Weeds: A Germinating Theory by Kwan Queenie Li. Mack Books, 160 pp., $28.
“What is a weed?” Ralph Waldo Emerson famously asked in 1878. His answer: “A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered—every one of the two hundred thousand probably yet to be of utility.”
A weed was just waiting for a man to discover its uses and extract value from it, to make this plant work. Now a woman, Hong Kong–based artist Kwan Queenie Li, asks a similar question. She begins her novella-length photo essay Weeds with a definition too, with Merriam-Webster, never my favorite place for writing to start. She turns to other languages, like the Spanish mala hierba (“bad herb”) and German unkraut (“not herb”), which she likens to the “unperson” the Nazis used for Jewish people in the Holocaust. I write now from Berlin, itself a weedy city where my first week here someone else mentioned this term in passing. Emerson’s speech was not actually about plants but the US, then in the middle of a recession and ending Reconstruction. The West has always seen weeds as la…
