Pigtails 'n Breadfruit. (Book Reviews).

Pigtails 'n Breadfruit, A memoir,

Austin Clarke, 248., Random House

Austin Clarke needs no introduction after writing books receiving numerous awards and lecturing at some of the well-known universities in North America. Clarke is one of the best story tellers (fiction writer) this side north.

Pigtails 'n Breadfruit is vintage Clarke. His nostalgic jaunts down memory lane are like little trips in and out of the West Indian kitchen of colonial years. It is about a boy coming of age in a world where family values encoded the food one ate, the games' one played and the company that one kept. Clarke takes us back to his roots in colonial Barbados. The time is the late thirties and early forties when culture meant good manners and good behavior and women were the keepers of family values.

Pigtails 'n Breadfruit is a masterpiece. Viewing it as a book about food, would definitely misinterpret the nature of the work, misconstruing the genius and mastery of Clarke that have paid great respect to West Indian culture over the years. Pigtails 'n Breadfruit is a good study in West Indian aesthetics. Names of food and their preparation are definitive elements of West Indian folk culture.

Clarke is humorous, witty and direct. Cookbooks in earlier times, he states, were an assault on the culture and character of Barbadian women as he explains "To be caught reading a cookbook would suggest that the wife,, daughter or maid does not know how to cook, does not know how to take care of her man." In other words she is improperly brought up.

Reading Pigtails 'n Breadfruit brought back some fond memories of my grand mother, mother and my wife's cooking using a pinch of this and a pinch of that, habits stamped on the psyche of good West Indian cooks. The taste of the cooking is in the eating, and not in how the food is served up because slaves and their offspring hadn't the luxury of utensils and conveniences like their masters.

"Whatever it is that we cook we call Food, in the sense that any combination of any ingredients ("ingreasements") of whatever quality, that we put into a pot and cook is food-- giving this food no more sophistication or pretense about its distinctiveness to make us use fancy words and fancy attitudes and call this kind of food, and the time the food is eaten, by names to give it more appeal, myth and class than it deserves."

My taste of Pigtails 'n Breadfruit left the feeling that there are slight variations in the values and traditional ways of West Indian cooking and cooking in the Diaspora:

"Barbadians have always known that the Food we eat is "slave food." based on leavings or left-overs, the remnants of the better cuts of meat eaten by the plantation owners. The Americans would call it soul food, but. I would argue that we West Indians, and Barbadians in particular, had come to soul food long before African Americans, African Canadian and Africadians."

Clarke raised an interesting point when he states that slave food is part of Black aesthetics and black culture; but to say "slave food" is older than Soul food or doesn't have anything to do with the soul, having everything to do with the belly, is questionable. The term "soul food" expresses the therapeutic nature of slave food and relates to the healing of the spirit. Traditional cooks were like herbalist. Their cooking practically healed and strengthened the will to persevere, Therefore, soul food has everything to do with slave food. With the exception of this, Pigtails and Breadfruit is a taste in authentic West Indian (Barbadian) culture and a good dish for the palate in the new millennium.