Kris Singh
Austin Clarke begins his culinary memoir, Pig Tails ’n Breadfruit, with a declaration that resonates with many a Caribbean reader: “Food. It is a word that defines my life” (1). This line came to mind as I reflected on my relationship with my grandmother and how frequently we talk about food, whether it is about how hospitality for us Trinidadians involves feeding our guests, her steadfast belief in the power of offering food to murtis, or the first time she slit a goat’s throat to satisfy her husband’s appetite. It is not that she has a particular fascination with food. Rather, it is that food is the language through which her care, knowledge, experience, and personality can flow to me. At the same time, her relationship to food is shaped by the political forces defining her life. In January 2016, for example, the prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago engaged in a clumsy attempt to prioritize the local agricultural economy by lambasting the attendees of a Chamber of Industry and Commerce dinner. He singled out the women: “The average woman in this room cannot peel a cassava” (Clyne). Prime Minister Rowley served up a clear example of how women are positioned as caretakers of culinary knowledge and as meal providers. He was shifting public emphasis from larger political decisions mostly made by men to what he saw as the personal shortcomings of women. These two instances exemplify a point Clarke has frequently made in his work: food is personal and political. Its preparation informs intimate family relationships as it reinforces gendered divisions of labour. Its availability influences an individual’s access to a balanced diet, just as it determines a nation’s balance of trade. Its discourse—the stories, jokes, knowledge, and history that circulate with it—shapes individual and collective identities.
Clarke’s Pig Tails is explicitly aimed at exploring how the roles of food in his life, in Barbadian culture more broadly, and in the Caribbean’s history of slavery are all intertwined. In addition to the explicit focus of Pig Tails, much of his fiction foregrounds the personal, cultural, and colonial entanglements of food. In his description of Caribbean immigrants in his Toronto Trilogy, for instance, he describes characters who nostalgically yearn for home-cooked food, and others who have a knack for finding the necessary “ingreasements” in their new home. Yet, these characters must also deal with the stereotype of being “born cooks” and therefore naturally suited for domestic labour.
Clarke’s consideration of food suffuses not only his published work but his personal correspondence with Sam Selvon and Andrew Salkey; food becomes a basis of exchange in this male network of letters.1 During his Bajan boyhood, Clarke’s Sunday lunches were regularly paired with Selvon’s storytelling via the BBC Radio program Caribbean Voices. They eventually met in London in 1965, when Clarke was visiting as a freelance radio broadcaster for CBC and their correspondence began shortly thereafter and continued as Selvon moved with his family to Calgary in 1978. Salkey, whose communication with Clarke also began in the mid-1960s and whom Clarke affectionately calls Handrew, moved from Jamaica to Britain in 1952. His work with Caribbean Voices, his co-founding of the Caribbean Artists Movement, and his novels, poetry, travelogues, and editing work established him as a prominent literary figure. As with Selvon, a move to Canada features in his early letters to Clarke. On August 2, 1965, he writes, “Look man, the Canada thing has really bitten me and my wife. She hasn’t stopped talking a) about you and b) about Canada. She approves of both of you, especially of Canada for me, even for a brief spell on the Fellowship thing if it even comes off.” This plan was never actualized, but Salkey moved to Hampshire College in Massachusetts in 1976; throughout these relocations, all three authors maintained regular communication. Clarke commemorates the “triangular literary route” of these letters in A Passage Back Home: A Personal Reminiscence of Samuel Selvon, published upon Selvon’s death in 1994. In that memoir, Clarke notes, “Handrew bears an even bigger love for Sam. . . . I would not mention Sam’s name in three letters; and Handrew would want to know why? Did I hear from Sam-Sam? Was he all right? Was his health holding up? Was he writing?” (129). In what was undoubtedly a heavy blow to Clarke, Salkey passed away almost exactly a year after Selvon.
Clarke, Salkey, and Selvon partake in a form of epistolary picong that shares some of the improvisational skill and cultural knowledge of the kitchen talk that Clarke details in Pig Tails as well as some of the characteristic bravado, self-deprecation, affection, and humour that constitutes Caribbean “ole talk.” If we were to take Selvon at his word, he and Clarke were just “two big literary giants sitting down, one in the East and one in the West, pelting one another with shit instead of getting down to the serious business of creating Literature!” (August 12, 1982). Shooting the shit or not, their correspondence took on a familiar flavour, as culinary references pepper their epistles. A recurring metaphor is that of money as bread, but often with a Caribbean twist, as when Clarke triumphantly announces, on June 20, 1980, “Bread like peas!” This phrase riffs on the more familiar saying “licks like peas,” or a good licking. Pigeon peas, of course, are abundant when in season; and so, too, when you receive a happy financial windfall in lean times, it seems plentiful.
