We have no use for the lawn now that Zeke is under it, and the herb garden is going in to replace it. It is, at least, familiar work. It is, at least, a diversion. I have ordered a few different species of oregano and some clove pinks, thyme and sage and a few others. I thought a small lemon tree might be a nice addition to the place, as Becky uses a lot of lemons in baking, so I went to the nursery today to see what was available. I came back with a Eureka lemon, nothing exciting, the same lemon you can buy at every corner produce stand in North America. But it’s a reliable variety, so I got one.
I also came back with a tree I hadn’t expected to find: a Citrus histrix, a type of lime whose leaves are frequently used in Thai and Cambodian cooking. If you’ve ever come upon a thickish, sour, dark green leaf in your Thai curry, that’s almost certainly a Citrus histrix leaf. The flavoring of Tom Yum soup is often almost entirely Citrus histrix leaves and galangal. It’s a useful flavor and I snagged a tree, brought it home, and I’ll try to use it fast enough so that it doesn’t take over the yard with its thorns.
The nursery was selling it as a “Kaffir lime.”
The nursery isn’t unusual in this regard: that’s pretty much the plant’s standard common name, at least in North America. “Kaffir” is derived from “kafir,” an Islamic theological term which essentially translates to “heathen,” or “infidel” if you’re feeling uncharitable. Sounds good to me: I like the idea of having an infidel lime growing in my yard.
There’s a problem though. “Kaffir” is used in South Africa as a virulent ethnic slur toward native Africans, fulfilling essentially the same function in South African society as the word “nigger” does in US society. Throughout the rest of the Indian Ocean basin where the tree is used, “kaffir” is as value-neutral a word as anything translatable to “infidel” can be. But in South Africa? Poison. Thus I flinch at the tags in the nursery.
A nursery tag in California may seem irrelevant to South African culture. Sure, a South African might wander into the hardware store in California and get upset. But the word doesn’t carry that freight in California. I know African American gardeners who call it a Kaffir lime without wincing.
Gardening in California, though, ties one to South Africa pretty firmly. This part of California’s got what the biogeographers call a Mediterranean climate: dry summers, warmish, wet winters, and plants adapted to both. There are only a few other places with similar climates. One of them, in an amazing coincidence, is the Mediterranean. Australia’s another, with Mediterranean outposts in the west and south, and central Chile is another spot. And South Africa rounds out the list, with its Cape Floristic Province, land of proteas and iceplants and aloes. South Africa’s fynbos is the ecological equivalent of California’s chaparral.
As a result of the horticultural similarities among these places, gardeners in one Mediterranean climate often read writing by garden writers in other Mediterranean climate. Thus a California garden writer, such as I occasionally self-style myself to be, may well end up giving inadvertent offense even when using a phrase that’s completely inoffensive in its place of origin, such as “Kaffir lime.” The Thai word for the plant is “makrut,” and that’s what I’ll try to remember to call it. Or Citrus histrix if I’m feeling Latinate.
Makrut’s not the only plant that poses the problem. About seventy-five South African plants contain the word “Kaffir” in their common name, including the widely grown Clivia or “Kaffir lily.” Some, such as the coral tree Erythrina caffra, have the word enshrined in their Latin binomial. Xanthorrhoea, a gorgeous Australian tree vaguely resembling a Yucca or a palm, is often referred to in print as “black boy,” for the putative resemblance of the trees’ charred trunks in their native, wildfire-prone grassland habitat to aboriginal Australians. Fortunately the phrase “grass tree” is available, or “Australian grass tree” if one needs to distinguish a Xanthorrhoea from a Dasylirion, a “Mexican grass tree” with no racist alternative name of which I’m aware.
Another example, with which anyone over the age of 35 who’s kept houseplants will be familiar: Tradescantia, or “Wandering Jew,” which went through a phase of serious popularity as a houseplant in the 1970s. I never quite understood what was supposed to be so Jewish about the plant, but I don’t get the connection between Judaism and little metal leaf springs you put against your mouth to make intensely annoying sounds, either. In any event, Tradescantia is increasingly referred to as “spiderwort,” which in any event sounds better and less dactylic.
