Maroon: Musings on Fugitivity
Words by Therese Nelson
1. There is something romantic about the way Black folks talk about our food. The sense memories of intergenerational recipes are such that these recollections are often more powerful than the dishes themselves. The fond emotions around our food memories are often more palatable than the reality of our lives, and so I’m thinking about the chasm between the tropes that make us feel good and the reality of why we need them. The brilliant writers, theorists, and professors of African American studies, Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten, give us the language of fugitivity as an insight into this disparity and ask us to expand our concepts of freedom and personhood in order to construct a more nuanced way of processing our lives and the roles we play. Mr. Moten ties these ideas to Black art and performance as the mediums and in that I see a correlation to the food world. It occurs to me that much of fugitivity's power in this framework is that it forces us to name the circumstances of the traditions we uplift and preserve—not just the recipes but the context in which they were born.
2. I’ve been sitting with the idea of abundance lately. This feeling of fullness. In this complicated moment of racial reckoning that occurred in the midst of a global pandemic and state-sanctioned violence, I’m thinking a lot about the abundant Black table and whether our foodways aren’t a balm for the daily emotional labor of navigating Blackness. In the Black food world, the bountiful table, a place where we can control the narrative of our lives, is a marker of agency. This is not to say that food is always a sanctuary, but whether we’re talking about lack or abundance, the plate is often a fair barometer for how Black life is measured. Very often celebratory foods like fried chicken and intricate and dense desserts get conflated with the totality of our foodways because it’s the easier, more comforting narrative to sell. We’ve allowed these celebration foods to overshadow the fullness of our cuisine because the world is most interested in Black joy, and can’t seem to stomach Black pain. If we were to have a true conversation around what constitutes our foodways, we’d also have to confront trauma, food security, racial equity, and the dismantling of culture through lost history. I’m wondering if Black food creatives are complicit in this conflation because we aren’t doing the more useful work which is constructing fuller narratives around our foodways.
3. I’m a chef because the kitchen is one of the few spaces I get to feel free. Me, my whites, my knives and the stove are in an insulated bubble that I am able to invite people into. I get to use history, a curated palate of ingredients, and a set of techniques to create art that offers something tangible to another person. In a world that challenges my humanity as a Black woman daily, it’s a space of respite for me, yet I rarely take the time to consider what it is for the consumer. The role of the consumer is an important question to interrogate because there is frivolity in the consumption of Black food that steals its power. I believe this disconnection between the art, Black food, and consumer is at the heart of why our foodways are so misunderstood and underestimated. I’m confronted with my privilege in my personal fugitivity which leaves me searching for a more useful framework to define Black foodways in ways that require more intention on both sides, the consumer, and me.
4. Mobility as a mode of transformation brings up one of my most favorite historical eras: the Great Migration. You can’t talk about modern Black foodways without talking about the movement of Black people from the southern states of the United States. It happened in two waves. First in the 1920s which gave us the Harlem Renaissance and its bounty of art and writing that birthed a new kind of post-emancipation Black liberation. These first wavers included the generation of land grant institutions like Tuskegee and, by extension, the brilliance of George Washington Carver. They were the generation of Paul Robeson and the expansive political ideology that looked to a global notion of freedom—the idea of Blackness thriving outside the United States. This kind of mobility taught us to protect our foodways as an essential part of survival. The second wave began in the 1940s and was at its most kinetic in the 1960s when Jim Crow laws drove the kind of volatile dissidence that produced the Civil Rights era and later the Black arts movement. The convergence of the strategic assassinations of our most visible and active Black leaders; the new conscience of two generations returning soldiers first from WWII and then Vietnam, and the palpable possibility of full citizenship just far enough out of reach, all serve to make this second wave even more fascinating. In this second wave, we’re also gifted the language of soul food. This way of reclaiming home, of tasting dignity, of adapting to exile, was nurtured in the first wave, in the salons of A’lelia Walker and Arturo Schomburg, but solidified in the second wave, in the iconic restaurant of Sylvia Woods where she offered Harlem a cultural meeting place with classic soul food and contextualized in the lyrical writing of culinary anthropologist Vertamae Smart Grosvenor.
5. This current moment is primed for a similar transformation of social conscience. The responsibility of making food in a moment like this is to do so with open eyes and outside the bubble of fugitivity. To say the words and to be in community with people who see the urgency of the moment and are brave enough to create anyhow. This looks like chefs owning the beauty and specificity of our foodways as central to our practice. It’s food writers telling complicated, nuanced, layered stories that hold the reader more accountable, as well as being reverent about storytelling as a cultural heirloom. All this requires faith in the consumer, the zeitgeist, and one another.
6. There is a stunning documentary memorializing the life of artist Beah Richards produced by Lisa Gaye Hamilton called Beah: A Black Woman Speaks (2003). It’s a hard film to watch because Ms. Richards was at the end of her life battling emphysema. We see her mainly speaking from her bed in a vastly diminished capacity, yet her power and saliency remain palpable. You don’t even get five minutes into the film when she drops a framework for her artistry that has sat with me since hearing it nearly 15 years ago. She talks about her life on stage, entrenched in her craft, and she says when she was working, she was complete and perfect, lacking no essential characteristic. This is the freedom I am talking about. But the second half of her statement was that her art was the only place she was free. I look to Ms. Richards and the conviction of her work as a guide to engage with art, with food. Ms. Richards’ life compels us then to revisit the framework of fugitivity because it feels shortsighted to end the discourse at the art without also examining the conditions of duress, trauma, inequity, and violence in which the art is created.
7. I love this work. I derive joy and salvation from having a place to be whole and perfect, but that fugitivity has limits. It can’t only be refuge if we want to be free. It must also be dismantling the systems of exploitation that do not really serve us by questioning the need for escape and engaging in more presence, honesty, and parity.
