Food, identity and being a woman of Indo-Caribbean heritage

In the heat and noise of our family kitchen, I duck into the spice cupboard and inhale. Cumin, turmeric, garam masala, star anise, coriander seeds and cinnamon – the same smell as my Nani’s kitchen more than 3000 miles away in Toronto – the same, I like to believe, as her family kitchen another 5,000 miles away back in Guyana.

I’ve been thinking a lot about identity: what it means to be a woman of colour, and particularly one of “Indo-Caribbean” descent. It’s a term that people are usually unfamiliar with, and I while I can explain the standard “oh, my mum’s parents are from Guyana in the Caribbean and their great-great-grandparents were originally from India…”, it’s often food that gets the point home.

We eat dhals, and we eat curries, but they are less complex than what you might find in a South Asian restaurant here in London. We have roti, but it’s closer to paratha than South Indian or Western Indian roti (often to the confusion of South Asian friends that come over for dinner). We eat puri, but we call it bake. Our actual puri is made up of folded layers of dough like our roti, filled with spiced and ground dhal and cooked over the high heat of the tawa. We also have rice and peas, and jerk chicken: we fry up plantain, we stew okra, we eat saltfish.

Food is a form of art, of self-expression, of identity. These recipes have been passed down through generations – an informal education taking place between mother and child, grandparents and grandchildren, aunties and cousins. The tradition also traces us through our migrations and connects us to our home, even as our definition of home shifts from generation to generation.

On the crossings from the Indian subcontinent to the Caribbean in the 1800s, indentured workers (read more about our history here) are written having travelled while clutching bundles of spices to their chests; protection against the foul smells of the ship, but also a piece of home to take with them – an old comfort for a new exile in a strange land (Mehta, 2004). As they settled in the Caribbean, they were confronted by unfamiliar ingredients alongside the hard labour and poor conditions faced on the plantations. The new tradition of Indian food started in the Caribbean is said to have been “born of poverty and skillful seasoning” (MacKie, 1992). Food transformed in a time of necessity, as did the women preparing it as they carved out their role as feeders of not only their biological families, but their communities too.

Within this culinary transformation comes a personal one. Indo-Caribbean women have been converting the kitchen for generations, turning it into a site of creativity and community. The role of food becomes an external marker of this transformation, as spices – and the security they provided – act as emblems of Indo-Caribbean immigrant history (Mehta, 2004). Food in the Indo-Caribbean context was a symbol of negotiating otherness, demonstrating integration as dishes were shared between groups, yet still resisting assimilation into the dominant culture.

Food and spices have borne the Indo-Caribbean identity through history to today, but they are also a mechanism for me to reach backwards, undergoing my own transformation as I gain a better understanding of my families’ past. By tracing these same recipes and methods – even if we need to swap out green mango for the unripe apples that grow in our back garden here in the UK – I can reconnect with a part of my identity that sometimes struggles to persist in a context where even the term “Indo-Caribbean” demands an explanation.

Instead, food needs no words. I see my mum cook her family’s food when she feels homesick. My (White-British) dad has learned the same recipes, showing his commitment to the culture he married into and its role in his daughters’ identities. Now that my Nani and Nana have both passed away, I make roti as an embodied form of remembrance. I may not always be able to verbalise my grief, but I can focus on the dough beneath my hands. I can perfect the art of rolling it into flawless circles on my countertop like my Nani taught me, and I can wait for it to puff up from the heat of the tawa. In the seconds of anticipation while it cooks, I can allow myself a moment to think of them.

Annalise Halsall

Daughter of Devina Halsall, Controlled Drugs Accountable Officer Northwest        

Texts referenced in this blog post:

• Mackie, C. (1991) Life and food in the Caribbean
• Mehta, B. J. (2004). Diasporic (dis)locations : Indo-Caribbean women writers negotiate the kala pani