Season 1 Recap

Get ready for the launch of Season 2 of The Moreish Podcast. In this recap episode Hema revisits the key themes and highlights from Season 1.

The podcast explores the intricate history of the Caribbean, examining how colonialism has shaped present-day culture and cuisine. We look back at key discussions including Keja Valens' insights on colonialism, the historical accounts of the Arawak and Carib peoples, and the enduring influences of colonization on local food traditions. 

The episode also touches on the significant contributions of British, French, Dutch, and other European powers in the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the introduction of indentured servants from South Asia. 

In Season 2 we'll dive deeper into Caribbean history with expert guests and personal stories, continuing to trace cultural practices and cuisine back to their historical roots.

Resources:
Caribbean Yard Campus courses

This episode includes excerpts from:
Exploring Caribbean Culinary History with Keja Valens
Land of 365 Beaches: Antigua & Barbuda
The Nature Island: Dominica
Hairouna, Land of the Blessed: St. Vincent and the Grenadines
One Island, Two Countries: St. Martin / Sint Maarten
Slave Voyages: Interview with Gregory O’Malley and Nafees M. Khan
West Indian Diplomacy: An Interview with Melissa, West Indian historian
Djamil Ninsoo, Afro-Indo Jamaican Cultural Advocate
Carnival Chronicles: From Roots to Roads with David Bremang
More Than Jerk Chicken: Jamaica
The Spice Island: Grenada

Transcript

This is The Moreish Podcast, where Caribbean history meets culture and cuisine.

Hema: Hello and welcome to Season 2 of the podcast. This is Hema, your host. It's been a while, and before we dive into Season 2 with all new episodes, I wanted to take a quick look back at Season 1. This podcast began with the idea to look back at the history of the Caribbean, where people came from, and how those people and their origins have influences in current culture and cuisine.

In the episode with Keja Valens, author of Culinary Colonialism, Caribbean Cookbooks, and Recipes for National Independence. She writes, "This book rests on two paradoxes. Colonialism both destroyed and created the Caribbean as we know it. Independent nationhood created the, "native" cultures, whose autonomy it putatively restored. Through the examination of how these paradoxes play out in cookbooks, I dig into the forces of destruction, creation, and restoration that are cause and effect of colonialism and national independence in the Caribbean, and that are inscribed in the foods, the foods, peoples, cultures, and sociopolitical formations served up by Caribbean cookbooks."  

Excerpt from Exploring Caribbean Culinary History with Keja Valens

Keja: First of all, the destroyed part is probably more obvious and easier to claim, right? Europeans arrived and they tried to wipe out people. They didn't succeed, but they certainly tried. They, you know, destroyed crops. They destroyed ecosystems. They destroyed political organizations, right? There was just massive destruction. 

And particularly, I think, when we think about the ecosystem change, right? It's as much as the people, as you were saying, these foods that, you know, breadfruit, sugarcane, plantain, all of these foods that are all over the Caribbean, right, were not there before the Europeans arrived.

And so it's just a massive ecosystem destruction, and human destruction. There's no going back to the, to a pre-colonial Caribbean, right? And, and that's that destruction. But at the same time, the Caribbean as we know it would not exist without colonialism and out of all of that destruction and, and abuse of people and forced removal and coerced migration, of all of those things has emerged the Caribbean as we know it, right. 

And, you know, you can see this again, food is a, maybe a, a a slightly easier place to look at it than people, and so we can see the ways in which there isn't a single Caribbean dish that doesn't have some European elements to it. Or that doesn't have some element that came out of the slave trade, right? Yams, right, as a really huge one, but tons of different foods and practices came from Africa and were reshaped, right? They're not exactly African, right? They were reshaped in the Caribbean in that interaction. And so it's that, it's that process, what, what Glissant calls creolization, that process of forming together, right?

Um, and the ways in which, you know, the, uh, South Asian indentured servitude and East Asian indentured servitude, right, comes together and all of those together build what is now the Caribbean. And that is the outcome of colonialism, right?

And and so in a way, you know, I think a lot of, one of the things that we think abou…in colonial and post colonial studies, there are several, there are plenty of places where colonizers arrived, they took over political structures, they took a lot of control, they did a lot of damage, but the people and the traditions, remained, you know, up to 70 percent, maybe sometimes up to 80 or 90 percent intact.

And once the colonizers left, there were massive changes, but there was a really solid ability of, pre-colonial folks to be able to return, and continue to develop, right, in their own terms. In the Caribbean, that's not the case because colonization was settler colonialism and it lasted so long. And it's not just negative, though.

