Oakland does not look like this.
I kind of hate that I liked Farm City. It’s a short, very readable memoir by a woman who built a farm on an abandoned lot in West Oakland. Having recently begun experimenting with gardening myself, and given the fact that I live about 1.4 miles away from her farm, I can’t help but feel jealous of her tenacity and know-how, and perhaps this generalized sense of admiration/envy is why I was able to set aside the more disturbing undercurrents of the book (see, e.g., racism, deliberate gentrification, self-obsession, liberal martyrdom).
The autobiographer is a character from a Jonathan Franzen novel. Self-effacing woman raised by flawed yet idealistic parents works out her childhood issues through a sudden, absurd break with the oppressive suburban lifestyle; flirts with self-actualization. Her long-time boyfriend/husband is the kind of anachronistically masculine figure you’d expect from Franzen as well. Mechanically gifted but a bit lazy (that’s men for you!) he has a penchant for repairing anything and everything, building chicken coops and planters and fences and reviving non-op cars. In case it wasn’t obvious, they met in grad school. She thinks his gawky thinness and coke-bottle glasses are sexy.
And yet, I devoured this book. She built a fucking farm in West Oakland! She raised chickens and ducks and turkeys and a pig! How awesome is that!? The central conceit of the book is that the author doesn’t realize that her readers will absolutely love her for this. It’s narrated with a sort of aw-shucks tone that makes it sound like she regards her project as foolish and embarrassing rather than impressive and legendary. Which, when you think about it, can’t really be the case, since she saw fit to write a memoir, the most arrogant and self-important of all literary forms. Perhaps if this were a compilation of her farm-poetry or an instructional text the reader wouldn’t have to contend with the fact that the narrator must have at one point pitched herself to a publisher. “A book about my life would be a really good addition to the pantheon of American literature!”
Ultimately, I am left with a few persistent qualms, especially given how much I want to throw myself fully into replicating her achievement (midway through the book I went out and salvaged a discarded shipping pallet and built myself a vegetable garden…). For example, she refers to the neighborhood in which she lives as “the ghetto.” Except that she moved there from the Northwest by way of the Berkeley Hills. This raises serious red flags about her deliberate efforts to improve the neighborhood by building a squatter farm on the abandoned lot next to her apartment, which she is surely renting for more than the previous tenants paid… Nowhere in the memoir does she consider the ramifications of gentrification, or even of her own presence in the neighborhood, as anything other than an unalloyed good. At one point she grows fearful of the neighborhood kids (apparently because they are black) and wonders if she can manage to keep living in a bad part of town. It doesn’t occur to her that her geographic mobility is a tremendous privilege, and that by showing up and deliberately transforming her neighborhood by building a community garden and educating “the locals” about farming, she is wielding her privilege like a bludgeon.
Of course, I can’t help but feel that a community garden, however obnoxious and cliched it may sound, is preferable to an abandoned lot. Even in “the ghetto,” and even when its run by suburban transplants with no cultural competency. So yeah, I liked Farm City, and I like Oakland, and I’m secretly nervous about the negative impact that my having moved to my neighborhood will have; hopefully I won’t do any more damage than building a farm on an empty lot.
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