Between Meals and Memories: Care as Access Point to Immaterial Archives of Embodied Knowledge
As far back as I can remember, food has always produced in me very unique somatic experiences. I recall my aunty’s summer parties every time I have a mango lassi, and I am brought right back to the heat and the smell and the noise of those days. When I taste okra soup, an overwhelming sense of nostalgia fills me; I seem to remember moments with my dad when I was little eating okra soup and garri in our second-floor apartment while also feeling anticipation and a profound sense of longing for the future. These moments of accessing and contributing to archives of knowledge and memory are one way of experiencing the immaterial archive. In her book Immaterial Archives: An African Diaspora Poetics of Loss, postcolonial theorist Jenny Sharpe explores the spaces of erasure and loss present within literary and cultural archives; spaces within which Black people exist and are made non-existent. Growing up in predominantly white spaces, I have existed on the outskirts of the minds of those around me. From the boundary, however, I was in a unique position to connect with the knowledge passed on by those “others” who also exist within immaterial spaces, knowledge that is often embodied and based on emotional experience. I recall moments of intense feeling, when I ate okra soup and garri or when I watched my dad host an Egungun ceremony, during which I felt I was in conversation with and had access to a wealth of cultural knowledge that was innate within me. These moments, when I embodied the silences and erasures of myself and other Black people around me, are characterized by a re-membering. Memory is at once now and then, both a past and present in a simultaneously immaterial and material form. As such, it is an incredible tool for accessing archives and creating knowledge. Additionally, many cultural theorists have explored the potential of turning to the past to build the future, using memory to contextualize the present. In her text, We Are Always Turning Around On Purpose, Carcross/Tagish First Nations curator and researcher Candace Hopkins describes the Cherokee saying “Ni’ Go Tlunh a Doh ka”, which means “We are always turning around… on purpose”. While turning around might imply spinning in place, Hopkins theorizes the reversed gaze as being “tactical as a means of changing course”. This perspective foregrounds the importance in Indigenous aesthetic methodologies of acknowledging what came before to contend with what comes next. In his essay The Negro Digs Up His Past, author Arthur Schomburg writes “the American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future”. Schomburg speaks to the lack of material archives within marginalized communities and the necessity of digging through the dirt to uncover the erased Black bodies and histories buried within. In her essay The Site of Memory, Toni Morrison writes that “they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. "Floods" is the word they use, but in fact, it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be”. Morrison speaks to bodily memory, “what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared”, and its power to change the very fabric of our present and future. In this essay, I will argue that care can be an access point to ancestral memories and embodied archives of knowledge. Brought forth by physical catalysts, such as conversation or a meal, the past is not pictured as such but sedimented into the Black body. Through eating and talking, acts which are both ephemeral in form but somatic in execution, those immaterial archives of knowledge can be accessed, added to, and explored as an alternative knowledge-creation practice, one which is wholly different from the banking system most familiar to us.
The emergence of “memory” as a concept connected to and in tension with “history” and its understanding, representation, and construction occurred in the 1980s. This was enormously impacted by French historian Pierre Nora and his three-volume collection Les Lieux de Mémoire Contents. The importance of memory within diasporic knowledge-making processes cannot be understated. Unlike history, memory is particle, selective, non-linear, and cross-temporal. Unlike history, it is never occurring only in the past, rather memory is “always memory-in-the-present: the exercise of recovery of the past is always at once an exercise in its re-description”. Where history records the achievements of dominant powers, the interests of states and empires, memory recalls the lives of those who have been marginalized by those powers; the ones who have been immaterial to the archiving process. David Scott, professor of anthropology at Columbia University, posits in his introduction to the twenty-sixth edition of Small Axe Project: A Caribbean Platform for Criticism that memory for African American peoples is something that cannot be separated from their connection to and contention with a slave past. He also argues that being contextual in form, memory is inescapably social, always informed by “socially inscribed circumstances…embedded in particular social practices of individuality and sociality”. How might the inherent relationality of memory, and its ability to cross temporal boundaries allow Black peoples to connect to and build from the immaterial archive? What might the engagement of such an embodied form of knowledge look like? These were the questions most prominent in my research. Particularly, the changes that COVID-19 has brought about to ways of learning have led to a recognition of the importance of different constructions of knowledge. Throughout the pandemic, as systems of government thrive only while marginalized people are left to die, the instinct toward life has been an instinct toward care and community support. After these past two years, I have been left with the question of what comes next. How can we hope to build a decolonial, anti-racist future? Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes says we must “Remember the Future: It shall be multiple, it shall be shared, it shall be historically and culturally diverse”. To remember our future, looking to our ancestry as the guide for imagining our path forward, is the basis of this project. The ability for life-sustaining acts of care, that take place outside of a neoliberal institution, to be a tool for survival within Black communities (particularly those at OCAD), and to foster futurity through remembrance, is what has driven my research and focus on social practice.
