Caribbean Kitchen Wellness: An Introduction
-Regina A. Bernard-Carreno
I once wrote an essay called, “Because My Callaloo is Political.” In that short piece of work, I talked at length about my maternal grandfather being an original farm-to-table man. A descendant of Indian indentured laborers who landed in British Guyana (née Guiana), my grandfather, as a child, learned quickly how to scale-farm, tend to a front-of-house food garden, work with sugar cane, hold multiple jobs (field and house), reap what he sowed, sell some of it to neighbors who could afford it and gave away the rest to those who couldn’t. What feels sold to and in modernity, oftentimes feels to me, under-discussed in its original state, its authenticity. My Callaloo essay never felt finished as I struggled to try and celebrate my grandfather’s labor in any way other than to recognize the hardship, what it means to work the land for others, for yourself, and what it means to island-survive. Finally settling on the idea that I didn’t have to partake in what modern-day salutes as “farm-to-table,” that which extracts or dismisses altogether, people’s histories, identities, and cultural productions, I put the essay away. Forgoing a future invitation to publish it, I tucked it away for another time. That was nearly twenty years ago. In part, Caribbean Kitchen Wellness is my return to that work.
As the youngest of three children, I grew up listening to my siblings talk about the span of time being under the care of my grandfather in British Guyana. The collected imagery of them gathering mangoes, guavas, green and sour five finger (also known outside of the Caribbean as star fruit) and all the tropical fruits laden on nearby trees is etched onto me like a girl scout badge. My sister, especially, would share beautiful stories of my grandfather ironing silk ribbons for her long, curly hair, later tending to his garden with her at his side, and quieting the evening listening to British broadcasting over a small radio, as his famous chicken curry boiled away in a karahi. My grandfather would then pivot from cooking to cleaning the entire house, from top to bottom, by hand, with homemade products (because the options and access were limited), and after dinner, take my siblings for Sunday custard.
Growing up in New York City and belonging to a biracial Guyanese household alongside a Dominican Godmother who, like my grandfather, loved her country, I embody a kind of Caribbeanness I didn’t know I owned. Writing the essay on callaloo, twenty years ago, got me thinking about the way Caribbean hands engage in the urgency, intimacy and expertise of their kitchens. Questions would jump into my mind as I thumbed through old pictures: What stories are behind the way my mother claps the hot, oiled dough that makes the roti everyone in her home devours? What song did my abuela hum when she seasoned the pernil she brought over to our apartment during Christmas? How did my grandfather learn domesticity in a way that most men of his time refused? Would who he was around the kitchen make him an Indo Caribbean feminist in a way that is almost never talked about?
I have spent years working on research and social activism in and around local food (in)justice; I’ve investigated home fridges, food apartheid concepts and cartographies, food deserts, government-run pantries and soup kitchens, and the lack of access and hidden ingenuity within urban poverty and neglectful policy. Deeply embedded in my personhood and my politics of societal care and neglect, the exposure to those small portals has shifted my intellectual desire just slightly. Believing that there is such a thing as authenticity, especially when it comes to people and their ancient traditions, I want to tell the stories of people and sites where imagination and origins root their very acts of their survival. This is true for my grandfather, my abuela, my mother and so many other Caribbean kitchen artisans. Caribbean Kitchens are core places where the voice of practice, prescription, healing, community, culture and resistance reign supreme. Despite attempts at appropriation and erasure, the stories within these kitchens old and new transform our identity and root us deeply into who we are as a people. The person that I am and am always becoming.
As a child of immigrants, blood-related and otherwise, I want to invite you, dear reader, on a journey of (re)discovery. Together, we’re going to deconstruct the ways in which Caribbean kitchens are sites of woven memory, repositories of resistance, struggle and perseverance, and archives of collected lived experiences that exemplify productions and consumptions of culture. Looking at the traditions of Caribbean kitchen wellness that are unified through their ties at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, these stories and practices are legacies and heritage identity markers that sustain our lineage. Sure, these stories have evolved and modern practices continue to shape us, mold us, destroy us and build us back up. I want to navigate that shift in our passage as well.
Holding this close to the work ahead and using it as the foundation of this project’s thematic framework, in this series, we’ll consider together, questions like, what does it mean to look deeper into Caribbean food as a practice of healing, intellectual and invisible labor that is organic, embodied and innate? In other words, how does a plate of dhal and rice tell us the story of indentured servants from India being brought to the Caribbean; and how does a cooked pernil served on Christmas day give us insight into the African and Indigenous culinary expertise stemming from endurance, sustenance and insightful flavor? What are the other stories told in Caribbean kitchens that ground us, teach us history, shake us up, and move us?
It would be false of my personhood to write solely as a scholar, a public academic and teaching professor. It’s what I do and dare I say, much of who I’ve become over the last twenty five years in this field. However, I will also write as my other self. The person who watched from a stepping stool how my Caribbean women cooked staples, and how sometimes I still make rice too tough to eat, or burn my chicken on the outside and try to pass it off as “blackened” and seasoned. Or as the person who is still blown away by nuggets of history discovered about Guyana, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico that I never knew but should have. Yet, I’m of the belief (and practice) that not all professors know the content fully of which they teach. Sometimes the best of us are also learning with our students, reading something together for the first time, and reveling in findings that ground us, ignite us, and surprise us. As such, this place, CKW, is our place of comfort and collected research and shared memories. We’ll explore, uncover, recall, maybe even laugh and sometimes privately cry. We’ll be able to talk about Caribbean Kitchen Wellness and recall our ancestor’s sedulous toiling and stories of their organically-intellectual ability to identify plants and roots to make salves, balms, and teas. We can sit with material that confronts our understanding about our great-grandfathers as original farm-to-table masters and also think about their mothers as servants to their masters all while teaching each other how to grind masala and blend recao leaves for sofrito. This is that place.
I’m going to keep hold of this series as a mise en place while also revering the Caribbean kitchen as a sacred archive. It is my hope that you’ll help me pull from the chronicles of our experiences and create a robust offering of Caribbean Kitchen Wellness: a practice of life, ontological wisdom, goodness and cultural preservation.
Welcome to CKW!
RBC
