In her poem “Azalea Azalea” from the collection Hard Damage, quoted in part in the above epigraph, American poet Aria Aber describes gardens and gardening as attempts at place-making that clash with the narrator’s memories and her family's experience of war, violence, death, and destruction in Afghanistan. In the US, they admire jasmine, evergreens, and azaleas “perk[ing] up … thousand heads” (Aber 2019, 13), but the US is also the country that bombed Afghanistan and tortured Afghan prisoners of war. The narrator and her family are making themselves a home, of sorts, in the US; gardening and tending to plants is clearly a form of place-making. But they also hide their Afghan origins out of fear. They want “to excel in” gardening in the US, in creating “elixirs of thought,” but “what is the order of violence?,” the narrator of the poem asks (Aber 2019, 12). In the poem, violence, overlapping memories and places, and place-making are associated with flight and migration; refuge and home-making with gardens, gardening, and growing plants. This home-making manifests in gardening and growing plants. Yet these gardens remain uncanny, always in tension and conversation with images of dirt, bombs, and decay (see Aber 2019, 12–13).

Aria Aber grew up in Germany as the daughter of refugees from Afghanistan; she studied in the US and currently lives in Oakland, California. Her poetry offers fierce reflections on violence, war, and flight and connects these reflections to questions of language, belonging, and place-making. Germany is a step on her journey, and the German language and German-language poetry (specifically Rilke) make their way into her work, mingling with English and some words in Dari. She describes her “hate-love relationship” to German and the “ghosts of various languages” that inhabit her poetry (O’Rourke 2020).

During the final week of the year 2020, as I was in the middle of writing this book, my family and I took a short trip from our home in Knoxville, Tennessee, to Edisto Beach, South Carolina. The COVID- 19 pandemic was still raging and Donald Trump continued to, without evidence, contest the election results. As part of this trip, we went to explore Botany Bay Plantation and Driftwood Beach, nearby. Today marketed as a Wildlife Management Area and “Heritage Preserve,” Botany Bay is the site of some of the most violent plantations of the area, where countless enslaved people were murdered. The Catawba and Edisto tribes inhabited these coastal lands before the plantation owners stole them. At the entrance, people register, pay a fee, and can take a map and guide for a driving tour through the grounds. There is no explicit mention or any form of commemoration of the site's brutal, racist history, yet the place had an eerie, haunted beauty (Fig. 36 and Fig. 37). After a turn from the main road, from which, passing over the marsh, we had seen a shamaniclooking tree decorated with colorful shreds of fabric and what looked like small dolls, the drive took us through overgrown fields, past some remnants of human structures, freshwater ponds, to the beach, where the shoreline seems to have slowly eroded the oaks that used to grow along this stretch of land. We wandered along this beach and climbed over halfsubmerged skeletons of trees, tasting the salty sea air.

The surfaces of the trees on the beach are smooth, not wrinkly and “old” as suggested in Pepperminta, when Pepperminta strokes the bark of a tree cross-cut with her touching the wrinkly skin of an elderly woman. The trees feel smooth because they have died, lost their bark to the raging sea and, maybe, the rising sea levels.

In the final scenes of Faraz Shariat's film Futur Drei (Future Three; in English as No Hard Feelings, 2020), a muffled female voice speaks these words in Farsi in a message left on a borrowed cell phone, a belated goodbye from Banafshe to her brother Amon. Banafshe is in hiding somewhere in Europe to avoid deportation to Iran; Amon is staying in Germany, for now, waiting for his asylum case to be decided. The film conveys her message to him as a voice-over; her location remains undisclosed. The close-up, almost still images that accompany her words shift between showing fragile, precious-looking house plants, intricate leaves, and soft grass to plants with spikes and strong, protective bark (see Figs. 1 and 2). At times, the plant images clash with the words as they connect the different emotions expressed in the message and in the film, from displacement and precarity, to permanence, sadness, and past hauntings, and finally to love, joy, and, importantly, hope for the future. They reference the plants Amon cares for in his room in the refugee shelter, the greenhouse where Banafshe and her brother Amon and his boyfriend Parvis joyfully celebrate Amon's birthday, and the carefully groomed gardens in the middle-class suburb where Parvis lives with his parents.

I have begun my introductory chapter with a description of the final scenes of the film I discuss in the last chapter of this book. Faraz Shariat’s film illustrates how plants in literature and film speak about complex histories and structures of violence but also about more just interrelations, place-making, and hopes for better futures. The film is intense and emotional, funny and political. It is easy to overlook the crucial importance plants play as connectors in the film; however, plants are closely tied to the film's complex negotiation of identity and belonging, specifically when it comes to sexuality, gender, citizenship status, and language.