Salkey, however, in a letter dated July 10, 1972, reminds Clarke of island nuance when it comes to peas:
Make me take first things first, nuh. Who tell you say that we Jamaickans call f’we rice an’ peas “peas an’ rice.” You make mistake man. Is Trickidadians who say peas an’ rice. Not we! We born an’ grow sayin’ rice an’ peas, always Jamaickan rice an’ peas. We even got a whole complex o’ different rice an’ peas dishes to rass clate! We got red peas rice an’ peas, gunggu peas rice an’ peas, split peas rice an’ peas, an’ so on, papa! So don’t fuck wit’ we an’ confuse we wit’ Little Eric people them a blood!!!
In both serious and playful ways, Salkey displays close attention to national and regional identities in his letters. Here, his reference to Eric Williams, the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, demonstrates how his comedic turns, which were rarer than Selvon’s and Clarke’s, usually feature in more explicit, extended political discussions.
Salkey often relayed to Clarke not just the latest election result or policy decision but also the quality of his peers’ political sensibilities. On April 28, 1970, he laments, “The boys fucking up with all sorts of imported mouthings, and not thinking natively, at all, at all. Every time I turn either Marcuse lick me, or some out of date Marx, or some stale Cleaver that even Eldridge himself would disown.” Yet Salkey was not one for distanced condescension. He staunchly believed in community building and organized activism. He says in the same letter,
But, papa, they, over here, stale and pretentious, but I working solidly with them and giving them hell all the same. We just got extremely bashed about by the police in Hyde Park last Sunday. We marched on our Trinidad question, and we take over from another march on Vietnam with some English Marxists, and the police arrest twenty-five of us, and kill we with beating. I manage to fuck one straight in the face with a hard fist, and duck him, when he tried to arrest me. It was a bitch!
Salkey prioritized local action that worked in tandem with transnational movements toward justice. The “Trinidad question” refers to the militarized crackdown by the PNM2 government on what was framed as young people mimicking the radical Black Power politics of elsewhere. W. Chris Johnson details this history in his article “Guerrilla Ganja Gun Girls: Policing Black Revolutionaries from Notting Hill to Laventille,” in which he discusses the National United Freedom Fighters in Trinidad alongside the protests in Notting Hill and in Sir George Williams University in Montreal. When situated within this larger political history, Salkey’s letters in effect detail his participation in the “community of black liberation movements in England” in the 1960s and ’70s (Johnson 286). Johnson explains that this community was “an electric latticework of people and ideas that coursed through homes and neighbourhoods, shattering and fusing organizations, trespassing across cities and national borders” (286). He adds special emphasis to the role of gender and sexuality in these movements, considering Althea Jones-Lecointe; her mother, Viola; and her sisters, Beverley and Jennifer. Jones-Lecointe features in the Clarke-Salkey correspondence as Salkey updates Clarke on the circumstances that preceded the landmark Mangrove Nine trial. On July 13, 1970, Salkey reiterates to Clarke that “John La Rose and I have staked our lives on our work in the community, not only as writers but as workers and common blood to all Black people in Britain.” However, once again, he condemns the lack of support from his peers: “You see all like George Lamming, V.S. Naipaul, Wilson Harris, and even Samuel Selvon (a sweet brother though he is)! None of them ever bothers to come into the mainstream of the struggle and help out, you know.” He contrasts the “selfishness” of these writers with his commitment: “Right out front, taking all the fucking blows and getting our names in the MI5, Scotland Yard, U.S. Embassy and High Commission lists are the same ol’ pavement fighters: John La Rose, Jeff Crawford, a vanguard of two students at the Centre, and yours truly” (July 13, 1970). It is clear that while Salkey worried about what was lacking amongst those around him in London, he perceived Clarke to be as politically astute, engaged, and savvy as himself. Much like the communal space that was the Mangrove Restaurant, the epistolary space Salkey and Clarke carved out afforded vital expressions of joy, anger, and solidarity.
