Archiving Epistemologies and the Narrativity of Recepies in Ntozake Shange's Sassfrass, Cypress, & Indigo

Africans uprooted from ancestral soil, stripped of material culture, and victimized by brutal contact with various European nations were compelled not only to maintain their cultural heritage at a meta (as opposed to a material) level but also to apprehend the operative metaphysics of various alien cultures. Primary to their survival was the work of consciousness, of nonmaterial counterintellegence.

Houston Baker, Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing

In her novel Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, Ntozake Shange reminds us that black women cooks of the New World and the dishes they continue to prepare are, indeed, legendary. For Shange, black women's legendary status is evinced through their recipes, which can be read as narratives that contain what Judith Carney would consider a gender-specific "indigenous knowledge system" (Carney 6). These recipes, many containing centuries-old information about the traditional preparation of different foods throughout several regions in Africa, crossed the Atlantic along with the slave cargo during the three-hundred-year period of the transatlantic trade. Along the way, African women modified their traditional recipes to make up for the lack of some of their native foods and to put to use the unfamiliar indigenous and European ingredients, cooking utensils, and methods they encountered in the New World. When colonial European women began recording the recipes of the New World in commonplace books and, eventually, in published cookbooks beginning around the eighteenth century, few to none acknowledged contributions made by African women.¹

Without a doubt, these recipes bear the trace of the transregional and transgenerational oral transmission of traditional food preparation among African women during the slave trade. Despite the difficulty in tracing the African antecedents and the many modifications made to their traditional dishes over the centuries "with absolute accuracy," according to Jessica Harris, one can still gauge African influences in the cuisines of the Americas, the Caribbean, and other parts of the world (xii). I do not mean to suggest here that there is a continental "African" cuisine that enslaved women brought with them, intact, to the Americas. Research on the agricultural practices, foodstuffs, food production, and cooking methods in sub-Saharan Africa before, during, and after the period of the slave trade by scholars such as Harris, David Schoenbrun, and Igor Cusack show how migration, climate, mercantile trade, colonization, state formation, and other factors contribute to both the differentiation and creolization of cuisines within Africa.² And, as Harris notes, "[t]he reciprocal flow of foodstuffs from the New World to Africa and back, along with the European influence on the West African diet" makes both ridiculous and impossible any conception of a continental cuisine (xii). Rather, the point here is to consider what black women's recipes tell about their culinary and other encounters with one another in the creation of themselves as historical subjects in the Western world.

In particular, this essay examines the recipes in Shange's Sassafrass as historical and literary narratives that form an archive that preserves the epistemological and aesthetic connections among black women in the Diaspora. Representing black women's collective experiences is critical to Shange, who views the African American literary tradition as historically failing to do so adequately. Other black female writers have shared this concern, most notably Alice Walker, who writes of the importance of writing her mother's stories and "the urgency that involves the knowledge that her stories—like her life—must be recorded" (Walker 240). These stories must be recorded, according to Walker, to recover the lost aesthetic of generations of unknown black women, deprived of education and rooms of their own, whose artistry was expressed through their gardens and their kitchens. Shange locates her work along a similar historical, aesthetic continuum through her construction of a "women's aesthetic" that articulates "those parts of reality that are ours, those things about our bodies, the cycles of our lives that have been ignored for centuries" (Blackwell 136). In facing the trauma of historical loss, recovering what was violently taken from African women in the New World, Shange...