The nesting grounds of rare migrating birds with the telling name “Kampflaufer” (fight runners) are the focal point of mounting tensions within the community of Unterleuten in Juli Zeh's novel of the same title (2016). The old and new inhabitants of the village contend with the plan to build wind turbines that would, presumably, impact the birds and lower property values for some inhabitants but allow others to make a considerable profit. Valeska Grisebach's film Western (2017) contrasts scenes of construction sites with shots of pristine, wild landscapes as a team of German contractors begin work on an EU-funded hydroelectric power station in rural Bulgaria, close to the Greek border. Tensions erupt as the German men interact with locals and as their construction project stalls. In Anna Sofie Hartmann's film Giraffe (2019), Dara, an ethnologist, explores the ways in which the preparations for a tunnel project between Germany and Denmark displace people and change the rural landscapes. Dara becomes preoccupied with diaries she finds as she explores an overgrown garden and an abandoned house marked for demolition, and has a brief romantic relationship with a much younger Polish migrant worker.

In their depictions of preparations for large-scale infrastructure projects, all three works confront specific social and historical tensions. In Unterleuten, the legacies of divided Germany, socialism, and collectivist, state-run farming operations haunt the village. Western addresses the legacies of Nazism and German militarism in the rural border zones it depicts. Giraffe shows tensions within the EU, both between urban and rural areas and between richer and poorer EU countries. None of the three works is about environmental activism, specifically or exclusively; none of the three is dystopian or utopian, yet all three works depict plans to take over land and alter landscapes in the name of profit and progress. They show the failures of and challenges for infrastructure projects in multi-layered, fictional, documentary-style narratives.

The woman in Emma Amos's famous painting Flower Sniffer (1966) looks at the viewer skeptically, almost as if she feels guilty being caught holding and sniffing, maybe arranging, the cut flowers. Her neck is bent forward in an exaggerated way, making herself smaller in what seems like a submissive gesture, but her gaze is powerful: the viewer might have caught her sniffing, but this is her moment. In a composition that borrows from classic painting, the woman, the “flower sniffer,” is framed by a window. She is in a private space—maybe her own space—but everything seems slightly off-center: the white paint framing the figure is thick and the figure is positioned low in the frame.

Emma Amos's painting from 1966 of a Black woman sniffing flowers in a domestic scene evokes histories of representation of women and flowers associated with the private, and with domesticity, fragility, and the patriarchal order. The submissive posture and the subversive gaze of the woman depicted, however, create new relations between the figure and the flowers, the figure and the space she is in, and the figure and the viewer who “catches” her in the act as she defiantly looks back. She is having an intimate, sensual experience of smelling, touching, and looking at the flowers. In what is assumed to be a self-portrait of Amos, critics see a Black woman's claim to space and to be taken seriously in the predominantly white and male art scene of the mid-twentieth century.

The fact that the figure in the painting is holding and smelling flowers is crucial for understanding the painting's power and its interventions. In that sense, the flowers tell a story: they speak of gender, race, history, domesticity, and representation. The flowers are the woman's co-conspirators; they offer her sensual pleasure and she offers them care. The interventions of Amos's painting are multiple, but they clearly align with the previous chapter of this book, as they point to ways in which art uses overly coded symbols, such as flowers, femininity, and race, to shift and question meanings.

Twenty-twenty, the year I began to conceptualize and write this book, was a year that left many of us feeling lost, confused, and hurt. The global COVID-19 crisis and all the associated crises across the world caused an array of fears and uncertainties. Urgent discourses about climate change and the political and social crises triggered by climate change temporarily moved into the background. People across the world felt vulnerable and scared of the virus and of getting sick, but also of losing their jobs, incomes, and sense of security, as social and political systems threatened to collapse under pressure. In the midst of those tensions, social inequalities became even more glaringly obvious.

I wrote most of this book physically located in the US, in a country where police violence against Black people continues to highlight persistent racisms. In the summer of 2020, California had some of its worst wildfires in history and hurricanes struck the gulf states. It was also the year of the highly anticipated and anxiety-provoking US presidential election of 2020, which led to a violent mob contesting the election results and storming the US capitol building on January 6, 2021, the day congress was to certify the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. I finished the first draft of this manuscript in the summer of 2021, during my first visit to Germany in two years, as the pandemic still raged in parts of the world while the rich countries were slowly emerging out of their lockdowns and restrictions. As I edited my chapters from my parents’ house in rural southern Germany, I listened to trees being cut down, crashing down, falling to the forest floor with loud thumps. Pine trees (specifically Fichten) in the monocultural pine forests of Southern Germany are dying: they are dried up and infested by pests after years of insufficient rain. Only a few weeks later, in the summer of 2021, parts of Western Europe and China experienced the worst floods in decades.

The cover image of this book, a watercolor painting by my youngest daughter, shows a beautifully lush line of pine trees, the bright orange sky of a sunset, and a yellow flower meadow. The image also evokes a sky lit by the hot glow of forest fires.

Flower Acts: Commercialism, Objectification, and Art

A series of works by London-based artist Anna Ridler centers around tulips and the tulip industry. She produces tulip imagery by reproducing technologies of genetics with artificial intelligence. This complicates questions of power, representation, and agency in the relationship between technology and plants/life, in this case genetically engineered flowers. Ridler's work sets out to “trace the lineage of natural history with technology,” to capture life with the tools of artificial intelligence. Tulips are one of the most common spring garden flowers, familiar but made uncanny in their multiplicity in Ridler's artwork. These tulips speak of manipulation and of the markets in which they are sold, but they also speak of variation. The imagery estranges viewers from ideas and associations they might bring to tulips, such as spring flower bouquets, Easter decorations, or spring gardens. These tulips ask questions about beauty, production and reproduction, commercialization, and representation.

