Monday 6 August 2007

Montserrat's Secret Gardens

From Raymond Sokolov, in "Natural History" (April 1992, pp. 72-75)
Also mentions a pioneering paper published in 1960, by Sidney M. Mintz and Douglas Hall - about Jamaica - and "Seeds of Change" by David Barry Gaspar about Antigua


In this quincentenary year, much has already been said about the Columbian exchange of cultures and commodities after 1492, but the most eloquent statement is entirely lacking in words. I refer to the great corn portal that is serving as an entrance to the "Seeds of Change" exhibition at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Here, hundreds of ears of colorful Indian corn have been affixed to a columnar baroque arch.

Passing through this joint symbol of New World fecundity and Old World civilization, one continues on through a set of diverse galleries filled with every kind of relic and diorama, from Colombian emeralds to Amerindian horse regalia to a Mexican colonial biombo, or "screen," that combines Asian and European art to depict Cortes's conquest and its results. The organizing principle behind this polymorphous array was a somewhat arbitrary but provocative choice of five "seeds" to illustrate the impact of 1492: sugar, maize, disease, the horse, and the potato.

Well along in the exhibition, one emerges in a somber mood from the simulated interior of a slave ship into a reproduction of a village scene on the Caribbean island of Montserrat. There is a full-size planked hut on pilings; a one-room modern-day general store that visitors can enter; a sophisticated photodiorama that shifts dramatically between the pre-contact rain forest and a full-blown plantation with cane fields, a mill, slave shacks much like the "real" dwelling across the gallery, and the planter's house. In a display case are coins, potsherds, fragments of Staffordshire pearlware from 1825, and a slate pencil--relics of plantation life excavated from the ruins of Galways plantation on Montserrat.

This evocative section of "Seeds of Change" is the brainchild of Lydia Mihelic Pulsipher. She is a cultural geographer at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and has spent years excavating at Galways plantation and looking into the history of Montserratian horticulture.

For someone who has not been following recent research in Caribbean archeology and social history, Pulsipher's work comes as a welcome surprise. She has been digging, literally and figuratively, into the physical evidence and documents that throw light on the life of African slaves on Montserrat. In particular, she has been able to show that slaves raised much of their own food in gardens they tended during precious spare time from plantation work. Some of these gardens were at a distance from the slave village, high in the mountains where growing conditions were better for certain crops, such as the tuberous rhizome called dasheen, one of the various starchy vegetables known in the English-speaking Caribbean as ground provisions.

In an imaginative reconstruction of a Sunday in slave days in the early nineteenth century, Pulsipher writes:

In a moment Margaret will join Beneba, Lettice, Cumba, and Jenny Ebo for the hour's walk to market; but first she reminds Garrick to bring some dasheen down from her mountain ground at Gadinge and shallots and thyme from his garden at Hog Island.... The fertile dasheen plot was first worked by Judy Congo, an African woman who was grandmother to Margaret and Venus. The use of the steep plot at Hog Island comes to them through Garrick's family, having been passed from uncle to nephew for several generations. Lying in a steep ravine within ten minutes of the plantation, it is prized for its covert convenience. A third plot lies with many others on a strange tabletop land formation completely surrounded and shielded from view by deep forested ravines. This secret garden also can be quickly reached from the slave village but only via a steep treacherous track. The plantation manager knows of the existence of these gardens, but he has never taken the trouble to look for them since they cannot be easily reached on horseback. Almost daily his own kitchen is furnished with slave-grown produce, some of which is given to him and some of which he buys at reasonable rates.


In this way, in the middle of a brutally efficient and cruel slave system, slaves carved out their own quasi-legal, capitalist market-garden system and established de facto rights to land and to control over their own leisure time.

This "life-affirming saga of resilience, resistance and creative adaptation" is not an isolated phenomenon. In a pioneering paper published in 1960, Sidney M. Mintz and Douglas Hall presented similar evidence of an internal market-garden system in Jamaica. In "Seeds of Change," David Barry Gaspar paints a parallel picture of Antiguan slaves fighting to assert themselves against the "worst tendencies within slavery" by finding ways to take a greater part in the economic life of the island, in particular through gardening.

