War Bride, Entanglements, and Symbiosis Ruth Ozeki's All Over Creation and Asian American Agrarian Writing

This article reads Ruth Ozeki's All Over Creation (2003) as an Asian American agrarian writing. Drawing upon multispecies ethnography, I consider farming as a contact zone between humans and other species. I place the novel in the context of American agrarian writing and highlight Ozeki's reflections on the critiques of GMOs as well as her innovative ways in which the connections between culture and nature are narrated. The novel consists of two narrative strands, one manifest, the other shadowed. The manifest narrative examines the agrarian community through toxic discourse, the controversy of GMOs and equally controversial anti-GMOs movements. Combining voices and perspectives from multiple characters, the manifest narrative forms a rhizome, unfolding various forms of symbiosis between humans as well as between humans and other species. The shadowed narrative entangles characters and plant species into moments of encounters, extending the narrative toward including an imaginary of cross-species inheritance and symbiosis. With this, Ozeki reveals the precarious lifeworld of the Japanese war brides hitherto underrepresented, and rewrites the Asian American mother-daughter narrative as accomplished through the mediation of plants and seeds. All Over Creation thus reinvents agrarian writing, while reconfiguring the subject of war bride in Asian American narratives.