Summary One of the powerful but mostly overlooked productive forces in and behind Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa (1937) is Coffea arabica, the coffee bush of Arabia. In this article, I first discuss the dominant anti-pastoral tendency in recent Blixen-criticism, which has classified Out of Africa as a neo-colonial text and reduced Blixen’s interest in more-than-human nature to an expression of conservative ideology. I introduce two alternative concepts – “arabesque” and “phytographia” – that help me reposition Out of Africa and reconsider the significance of the text’s many plant-references. Blixen’s writing, in my understanding, holds a more timely interest and performs a more culturally productive function than is often assumed, especially insofar as it fore-grounds the life of many different plants and asks us to consider their powerful impact upon humanity. Read at a time when we are beginning to understand the disastrous implications of Western culture’s deep-rooted “plant blindness”, Blixen’s text helps question the insignificance of plants and problematise the powerful conviction that humans and plants lead separate and unrelated lives.

中文翻译：

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“咖啡种植园是一种抓住你不让你走的东西”：Karen Blixen 的《走出非洲》中的植物写作

总结 在 Karen Blixen 的《走出非洲》（1937 年）中和背后的强大但最容易被忽视的生产力之一是阿拉伯咖啡树，即阿拉伯咖啡丛。在这篇文章中，我首先讨论了最近 Blixen 批评中占主导地位的反田园主义倾向，它把《走出非洲》归类为新殖民主义文本，并将 Blixen 对超人类本性的兴趣简化为一种保守意识形态的表达。我引入了两个替代概念——“蔓藤花纹”和“phytographia”——它们帮助我重新定位走出非洲并重新考虑文本中许多植物参考的重要性。Blixen 的作品，在我的理解中，比通常假设的更具有及时的兴趣，并发挥了更具文化生产力的功能，尤其是它以许多不同植物的生命为基础，并要求我们考虑它们对人类的强大影响。在我们开始了解西方文化根深蒂固的“植物盲症”的灾难性影响的时候阅读，Blixen 的文字有助于质疑植物的微不足道，并质疑人类和植物过着分离和无关生活的强大信念。