The Oleander Takes Me Home: Rooting Practices of Refugees in Tbilisi

• In Event: Postsocialist Diasporic Encounters: Migration and Domestic Space across the Global East

Abstract

This paper investigates how displaced people take root in new environments, nurturing relationships with companion plants. Deborah Bird Rose (2011, 11) suggests that the process of becoming human is a joint venture involving collaboration between different species. Based on ethnography in Tbilisi, Ketevan Gurchiani explores in-between places such as little land plots adjacent to housings as well cemeteries where refugees from Abkhazia created their own little gardens. They are remarkable as places where care, adjustment and rooting happen. Flowers and trees exotic to Tbilisi, are at the same time a symbol of being uprooted and rooting. The text addresses multispecies losses and creative efforts to cope, emphasizing plant-care as a profound method of mourning, healing, and reconnecting. 

Author

• Ketevan Gurchiani, Ilia State U (Georgia)