The first chapter of If I Can Cook / You Know God Can addresses the effects of food’s presence and absence. When there is a shortage of food, the first efforts made are simply to nourish —in any way possible, as soon as possible. Efforts made to eliminate food insecurity, whether within in the United States or outside of it, almost always move away from native culinary traditions, as the cultural associations that they carry are intimately tied with infrastructures that created and propagated the insecurity in the first place. In other words, attempts to eliminate hunger inevitably lead to the elimination (if merely inadvertent) of culinary traditions personally associated with it. That it is inadvertent is critical; the pain of hunger is urgent, fundamental, and quickly becomes a matter of life or death with the passage of time. The general condition of food insecurity carries with it its own urgency; even if not hungry in a given moment, there remains the looming possibility that one might be thrust into that life-or-death-condition at any time, and be dramatically inhibited from meeting the demands of daily life —the meeting of all of which and more are necessary for the removal of one/one’s family from this position of precarity.
So with this in mind, no one —those who find their home in ‘American food’ and those who don’t— thinks to consider the health lost in the abandonment of native food traditions, and the possibilities of food beyond essential daily calorie replenishment and into realms of spiritual healing, unity within and across cultures, and ritual acts of decolonization. Shange wonders
“if the move to monolignualize this country is a push for the homogeneity of our foods as well. Once we read American will e cease to recognize ourselves, our delicacies and midnight treats?” (5)
Food serves a deeper need than physical nourishment, even when focusing on physical nourishment is all we can afford. Just as African-Americans in Philadelphia hesitated to celebrate the American Declaration of Liberation while the Fugitive Slave Act was in effect, they especially hesitated to do so with potato salad and golden or blanched flesh melon.
In support of the contemporary social justice project to “decolonize your diet,” Native American activist Winona LaDuke emphasizes that
“The recovery of the people is tied to recovery of food, since food itself is medicine—not only for the body but also for the soul and spiritual connection to history, ancestors, and the land.”
In this way, as Shange articulates,
“black-eyed peas and rice or ‘Hoppin John,’ even collard greens and pig’s feet, are not so much arbitrary predilections of the ‘nigra’ as they are symbolic defiance; we shall celebrate ourselves on a day of our choosing in honor of those events and souls who are an honor to us” (6-7).
Even those who are fed —the slaves no longer slaves— are provided food historically tied to victories of their oppressors. Even those who are fed are still hungry for food whose history and semiotics is their own.
She quotes Bob Marley’s “Them Belly Full (But We Hungry)” to explain this.
“Dem belly full, but dey hungry/ A hungry man is an angry man.”
The popular interpretation of this is a warning against allowing Jamaica’s poor to go hungry —which is certainly not untrue. But here Shange uses it to better articulate the deeper hunger that remains even after the little Hatian girl eats every one of the cookies in the red-lettered American box. The song asks the listener to forget their troubles, sorrows, sickness, and weakness through dance, which, like cooking, is a personal, pluralizing, and culturally-motivated strategy by which to reclaim the body.