The people who arrived by force or by choice were so creative, and so resilient, right, that they built these amalgamated, and it's not just one mush. And I think that's the other thing that's really important to remember, right? Even if you think about, places like Jamaica, places like Trinidad, places like Guyana, where yes, there, there is Guyanese food, but they're also African Guyanese traditions and communities that are quite different from Indo Guyanese traditions and communities and food. And so they have come together, but they've also, you know, there's also a real mosaic quality within each island and across the islands. 

Hema: Valens goes on to say that, "Colonialism in the Caribbean started in the 15th century when Columbus claimed the Caribbean islands for the Queen of Spain." That, however, is not where it begins. There is a whole history of the First Peoples, the Indigenous population that we get into in season one, as we discuss one country at a time.

Excerpt from Land of 365 Beaches: Antigua & Barbuda

Hema: The first well documented people living in Antigua were the Arawaks. They were Indigenous people to the Caribbean who may have come from what is currently known as Venezuela. The little bit that we know about the Arawak people is that they were peaceful people, and they were an agricultural population.

Another Indigenous population are the Caribs. Now, I'm going to take a little stop here because some of the things that I'm going to say about the Caribs and about the Arawaks are stories and information and writings that were provided by the people that were raiding, pillaging, colonizing the islands. 

How did they describe the Caribs versus the Arawaks? The Arawaks were peaceful people. The Caribs were said to be really good warriors and fighters with superior weapons, they were well skilled at travelling by sea, and they raided Antigua, defeated the Arawaks, enslaving some of the people, and cannibalizing others.

Hema: The somewhat frustrating part that we encountered is that much of the history was written from one perspective: the colonizers. That is evident in the fact that the Caribs, a name given to the Indigenous people, were believed to be cannibalistic. 

Excerpt from Exploring Caribbean Culinary History with Keja Valens

Keja: The colonizers were operating on a principle called terra nullius. So they needed to find nothing there in order to be able to claim it and say, Oh, there's nothing here, it's ours. And so, even when they did find very vibrant cultures and towns, they couldn't see them that way, in part because of their own assumptions about what counts as culture, and in part because of their own need to find nothing. And so, they showed up and they, and you know, it's in, in the letters home, Columbus's letters home, have all of these descriptions of cannibals that they found. It's highly unlikely that they actually found any cannibalism, but they found pots with bones in them and they said, Oh, there's cannibals here, right? And they, but they also were really, invested in seeing these foods as insufficient and dangerous. 

Hema: With more information and time comes change. In 2015, for example, the country of Dominica officially changed the name of the Indigenous people from Carib back to the original Kalinago. 

Excerpt from The Nature Island: Dominica

Hema: Dominica is the only Caribbean island with a present day notable Indigenous Kalinago population, with about 3,500 people who are descendants of the inhabitants of the island pre-colonization. 

Mireille: They live on a protected area of the island. It's almost like the reservations in the United States, they're treated much better, And I I stayed in what was then called Carib Territory, it's now called Kalinago Territory. 

Hema: We also briefly touched on the Garifuna population, both in and outside of the Caribbean.

Excerpt from Hairouna, Land of the Blessed: St. Vincent and the Grenadines 

Mireille: Here in New York City, and specifically in the Bronx, we have the largest Garifuna population in North America. And the Garifuna have ties to St. Vincent, which is why I'm bringing them up. Somewhere in the 1600s. Some records say 1635, while others say 1673, so take your pick. A slave ship got shipwrecked somewhere near St. Vincent. The Kalinago rescued them and intermarried with the Africans. They would later be called the Black Caribs by the colonizers. Today, they are known as the Garifuna. 

Hema: These brief clips have inspired me to take a deeper look into the First Peoples of the Caribbean that I can share here on the podcast. If you're eager to learn more now,  Caribbean Yard Campus has an online course starting on September 25th called Indigenous Conversations, and I will link that in the show notes if you want to learn more.

In season one, as we followed the history of the period of colonization in the Caribbean, we started to see the same European nations showing up time and time again in what they call, "discovering" the islands, fighting over the land and settling. I've already mentioned Christopher Columbus on behalf of the Queen of Spain, but the French, British, Dutch, Portuguese show up time and time again in this history.

This is the time period that Keja Valens was speaking about. The time period that dramatically changed the makeup of the Caribbean. "Colonialism both destroyed and created the Caribbean as we know it." 

It was these Europeans who brought slavery and indentured servitude to the region. And in every country that we've talked about there is a part of the history that goes something like this from the episode on St. Martin.

Excerpt from One Island, Two Countries: St. Martin / Sint Maarten

Hema: The early history of this island is similar to that of the other Caribbean nations that we've talked about thus far. The original inhabitants of the entire island were the Indigenous - Arawak and Carib people. Europeans came along, settled, brought slavery to the island.

Hema: Now, obviously that's very much an oversimplification. In each episode, we do get into much more detail. 

