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Food Across Cultures pp 43–70Cite as

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Callaloo or Pelau? Food, Identity and Politics in Trinidad and Tobago

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Abstract

In the history of mankind, food has always played a crucial role as a performative act and marker of ethnic, religious and national identity . In particular, the usual number of biological, social, economic, historical and ethnic dimensions, involved in any discourse on food, seem to have reached a new degree of complexity in the Caribbean. In a region heavily influenced by its colonial past, a variety of migratory fluxes from all over the world brought along a vast array of diverse social, cultural and economic practices related to food in the archipelago. In Trinidad and Tobago, the heritage of British colonial policies influenced many aspect of socio-political life and contributed to mark and reproduce an ‘Us vs. Them’ division between citizens of African and East Indian ancestries. While the varied local cuisine can be regarded as the best reflection of the country’s colonial and mercantile history, both the African and East Indian communities claim to be the only creators of the most representative national dishes. This paper aims at investigating the major role played by food in the current identity narratives of both the single Afro- and Indo-communities, as well as that of the nation as a whole. In particular, two food metaphors (‘Callaloo’ and ‘Pelau’) seem to epitomise the tension between ethnic groups in Trinidad and Tobago. By means of an interdisciplinary CDA approach, I will be looking at the usage of ‘Callaloo’ and ‘Pelau’ as “mixing metaphors ” (Khan in Cult. Anthropol. 16: 271–302, 2001) in Trinidadian cultural and political discourses. We will see how the two metaphors entail different degrees of heterogeneity and homogeneity in the discursive construction of national identity in Trinidad and Tobago.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See also Bourdieu (1984) on food and class, Wirzba (2011) on food and religion and E. N. Anderson (2005) on food and culture.

  2. 2.

    This ‘Africanness’ of callaloo is widely acknowledged in Trinidadian popular culture, where it is also associated with Obeah, the folk magic and religious practices of West African Igbo origin. In a popular 1939 calypso, Errol Duke, also known by his nickname ‘The Growler’, lamented that women hid human, animal, herbal substances in the callaloo to perform obeah and turn the callaloo into a love potion. The fact that ingredients are simmered down in a mixture made callaloo the perfect plate for Obeah performances.

  3. 3.

    Brathwaite’s (1971) study of the development of creole society in Jamaica was framed between 1770 and 1820, a time when African slavery was still active, and East Indians were not present yet in the West Indies. Brathwaite later addressed the East Indian presence in the Caribbean in his 1974 work Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean. However, it has been pointed out, both by Puri (1999, p. 20) and Munasinghe (2006, p. 555), that this theoretical integration significantly changed the trajectory of Brathwaite’s “Creole” society into a substantially “Plural” one, since East Indians were seen by Brathwaite (1974, p. 11) as compelled to “adjust themselves to the existing creole synthesis and the new landscape”, without actually becoming “Creoles”.

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  1. Institute for Culture and Society (ICS), University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain

    Eleonora Esposito

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  1. Department of Literary, Linguistics and Comparative Studies, University of Naples “L’Orientale”, Naples, Italy

    Giuseppe Balirano

  2. Department of Humanities, University of Salerno, Fisciano, Salerno, Italy

    Siria Guzzo

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Esposito, E. (2019). Callaloo or Pelau? Food, Identity and Politics in Trinidad and Tobago. In: Balirano, G., Guzzo, S. (eds) Food Across Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11153-3_3

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