In Sunset’s Western Garden Guide, as of the 2001 edition at least, the warm interior foothill regions of Oregon and California that make up that book’s “Gardening Zone 7” are now referred to as the “Gray Pine Belt,” an improvement over the 1980 editions’ casting Zone 7 as the “Digger Pine Belt.” “For those of you ignorant of the history of California’s settlement by Europeans, which includes most people outside of California and a startling percentage of people inside California, “digger” is an extremely derogatory 19th century epithet applied by Anglos to Native Californians. The term is a reference to native wild food harvesting methods that — from what I’ve read — seems to have been created as a deliberate parallel to the word “nigger,” and is taken in approximately the same spirit by Native Californians of the 21st Century. Renaming Pinus sabiniana in the public consciousness from “Digger pine” to “Gray pine” is a big job, still in progress.
Part of the problem is, as one might expect, resistance to ditching what people unaffected by the slurs consider to be “perfectly good names” for reasons of “political correctness.” On a California Native Plants email list I belonged to a few years back, a rather heated discussion broke out over Rhus trilobata, a poison oak relative that closely resembles its cousin in all aspects but the dermatological. Most of the participants on the list seemed perfectly willing to concede that the plant’s most common common name, “squawbush,” was best discarded out of respect for natives of the non-botanical sort. A few list members objected, decrying the jackbooted anti-racist botanical thought police and the discussion was still going on when I unsubscribed from the list in some disgust.
Of course, it doesn’t help the pro-sensitivity argument that certain people who should damn well know better keep using names like “squawbush.”
In 1991, botanical writer Melvin Hunter published an article in The Scientist entitled “ Racist Relics: An Ugly Blight On Our Botanical Nomenclature.” In the article, Hunter described the resistance by certain editors of botanical publications to even considering the issue as a topic worth discussing:
Surprisingly, there is a great reticence among botanical scientists to challenge the existence of these racist relics in the garden. Before The Scientist agreed to publish this article, the idea had been rejected by a half-dozen regional and national horticultural and garden magazines. The editor of one scholarly West Coast journal, which represents a number of influential horticulture societies, rejected the idea by responding, “I feel it would stress the sociological implications at the expense of the botanical. Into an article [on plants] the origin and implication of the vernacular name might fit with a sentence or two.” A prominent California horticultural society also shied away from a discussion of racially derogatory common plant names. The editor of the society’s journal commented: “The subject is inappropriate and appears to create a quarrel where there isn’t one at present… your charge of racism is a little dramatic, I feel.”
Because only white people garden, I think the reasoning went.
Hunter found hope in a couple of places, however:
Elizabeth Knoll, sponsoring editor for science and the history of science at the University of California Press, says, “I will make it a point of telling the authors and the advisory board members — if they don’t have the sense to realize it already — that racist and derogatory terms are unacceptable.”
It may well be Elizabeth Knoll’s influence that put the kibosh on one of the most startling examples of use of racist common names I ever came across in my daily reading. It was in the UC Press’ Cacti of California, 1966 edition, in which the small, charming Mojave desert cactus Echinocactus polycephalus was listed, prominently, under the common name “Niggerheads.” The usage extended to a number of other UC Press books as well. No more: the University of California Press has expunged the name from its listings, and they now refer to Echinocactus polycephalus by the common name “cottontop cactus.” (Although I prefer to use the alternative “Mojave mound cactus,” which is the one I first learned.)
Alas, UC Press’ editorial policy seems not to extend to the rest of UC Berkeley.
It’s 2007 and they still refer to the species as “Niggerheads,” prominently, without explanation or note or apology, in the labels of a major, publicly accessible native plant photo database. I wonder how many African-Americans work in the UC Berkeley Plant and Microbial Biology Department. Hmmm. We might have one of those chicken-egg situations here.