Anna Ridler starts with the premise that a virus causes the color variations in tulips; she then creates AI-generated art to represent the repetition and variation that is at the heart of the tulip industry. Ridler's three works in the tulip series, Elaine Ayers argues, “make the case that the artist and algorithm can never be separated, that flowers are inextricable from systems of social and economic currency.” Ridler's work references Dutch economic exploitation in the present and the past going back to colonialism, when, as Ayres explains, the tulip craze was part of an “economic bubble,” “driving overzealous buyers to financial ruin.”

The emphasis on the colonialist social and economic currency of flowers is but one aspect of this work. Ridler's work is also about beauty and becoming, about manipulation and control, about virality and excess, vulnerability and connection. The tulip cycles pose questions about the future of plants, specifically flowers, their relationship to technology, and our (ethical) relationships to them. The artworks’ focus on digital and manufactured reproduction as well as chance creates an ambivalent sense of place, agency, and the ethics of care. Ridler's imagery builds on the tension between a harmonious alignment of people and flowers and human attempts to dominate and manipulate plants, between production and reproduction, between agency and being acted upon or violated.

The works discussed in this chapter echo the discussions in the previous chapter in their insistence on a search for community as a key intervention in the process of place-making. They suggest listening to trees and letting trees and roots speak about exclusion and racism and for anti-racist futures. These works, however, are not explicitly or exclusively about trees; yet focusing on trees offers an angle for interpretation that opens broader political contexts and discussions as part of a continued “search” in “the forest of falsehoods.” Trees in these works connect and re-signify places. They claim place and act in defiance, yet they also speak of exclusions, violations, and violence past and present. What is present in the texts discussed in the previous chapter becomes explicit here: that displacing whiteness and white supremacy is the foundation for developing more racially just relationships. In the previous chapter, I argue for critical perspectives on history and memory; this chapter takes these perspectives and applies them to histories of racism and ideologies of racial supremacy.

Why Trees?

Tree symbolism is deeply engrained in cultural production. One might just think of two popular TV series of the last decade to make this point. During the intro credits of the pilot of the popular Netflix series Bridgerton (created by Chris Van Dusen), the blooming tree symbolizes growth, coming of age, and the hope for (or fear of?) the survival of a bloodline. In an even more popular TV series, Game of Thrones (8 seasons, 2011–2019, created by Benioff and Weiss), the tree in the North is a mystical creature that connects and conjures, maybe saves, but also creates and senses danger. Symbolism of trees continues to evoke both the idea of a dynasty and a “bloodline” and the dark, gothic, romantic, and mystical.

In the German context, forests and trees are also tied to the racist blood and soil ideology of National Socialism, an expression also used by the Nazi Minister of Agriculture, Rudolf Barre, “who pushed for a policy of Naturschutz (protection of nature) as a state priority” (Schama 1995, 82).

SINCE THE MID-2000S there has been a marked uptick across the Western world of discussions surrounding the validity and effectiveness of feminism today. Terms such as “postfeminism” or “lifestyle feminism” are increasingly used to characterize a popular interest in making feminism palatable through depoliticization, even as political actions are publicly evaluated as successes or failures on the basis of criteria more appropriate for their second-wave forebears. These discussions either brand feminist cultural production as successful activism against a sexist, mainstream, and consumerist culture, or condemn it as mere media sensation that points to the failure or ineffectuality of feminism today. This production of unclear political meaning speaks to the current situation of contemporary feminisms in both popular and academic discourse.

The label of women's writing used in this volume is particularly illustrative of the pitfalls of such desire for clear evaluation, for it suggests that a neat categorization along easily delineated gender lines corresponds productively with literary work geared toward consumption by a specific, self-identified female audience. The term “Popfeminismus” (popfeminism), which emerged in Germany alongside these other terms to reference a feminism entangled in popular culture, offers one way of undoing the categorical delineation. Popfeminism uses feminism to draw from, disturb, and rewrite popular culture, but also uses popular culture to draw from, disturb, and rewrite feminism. The circular result contains an inherent awkwardness that we suggest is politically legible.

In this essay, we explore how that awkwardness is a useful concept for the production, consumption, and analysis of a branch of contemporary “women's writing” that understands itself or is received as both feminist and popular, because it offers a way out of the failure/success binary. In so doing, it problematizes the existence of the category of women's writing altogether, even while it confirms that in feminist literature, beginning a discussion with a notion of women's writing is potentially necessary. Awkwardness embraces the ambivalence of effectiveness in feminist creative work today that refuses clear meaning-making by nevertheless showing how its own position is intentionally (if ambivalently) political.

We use a popfeminist methodology to propose awkwardness as a theoretical tool for political interpretation.