food – The Worlds of Ntozake Shange and Digital Storytelling

cook by faith, not by sight

student blogpost

by Elizabeth on November 20, 2019 3 Comments

I have always loved to cook. When I was younger, I loved helping my parents prepare for family holiday meals, whether that meant sticking my finger in the bowl to “test” the red velvet cake icing for Christmas, or helping my dad season the burgers on the grill on the Fourth of July. At the time, I don’t think I really processed how important food was to my family. It was culture and community. Like Shange writes, it was a celebration. It was love.

When I got to college, the importance of cooking became clear to me because I was no longer able to enjoy food in the same way. Not only did I not have my family to eat with or the type of food I was used to, but I also did not have a personal kitchen. Not having home-cooked meals is something that I think the majority of college students miss, but I also didn’t feel like I had an easy replacement. There aren’t many places in New York that have food that is both Southern and Black, and I can’t exactly afford to eat out all the time.

my mom’s mac and cheese recipe.

Once I moved to Plimpton and had my own kitchen, I was finally able to start cooking again. I realized almost immediately that there were so many things that I couldn’t quite remember how to make, or had never made without my mom. I got mad at her for being vague and she told me, “I don’t know how to tell you to make your mac and cheese, you have to figure it out.” Reading if i can cook reminded me of all of this. The book connects stories, history to the recipes, which I think is so crucial to the way that many cultures connect with food and cooking, and more importantly, the way that we use these things to connect with each other across generations and distance.

Out solution has been Facetime. She too far away to put her hand over mine as I pour ingredients into a mixing bowl, but she can watch me through the camera and tease me about not “folding” my noodles the right way.

decolonizing the diet

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by Sophia on December 10, 2015 0 Comments

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.

Shange and Radical Farming

by Clarke on December 3, 2015 2 Comments

Photos from Soul Fire Farm courtesy of Afropunk and Yes Magazine

One could also say that racism is toxic, so by metaphorically refusing an all-American diet of meat and potatoes, Yvette and thousands of others refuse to swallow what will, in fact, poison them: self-hatred. (Shange 91)

Recognize that land and food have been used as a weapon to keep black people oppressed …Recognize also that land and food are essential to liberation for black people. (Curtis Hayes Muhammed via Soul Fire Farm)

In If I Can Cook/You Know God Can, Shange celebrates food and farming as a global black experience, while pointing to the disregard of black life that informs American food policy. In this way, If I Can Cook shows that decolonizing our minds goes hand in hand with decolonizing our diets. Shange’s statements evoke principles of radical farming, which emphasizes solidarity with people marginalized by food apartheid and reverence of ancestral knowledge of the land.

In fact, we knew something about the land, sensuality, rhythm, and ourselves that has continued to elude our captors (Shange 41)

Soul Fire Farm, a family farm committed to the dismantling of oppressive structures that misguide our food system, partners with Project Growth, a restorative justice program in Albany, in order to continue the literal work of “eluding our captors” via ancestral knowledge of the land and ourselves. The initiative brings convicted teenagers to the farm, both as a way for them to earn money to pay their restitution and “heal relationships with their communities, the land, and themselves.”

By understanding food as both a weapon of oppression and an essential tool for black liberation, we can more fully claim our pasts and envision radical systems today.

The Holiness of a Cookbook

by Nicole on December 3, 2015 1 Comment

While reading both Shange and Mae’s cookbooks I took time to think about the ways in which cooking is important in my family. The first thing that came to mind is the cookbook that my mother keeps which contains recipes from my grandmother and great grandmother and some of our current favorite dishes. To be honest, my mother really does not do too much cooking, my grandmother was the cook in our household until she passed away. My grandmother is no longer here to cook for us, so having a catalogue of her recipes is like preserving the memory of her existence in our household. Her recipes are proof that she did not leave us empty, but left behind ways of nourishing our bodies. This way my grandmother can continue to fill our stomachs despite her not physically being here. Now my mother’s cookbook, our cookbook, is not the same book my Nana (great-grandmother) used. My mother has updated the book itself, but the recipes on cards and sometimes scraps of paper are still the same. Shange writes that “[c]ooking is a way of insisting on living,” I also think that recipes themselves are a way our elders insist on continuing to live with us after their passing (If I Can Cook/ You Know God Can, Ntzoake Shange, 70). This is how we refuse the idea that black culture is static and was ruptured during the Middle Passage. The fact that black people can pass down recipes and see the similarities in traditional dishes among different peoples of color prove that “[w]e are not folklore,” (Shange, 32).

It resonated with me when I read that Mae does not cook with measurements and relies on the feel of things. Reading this reminded me of what I’ve seen in my own home.

And when I cook, I never measure or weigh anything. I cook by vibration. I van tell by the look and smell of it. Most of the ingredients in this book are aproximate. Some of the recipes that people gave me list the amounts, but for my part, I just do it by vibration. Different strokes for different folks. Do your thing your way.

(Vibration Cooking, Verta Mae, xxiii)

In my family’s cooking all of the recipes from my Nana and many of those from my grandmother are without certified measurements. Many describe using a tea cup as a measure. Now, what size tea cup, I have no idea. I believe that is what Mae describes as “[d]different strokes for different folks” cooking,” (Mae, xiii). Deciding to not use measurements also makes cooking a learning experience instead of following someone else’s formula. I believe that this is how the act of cooking becomes nourishment in itself, that making your own food is akin to the magical-like home remedies in Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo. Not only is the food nourishing, but the process of cooking and creating on your own terms is liberating.

Below are some photos of recipes from my family’s cookbook: