Embodying the wildflowers of California
Unfaithful Re/creations: A conversation with artist and activist Barnali Ghosh, by Elisabeth Plumlee-Watson
I’m so pleased to be bringing you today’s interview between Elisabeth Plumlee-Watson and Barnali Ghosh. It’s been a while in the making.
Elisabeth first approached me with this idea and her excitement for Barnali’s beautiful and playful flower re/creations quite a few moons ago and for one reason or another it has taken a while to bring it to fruition on these pages.
As you can probably tell, things brew slowly and in their own time here. There is no rigid publishing timetable and many articles take time to emerge. It has been a conscious choice from the beginning for me to avoid operating this newsletter from a sympathetic nervous system state of *should*. Whether that’s for me, or contributors, or for you as a supporter, reader or passing visitor. It has been something of a practice (isn’t everything?) to not fall into the trap of grind culture and the pressure to push out content, just for the sake and speed of it.
I keep this message from Tricia Hersey (aka the Nap Bishop of the Nap Ministry) close and think on it often. I think about how grind culture and capitalism manifests in myself and how I can try, in small ways, to not perpetuate it in how I run this newsletter, in how I treat myself and others. We do not exist simply to consume and be consumed, no matter how we’ve been conditioned to value ourselves and each other. The benefits have to be mutual, boundaries honoured. We all do this thing - continuing this newsletter - because we want to, because the relationships are reciprocal.
There is so much to read, so many messages coming from all angles, so much noise everywhere and things vying for our attention - it’s a real struggle to keep up and take it all in. Maybe it’s just me and my brain/body/being, but I like for things to have time, space and peace to percolate and absorb. So I don’t feel apologetic about not churning out piece after piece on here continuously. It’s OK to take things slow, at a pace that feels sustainable for everyone involved.
I’m grateful for all of you here, sticking around and reading what materialises when the time is right. And especially to those who choose to support Radicle with a paid subscription. Your subscriptions make this newsletter possible and enables contributors like Elisabeth and Barnali to be paid for their work.
I hope you enjoy their thoughtful, generous and open-hearted conversation, which I’m so grateful to them for them sharing with us. It’s slightly longer than most Radicle articles, so why not take a moment to pause, put the kettle on and savour reading it with a nice, comforting mug of something hot.
Unfaithful Re/creations: A conversation with artist and activist Barnali Ghosh, by Elisabeth Plumlee-Watson
From Elisabeth Plumlee-Watson:
I had the happy luck of stumbling across Barnali Ghosh’s “Unfaithful Re/creations” of California wildflowers over a year ago when naturalist JoeJoe Clark (@lilyboyjoy) shared one of her photographs on Instagram. I loved the playfulness and joy that radiated from Barnali’s self-portraits, but was also amazed at the way her choice to embody flowers’ bodies with her human body, and her choice to focus on native California wildflowers using Indian textiles and Odissi dance, complicated ideas of of culture and science, identity and identification, of nativity and belonging.
Barnali’s and my conversation, held over Zoom this past August, explored much of what I first loved in her art but so much more, too. Barnali’s envisioning of relationship and embodiment—in her art and dance, in her choice of what to wear for a bus ride across town; in her climate activism; in the Radical History walking tours she leads around Berkeley—equips me to approach my garden, my writing, and my own queer white embodiment on colonized land in new, more deeply considered ways. I hope after reading this conversation you might feel the same.
(Especially at this time of year I encourage you to check out Barnali’s beautiful California Wildflowers Calendar featuring her artwork [currently only shipping in the US]! Proceeds benefit both Barnali’s work and the work of the California Native Plant Society and the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust)
Elisabeth Plumlee-Watson: You're based in Berkeley, California - am I right that you’ve been there a long time?
Barnali Ghosh: Well, I’ve lived in Berkeley longer than anywhere else - for over 22 years now. I moved here in 1999 from Bangalore, India, which is where I grew up. I moved to go to grad school at UC Berkeley and within the US have only lived in Berkeley.
I came to study landscape architecture and then worked as a landscape architect, mostly on public projects: a lot of public parks, school yards, public streets, things like that. I don't do that anymore. In 2008, my husband and I decided to take a year off, and after, I didn't feel moved to sit in front of a desk, or to keep doing something that I had committed to when I was 18. By that time, I had US citizenship, which allowed me to do anything I wanted, rather than what my work visa would have forced me to do.
Currently, I do a lot of walking and biking advocacy. I sit on the Planning Commission and the Transportation Commission in the city of Berkeley. A lot of it is related to climate justice and climate activism, and that's been my path: to find things that I can do locally.
