If I Can Cook, You Know God Can: Food, Histories and Memory

In If I Can Cook, You Know God Can, Ntozake Shange attaches specific dishes with specific experiences and histories. In doing so, Shange gives depth about a particular recipe and thus connecting how it shapes a people’s existence. Integrating the histories of foods and its impact is essential as the stories and movement of people across the diaspora is shared and better understood. Shange expresses a fluidity of exchange of foods and methods of preparing said foods, from Cuba to Venezuela to Guadeloupe, which is indicative of familiarity and fundamental relations. The fundamental similarities in the preparation of foods is translated to the colloquialisms that are used to describe foods and actions as Grosvenor mentions in the foreword:

“When I was growing up in Carolina low country, I didn’t know the word culture. We Just did the things we did the way we did them because that’s the way there were done. We said what we said because we said it. I had no idea that many things we did in our everyday life reflected an African connection. When GrammaSula said, “Yenna come nyam” we came to the table. I had no idea nyam was an African root word for “to eat” that can still heard throughout the Americas.” (xi)

Histories travel through bodies and it is evident in living remnants that are of African people’s ancestry, despite differences in lingual expressions. Food and languages are reflective of the mobility of ancestral influences across borders. It manifests itself in national dishes and traditional family recipes. Though the names and methods may vary, there are inherent similarities that exist because of the displacement of black people due to slavery.

“We got a sayin’, “The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice,” which is usually meant as a compliment. To my mind, it also refers to the delectable treats we as a people harvested for our owners and for our own sleves all these many years, slave or free. In fact, we knew something about the land, sensuality, rhythm, and ourselves that has continued to elude our captors-puttin’ aside all our treasures in the basement of the British Museum, or the Met, for that matter. What am I talkin’ about? A different approach to the force of gravity, to our bodies, and what we produce: a reverence for the efforts of the group and the intimate couple. Harvest time and Christmas were prime occasions for curtin’. A famine, a drought, a flood, or Lent do not serve as inspiration for couplin’, you see” (41)

Combative breathing and carnal intellectuality relates to the preparation of foods. Cooking has rhythm through bodies and the histories they carry. For example, the Brazilian Hominy and Dominican Bread Pudding are very similar to the Jamaican Christmas fruitcake as well as the cornmeal pudding recipe below in the cooking video.

Brazilian Hominy (37)

Dominican Bread Pudding (101)

Creative Cooking is a cooking program that is aired in Jamaica daily around primetime and I grew up watch it.