My thesis project, Between Meals and Memories, seeks to explore language and food as tools for knowledge-making within Afro-diasporic communities. Particularly, my project suggests acts of care, such as shared meals and conversations, within community as a point of entry to immaterial archives of ancestral memory and embodied knowledge. The relationship between cultural and ancestral knowledge which is constructed and experienced outside of the institution and the “banking system” of education, as well as the potential for multiple ways of knowing within oneself and within the institution to be valorized, is what has driven me to explore these ways of constructing and accessing archives of knowledge. This accessing and constructing of generational knowledge through acts of care within community is something that my collaborator Temple Marucci-Campbell and I call “reparative accession”; the simultaneous adding of new pieces of cultural knowledge to an already existing database, achieved when communities come together and complete acts of care. My project consists of a social practice event and an accompanying research paper. The event, titled Suppa Club, was a dinner hosted in collaboration with Temple Marucci-Campbell. Together, we put out an open call to Black members of the OCAD community to attend a dinner hosted by myself and Marucci-Campbell at my home, and we each prepared meals significant to ourselves. I made okra soup and garri, jollof rice, and fried plantain. Throughout the dinner, we had a generative conversation, shared our experiences as Black students at OCAD, and held space for each other’s voices to be heard. At the centre of this event, was a focus on community care. Although community broadly signifies a group who share some aspect of identity, French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy argues that to understand community as such, essentializes the ever-fluctuating condition of our identity. Therefore, my definition of a community takes into account the intersectionality of identity. Each member of the community to which I speak has come to understand themselves and others only through their experience of gender, race, class, ability, religion, and so on, and their understanding of each of those things, in turn, is shaped by their experience of every other. Working from this understanding, I have structured my research around a definition of community that is intersectional in its approach and takes into account the fluidity and nuance of identity and experience. As such this project also explores how a shared aspect of identity can be a point of connection for a body of people through which to form a community. Specifically, the community which I am referencing throughout my project and attempting to construct my research around is that of OCAD community members who self-identify as Black. In viewing community through an intersectional lens, I can explore modes of constructing knowledge from the entry point of overlapping and communal aspects of identity, keeping in mind the different ways of knowing and constructions of subjectivity based on experiences of race, gender, class, region, etc. Likewise, I define care using intersectional theory to imbue my definition with a relational understanding of location and identity. In his journal article Rethinking Care Theory: The Practice of Caring and the Obligation to Care, care theorist Daniel Engster seeks to provide a definition of caring that addresses the weaknesses of existing definitions, as well as outline a theory of moral obligation to care that can be used in moral and political theory. Previous definitions of care have been based on the general function care serves in society, advocating for a new democratic political life that centres care over the economy (Tronto, Fisher). These were often grounded in a supposedly “objective” moral foundation, and care theorist Sibyl Schwarzenbach emphasizes the “reproductive labour” that constitutes acts of care. The scope of my project is such that the broader political implication of centring care in policy cannot be fully covered. Instead, I seek to explore the potential of care in relation to knowledge production and research techniques. Engster defines an act of care as anything we do to directly help others to meet their basic needs, develop or sustain their basic capabilities, and alleviate or avoid pain and suffering, in an attentive, responsive, and respectful manner. By conducting our social practice event with an overall emphasis on the values of care, establishing an intersectional understanding of our own identities and those of the guests, and holding space outside of the institution, myself and Marucci-Cambell were able to enter into a space within which ancestral knowledge could be accessed. While we had drafted topics and questions to help guide the discussion, the conversation flowed naturally and touched on all the topics which we hoped would come up without our prompting. Including myself and Temple, there were 6 people around the table. Everyone’s voice was heard and the conversation was balanced and respectful throughout the evening. Eating foods from my childhood while hearing from other OCAD students about their experiences felt like coming home. Throughout the dinner, I kept feeling as if I was remembering the dinner as it was happening. This sense of deja vu, of innate memory within the present moment is exactly what I hoped to bring about for myself and the other guests through the dinner. The dinner also prompted a consideration of food as a language, one which is incredibly similar to oral history. In the same way that a sentence is ephemeral by nature, food passes through the orifice of expression and is absorbed by the body. In her book Immaterial Archives, Jenny Sharpe posits “that the mother tongue exists as a linguistic memory transmitted across generations even if language itself is not”. Similarly, I would argue that the language of food, its taste on our tongue and the feelings it brings up depending on the meal, the company, and the setting, also serve to create memories that are transmitted across generations. This dinner allowed me to experience reparative accession through cultural and nostalgic foods within a context that myself, Marucci-Campbell, and each guest created in collaboration. This allowed me to better understand the factors involved in both fostering and experiencing the transmission and recollection of memory through food.