Through the decades, Salkey and Clarke invite each other into discussions about political developments in England, Barbados, Jamaica, Canada, Ghana, Libya, South Africa, and elsewhere. A juxtaposition of two such conversations highlights these writers’ cognizance that anti-Black racism does not emerge spontaneously but through longer histories. In a letter dated June 19, 1970, Salkey gives a play-by-play commentary on the UK elections as Edward Heath surprises all in defeating Harold Wilson. He notes, “Well, papa, here I am at 12:25 midnight, into the day after the British polling stations are closed and the counting and results are going on round me like peas.” He moves on to discuss his progress with writing Georgetown Journal but cannot help but return to the elections a few paragraphs later: “Time: 12:45 am Friday 19th June. Jesus! Winston Spencer Churchill, Churchill grandson just get elect, the radio say. . . . But what happen now that Enoch Party going rule the country?” His agitation mounts as he conveys the results of a few more constituencies and ends with the prickling prediction that “Is nothing but pass card and detention catch Black people, now, in White Britain.”
Salkey’s reporting exposes the political environment confronting Black writers in England in this era. A decade later, by which time Salkey was situated in Massachusetts, Clarke comments on the latest election result. On November 10, 1980, he writes, “Reagan get in! Um going to be pressure in black people arse from now onwards christian soldiers! Rax-rax-rax! I like I getting frighten to come down there in January yuh! Reagan isn’t no sweetbread. Reagan believe in mekking Amurca strong again; and when Amurca strong, the brothers going-be catching shite.” The meaning of Reagan’s success is as clear to Clarke as Heath’s was to Salkey. These were the latest iterations of a longer history of anti-Black racism, and they had to make sense of each noxious development. Though Clarke’s appeal to that favoured English hymn may be facetious, his fright is real. Yet he makes room to write with style, remaining assured of Salkey’s enjoyment of it and somehow mitigating the dread evoked by the news. These letters serve as warnings and acknowledgements of real threats, but the tone is not one of despair.
An extended passage from Clarke illuminates how their letters and friendship sustained them over the years. On March 20, 1987, Clarke was in the throes of writing More after a spell of inertia. He exclaims,
For had I not been possessed of a strength poured into my veins by Gladys Luke, my mother, long ago, and had been affected by the tenuous philosophy of life of North Americans, I would have given hope to the winds, drunk a thousand sleeping pills, or else commit some other stupidly heinous act. But the fish head soup, and the Bible; the boil’ chicken in rice, and the Bible; the green banana and mackerel, and the Bible; the sheep head soup with the eyes staring at you, and the Bible; pulp’ eddoes and herring, and the Bible; split-pea soup and dumplings and salt beef and pig tails and sweet potato, and the Bible; cou-cou and h’arslick, and the Bible, cou-cou and salt fish, and the Bible; and breadfruit cou-cou and Bajan stew, and the fucking Bible, is what have me here this blessed Sarduh morning.
Clarke often offered such introspection, and it is clear that he is underscoring not the nutritional value of food but the traditions, the relationships, the values, and the love implied. Brinda Mehta in “The Mother as Culinary Griotte,” explains that in Pig Tails Clarke uses food and his mother’s preparation of food to show that “food production permits black Barbadian women to assert their selfhood through their subjective claiming of Caribbean history. Food becomes a signifier of cultural consciousness and a subsequent affirmation of a mode of cultural production that has its roots in a disenfranchising history of slavery and oppression” (327). Clarke’s improvised culinary riffs reflect and reproduce those affirmations. What is being trafficked in Clarke’s writerly whims often drew Salkey’s honest appreciation: “Got two wonderful letters from you today. Brilliantly witty. Splendidly salty. Loved them both” (March 11, 1982). Salkey expresses a similar appreciation of Clarke’s fiction, explaining, “I like your work papa. It clean & strong & full of power because it is so people-centred” (March 6, 1972). Wordplay for its own sake was never enough for Salkey. Public and private writing had to do more, and what these letters do is centre intimacy as a political act. Yes, these letters show a healthy trade of articles, newspaper clippings, and books across national borders and across continents. Yes, there is an urgent exchange of appointments, letters of recommendation, and opportunities that are vital to the writer’s fiscal well-being. Yes, there is commentary on elections, assassinations, and protests. Yes, there is mentorship, mutual advising, and peer review. But the intimacy borne and nurtured through these letters is as political as the circumstances that demand them. In bearing witness to each other’s achievements and failures, glee and anger, fears and jokes about those fears, they find the salve of knowing that one is not alone and that one’s work is read by those with the cultural and historical sense that match one’s own.