Cooking was another area in which slaves mastered their new and restricting environment. Pulsipher reminds us that slaves adapted African plants to plantation life and that they learned about local plants from the indigenous Indians. Native cassava became a slave staple, and evidence from the dig at Galways slave village shows that slaves may have improvised the mass production of cassava "as an entrepreneurial activity. They used metal griddles, rather than the stone-shard board graters, basket presses and sieves, and clay griddles of the native tool complex."

In their kitchens, slaves mixed New and Old World foods to invent a post-Columbian cuisine. The ceremonial stew of Montserrat called goatwater combines West African (Yoruba) sacrificial ritual elements with New World ingredients. Duchno, a dish with a name probably derived from an African world for millet, is a mix of native (sweet potatoes, peppers), Asian (sugar, coconut), and Near Eastern (wheat flour) ingredients, wrapped in a banana leaf and then boiled.

Perhaps the most interesting of these post-African garden-kitchen adaptations arose when slaves applied themselves to the production and consumption of the taro in the West Indies. I use the term taro loosely for a very large and various group of related plants, because it has the widest currency in English as a name for edible members of the arum, or Araceae, family (aroids include 2,000 species and 115 genera, including decorative philodendrons, dieffenbachia, and calla lilies). The best-known taro dish is poi, the mucous Polynesian mush made from the plant's tuberous rhizome and universally detested by tourists at staged luaus.

The taro behind this gastronomic nightmare is known, in myriad species and cultivars, throughout warm parts of the Old world, from Pacific Asia to Africa. The genus is Colocasia. Its leaves are similar to spinach and are most frequently encountered in the Caribbean soup called calalu. The tuberous rhizome (hereinafter to be referred to as root) is a starchy food source that, like all aroids, contains calcium oxalate crystals in its sap. These cause severe, long-lasting pain if ingested when the root is raw. Cooking removes the danger.

Colocasia had reached West Africa and established itself in local diets long before 1492. As a result of the slave trade, Colocasia was naturalized in the islands, where it goes by a confusing multiplicity of names descended from words in various African languages: dasheen, tania, eddo, malanga, coco.
To complicate matters further, there already was another edible aroid under cultivation in the Caribbean before 1492.
Some forty species of Xanthosoma go by the vernacular names of tania, tannier, malanga amarilla, yautia, and cocoyam. The nomenclatural overlap with vernacular names for Colocasia makes identification especially difficult for the neophyte.
Fortunately, most North American retail sources, which are usually Hispanic, deal in two fairly distinguishable varieties.
The Colocasia is most often a smoothly cylindrical, lightly hairy root whose brown rind shows pink underneath when peeled. The white flesh shows patterns of dark lines, which Elizabeth Schneider, in "Uncommon Fruits and Vegetables" (Harper and Row, 1986), says remind her of grated chocolate. The Manhattan supermarket I use sells Colocasia as malanga and merchandises Xanthosoma as yautia.
The yautia I see at the market are gnarled and hairier than the malangas. The flesh, visible through the rind, has a yellow cast to it. When sliced, it is a pure white. Forced through a food mill, the flesh emerges dry and crumbly, but when mixed with a small amount of milk it turns into a smooth paste somewhat like mashed potatoes. The taste is strong, earthy, and vaguely metallic. If cooked long enough, yautia breaks down into a smooth, creamy substance that blends easily with and thickens stews or mixes well with other root vegetables, as in the plantain dough for Puerto Rico alcapurria fritters. The taste of malanga is similar to yautia's but more assertive. After cooking, the flesh turns purple. Malanga should probably not be eaten by itself as a puree, but in combination with other foods or fried as chips.

This discussion only scratches the surface of an extremely intricate subject. But its complexity was an open book to slave gardeners and cooks. Island recipes call for one variety of aroid or another with great specificity. And slave gardeners also treated Colocasia and Xanthosoma knowingly, according to their special cultural requirements. Pulsipher's research shows that the moist conditions of the high, "secret" gardens of Montserrat (and elsewhere in the region) favored the cultivation of Old World Colocasia. So in those bravely nurtured aeries, slaves stole time and land from their masters to keep alive the edible heritage of Africa.

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