If we were to host another iteration of Suppa Club, there are some things I would choose to do differently. Firstly, I would expand the call to be broader in its reach, not only for OCAD students but for Black artists in Toronto to be able to connect and care for each other. Furthermore, although we tried our best to document the dinner, I think designating a person to document the event would be much more convenient and would have allowed myself and Marucci-Campbell to put all our energy into hosting. Finally, I would encourage attendants to bring dishes of personal significance to themselves, as I believe this was integral to my own experience of reparative accession and would foster the same experience for other attendants. In addition, although the dynamic of host/guest was undone somewhat by allowing the guests to enter the kitchen and spend time with myself and Marucci-Campbell while we prepared dishes, I believe encouraging everyone in attendance to bring their own dish would provide them the opportunity to share themselves, and their own memories, with the larger community. This sharing of food places everyone on more equal ground, undoing some of the underlying power dynamics present. Chandra Mohanty states that “resistance lies in self-conscious engagement with dominant, normative discourse and representations and in the active creation of oppositional analytic and cultural spaces”. For myself, the act of gathering Black artists and thinkers from OCAD outside of the institution and joining over dinner to hold space for discussion in a self-actualizing way is exactly that sort of “self-conscious” engagement that Mohanty and bell hooks believe engaged pedagogy stems from. In her essay “Eros, Eroticism, and the Pedagogical Process”, hooks’ brings forth the idea of not shying away from bodily reactions, allowing the mind and body split to be undone within academia. By centring this project around the act of eating and sharing meals, the act of constructing and theorizing knowledge is one that necessarily involves the mind and body simultaneously. To come together to share food, experience, dialogue and to hear and care for each other’s struggles in an uncensored and safe space (keeping in mind my location as a lightskin able-bodied person affords me safety that, even in Black spaces, is sometimes not given to others), emphasizes an engaged pedagogical practice. By intentionally listening to each voice, bridging being wholly present in mind and body, and practicing care with attentiveness, responsiveness, and respect, we established a communal commitment to learning and created a critical space for knowledge-making.
While this project can be considered an artwork, it was incredibly important to me that the focus of my research on care and community be at the centre of my project. Framing it as a social practice event allowed it to exist outside of a need to execute a goal or present some purpose to an audience, while still recognizing it’s ability to do those things. Community care is not new to certain radical art traditions; “the Black Arts movement, the Chicano Art movement, certain manifestations of Happenings, and, later, relational aesthetics, have all experimented with community service and care provision, be it via offering food, shelter, murals, education, or alternative venues for living, loving, organizing, and making art”. However, this project takes its historical reference from works like that of Theaster Gates’ Soul Pavilion. The Soul Pavilion was Gates’ addition to his Dorchester Projects for Stephanie Smith’s publication Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art. At a series of Sunday dinners, Gates hosted a series of ritual meals designed to celebrate the complex tastes and histories of soul food and bring people together across lines of race, class, and culture. This work is one work which I have been engaging with often, both as a precedent to my project and as an example of social practice that attempts to deconstruct normative structures within art from outside and within the institution. Like Gates, my project created a space outside the institution where engaged learning took place, and will exist within the institution only through picture, video, and sound documentation. The success of Soul Pavilion, both the original work and exhibition and its repeated iterations, has been a model for my project. For me, the purpose and potential for vulnerability, from myself and participants, within my project necessitated that it take place in the privacy and security of my home. To see that Gates was also able to conduct a similar social practice which was then brought into a museum space showed me that knowledge can be formed outside of pre-established spaces for learning and also be connected to dominant discourses and institutions after the fact.
Time and time again, I have returned to an instinct for community, care, and knowledge sharing as a means of comfort and sustenance within myself. In the wake of COVID-19, once more I have begun to look to my community for answers. In doing so, I have been pointed to the past. Within myself and within my research, I have been led toward memory as a source of knowledge and a tool for survival. Audre Lorde says in her essay Poetry Is Not a Luxury, “as we come more into touch with our own ancient, non-european consciousness of living as a situation to be experienced and interacted with, we learn more and more to cherish our feelings and to respect those hidden sources of our power from where true knowledge and, therefore, lasting action comes”. This ancient consciousness and hidden power is the knowledge archived in the immaterial. Through sensorial mediums, like food and language, Black bodies embody ancestral memories, giving material form to the immaterial archives theorized by Jenny Sharpe. This knowledge, innate within the Afro-diasporic community, is accessible through acts of care. As such, the Suppa Club, a social practice event put on by myself and Temple Marucci-Campbell, fostered a sense of community, was grounded in the virtues of care, and exemplified an engaged pedagogical practice. This was not an attempt to define or quantify this knowledge. Instead, it served to ask the question of how a younger generation, our generation, might learn to remember in such a way that engages the distinctiveness of our own identities and the locations from which they are constructed while honouring the standpoint of our elders, and the frameworks of futurity which their memories offer us.