Feasting on Sancocho Before Night Falls: A Meditation
Setting the table with G.G. Márquez
On the one-year anniversary of his 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature, Gabriel García Márquez had a single obsession: to celebrate with a sancocho stew at the edge of a river in his Colombian native village of Aracataca (Galván, par. 2). One can't help but ask, why so humble a meal for so world-class an achievement?
Solitude and sancocho are polar opposites. Cooking and consuming in complete solitude a dish as communal and integrative as sancocho borders on the sociopathic. Who better to crave sancocho, then, than the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude? This meat-and-vegetable stew—embodiment of abundance, celebration, and communion—is antidote to the solitude writ large addressed by Márquez in his Nobel Lecture "The Solitude of Latin America":
[Latin Americans] have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude (par. 6). Why is the originality so readily granted us in literature so mistrustfully denied us in our difficult attempts at social change (par. 9)? [W]e, the inventors of tales [. . .] will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite utopia.
(par. 11)
I'll dare entitle myself to believe, Márquez, that the preparation and sharing of sancocho is our attempt at utopia, albeit writ small in the boiling cauldron of a war-torn world. A pot of sancocho functions as an anti-bomb, a weapon of mass attraction that sets the American concept of nuclear family in a radically different context. A pot of sancocho serves up the reverse of violence, of solitude, and of all other divisive forces. Hyperbole, maybe, but hyperbole's a Dominican trademark; our general willingness to suspend disbelief is symptomatic of a political history worthy of a traveling circus. I'll indulge.
The history of sancocho, also Spanish for "pig slop," is all about raising the least to the most, the ordinary to the extraordinary, and—for good Márquezian measure—the earth to the heavens. Call us alchemists. The African Diaspora's always done what it could with what it's had, transmuting base metals into gold. We've turned table scraps into feasts, curd into cheese, sour grapes into wine, lemons into lemonade. It's hard work, disarming [End Page 259] bombs. And we season our efforts well. It's how Dominicans have alchemized into a national dish the hodge-podge stew also enjoyed throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. (In Colombia a1 nd in Cuba, sancocho is also known as ajiaco.) Proudly we hold up humble bowls, as an expression of identity, abundance, celebration, and communion. Visit us. Let's celebrate. We'll regale you with a well-seasoned sancocho.
Click for larger view | Figure 1 |
Click for larger view | Figure 2 |
For Márquez and many other writers, language and literature are what a table is to a shared meal, inviting the reader to partake of what may otherwise be private, isolated worlds. Take Sancocho: Stories and Sketches of Panama, Evelyn Moore's self-described "delightful potpourri of quaint anecdotes" that attempts to bring a piece of Latin America out of the isolation described by Márquez. Originally published in 1938, and again in 1947, this literary collection offers a glimpse of the people of Panama's interior before the turn of the century. There, in the ordinariness of life in another time and place, it's possible to bump into ourselves. Márquez tapped into what my mother and all great cooks intuitively know, when he called poetry "that secret energy of daily life, that cooks the chick peas in the kitchen, and infects love, and repeats images in the mirrors"1 ("Banquet Speech," par. 4). The journalist who managed to...
