Family

The role of food in communicating family traditions was a theme I found interesting in this week’s poems. Phillina Sun in “Untitled” says that “a kitchen is [the women’s] temple.” We see them” as “priestesses...carrying the fragrant rewards of worship.” Through their preparation in the kitchen, they are revered, and they know their responsibility is to pass on their “unwritten recipes generation to generation, from mother to daughter.” Because these recipes are unwritten, they will last in each generation’s memory along with the memory of learning the recipe directly from one’s mother or aunt. The family bond is created and maintained.

In “Last Days of a Slow Cooker” by Mursalata Muhammad, preparation of a meal by the matriarch for a large gathering of family is detailed. “[S]he knows who’s been there by what they’ve left to be cooked,” and we learn about the members of her family this way. The generations of the family “descend...wearing Muslin names like after-thoughts;” we see that by preparing and serving this meal, she is the center of their family and the keeper of their tradition.

In Chezia Thompson Cager’s “Callaloo,” however, the daughters see the passing on of recipes as “instructional tales of horror,” and the “secrets would be lost to the ages with [their mother’s] last breath.” “[T]hey never learned to cook...they didn’t see the point.” They’ve rejected the preparation of these meals. They will not do it on their own. There is a difference in priorities between the generations. What then, is the purpose of food in the family? Why did the mother care so much, but the daughters do not? They are educated women – “three doctors of Medicine, Chemistry and Robotics.” (Ironically, the fields they study relate to the nutrients, health and synthesis of things.) Are the old recipes themselves important, or was the love that went into the act of preparation the “legacy?” Or, does the food represent something else to bequeath to and maintain the family?

I loved the last lines of “Mexican Almuerzo in New England” by Richard Blanco: “home is a forgotten recipe, a spice we can find nowhere, a taste we can never reproduce, exactly.” The speaker’s mother, Marina, is doing “the best she can do” in her son’s kitchen far away from her home. He talks about a “kitchen island,” and I picture an “island kitchen.” The fragility of the family traditions is evident; they cannot always be passed on authentically. Future generations may forget how, may not care about, or may make mistakes in recreating the recipes of home and family. For me, it reflects the idea that we wander far from home, where we began, where we were raised, where we learned what the world was like. Nothing will be identical to what it was when we were growing up. Although this poem seems wistful about home and family, sometimes it’s a good thing it can’t be replicated.

Who are these people to whom we are related? If we eat the same food, if we share a meal, if we sit around the table together, does that bring us closer? And, do we want to be closer, or is rebellion and rejection an option? There are poems in the reading this week where the food sends this other message. In “On Eating” by Lara Hamza, the scene begins “[w]e gathered around the dinner table, my three brothers, mother, father, and me.” We picture the ideal, happy family until we learn that the daughter/ the speaker “[isn’t expected] to eat, because for almost a year, [she] had stopped.” Her dad won’t be able to have a piece of steak if she decides to eat at this meal because he hasn’t made enough to include her. She does; she deprives him of his piece but later throws it up. The dynamics of this family are not the nurturing, cooperative, loving ones we expect from the first line.

In Sapphire’s “In My Father’s House,” I knew not to expect a respectful, trusting dinner experience when our speaker “had to have dinner ready at 5:30pm,” but the blatant rejection when the “father had only set a place for himself & my little brother” still comes like a slap across the face or like a beating with “a piece of rubber hose.” When the cat gouges her Bob Marley album, our speaker recalls being raped by her father. The cycle of abuse is exposed; the family “tradition” of pain and cruelty continues. The father left home at 14 – “his father put his foot on his neck/& beat him until his nose bled.” Our speaker is 14 when this dinner occurs. Again, family is where we learn what the world is like.

In Sapphire’s other poem in the collection, “Wild Thing,” the mother “makes corn bread from Jiffy box mix” This small detail, that the family’s meals are not lovingly prepared from recipes passed down through the generations, fits with the rest of this disturbing poem. It shows the absence of opportunity, of education, of better living conditions, of money. The influence of family is felt in a most unsettling way. Food has a complex relationship with families. It can be seen as something that nurtures us both individually and through the generations, but it also can be the source and symbol of something destructive.

Sheila Joseph