November 6, 2015 - 17:46
All Over Creation, by Ruth Ozeki, is not an environmental treatise or manifesto. It is a novel, a work of fiction, and it is about people and the complex relationships between them. In the midst of daddy issues, child molestation, pornography, cancer, baby-stealing, miscarriages, abortion, cultural appropriation, Alzheimer’s, and bombs, the environmental side of the book can seem secondary. And yet, as Yumi tells us at the beginning of the story, “It starts with the earth. How can it not?” (Ozeki 3). The very point that the novel is making is that we cannot separate ourselves from the environment. Ozeki demonstrates this through Momoko’s relationship with seeds.
For Momoko, seeds are as alive as any person. “‘They’re all she remembers,’” Lloyd says, and indeed, she has reached the point where she cannot always recognize her own daughter (Ozeki 104, 333). She even treats her seeds as people, always talking to them, telling them (in Japanese,) “Be strong, my little seedling!” (Ozeki 5). She also treats people as seeds. When Lloyd refuses to acknowledge Yumi upon her return, Momoko throws poppy seeds over him, laughing at the pun (since “Poppy” can be a nickname for father.) Pouring water over the seeds that fell at his feet, she orders, “‘Okay, poppy. Now you grow up!’” (Ozeki 71-72). She considers Lloyd’s behavior to be childish and sees him as an obstinate seed, afraid to break through its shell into the sun (he perceives Yumi as a “variegated confusion of light”), and she treats him as such, not only by “watering” him, but also by talking to him as she does to her seeds (Ozeki 72). However, she does not think of seeds only as the earliest stage of life; Yumi later finds her talking to mature plants and calling them seeds (Ozeki 331). Momoko then informs her that “‘Grown-up plant is seed, too...Those ones are only flowers now, but they gonna be seeds...Everyone gonna be seeds’” (Ozeki 332). Momoko thinks of life in cycles, and for her, the most important stage of that cycle is the seed. This is the stage that allows the cycles to continue, and it is the stage that has the most potential, all of one plant’s having been reached, all of the next plant’s yet to be. Her use of the word “everyone” has two implications. The first is that she considers her seeds and plants to be people; the second is that she believes the seed stage happens in humans’ lives as well as in plants’.
This idea of life cycles, with the “seed” stage coming at the beginning and end of life, is developed through the young and elderly characters in the book. Both Momoko and Lloyd are at times compared to children. Shortly before Yumi arrives, Lloyd observes that Momoko “looked so small, curled over and concentrating, like a child at a task” (Ozeki 69). In the same scene, as the nurse informs Momoko about Lloyd’s progress, she speaks about him condescendingly, calling him “our boy” and saying that “he buttoned up his own pajama tops and walked to the potty all by himself” (Ozeki 69). Lloyd and Momoko are old, childlike, and dependent, but like seeds, they have a contribution to make to the next generation. Seeds pass along a plant’s genetic material, so that life can continue; Lloyd and Momoko, “prophets of the Revolution,” must pass along their knowledge, which in this case is also essential to life, since it concerns the survival of humankind (Ozeki 140).
Meanwhile, Tibet, Poo, Ocean, and even Phoenix and the Seeds of Resistance, as the younger characters in the story, represent seeds that are beginning to grow. As such, they also represent hope for a better life; as Cass tells Tibet, “‘Daddy’s going to save the world’” (Ozeki 417). The old can only dream of a better world, but the young have the power to create it. The Seeds’ name even implies this: They are “seeding” a movement with the goal of preserving the natural world, a world where seeds of all species can continue to grow and thrive.
In Ozeki’s novel, seeds represent birth, life, death, and most of all, change, a process that occurs within each of the characters and that they are trying to germinate in the world around them. The oldest generation returns to the seed stage so that a new one may be born to carry on and improve upon the legacy the last seeds left. As with any seed, environment is crucial in this process; nothing can happen without the nourishment of the land. That is why Momoko is so caught up in her seeds, and why the Seeds are so caught up in their activism: so that the next generation of seeds may flourish.
Works Cited
Ozeki, Ruth. All over Creation. New York: Penguin, 2004. Print.