Abstract: | The Caribbean era was historically marked by suffering: colonization, the attempt to eradicate autochthonous populations, the enslavement of Africans, followed by the importation of indentured workers from India an Asia, left indelible traces. They also gave way to cultural cross-breeding, perceptible in cooking, which is born in the fields, but mostly in the orchards and vegetable gardens, the means of survival of the family – the higglers selling their extra crops on markets. The mountainous landscape of Jamaica favoured maroon slaves, and resistance for the Tainos who were able to endure, where settlers thought they had decimated them. The economic exile toward the city severely struck the countryside, creating a double culture. However the link of food kept them attached to the mother-earth, cultivated the satisfaction of the senses, and the cohesion of the family, through generations. Lorna Goodison’s work is saturated by the presence of food and its hedonist, sensuous reading can be done through: 1) a cultural way of cooking according to social class, opposing the subalterns to the gentrified class ; the stingy, selfish cooks and those with a sense of solidarity; 2) a motherly way of cooking calling for childhood savours and underlining a gendered fracture 3) a ritual cooking for love, celebration and death, and eventually 4) an oral pleasure which identifies the fruit of innocence of the original garden to poetry, the supreme pleasure that can be transmitted by the nourishing mother. |
