Sacred and Trampled and Still Blooming
My Mother’s artistic outlets are her flowers and plants. Every Mother’s Day, we spend the morning at the city’s annual Tulip festival. At our home her plants grew so long they were draped across the walls, which looked like you were entering a celebratory ceremony when you walked in.
Her garden is her centre and it is one of the experiences I look forward to hearing about in the summer. I know when it rains that she is elated, it means her flowers and plants are nourished. I know when there has been a dry spell; she is concerned for her garden. She knows each of her flowers’ distinctive coloration, geographic location and leaf pattern. This too is her art. Her joy. Her beauty. Her pride. It renews her, keeps her busy and is her own field of paradise.
Attending Eritrean events growing up I saw its significance heavily displayed in our cultural practices. In the traditional ceremonial celebration of weddings, a sea of guests’ fan big green leaves called ko-tely to welcome the bride and groom. Photos of family back home are often seen with a garden as a backdrop, or with folks squatting by a vase of flowers.
In Alice Walker’s In Search of My Mothers Gardens, she discusses how one of the many ways her mother showed herself as an artist was through her garden of flowers. “Because of her creativity with flowers, even my memories of poverty are seen through a screen of blooms — sunflowers, pentunias, roses, dahlias, forsythia, spirea, delphiniums, verbena…and on and on.”
She continues, “I notice that it is only when my mother is working in her flowers that she is radiant, almost to the point of being invisible-except as Creator: hand and eye. She is involved in work her soul must have. Ordering the universe in the image of her personal conception of Beauty.”

Black art on the Internet invigorated a climatic and special cultural currency in 2011, giving birth to a characteristic-like Black Renaissance moment. Black artists would set the model of many styles, experiments and alternative ways of releasing work that would mark its influences for years to come. Frank Ocean’s mixtape Nostalgia, Ultra was released by the artist himself after being shelved by his label. Warsan Shire’s exquisite and gorgeous poetry pamphlet, Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth, would set the blueprint of diaspora poetry that popularized the short verse again by poets attempting to imitate her style for years to come. And Tumblr created a subculture of specialized Black photographers who used plants and flowers for their photographs, creating a new aesthetic, reshaping the playground of earthy portraits, and experimenting with cultural diversity and storytelling that widened representation.
Fast-forward to 2018, Frank Ocean is no longer on Twitter, is independent, and is arguably one of the most important musical artists of our generation. Warsan Shire wrote the poetry for Beyoncé acclaimed visual album, Lemonade, providing the narrative threading that turned a collection of personal songs and compelling visuals into a film. And flowers and plants continue to be used as a backdrop of photos popularized by people on Instagram, with festivals such as AfroPunk whose social media pages showcase Black people creatively decorating themselves with flowers in their hair. Most recently, Rihanna and Beyoncé were the faces of Vogue for the September issue, with both artists adorning themselves with floral crowns as part of their outfit. Beyoncé opted for no make-up, wishing to present herself as unfiltered with opulent flowers. In contrast, Rihanna overdramatized her make-up with the flowers in much more darker colours in shade and tone. The significance of their different approaches challenge the conventional definition of what ‘beauty’ is, intriguing us with the colours and textures.
Jazz Cartier, whose new cover album Fleurever, with ‘fleur’ meaning flower in French, shows an illustration of him and flowers dripping across this face. Solange’s video for her song, Cranes in the Sky, showcases green space integrated with urban space, and creatively uses plants as handmade dresses and backdrops to a row of dancers. The use of foliage in the video for Cranes in the Sky brings the theme of her personal journey; inviting connections through the many emotional layers in her lyrics to life through the pairing of large-scale industrial spaces and carefully placed planets and flowers.

This new era of cultural currency established by these range of Black artists is connected to historical references and Black expression going back decades. These fresh ranges of creative expression brought a look and feel that created an impression that is part of the current wave of cultural currency. Ostensibly, what we are seeing now emerged by these creative icons is something that is very much a part of Black expression. New wave of Black artists that set the tone of what is part of the cultural fabric and expression is tied into personal experiences of the Black diaspora and Black Americans, thus a continuum.

The premise of Black presentations of greenery and flowers has many historical and cultural references. Stevie Wonder was and still remains my first and favourite musical love. His album, Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants, is a celebration of the earth’ ecosystem, a soundtrack to a documentary and book with the same title. Like watching a flower bloom in a nature show, the album’s primarily instrumental soundtrack thrusts the listener into a melodic wafting of sounds which arouse visual stimulation of plants in all its stages and forms. My personal song for when my friends feel down and weary is Aretha Franklin’s woman’s anthem A Rose is Still a Rose, penned twenty years ago by Lauryn Hill. With its simple and catchy chorus, its a motherly song that serves to give wisdom to a younger woman on her failed relationships and insecurities. The title of the song is a reminder of a woman’s prowess and magnificence, and I always like to show my friends that they are seen in this light. Even now with her passing and extensive catalogue, its still one of her top songs I enjoy listening to consistently.

Toni Morrison’s narrative propensity with the natural world as a symbol and translation for the human experience is widespread in her novel, The Bluest Eye. Reading this novel at fifteen years old, it would be seeped into my memory how deliberate and prolific Morrison was in utilizing symbolism to translate a message. Pecola, the main character, states that there is a disregard for dandelions because “they are so many, strong and soon.” Dandelions are one of the many flowers that can be found in groves. Its purpose is vital to the garden ecosystem and prepares for the instance from the preceding spring, when it dries, awaiting for the stream of wind to carry new plants.
Morrison writes, “Dandelions. A dart of affection leaps out from her to them. But they do not look at her and do not send love back. She thinks, ‘They are ugly. They are weeds.’ Preoccupied with that revelation, she trips on the sidewalk crack. Anger stirs and wakes in her; it opens its mouth, and like a hot-mouthed puppy, laps up the dredges of her shame. Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth.” Pecola’s revelation of this is disheartening, when we know it is the flower people easily pick in a field, it is used for tea and healing and its colour and texture creates vibration in the ecosystem. A young Black girl knows its beauty and purpose is necessary, in spite of the reception by others.
Flowers are available and beautiful, but the commodification of flowers is paramount, from floral companies charging large amounts for weddings to the special prices labeled by supermarkets on Valentine’s Day. But it continues to be a way of commanding and accentuating beauty.
Haniq Abdurraqib’s poem titled ‘How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This’ asserts: “What is the black poet to be writing about ‘at a time like this’ if not to dissect the attractiveness of a flowers — -that which can arrive beautiful and then slowly die right before our eyes?” The beautiful synergetic aspect of flowers and plants are reflective of care. It is drenched in symbolism and itself is a creative representation of Blackness. When they are dying, have been neglected, it mirrors your own life: what aspects are waning? Where does the limb-like faltering of those plants and flowers illustrate your own negligence?

I have taken on my Mother’s incredible imagination and care. During my travels, I always take photos of flowers to show to her. I grab mint leaves and dandelions from her garden to make my tea. I purchase lilacs and roses to display in my house, conscious of the attentiveness needed to cultivate them. My mother, much like Alice Walker’s, is the first artist I knew. But she is also the first person who taught me about caring about earth’s display of beauty, and in her demonstration, I know when you care for them, much like one’s own life, it shows when it blooms.