"A Coffee-Plantation is a Thing that Gets Hold of You and Does Not Let You Go": Plant-Writing in Karen Blixen's Out of Africa. Issue 4 (2nd October 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Mortensen, Peter
• Is Part Of: Journal of literary studies. Volume 35:Issue 4(2019)
• Page Start: 28
• Page End: 45
• Publication Date: 2019-10-02
• Subjects: South African literature -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Literature -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; 820.9968
• DOI: 10.1080/02564718.2019.1690805
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0256-4718

Abstract

Summary: One of the powerful but mostly overlooked productive forces in and behind Karen Blixen's Out of Africa (1937) is Coffea arabica, the coffee bush of Arabia. In this article, I first discuss the dominant anti-pastoral tendency in recent Blixen-criticism, which has classified Out of Africa as a neo-colonial text and reduced Blixen's interest in more-than-human nature to an expression of conservative ideology. I introduce two alternative concepts – "arabesque" and "phytographia" – that help me reposition Out of Africa and reconsider the significance of the text's many plant-references. Blixen's writing, in my understanding, holds a more timely interest and performs a more culturally productive function than is often assumed, especially insofar as it fore-grounds the life of many different plants and asks us to consider their powerful impact upon humanity. Read at a time when we are beginning to understand the disastrous implications of Western culture's deep-rooted "plant blindness", Blixen's text helps question the insignificance of plants and problematise the powerful conviction that humans and plants lead separate and unrelated lives.