My husband and I also run walking tours, which came out of wanting to get more people engaged in organizing and activism. Organizers and activists are always on the edge of burnout, one reason you need to continuously bring new people into the movement. For the South Asian community, part of bringing people in was letting them know that we do have a history of activism in this country, and in the city of Berkeley, that goes back over a century. These are not stories most people know, even in our own community. Our walking tours have been part of sharing that history for almost 10 years now.
The walking tours and the flower portrait project wrestle with the idea of always having one foot in the homeland; you're never going to fully be here. But then how do you live your life? There are external factors that push you to wonder whether you belong: post-Trump racism, even on the streets of Berkeley, or veiled comments that somebody might make at a city council meeting.
People might say Namaste to me…which to some people is sweet. But to me, I'm like, that's not something I said growing up in India! I guess that's nice that you know a little bit about my culture, but it’s also this huge assumption! My husband was born in Canada, he grew up in the US; for him it doesn't mean anything. People are making this assumption that we’re Other. My husband and I have these discussions about what kind of racism is better, hostile and explicit, or more veiled. [Laughs] I say none of it.
This constant reminder that I might be Other also comes from the way I dress, so saris are a big of part of my identity beyond the flower portraits project. I always dress in my clothes that I get from India, because that's what I feel most comfortable in. I hate going shopping here and none of the clothes fit my body type; I don't enjoy the colors.
EPW: Do the embodied experiences of both South Asian activist history on the walking tours and also the embodied experience of racism and anti-Asian immigration sentiment—those feelings of Otherness—intersect with what it’s like to embody native California wildflowers?
Barnali Ghosh: When it comes to embodying native flowers, there is this question of the language around native plants. And this goes back to my time studying landscape architecture. When I was introduced to native plants, the language felt very harsh because there were native plants, and then anything else was exotic or invasive. And those are also terms used to describe people, especially Asian Americans.
I grew up in the city of Bangalore, which is known as India's Garden City. We have gorgeous huge trees that flower, all kinds of colors, any color that you can imagine. I think my relationship with those trees and plants and flowers was established through the years that I grew up there, and in the way that those flora are incorporated in culture, in culture and fabric, in prints that you see around you, in rituals. You sort of organically start to learn some of the names and qualities of those flowers. You start to recognize them.
But when I came here, learning the names of plants in landscape architecture, school was really difficult. There were all these Latin names; doing planting plans was extremely challenging for me. So much of it was because I didn't really understand what these plants or flowers or trees were because I just couldn't connect with them.
I started to reconnect with flowers and plants once I left the profession, because the pressure to know them perfectly had lifted. For more than ten years now, I’ve been walking in Berkeley and taking pictures of flowers and trees and plants here.
EPW: It's so interesting to me to hear you talk about the intrinsic role of culture in knowing plants and knowing their names and feeling familiar with them. On YouTube I watched your talk with the California Native Plant Society, and you listed specific experiences from your childhood, like marigolds in ceremonies or jasmine in your mother's hair.
I thought about how I'm surrounded by people who are really invested in native plants here in Northeastern Ohio. But there's not usually that language of lived-with-ness. It can very much be about the need to save nature out there. Unconsciously, these conversations are permeated with a specific human culture, because nothing humans do is untouched by culture; but they would call it “science,” not culture (not recognizing Western science as a part of Western culture).
I’ve realized in recent years how much the plants I love, the plants I wanted in my garden from the time I was a little girl, are so impacted by British children's literature. Those are the plants that I have this heart connection to. Actually, I was born in Tucson, Arizona and I grew up in the Sonoran Desert. I thought I lived in the ugliest place on Earth. No one told me that it was an ugly place. But the storybooks that so consumed my heart created the world I wanted to experience with my body. I wanted to see foxgloves and primroses and all the things that I thought were worth writing a book about! I didn’t know the way British imperial hegemony affects every aspect of my life and your life—I just knew that the plants I saw in storybooks were the ones I loved, and I didn’t see saguaros and ocotillos in storybooks.
Fast forward 30 years and I’m navigating that relationship even now with the idea of native plants, though in a different landscape: as a passionate gardener, as someone who cares about delicate ecosystems, who knows some science around native species—still, the plants that I care most about having a relationship with come from childhood memories: but they're childhood literature memories, not embodied memories.
Barnali Ghosh: So much of it is emotional! And focusing on native plants happened by accident for me, because I really love the California Poppy. That flower! The orange reminds me of marigolds. I think, as immigrants, we’re often doing that, saying, “oh, this thing is just like that thing.” And often, that's how you create new connections.
And then I got that amazing response on the California Native Plant Society Facebook group. I think folks were hungry for new stories and new ways to see these plants. Like you're saying, it's not enough to understand the scientific reason [that these plants are important], it's not enough to understand the climate reason—those are often not enough to move us, or to move all of us. And all of us connect in different ways. Like with your story about literature, and what you grew up reading.
