Quand le mémoire culinaire donne des leçons d’histoire : Pig Tails ‘n’ Breadfruit d’Austin Clarke

Abstract

Barbadian-born Canadian writer Austin Clarke published Pig Tails ‘n’ Breadfruit: A Barbadian Memoir in 1999; by that date, many diasporic authors and Black American authors had been using the genre to tell their stories of family and ethnic heritage. A form of (minor) autoethnography, the culinary memoir helps authors claim for themselves a sense of place, heritage and history that may not be otherwise articulated. Clarke uses the culinary to tell and share his own version of Barbadian culinary history. Through the myths he tells, Clarke rewrites official history, the better to convey and share his “effort or passion of memory” (Glissant). Through his stories’ foregrounding food circulation, Clarke reminds his reader of (forced) human migrations which colonial powers enforced, both in the days of slavery and the colonial period that followed. Clarke’s culinary history of Barbados is a reminder of the island’s past as a sugar island. Clarke shows that within this universe of oppression and dehumanization, forms of humanity and resilience persisted. They were also transmitted. This is also why Clarke, in contrast to contemporary African American culinary literature, did not attempt to retrace the African origin of foods and plants, seeking instead to draw attention to Caribbean resilience and culinary and linguistic inventiveness. Clarke’s memoir focuses on the practice of cooking, and ordinary gestures. He pays tribute to his mother’s knowledge of the culinary, which allows him to debunk the opposition between the oral and written worlds he first foregrounded. As Clarke switches to Bajan readers, the creolization of his text, which echoes culinary inventiveness enables him to establish a strong relationship with his reader as fellow cook.