As noted before, Salkey did not find the same political commitment or awareness in Selvon, though he remained close to him. On June 19, 1972, Salkey considers Selvon’s upcoming teaching position in San Diego, and tells Clarke,
Advice him about the mood of the young people them, about their political thing, about their world view and so on. Poor Sam, he been lock away for a long time, and he sort of ol’ fashion in him thinking and ways. He hardly know anything about Fanon, Malcolm, Cleaver, Angela, or for that matter about Che, Ho, Giap, or about Vietnam, Algiers, Cuba, or anything in that line. . . . He don’t attend to Blackness or radical politics or nothing.
Salkey is often blunt about Selvon’s deficiencies while championing his strengths as a writer. Perhaps, Selvon’s East Indian–West Indian positioning meant that he enjoyed the privilege of representing Black immigrants in his fiction—and being lauded for it— without having to engage in a full-throated fight against anti-Black racism outside his writerly life. Salkey’s comments invite a re-interrogation of Selvon’s depiction of Black activism in works like Moses Ascending, published in 1975.
The exchanges captured in these letters make clear that all three authors stood ready to aid each other. To borrow their parlance, they knew that bread is good when you can get it and even better if you can trade it in for some variety in your diet. It is unsurprising, then, that when Clarke aided Selvon through his rough transition into Canadian literature, he sought to help Selvon find “the quickest way . . . to make some easy and fairly good bread, to help [him] buy a piece of salt fish and a roti” (October 21, 1977). Similarly, they recognized that it was not just a matter of getting good bread; it was also about who you can or cannot break bread with. To Selvon, Clarke’s reputation preceded him: “I hear you have five-six mansions in various parts of Canada, and you does invite the Mayor of Toronto for pigtail and rice” (November 9, 1976). Such facetious remarks were standard in the banter between two writers known for their humour. As with their fiction, however, their laughter responded to real social pressures that threatened to erode their dignity. These lighthearted comments about whose bread may be buttered were made alongside genuine concern for each other’s ability to be breadwinners.
Their exchanges of advice sought a balance between financial stability and professional integrity. On the one hand, they were contemplating the desperation of Selvon’s early years in Calgary. While Clarke served as an important point of contact in Toronto, Selvon initially found few rewarding opportunities in Calgary and in this time of limited choices, he became a janitor at the University of Calgary, where he was later to become writer-in-residence. His mounting frustration during this period took the form of his semi-serious complaint that he “can’t even buy mouth-organ for [his] son for Christmas, nor boil a ham” (December 6, 1980). On the other hand, both Clarke and Selvon knew that for racialized writers such as themselves, even when bread is hard to come by, they had to remain wary of underselling their work. On February 24, 1981, Clarke defiantly stated, “If we let them pay we small potatoes, they will consider our work to be small potatoes. Let me go bankrupt and keep my fucking integrity. Suck salt be-Jesus-Christ, and drink water to keep my belly full.” They intended to refuse crumbs from a white literary establishment they knew from experience was prone to belittling the contributions of Black and East Indian writers.
In striving to keep each other’s pantry full, however, Clarke and Selvon were not disinterested parties. The bountiful spread they expected whenever they visited one another was literal, and the specifics were a regular point of debate. After securing a few profitable opportunities in the first few months of 1982, Selvon, feeling his oats so to speak, warned, “You’ll have to do better than stale B.C. salmon and Hudson Bay, though; it is Chivas Regal and Dublin Bay scampi or nothing at all” (April 6, 1982). Their letters especially belaboured these anticipated and promised meals, not only because of the Caribbean brand of hospitality previously mentioned, but because of a sub-par meal served in the early days of their friendship that Selvon never let Clarke forget. Clarke explains the circumstances and contents of this meal in A Passage Back Home. Hurriedly prepared because of the unexpected nature of the visit, this meal, Clarke grudgingly admits, comprised “food [that] was either frozen or else not in adequate portions.” While hardly a significant fault to many of their readers, Selvon stood ready to niggle Clarke when announcing upcoming visits: “I don’t want no stale pork chops what leftover from last night, nor any of that evil Hudson Bay whiskey!” (July 4, 1980).