I'd been on the Facebook group for maybe ten years, but not fully engaging. And then once this happened, I was like, oh, maybe this is a way that I create my relationship with these plants that I have always been intimidated by. The flowers of my home [in India] will always be part of who I am. But if this is where I live now, this is a way that I'm connecting, and translating, and creating new stories and new relationships.
Your point also about relationships is so important, because when I talk to native folks, indigenous folks, they talk about nature as being our relatives. And embodiment is an interesting way to sort of find yourself in relationship with these flowers and plants, right, because it's not separate from you. There, I am the flower. And that's a very different interaction than just taking a photo of a flower.
EPW: I was looking back through your other work on Getty Challenge, where you [and many other people during the pandemic] were recreating pieces of artwork with things you had at home. But those are, in a way, so much more literal, you know? Usually there was a human figure in an image and you used your human body to imitate the figure in the image. So how did you make that metaphorical leap? To think, I’m a human, but I could embody the flower? And what’s the relationship of Classical Indian dance to that? What made you think, Oh, these clothes and holding my body in this way can transform my body into a flower’s body?
Barnali Ghosh: When I was doing the Getty Museum Challenge, I decided not to focus on old masters. I was doing a lot of contemporary artists, a lot of South Asian and Asian artists. And for me, it was also like a pandemic diary. So I wasn't doing just literal recreation; I was also adding a layer of response to what was happening for me in the pandemic.
But copyright restrictions got in the way, and I wanted more freedom in the way I used the images. I thought, Oh, I've been taking pictures of flowers for so long! These images are things are all under my copyright. And because of my design background, I sometimes observe form very closely. So I was walking, looking at the wisteria and going, I have a sari that color! Or, it looks like a dancer! And so I came home, and put on that sari, and took a picture. And I thought it was a one-time thing, because I'd also done one where I'm dressed like a samosa and I'd told my friends I won’t dress like more foods! [laughs] But then this happened organically.
Then there is Odissi dance. Without my being a student of Odissi dance, I don't think I could have brought in the emotional aspects. I could copy the colors, but the storytelling and the emotion around that pose that I picked for the flower—that’s all a reflection of how a flower makes me feel. It's maybe the only Indian dance form that I know of that has an ability to convey softer, more sensual, emotions. Bharatanatyam is more angular, more athletic. In Kathak you're moving a lot. But Odissi dance is based on the poses that you see in the sculptures on temples. So there is a lot of holding of the pose, and it's more curvaceous. And it's not scared of being sexual or sensual. It just makes sense to me: that if you wanted to depict flowers, then Odissi would be the dance form to do it.
And there’s also a body image perspective, just putting my body out there, in light of some of the experiences I have on the street, as a brown body, and people's reactions to me. By doing the art recreations, I got sort of bolder and braver. But even then, you could hide under some paint, you could hide under some tape. But with the flower portraits, it was just me, my self-portrait.
EPW: On that note, maybe you could talk about how doing the South Asian History walking tours shaped the way you view who you are in the world and what you do in the world. I'm always curious about people's experience of embodiment in landscape.
Barnali Ghosh: Like my flower self-portraits, we also started the walking tours for multiple reasons. One was to just get more South Asians involved in organizing. In our communities there’s this idea that we're all doctors, engineers, lawyers, even though you know, our countries —India, Pakistan, Bangladesh—exist because of civil disobedience and activism, because we fought the British! We wanted to reconnect our communities with that.
Walking in that history led me to feel entitled to the city. Entitlement is something I saw a lot of as a landscape architect. I also have a lot of community meetings, being on the planning commission, there's a lot of public interaction. And people will always come and say, “I've lived here for so many years”. Or, “my family's been here for three generations”. And it always irks me, because how long you've lived here shouldn't always determine how big your voices are in relation to what should happen to the city. I don't think that's the only thing that should determine it.
The other thing is just being out in a space: our tours have all kinds of people, but very often they are primarily South Asian folks or Asian American folks, people of color just occupying a space in the city together. Thirty of us standing on a street corner can sometimes be surprising or threatening to people, even in Berkeley. For so much of our history, there are no plaques, there are no signs: the history is a hidden layer in the city. The walking tours make that more visible.
But we also have to talk about being an immigrant in relationship with Indigenous folks in our community, right? Last year we got a street renamed in Berkeley after Kala Bagai, who was one of the earliest South Asian immigrant women to come to the US. She came here in 1915 , and survived racism in Berkeley. While doing that project, we reached out to the Chochenyo Ohlone community, the indigenous people of this land, and we asked for their blessing.