Much of our research on the Transatlantic Slave Trade comes from the vast amount of research and databases available at slavevoyages. org. And we did an episode with the Operational Committee from Slave Voyages.

In that episode, Greg O'Malley shares this.

Excerpt from Slave Voyages: Interview with Gregory O’Malley and Nafees M. Khan 

Greg: So for your, your interests for this podcast in the Caribbean, the answer is the British in terms of transporting people from Africa to the Caribbean. A little more than half of all enslaved people delivered to the Caribbean arrived on British ships, and then France would be almost a quarter of the people who arrived. And that's particularly focused on the French Caribbean colonies, not surprisingly. and then the Netherlands and Spain would be the next two biggest after that. The answer becomes a little different if we look at the whole Transatlantic Slave Trade, including all of the Americas and all of a sudden Portugal shoots up to the top of the list because Brazil is such an important site of slavery and the slave trade. But for the Caribbean, Portugal has very minor involvement, basically a little bit of, of delivery of enslaved people to some of the Spanish Caribbean colonies, is where Portugal would appear a little bit, especially in the earliest decades of the slave trade. But for, for the Caribbean as a whole, Britain is the biggest player in that trafficking. 

Hema: There was so much great information packed into that one episode. And I do encourage you to listen to that episode. And if you're so inclined, go to slavevoyages.org to dive into the research and the articles and look at the maps to see the movement of people from region to region during that time period.

We also got into indentured servitude in the Caribbean with Melissa from West Indian Diplomacy and Djamil aka douglabwoy.

Excerpt from West Indian Diplomacy: An Interview with Melissa, West Indian historian

Melissa: And I realized that the records regarding the ships that brought Indian indentured servants, they are available, but in some countries they're rapidly deteriorating.

Other countries like Suriname have done a great job to preserve them and make them available online. But places like Guyana, they are. not kept in the best of conditions based on my understanding and video that David Dabydeen has put out. And so if we don't preserve them, they could be lost. And that's really our main connection to find out where we're from in India.

Excerpt from Djamil Ninsoo, Afro-Indo Jamaican Cultural Advocate

Djamil: I think to do the like the spark notes right is indentured servitude like in a whole right is the basically I'm gonna say renting right but like allotting yourself out for a period of time to do certain work in exchange for money or land or whatever the case might be right. So in the case of the Caribbean you are looking at 1833 1834 you have the abolition of slavery by 1830 but so, by 1834, there's the abolition of slavery.

You have a four year period known as apprenticeship, which, for those of you familiar with the slavery system of America, think sharecropping, right? So, you're free, but not really free because, like, if you read the fine print of that Act, it said that everyone was free under over the age of seven. What's a seven or under year old child going to do? They're going to stay with their parents. 

So basically we have not really freed anybody. Um, but I say this because then from 1834 to 1838, that's when this period runs. So 1838 is when abolition really kicks in, folks are really free. Mind you, this is August 1st, 1838. May 5th, 1838, Guyana receives its first importation of Indians or people from British India.

So before folks even had their freedom, their replacements were already on their way. Right? In Jamaica, you're looking at the 10th of May, 1845, and in Trinidad, you're looking at the 30th of May, that same year, 1845. Right? Suriname would also follow suit, as well as Martinique, Guadeloupe, some of the other French, Dutch, and English colonies, um, were really big on the importation of people from South Asia.

That's what indentureship looked like. So you had these people moving into these plantations. The Africans are not being paid a, uh, a livable wage, right? Many of them are being moved off of these estates. The Indians are moving in. 

So they're very same estates. Actually, let's take a step back. The very same ships that would have brought some of those last Africans brought the first Indians to the Caribbean. Those same estates that were worked by Africans were now being worked by Indians.

Those same, you know, huts, those, those, those logis, depending on like where you're from and what they were called, which were once occupied by Africans, were now being occupied by the Indians. Um, in some cases, they were working side by side. In other cases, estates had switched over from one system to another.

Hema: So why did we, and why will I continue spending so much time talking about the history? And that's because present day food and culture can be traced back to historical events. What do I mean by that? 

For example, Carnival is celebrated all over the Caribbean. And in our episode with David Bremang on Carnival, he shares the historical significance.

Excerpt from Carnival Chronicles: From Roots to Roads with David Bremang

David: From the knowledge that we know is that these are, this is not something new. It's been going on 200 plus years. And these traditions mainly come from West Africa. And so what I've been looking at too is even Egypt. So just the style of a procession and giving back to something and praising something or worshiping something in a community manner of just walking around in a parade and listening to music and playing drums and, you know, dancing, movement, it all started from the motherland.

And so when the Transatlantic Slave movement happened, those traditions still came along. And within, like, specifically for Trinidad, what happened was, like, within the early 1700s, there was, the Cedula population, which were aristocrats from people from Martinique, Dominica, Guadaloupe, all came down to Trinidad.