The camaraderie between these two men is apparent, but their culinary references were also opportunities for them to display their poise as writers. On December 16, 1985, Clarke wrote to Selvon, “Whilst you having ham: I having salt fish; whilst you having black pudding and souse: I having a biscuit and a piece o’ hard chaddar; whilst you having drink; I having a beer; and whilst you mekking money ’pon race horse, I going be pelting some blows in this typewriter.” Selvon was also ready with rhetorical bravado, as seen in a letter dated September 19, 1985 in which Selvon compared Clarke’s planned trip to New Brunswick to his own trip to Trinidad: “Cold going to make your totee shrivel up and the foreskin would curl inwards and you can’t find it when you want to pee. Mines would be bathed by tropical seawater and stimulated with canejuice and rum, and if I drink a fish-broth, I would not be responsible for the havoc it would cause.” Their epistolary humour entertains, but as with their fiction, clever intersections of race, class, gender, and nationality can be teased out. Clarke jokingly juxtaposes the clichéd image of the starving artist diligently pursuing grand literary ambitions with the Caribbeanized man of leisure. Likewise, Selvon caricatures the tropical island that is ready to rejuvenate every tourist and that offers the ideal stimulants to heighten (and satisfy) male virility. They make fun of these images while acknowledging the real differences between writers with and without rewarding opportunities, as well as the nostalgia and desires of Caribbean immigrants.
A comparable sentiment emerges on February 27, 1979 as Clarke harangues Salkey: “a little bird told me, while I was in Brooklyn sleeping on the floor in my mother’s slum house, that you were on the Riviera of luxury, sipping champagne and eating frogs’ legs. I was eating Aunt Jemima pancakes with no syrup on them.” These are fictional scenarios that highlight and mock real class differences. Clarke, however, cannot keep up the lie of being underfed while visiting his mother: “But really, Handrew, while I was in Brooklyn for two weeks, I ate more black pudding and souse, more fried chicken, more peas and rice, and drank more liquor than in all the days in Barbados, when foodstuffs were all-a-penny. I can’t understand why you Yankees eat so much food.” Passages like this one are precursors to Clarke’s Pig Tails in that they anticipate Clarke’s use of the figure of the mother “as the necessary catalyst who facilitates an engagement with the self as it confronts and accommodates its exilic disposition” (Mehta 324). Clarke underlines his imposition of an American identity on Salkey because of his cognizance of Salkey’s discomfort with and in the American identity.
Clarke’s characteristic interrogation of cross-cultural encounters can also be found intermingled with his discussion of food in his letters. On February 24, 1987, Clarke explains how his romantic relationship with an English woman is affecting his diet: “I now, in my fucking ante-old age, liking roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, like if um is a black pudding and cou-cou. Why you was silent ‘pon these virtues o’ the cullinerry harts?” He offers an extended discussion of what he calls “the transculturalization of my psyche,” exclaiming at his change from a man “accustom to rackling-’bout ice in my glass, brack-ka-dakka-dak” to being “like kiss-me-arse Hinglish man, drinking scotch with water, and no fucking hice in the crystal glass!” Finally, he explains, “Man, you don’t know that this woman now buying pig tail; hokra! ground nuts; sweet potato—not yams, man!—real sweet potato; heddoe; eating cou-cou and salt fish, with a butter-sauce, like if England had sugar plantation, and not cotton jennies.” In typical Clarke fashion, his linguistic flourishes overflow with irony. He takes the kernel of truth that cultural exchange at the culinary level can be real and useful and exaggerates it to show how it can easily be misconstrued and romanticized.
What is clear from these letters is that Clarke was prone to rhapsodizing about food in a seemingly effortless and joyful manner. His detailing to Salkey of the menu for a dinner party he hosted comes across as proud, generous, and inviting: “And on Saturday, Greville Clarke’s birthday, I hosted a dinner party for him. We had split-peas soup, each soup plate decorated with a juicy hunk of pig tail; roast joint of lamb, with potatoes, asparagus and rice with the stalks of beets” (April 6, 1987). His conjuring, again to Salkey, of a wished-for meal were it not for the responsibilities of that day’s writing seems as satiating as the meal itself: “I feel peckish for a nice pudding and souse, a bowl o’ jug-jug, some increase-peas and rice, with the rice grain hardish, a roast pork with the onion, the parsley, the thyme, the clove, and the garlin juck-in the pork, and um baking slow-slow, ‘pon a low heat . . . with that, yuh have yuh lettuce, yuh spring tomatoes, yuh hard-boil eggs, and yuh avocado pear, with a sprinkling o’ blue cheese ’pon top of it, a nice slice o’ Wessindian sweet potato, and a bottle o’ Chateauneuf de Pape” (Easter 1987). When fitted into Clarke’s oeuvre, these riffs are emblematic of food’s significance in both the political and literary histories of the Caribbean. These writers expand and remould the culinary discourse they inherited to discuss serious and unserious matters, generating mutual sustenance.