is rarely the subject of the statement. And because the lawns I discuss are simply behind the sitter in the portrait, or in the foreground of the larger landscape or barely specified in architectural plans, they are difficult to track down and often unintended by the image-maker. This means locating lawns in artistic texts requires the collection of texts with the intuition that within the oeuvre of that author or artist there will be a lawn, somewhere. Those who have read Vladislavić, the biographer of Johannesburg, would expect to find a good many lawns in the geography of his writing, which they will. The same applies to the photographers Ernest Cole and David Goldblatt. But one would have had to have known to look there in the first place. The text collection was persistent and unsystematic – like cruising for sex in a park. The search term ‘lawn’ and permutations like queer lawn, black lawn, apartheid lawn, green lawn, post/colonial lawn, as well as translations like grasperk were put through digital databases and analogue searches. The first priority was South African and South African-focused texts, with an explicit intention to privilege texts by women, blacks and queers. I was willing to consider any medium: from poetry to pornography, online user comments to user-generated dictionaries, prophesies to painting, hate speech to children’s homework exercises, physical places to paper plans.
In selecting the lawns for analysis I especially searched for moments in which, for instance, a literary lawn clashes with a lived lawn or where a historical archive overlays a set of spatial practices. Here it was useful to think about Henri Lefebvre’s triadic conception of space, which suggests that far from being inert, neutral or pre-given, social space is a social product and every society produces its own space. The Production of Space shows that because of the ‘illusion of transparency’, space can appear ‘luminous’, ‘innocent’ and ‘free of traps or secret places’ (Lefebvre 1991: 27–28). Thus, it is possible and necessary to interpret social space as dialectically produced by representations of space, representational spaces and spatial practice (33).
Andy Merrifield explains that conceived space is dominant: expressed in numbers and systems of formalised signs, it functions in ‘objectified plans and paradigms’ (2006: 109). This kind of space finds its ‘objective expression’ in monuments and towers, in factories and office blocks, in the ‘bureaucratic and political authoritarianism immanent to a repressive space’ (Lefebvre 1991: 49). Spaces of representation (representational spaces) or ‘lived space’ are the ‘nonspecialist world of argot rather than jargon’, non-verbal symbols and signs (Merrifield 2006: 109), the ‘clandestine or underground side of social life’ (Lefebvre 1991: 33). Spatial practice or ‘perceived space’ includes the daily activity, which ‘secretes that society’s space’ (38), like the ‘pathways that spontaneously appear on a greensward as a result of walking patterns’ (Mitchell 2002: ix) and ‘routes and networks, patterns and interactions that connect places and people, images with reality, work with leisure’ (Merrifield 2006: 110). This is the space of daily routine (Lefebvre 1991: 38).
As Lefebvre argues, relations between the three moments of the perceived, the conceived and the lived are ‘never either simple or stable, nor are they “positive” in the sense in which this term might be opposed to “negative”, to indecipherable, the unsaid, the prohibited, or the unconscious’ (1991: 46). ‘Space,’ he argues, ‘may be said to embrace a multitude of intersections’ (33). The point should not be to dragoon the various spaces into domesticated intellectual submission. The goal of the present analysis is not to tame the profusion of unruly lawns.
Lefebvre’s theory underpins my approach to imagined spaces, maps, photographs of geographic spaces, intentionally and unintentionally unbuilt architectural proposals, empty spaces on the page (in literature, theory and plans) and empty spaces on the ground, patterns of lived space, the imagining, creation and use of play spaces, patterns of foot traffic, uses, misuses, reappropriations, deployment, rejection of spaces on paper, in person, by the body, against and with other bodies, both dead and alive. These assemblages complicate authoritative representation: they recognise the limitations of discursive analysis and attempt (within limits) to trace its silences. The goal is, however, not simply to examine the spaces from different angles or see different sides of the story. Rather, it is to examine how landscape and power are at work in producing human and non-human subjects in a process that is complex, open-ended, fraught and messy.
In Chapter 1, I work towards an operational definition of the lawn. By way of a discursive analysis of a number of key ‘scientific’ or truth-claiming texts from 1260 to the present, based on an extensive survey of English (as well as a limited collection of Latin, French and Afrikaans) gardening and landscape texts, the chapter identifies modes or themes. What the discourse analysis shows is a highly regulated terrain, with clear patterns governing what is and is not sayable and doable with respect to the lawn. It also shows a remarkable persistence over the long term – sometimes against all empirical evidence to the contrary. The lawn is understood in overwhelmingly positive terms, except for some picturesque writers of the eighteenth century and later anti-lawn campaigners. The overwhelming historical consensus is that the lawn is a good, clean, healthy and modern surface, worth aspiring to and worth the vast amounts of energy, effort and worry required to keep it as it should – indeed, must – be.
However hegemonic it may be, the lawn discourse is not totalising, and this chapter begins to identify many ambivalences, silences and contradictions. To trace a discourse is to be attuned to what was unsayable and undoable. By its nature, an archive excludes numerous subaltern voices. The small representation of working-class black female and black male voices is an expected limitation to encounter in a discursive study in a country with South Africa’s racial history. There is an acute need for primary empirical data on lived landscape from below, as it were, which would profoundly enrich our understanding of, and challenge our arguments about, the relationship between landscape and race. Apart from the absence of certain types of voices (a limitation of the methodology), the lawn (as a medium) itself