For many South Asians, we don't know about being in relationship with Indigenous folks. We always think we're going to go back to the homeland, and never quite feel like we belong here. When we learn US history in India, we learn about Christopher Columbus “discovering” America; you might learn about slavery. And then we come here, and we're like, Oh, shit. Indigenous folks are still in our communities?!
So as part of the street renaming, we reached out to activist Corrina Gould who is also the tribal chair of the Chochenyo Ohlone community and asked for their blessing. And they wrote us a letter of support. That interaction allowed me to more clearly recognize the way British colonialism has affected my homeland, and settler colonialism their homeland—both our homelands. The reason many of us leave and come here is because India was starved of resources after 300 years of colonialism.
EPW: All of this is about being in relationship, isn’t it? Being in reciprocal relationship instead of either an objective relationship or a situation of silence and refusing all relationship. You're building rings of relationship.
Barnali Ghosh: Yeah. It's an ongoing process, of course. I can relate this to the question of saris and textiles, because I think for me, wearing saris in the US was another form of embodied relationship. I often wear them just on the streets or taking the bus. Most people in our community only wear saris for special occasions and when they are in homogenous South Asian spaces—like going to a wedding—but not so much in mixed public spaces.
Cotton handloom weaving, like for weaving saris, was something disrupted by British colonialism—it’s something that had to be re-invented in the wake of that disruption. Odissi dance is also something created after the British left India: dance forms were also disrupted by colonialism. And native flowers in California: their relationships to native landscapes and native people were also disrupted by colonialism. All of these things are sort of being reconnected. What I do with my saris and my dance and my body and native flowers—it’s weaving all these disruptions into something new and beautiful for myself, and creating something joyful out of painful disruptions. And, disruptions continue today, right? These artforms didn't evolve organically; they all had to sort of be reclaimed out of pain, and the pain of that still exists.
EPW: I love hearing you talk about reinventions—whether it's Odissi dance, or a tradition of weaving. It’s a thing I would love more people to connect with, especially white folks in North America—descendants, like I am, of European settler colonists. I think so much of this pretense that we're going to “put things back together the way they were” comes from grief and guilt.
I went on a wildflower walk earlier this spring here in Ohio. The guides, veteran naturalists with decades of experience—and all of them white-presenting—were talking about restoring landscapes. And the number of times that glyphosate was brought up as like a tool for restoring landscape was mind blowing! To me, it speaks very much of this sort of willful refusal to acknowledge history, this saying: we don't have to invent something new from what was irreparably broken for the good of all currently living beings, we can just use whatever means necessary to kind of jump back in time. It hurts to admit that things will never not have been ruptured, but it’s the only truth. Whether it's a dance form or a craft form or landscape, it’s going to be a reinvention, and that reinvention has to honor everything and everyone, not just this obsession with return.
Barnali Ghosh: I think one thing that's given me a lot of hope is comments from the California Native Plant Society Facebook group. There are people of color there who comment, but most of them are white. When I first posted, I was very afraid even the positive comments would be like, Oh, Exotic! That would have been like a dagger through my heart.
But I have seen people use these images to think about native plants in a different way. Because these spaces can sometimes be very policed, in a way where people are afraid to ask questions. And how do you learn and grow and have a complex understanding of ecosystems, and how things are in relationship with each other, if you're being policed? I think art has that ability to sort of push us to think along different paths that might lead us to a goal, paths that don’t have to be rigid, paths that can be fun.
I'm grateful for people being open to the art that I put forward. I hope it helps people want to feel joyful and enjoy their flowers, even as they understand the relationship between those flowers and everything else.
Barnali Ghosh is a designer, artist, storyteller, and transportation justice advocate based in Berkeley, California. Her work attempts to bridge homes and homelands, and create spaces for belonging. She co-founded the award-winning Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour, which uses storytelling and theater to share narratives of local South Asian American resistance movements, from immigrant freedom fighters in the 1910s, to queer and feminist organizing a century later. Ghosh's latest project is a series of photographic self portraits that highlight the beauty of California’s native flowers, and the fabrics of South Asia. You can see her work on Instagram @berkeleywali and @berkeleysouthasian or at barnalighosh.art.
Elisabeth Plumlee-Watson’s writing has been published or is forthcoming in Terrain.org, Oh Reader magazine, Killing the Buddha, Gulf Coast, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She writes the seasonal book recommendation Substack, Seasons Readings, and after almost 10 years working in publishing in New York City, is now a fulltime bookseller and book editor in her hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, where she lives with her wife. She gardens land near the shores of Lake Erie in the Great Lakes region, one of indigenous North America’s most diversely peopled regions of pilgrimage, trade, and passage for thousands of years. You can find Elisabeth on Instagram @eplumleewatson
Elisabeth and Barnali are being paid for this article.
Photo credits: Barnali Ghosh