Civilising Grass. Jonathan Cane
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not fully accomplished, or indeed planted at all. Its normative and normalising frame can exercise its power even as a mental abstraction, a literary assumption or mode of seeing. Apart from these kinds of silences, certain internal contradictions unsettle the account of lawn landscape as fixed and permanent. One becomes aware of a kind of neurosis at the lawn’s limits and boundaries. Many of these fears and anxieties are barely whispers but are nascent of a challenge from the margins.
Chapter 2 engages with the fundamental quality of the lawn: that it must be made and kept. It requires material inputs, competencies, tools, time, labour. In the South African context, these conditions of possibility are constituted by and constituting of racial inequality. The chapter builds an extensive discursive analysis of the ‘garden boy’ and his place in the lawn landscape, arguing that the figure of the garden boy is important, under-studied and quintessentially southern African. He demonstrates the complex relationship between raced and gendered human and non-human life that characterises the colonial landscape. The garden boy’s subjection to his master/mistress, the stunting of his chronology, his abuse, his embodiment of white fear, his body as a machine, challenge the landscape’s attempted effacement of labour. While obviously made, the lawn still manages to hide or forget the labour that must continuously make it, the process of its emergence, the tenuous accomplishment that requires consistent and constant attention. The tendency to erase black labour is made all the more obvious by the instances where white garden work is recorded and monumentalised. The meaning of these different acts and the disparities in their modes of representation draw attention to the problems of race and respectability as they manifest in the domestic space. This chapter also attempts to examine the relationship between white women and the lawn. In what could be called a ‘Rhodesian’ discourse, women memoirists and novelists attempt to write a place for themselves in relation to black labour and the garden landscape.
Chapter 3 investigates a period of optimism, early- to mid-twentieth century, during which the lawn signified, often in entirely unstated and unconscious ways, one of the promises of modernity. The utopian discourses that energised much of the planning and urban design by white planners, just before and during apartheid, drew inspiration from and were part of international debates that were consummately amenable to the kind of racial social engineering desired in South Africa. This chapter attempts to historicise the landscape preferences of these technocrats and to connect their (so far unstudied) garden designs with the broader, established literature on apartheid spatiality. That these official ‘representations of space’ never materialised in the ways that were imagined and hoped for is to be expected. Thus, this chapter emphasises the multifarious ways in which ‘lived modernisms’ (Le Roux 2014) disrupt the sites under investigation, producing dynamic, unexpected and dangerous spaces. The chapter examines three sites: first, an audacious and unbuilt high-rise township for 20 000 ‘urban natives’, designed in 1939 by radical University of Witwatersrand students; second, the assemblage of spatial production in the black township of KwaThema, both historical and contemporary; and third, the landscape designs for the mining town of Welkom by Joane Pim and, as a contrapuntal reading, the landscape of the Welkom-Wes Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk by Roelof Uytenbogaardt. The case studies in this chapter provide a critique of the lawn’s teleological orientation towards progress and instead suggest, borrowing from Bruno Latour, that the lawn has never been modern (1991).
Drawing on anti-social queer theory, Chapter 4 explores the notion of failure as a potential site of freedom from heteropatriarchal capitalism and its teleology. Doing bad things to and with the lawn means including into the archive narratives of inappropriate, tacky, sleazy, perverted, incorrect lawn keeping and usage. The chapter presents three particular examples. The first is an analysis of Pennisetum clandestinum, better known as kikuyu grass, a remarkably mobile botanical actor that, after being ‘discovered’ in what was then the East Africa Protectorate, travelled first as a cutting in a milk-tin to Pretoria, then to London and then back to South Africa and other parts of the world. Officially categorised as an ‘excellent colonizer’ (Quattrocchi 2006: 1637), kikuyu’s vitality, mobility and aggressiveness offer a counterpoint to the dominant discourse that the lawn is peaceful, stable and immobile. The second example is Joubert Park in Johannesburg. The narrative of the park’s decline from Edwardian promenading ground to post-apartheid blight provides an opportunity to question the supposed failure of modernity. Contrary to what is often imagined, the photographic records of the park demonstrate the versatility and amenability of the lawn to alternative and incorrect uses. The third case study, the lawn in Marlene van Niekerk’s novel Triomf (1999), continues the elaboration of possible disruptions by and desecration of the landscape. Whereas the analysis of Joubert Park examines the threat of failing public space, the failing yard of the ‘poor white’ Benade family provides an opportunity to examine the possible repercussions of wrongful gardening for neighbourhood sociality. With the spectre of the 1994 elections and the end of apartheid hanging over the Benades, we witness obscene, funny, abject and violent effects in their garden. The landscape fails to contain the ambiguous claims of ownership and belonging to the land.
Chapter 1
The Lawn Discourse
(n.) A grassy place in front of my house that you should stay the fuck off of.
— TenInchPlaya, urbandictionary.com
In Travels and Adventures in Southern Africa George Thompson describes his arrival at the residence of his friend Mr Thornhill in the Eastern Cape. He remarks that it is ‘one of the most beautiful spots in Albany, with lawns and copsewoods, laid out by the hand of Nature, that far surpass many a nobleman’s park in England’ (1827: 20). The image of the lawn provides Thompson with a familiar convention by which to order the landscape and bring it within a British frame. He is not content simply to note that the lawns and copsewoods are thoroughly English; he stresses that they would ‘surpass’ an English landscape garden.
Thompson’s comment provides insight into the logic of British imperial adjudication and ‘measurement’ and also reveals the way in which landscape is in the service of class. The naturalness of the lawn appears as a sign ‘of the aristocratic landowner’s improving hand’ (Bunn 1994: 152). Even in England where the lawn was thoroughly naturalised, commentators were well aware that vast amounts of labour and capital were involved in making and keeping lawns, although this was often downplayed or even purposefully hidden, as in the American example of Andrew Jackson Downing, who in the 1840s had his lawns mowed at night by ‘invisible hands’ so that family and guests would not have to witness this ‘distasteful activity’ (Jenkins 1994a).
It seems to me that this impulse is more pronounced in the colony and serves not only to keep out of the frame the ‘invisible hands’ but further to assert that the ‘hand of Nature’ is responsible. If the English landscape garden of this period strived for an affected naturalness that served as evidence of the naturalness of its owners, a landscape garden discovered in Africa that actually required no labour must surpass that of a nobleman’s.
This chapter defines the concept of the lawn as a transplanted concept that crosses the colonial threshold. The idea of the lawn, with all that is connected to it, is confronted by a different physical reality, a place where the lawn does not exist, or does not yet exist, or has yet to find its place in a new environment; thus it is often imagined, conceptually placed within or read into the landscape, as something that is yet to be made. The discourse (which includes the sense of an ideal lawn) is largely shaped already but now has to be integrated with a new environment. Thus the concept of lawn hovers between the ideal and the real.
A non-event
The more they tried to make it just like home, the more they made everybody miss it.
— Apocalypse Now (Coppola 1979)