Guantánamo, Eatonville, Accompong: Barbecue and the Diaspora in the Writings of Zora Neale Hurston

Extract

African American writers often express great affection for barbecue, a food many describe as “scrumptious” – to use a term that recurs throughout Bobby Seale's cookbook, Barbeque'n with Bobby (1988) – and invest with a particular capacity to lend shape and coherence to the idea of the African Diaspora. In the writings of Ntozake Shange, Albert Murray, Alice Walker, and others, barbecue seems able to reunite black communities, to gather together people dispersed across the USA or even the world. This literary use of barbecue is epitomized by Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982), the concluding pages of which make the food central to a rejuvenating Diasporic optimism that stands in sharp contrast to the novel's desolate opening description of Celie's sexual abuse. Having grown up in West Africa, Adam, offspring of Celie's rape, finally meets his mother at a barbecue held in the American South. The food provides a conversation opener, a point of contact that the estranged family badly need:

Everybody make a lot of miration over Tashi. People look at her and Adam's scars like that's they business. Say they never suspect African ladies could look so good. They make a fine couple. Speak a little funny, but us gitting use to it.