So obviously, though, at that time, those islands were French colonized. And what they did when they came to Trinidad, they brought their own masquerading balls that they would have specifically the two days before Ash Wednesday. So for them, it was their Carnival was removing of the flesh. So they would party and do all these wild things.

And you know, that, that was theirs. But at the time our African people that were captured, I would like to say, not really slaves, did not have that access to be a part of it. So they would watch and observe and be like, okay, this is what they're doing. We were doing this back home in our own way. And it just became like this marriage of two cultures of taking from what the French did and what the Africans had.

And then you just slowly started to see them do their own thing. And Carnival always had, um a backlash or a rebel, because again, it was a communal thing. It brought people together. It brought their culture back together. And it's like, no, we can't have that. So there's always been a fight, fight, fight, a fight.

And that's where you have like old mas where it's like always bringing up politics and what's happening in society. So there was always a, in the music, you would hear it. There's always a chant of back and forth of them explaining what's happening, you know, and then slowly be getting to like. Kaiso, and Extempo, and Calypso, and these are where these stories are being told. 

Hema: When we look at the food and the national dish we see the influences in methods of cooking, we see ingredients used that were brought over on slave ships, and dishes that came out of times of struggle that are now a part of the culture. For example, take saltfish, which I talked about in the episode on Jamaica.

Excerpt from More Than Jerk Chicken: Jamaica

This is the part where I'm gonna deviate a little bit from talking about food and talk about the Triangular Trade, 3 legged trade route that was part of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. It was a trade route between Europe, West Africa, and what was considered the New World, and was active until around the mid nineteenth century. 

The first prong was manufactured goods from Europe, which could be things like metal or tools, textiles, brass dishes, firearms, ammunition, and alcohol were taken from Europe on ships to ports on the coast of Western Africa. 

The second prong was these goods were traded in Africa for enslaved and captured people who were put on the boats and taken to Brazil and the Caribbean. 

The third prong of this trade route. The colonies of Britain sent plantation crops and things made from these crops back to Europe. These were things like sugar, rice, cotton, tobacco, molasses, and rum. A lot of these goods came from around the Caribbean. The colonies, which also, as Mireille talked about earlier, included Canada, sent meat, fish, flour, and lumber to the Caribbean.

This is where I come back to saltfish. The fish used most often was cod, and the cod was salted for preservation to last the long journey and sent from the New World on these ships as part of the trade route to the Caribbean. It was considered a cheap source of protein and nourishment for the enslaved people, and being a cheap source of protein, saltfish was also adopted into the diets of the indentured labourers. 

Hema: In the episode on St. Vincent and the Grenadines, we talk about breadfruit, which is an ingredient used all over the Caribbean and was brought over on a ship, led by Captain William Bligh, a British naval officer, as a cheap source of food for the enslaved people.

Excerpt from Hairouna, Land of the Blessed: St. Vincent and the Grenadines 

Hema:  Similar history to that of other Caribbean islands and countries, it probably won't surprise you that breadfruit is a part of the national dish of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Brought to the Caribbean as a cheap source of food for the enslaved people, there were many trees planted to grow an abundance of this crop, and throughout the years it truly became part of the cuisine all over the Caribbean.

It is said that Captain Bligh, who we've spoken about in previous episodes with relation to breadfruit, took some breadfruit to the Botanical Garden in St. Vincent, which at the time was already established globally as a plant propagation and conservation garden. 

2015 marked the 250th anniversary of the garden, and they held a ceremony with a reenactment of the handing over of the breadfruit. 

Breadfruit is so important and so prominent in the St. Vincent culture that there is actually a Breadfruit Festival during Emancipation month. They tie these two together, emancipation month and the breadfruit festival, because of the association with slavery.

Hema: When we covered Grenada and the national dish of oil down, it really is a dish that has roots in the times of slavery.

Excerpt from The Spice Island: Grenada

Hema: We're gonna move on to the national dish, which is oil down. Much like the other two dishes that I mentioned, it is essentially a one pot stew-like dish. In the times of slavery, one pot meals made with simple ingredients or what was considered scraps was often made. And the dishes like oil down would be made when enslaved people got together so they could combine resources, combine the ingredients that they had into one pot to make a tasty meal. That would also serve as a social time. 

Hema: If you haven't listened to season one, go back and check it out. Each episode is a standalone episode, so you don't need to go in order. Pick the one that sounds the most interesting and give it a listen. 

So what's next? In season two, I'm mixing it up with more research and history. I'll have expert guests and everyday people who have a connection to the Caribbean.

Episodes will be published every other week, so don't forget to follow the show to get notified in two weeks when the next episode drops.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Moreish Podcast. Connect with us on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok @themoreishpodcast. See you for the next episode.